F*ck fear and failure
Recently, a friend asked ‘What is fear and how does it determine our life choices?’ Coming back to it, I read ‘Fear of life choices’ instead, and I think that is really telling of my thoughts about it.
Failure
There are many things that I fear in life, but the main fear is probably the fear of failure, because failure means loss—money, food, shelter, love, pride, friendship, etc. And most of these things are necessary for our survival.
How does this fear of failure (for survival) determine my life choices?
Intrinsically.
Sheena Iyengar, an expert on choice, said, ‘When we speak of choice, what we mean is the ability to exercise control over ourselves and our environment. In order to choose, we must first perceive that control is possible’ (Iyengar, 2011). In the modern world that we live in today, I believe we perceive that we have a lot of control in our lives, which presents itself as a lot of choices.
This perception is somewhat of a double-edged sword. On the one side, our choices (good or bad) become our own responsibility and no one else’s. On the other, this perception of control isn’t always accurate—there are actually plenty of factors that affect our lives, which we are not in control of and most likely unaware of.
Fear is real
There is no denying that our fears are real. More often than not, they control us. And if we are able to own up to it, it means our choices are actually controlled by our fears. This being the case, I realise now that my perception of choice has been wrong all this time—I don’t actually have a choice…?
We work hard in school because we don’t have a choice.
We work to earn money because we don’t have a choice.
We teach our children to be better than us because we don’t have choice.
Life pushes us on because we don’t have a choice…
or do we?
The next right thing
Going back to Sheena Iyengar, in The Art of Choosing, she used examples of experiments on dogs and rats where she concluded that, ‘how much choice the animals technically had was far less important than how much choice they felt they had’ (Iyengar, 2011). Considering our fear of failure (and thus, survival) is it better for us to perceive more choice than we technically have? I think the answer is a big, fat YES.
Even if this doesn’t allow us to make the choices we want—e.g. having fun in school, having a hobby as a job and not caring about income, allowing children to grow through exploration—it helps us accept the choices we make as the next right thing. We do them because they are the next right thing to do, as Anna tells us in Frozen II.
Take a step, step again
It is all that I can to do
The next right thing
And we do have a choice in the actions we make. Like writing this piece, hugging my family in the morning, telling a friend how much I appreciate her. These little ‘next right things’ are more important than fear and failure, so I say, ‘Fuck them.’