Facing Fear

In our youth, life is the movement toward goals and away from fears. With aging comes the winding down of this movement. The losses and failures that accrue through one’s life, in conjunction with the ever-increasing physical decline, awaken a natural “appreciation” of death and make pursuing goals feel somewhat pointless.

And yet, we must continue to live out our days. Facing fear allows this transition to proceed with fewer problems. Indeed, facing fear is the most effective way to travel down the road toward death. Note: while this essay is about managing the later stages of life more effectively, a deeper understanding of the following applies to all facets of life, both in youth and old age! However, this probably requires decades of life experience to take seriously enough to apply personally. Yet, even then it is a daily challenge because applying principle to practice is not an innate ability.

Facing Fear

Facing fear is no once-and-done trick; it requires constant ongoing vigilance. Because fear (a.k.a. the biological manifestation of entropy) governs every step we take in life, both literally and figuratively, the answer to what we must be vigilant of is subtle and murky. In our youth, fear brings about need, desire, and the drive to achieve something. As the years roll on, entropy manifests itself more as an increasing fear of pain, discomfort, loss, and dysfunction. The challenge for us lies in identifying how fears—or more precisely entropy—influences our every action and overall approach to life. Success here improves our ability to deal with life more effectively.

Fear as a Manifestation of Entropy

Energy is necessary to maintain the order, structure and function of everything in the universe. Entropy is the natural and inexorable dissipation of energy (heat) over time, bringing with it an increase in disorder, disorganization, and dysfunction (for background on entropy and negentropy, see Life’s Chain of Causation). The unique thing about living things, from simple life forms to complex mammals, is their ability to reverse entropy for a time, i.e., bring about negentropy. Living things strive to accrue enough energy to counteract entropy, which they then ‘burn’ in biological work to create and maintain the order, structure and function essential for their survival. Fear is the innate sense in all living things of entropy’s threat to survival. When perceived, fear triggers a biological reaction—a ‘fight or flight’ need—to counteract that threat. Entropy’s threat is often felt as loss, failure, weakness, stagnation, boredom, and so on.

Fear is entropy’s biological signal; entropy pulls all the biological strings behind the scenes of life, from the most mundane to the most engaging. Identifying why, how, and when is useful at anytime in life, but especially as we age. Acknowledging all this as theoretically probable, and then having the curiosity to observe and verify it happening to us personally, is the key to better management of the entropic aging process. It is either that or just letting nature run its course.

“All Roads begin from fear”

Many of my posts single out fear to be the deep driving force behind life. Observed broadly, we can see how fear might well originate in the innate sense of entropy that every living thing must respond to.

They say, “all roads lead to Rome.” Likewise, I say, “all roads begin from fear.” This primal fear is omni-present and omni-potent. It manifests as fear of predation, of discomfort, of great effort, of pain, of loss, of hunger, of heat or cold, of isolation, of embarrassment, of the unknown… the list is endless. Accordingly, in whatever way any of these fears manifest themselves will invariably engender a corresponding need—and it’s off we go on our road to Rome, the destination we are driven to reach. For example, a need to be stronger due to fear of weakness; a need to know due to a fear of the unknown; need for friends due to a fear of isolation, and so forth.

Besides the deep intuitive need felt by all living things, humans intensify this through desire and worry, i.e., desire = need + thought and worry = fear + thought ¹. So, while we can’t avoid fear or need, understanding how these operate can help us avoid unfavorable consequences. Simply put, knowing nature’s rules for the game of life ought to improve our game play.

Now at 81, I’ve come to realize fully how not facing fear gradually and imperceptibly reduces our mental and physical quality of life. Of course, these declines happen naturally to all living things, but because of our unique set of civilized circumstances, it can happen much more acutely than for animals in the wild. The Tradeoff (p.549) gives a detailed account of how these circumstances came about.

Fear and Decline That Comes With Aging

The first four lines of the Tao Te Ching, chapter 77, give us primary insight into the workings of Nature, and how facing one’s fear of exertion and discomfort is essential for improving one’s quality of life.

The way of nature is like a stretching bow.
The high restrains, the lower lifts.
The surplus decreases, the insufficient benefits.
The way of nature decreases surplus yet benefits the insufficient.

These four lines convey a balanced, albeit subtle, picture of nature. As the fourth line concludes, The way of nature decreases surplus yet benefits the insufficient.This is the fundamental nature of entropy—taking from a surplus to give to the insufficient, or as chapter 40 put it, Loss through death, of the way uses.

We can apply this aspect of nature to deal with any practical matter. An especially useful example that eventually applies to everyone who lives long enough is sarcopenia, a natural age-related progressive loss of muscle mass and strength, associated with a significantly higher risk of mortality. A deep dive into this entropic way of nature is relevant for anyone wishing to improve their quality of life as they age.

First, your body must biologically know you are serious before it will begin to decrease surplus of protein to benefit the insufficiency of muscle. This also applies to bone density and joint flexibility, but the muscle side of this is most clear-cut.

