Fear Is Its Own Food

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By Grant Wright, CEO

It struck me the other day that America was consumed by fear for so many months leading to the election. Fear of more Obama. Fear of change to Romney. Fear that the housing market isn’t strong enough. Fear that it’s too strong and becoming unaffordable again. Fear of Obamacare. Fear that Obama really does care. Fear that things won’t be OK. Fear that things will be OK for us, but we’re not doing enough for others. Fear. Fear.

Watching a morning ‘news’ channel that for months pedaled little more than outrage, speculation and what-ifs, suddenly overnight seeming to set its communication priorities on a discussion of coffee varieties; reading of Mitt Romney no longer having Secret Service or his campaign plane, and leaving a meeting a couple days later by getting into the back seat of his son’s ordinary gray Subaru; seeing the media offer us the latest catchphrase to turn our suddenly vacant fear capacity to “fiscal cliff” (listen for it, it too was everywhere overnight) – reminds me to stop and refuse to buy into it.

Don’t get me wrong – if you’re a gazelle with a cheetah bearing down on you then fear is a good thing. And arguably a little more tempering fear and prudence preceding the 2008 financial meltdown would have been a good thing. But we’re not gazelles and so much of what we fear is manufactured by others who profit ridiculously by playing to our fear response. So it can be hard to know good fear and harmful fear.

I recently heard someone quote a study that something like 98 percent of what we fret about never comes to pass. Arguably, at least some of it doesn’t come to pass because we worried about it and prevented it. But still, the extraordinary price we humans pay by worrying is, well, extraordinary.

Antacid sales worldwide each year alone reportedly top more than $10 billion. Sure, a lot of this is to do with other health factors like the obesity epidemic here in the U.S., but I’m guessing another big factor in this is simply people worrying, often needlessly.

KPBS radio recently reported that each year in the U.S. hospitals and surgeons have to pay out a total of more than $1 billion to surgery patients who have had something left inside them, like a sponge. And this is because there’s on average 4,000 items unintentionally left inside patients each year. Should I fear this if I need surgery? Of course not, in the same way you can’t worry about your plane being the one to crash from the roughly 50,000 commercial flights that take off every day somewhere in the world.

Since we live in the information age, we are bombarded with things to worry about like no time before. Things to potentially worry about have always happened; it’s just that we never knew about a lot of them.

So, how do we filter but not become callous? I don’t know. If you have a sure-fire solution let me know. For now, and for me, I do my best to balance and try to err on the side of concern versus indifference. As they say, what goes around comes around. So we can hope to put out more good than less, and if we’re lucky maybe some of that will come back to us. But you can’t, and shouldn’t of course, have that expectation.

At (W)right On, we advise our clients not to make decisions from a platform of fear. It is a poor platform. Better to make it from a reasonably and intelligently informed position, and then put full effort behind making whatever that decision have the best possible outcome.

Fear. Worry. Unless there’s a cheetah chasing you, in the inimitable words of Meher Baba made even more famous by Bobby McFerrin, “Don’t worry, be happy.”


Image credit: ajlber / 123RF Stock Photo