"I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer, fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over and through me. And then I will turn my inner eye to see it’s path, where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” - Dune Frank Herbert
Very cliche I know, but this has been a mantra I have used recently when shying away from hard decisions due to fear. Not even the typical fear which is very easy to spot. The more sinister kind that masquerades as wisdom. It is a completely natural fear, the human mind is hyper optimized for survival. It FEELS like your survival is being threatened when you make certain choices, even when you most likely have a safety net to fall back on.
In modern times for most of us, very few things actually threaten our survival. Yet, it can feel like that for even the most mundane things. I remember vividly as a kid how much fear I had of presenting in front of a class. I would watch the others present while rehearsing my presentation in my head. The teacher would call my name and I would walk up to present with my head hanging low. If I was lucky I would avoid eye contact and read my presentation quickly in a very monotone fashion and be done with it. When I got unlucky I would forget a whole segment of my presentation and just stammer for a minute. The class would be dead silent with some background snickering.
Doing Something New
Fear and uncertainty often go hand in hand. If you don’t know how something works or something is just entirely new to you, there will usually be a level of fear attached to it. The easy thing would be to avoid anything that’s new or challenging. To just ignore it and stick with what you know, you haven’t died yet you know? While this will keep you safe, it will really hinder your overall life enjoyment. You most likely have not heard your favorite song, watched your favorite movie, had your favorite food or met your favorite people yet. And while doing the exact things you always do, you most likely won’t either.
I got developmentally and socially stunted because of fear. In what way you might be asking? Pretty traumatic really, at least for a boy at the ripe old age of 15. There was this girl I liked and I also knew she liked me due to a friend of her literally walking up to me and telling it to me deadpan. I was a shy kid so in my head there had to be some weird joke or something. (literally everyone in the class knew after a few weeks lol) There was a school ball and I finally mustered the courage to talk to her and I say the magic sentence (thou shalt like me, damn wench!), she does not hear me and now I just feel weird standing there. So I just walk away ashamed… Yeah.
Since that the fear of expressing interest in girls was prevalent to the point of a legit phobia. It sometimes matched and even exceeded my fear of heights. This meant I over all just kept to myself and was more shy in general. My overall confidence tanked. Even while I took the correct decision to overcome my fear, I just had bugs in my mouth or something. (I mumbled like a motherfucker) At that point it was something completely new for me and I did make the right move I just completely fumbled. I did not have the same relationship with failure that I do now, so I just completely reverted back into my shell and stayed there for another four or so years…
The Benefit of Venturing into the Unknown
For living a good life, one you remember and one you cherish. I believe relentlessly exploring the unknown is really important. What the fuck does that even mean?? Simply, doing something outside of your comfort zone. Cliche, absolutely but also really useful.
The human is a very homeostatic being. That means we always want to stay at the known, why exert extra energy travelling a new road when you can just travel the same road you always travel? It is a principle of energy, do that which takes the least energy. More often than not, that is the path you always take and always will take unless you exert effort and awareness. By exerting “awareness” I mean being present when you make decisions. Don’t even stop yourself from making the decision you make, just question it. Why do I always walk this route? Why did I buy this food and not something else? Why do I keep working at this place even though I hate it? No judgments here, just genuine curiosity turned towards the self.
The actual benefits:
You get lucky by “increasing your luck surface area”, doing things you usually don’t is a great way of doing that. I.e you meet a future business partner, best friend or just someone that introduces something you love into your life.
Life is just more fun this way, time feels like it slows down and you are more present. Why? When doing new things your brain has to actually focus on what’s in-front of it instead of going on autopilot. (This is not very scientific in nature, just my observations)
You remember more of what you do, it’s so novel that anything new you do is way more memorable. For example when you commute the same path 30 times, you will probably forget almost every single instance except for the edge cases (weird drunk guy on the subway who hits a fire crip walk)
You get more interesting ideas, ideas are often just what you know and what you learn clashing in interesting ways. Reasoning from there it would make sense that the more you have to take from, the better.
Method to the Madness
My simple method towards “venturing into the unknown” and overcoming ones fear is to take new choices and to do it consistently. Don’t wait a year to act on a thought that comes up. Iterate fast, and act on your thoughts. Don’t let things just become a pipe-dream that you will do some day, find a way to make it happen right now and then figure out the rest as you go.
A simple way of instantly using this information is to walk a different route home, buy new groceries than what you usually would, trying a new snack, talking to someone you usually wouldn’t talk to etc. You will have to cultivate the awareness to notice yourself from a zoomed out perspective, otherwise you will just keep doing what you always do! The easiest way to get that is to meditate, it forces you to be with your thoughts in a way where you aren’t constantly existing with them but as a separated being witnessing them. You are after-all, not your thoughts.
This counts even more for the big ideas, the ones that are actually scary. When you get an idea to study in Japan, find out how feasible it is, look into it. Don’t just conclude that it’s too much effort and ignore the possibility that has presented it self to you. When you get an idea to make a comic, don’t just think that it would take too long or that you have to practice a bunch first, some of the best comics have shit art (one punch man by One comes to mind). I heard somewhere that power is directly related to how low you can get the lag time between having an idea and acting on it.
Thanks for reading!
Suhayb, Neunetic 🤖🤖
Ps: Work on my comic has slowed down a bit, I am currently travelling in Korea and Japan with my family and have therefore not had as much free time as I did back home. I will still commit to finish the project but there will be a greater delay (I am likely back home at the end of September)
Pss: Travelling to a new country is a really great way to shake up your thought patterns if you feel like you are in a loop. It’s essentially the extreme version of venturing into the unknow, especially when the place you travel has a vastly different culture.