Second, youthful energy (fear, need) is earnest enough to drive muscle growth and its maintenance. A major aspect of this is spontaneous physical activity, technically known as NEAT – Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. As people age, NEAT declines, lowering metabolism and physical activity. During this stage of life, you mostly want to maintain your life’s mellower routine, which sounds comfortable at first glance.

However, the progressive mellowing down as you age initiates gradual muscle loss. The body senses you no longer seriously need as much muscle as you did in youth, and so begins decreasing surplus, recycling the proteins in other ways. This can happen so gradually over years that it is comparatively unnoticeable… until it feels too late.

Here lies the hitch: we can’t rely on NEAT here, so our wish to reverse course must be backed up with raw survival will—as chapter 33 puts it, A striving to be current is will. Voluntary resistance exercise and braving the elements is the only way to reverse or at least slow down this process. Yet as we age we become more sensitive to discomfort, which makes it difficult to be serious enough to offset the fear of making the necessary effort.

The body must feel you are deadly serious and not just indulging in wishful thinking. True recovery is driven by a genuine sense of survival necessity, not desire (i.e., desire = need + thought). This way of nature pertains to all aspects of life, not just muscle. Now, one may wonder why evolution selected for this age-induced decline. Well it actually didn’t, at least to the extent humanity experiences it. All animals evolved to live in balance with nature’s demands, and so for our distant ancestors, many of humanity’s current problems were less severe, rare, or non-existent. We humans actively, though naively, sidestepped nature’s unpredictable and uncomfortable wild side as The Tradeoff details (p.549). This unavoidably brought about the deep-seated imbalances and resulting problems we see throughout civilization.

Clearly, the journey to rebalance can only begin by welcoming more effort and discomfort into life. As my lifelong motto goes, “Short-term pain paves the way to long-term pleasure.”

Comprehension leads to Resolution; Resolution leads to Action

Honestly acknowledging what is happening to us personally is necessary for actually improving our quality of life. Only this level of comprehension can foster sufficient resolution to make one’s actions reflect one’s intention. Not surprisingly, these crucial steps mirror the initial steps on Buddha’s Eight Fold Path: ‘Right Comprehension’, ‘Right Resolution’, ‘Right Action’. (See Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, p.604.) When comprehension is deep enough, resolution and corrective action become truly—and happily—unavoidable. I call this pseudo free will. See Free Will: Fact or Wishful Thinking? (p.587) and A Final Word on Free Will (p.642).

Facing fear is exposure therapy

Exposure therapy is a therapy in which you are gradually exposed to the things, situations and activities you fear. For example, if you fear spiders, you find non-threatening ways to be exposed to spiders, beginning with photos perhaps.

In the same way, facing a fear decreases fear’s ability to trigger an overreaction. This ‘facing up to’ effect is true in psychology, in weight lifting, pain management—in life. Facing fear essentially opens the door to a deeper intuitive knowing, i.e., Right Comprehension.

Naturally, the facing of fear I’m suggesting here is more subtle. It is less about fears you can already identify and experience, but rather the seeds of fear that trigger your life’s conflicting needs. You gradually probe deeper to uncover the invisible fears that drive your life. The progression goes like this:

Fear begets need, need begets conflicting needs, conflicting needs beget change and stress. We innately respond by striving to satisfy the need or reconcile the conflicting needs to reduce the stress. Alas, this only works briefly; it is like rearranging the furniture in the room. The room is still essentially the same, so you quickly return to ‘rearranging the furniture’ when new fears and needs arise.

The only way to slow down this cyclic swirling process is by perceiving the deepest fears that are creating the needs. This deepest form of comprehension is more a matter of feeling, and then embracing the fear sensation itself. Sincerely embracing the fear sensation lessens fear’s ability to trigger overreactions of need, if not actually nipping potential needs in the bud.

On the other hand, some fears are easy to identify. Take ‘FOMO’ for example. The ‘Fear of missing out’ is actually a primary survival fear—you simply fear missing out on something that feels beneficial to you or your group. The challenge is to see how innocuous fears like this add up to detrimental effects over a lifetime. Sincerely facing the fear lowers its ability to generate need or at least trigger overreactions.

The Two Faces of Fear

It is helpful to note the beneficial side of fear. Certainly, fear of any impending danger is crucial to survival. Less obvious is how the fear of pain (i.e., a fear of discomfort and of making an effort) is naturally present to put the brakes on idealistic ambitions. This, the origin of ‘laziness’, is generally good, for otherwise we’d soon burn ourselves out in an unbridled rush to accomplish whatever our ambitions hunger after—pleasure, success, fame or fortune.

Fear is a universally beneficial instinct in the wild. Inevitably, the fear of discomfort gradually induced us to adopt civilization as a way to shield us from nature’s wild side, as chapter 5 observes: The universe is not benevolent, and all things serve as grass dogs. Being able to unwittingly avoid the healthful aspect of fear that comes naturally by living in the wild puts us on an unbalancing downward spiral.

Valid vs. invalid fear

Clearly, avoiding this downward spiral begins with facing reality, which really means facing fear. My motto going forward: “facing short-term pain favors the odds for various forms of long-term pleasure, whereas giving into short-term pleasure favors the odds for various forms of long-term pain.” All I need do is exercise the wisdom to distinguish between the valid fears to heed and the invalid fears to face up to. This is where experience, perseverance, and self-honesty help open the door to reclaiming natural balance.

When you know in your heart of hearts that something is essential, putting it into practice becomes truly unavoidable. This is not a matter of self-discipline, but rather of self-awareness, self-honesty—self-truth. As Buddha put it in his 4th Noble Truth, “There is salvation for him whose self disappears before truth, whose will is bent on what he ought to do, whose sole desire is the performance of his duty.”

The Battle

Obviously, no living thing wins this battle against entropy. Yet all living things struggle in a life-long battle against entropy—the mother of fear. Our ‘fork in the road’ is whether to bravely wage this battle, or prematurely surrender. For us, that boils down to a life-long battle between our fear of effort and discomfort versus our need to avoid letting that fear get the better of us. While we can’t win this battle against entropy, we can achieve longevity. As chapter 33 observes:

Knowing people is wisdom.
Knowing self is honesty.
Success with people is ability.
Success with self is strength.
Being content is wealth.
Striving to be current is will.
Not losing place is endurance.
Dead, and yet not gone;
This is longevity.

There is no conquering fear

Fear (sense of entropy, loss, failure, death) is at play in every living thing, however subtle. Fear works both sides of life’s equation: it spawns both courage and cowardice.

It’s worth noting that all belief, from “crazy” conspiracy and flat-earth stories to mainstream religious and political stories, arises from fear born mostly from a sense of disconnection. We’re all just trying to return “home”, to belong, and belief promises that. Our disease often makes matters worse. You could say that humanity is stumbling, evolving, through life coping with a disease that it doesn’t even know it has.

The benefit of knowing all this helps greatly in dealing with others (or myself) when the offshoots of fear—need, anger, worry—override reason. By recognizing the source of intense emotion, any resulting drama has a harder time drawing me into its game, as long as I remember to keep at least one eye on reality.

Additionally, knowing there is no escape, futile quests to gain fleeting advantages begin to fade away. This helps liberate me from most of life’s second-guessing, hypocrisies, and double standards. Without such baggage, life becomes simpler and more universal.

Diligence is the secret sauce of life

Knowing there is no conquering fear, and no escape from it, clarifies something: the only meaningful response is to engage fully with whatever duty life places before you. When doing my duty feels more pleasurable than not doing it, I can’t help but fight to do it. Conversely, when doing my duty feels more of a loss than a gain, I can’t bring myself to do it. Flight from my duty into what is pleasurable becomes inevitable, and life becomes less meaningful, less balanced, and thus less enjoyable.

Buddha’s final words are enlightening: “All things are impermanent. Work out your own salvation with diligence.” To me, diligence feels like a balanced form of will, grit, and anger. In contrast, pursuing sensory pleasures feels like fleeing from languor, a need for stimuli, that requires no diligence and imparts little, if any, life meaning.

What fear does to our view of others

Fear is also what narrows our vision. It induces tribal perception, the deep biological sense that those unlike us occupy a different and lesser world. For most of life, I have dismissed many of other people’s roads to their Rome as a bypath, not really connected to reality. Now age has gradually tempered that myopic view of life, but there is always more tempering to be done.

This morning as I was watching TV, a segment on High Fashion came on. I’ve never understood that world; it always felt irrelevant to actual life. Silly. Frivolous. The designers, the models, the editors all seemed deeply and sincerely engaged, as true experts would be, and that was nothing new. Over the years I became increasingly able to respect the dedication to a craft, even if I deemed it rather useless.

Then this morning I suddenly saw them at a pinnacle, on a mountain peak. The same height as all the others. The Olympic athlete on her peak. The jazz musician on his. The surgeon, the cabinetmaker, the chef, the day laborer. Every human niche that civilization has carved out, each drawing in the people innately suited for it, each powered by the same engine: the subtle fear that drives us up whatever mountain promises life meaning and connection.

How wonderful to see High Fashion no longer outside the whole. It just wasn’t visible to me until my emotional bias wore thin enough.

That bias was fear’s doing. Tribal vision is not mere preference; it is fear organizing perception, sorting the world into “my kind” and “not my kind” before the mind has a chance to look more carefully. Aging wore the fear down enough that the sameness underneath became visible. Not through effort or discipline. Simply through time.

De Facto Buddha

This connects to something I noticed while musing over how we humans make “it” up as we go along, “it” being the cultural stories and truths we conjure up to guide us through life. These stories add legitimacy and meaning, yet they are provisional and relative. To paraphrase chapter 1: The truth possible to think runs counter to the constant truth. Yes indeed, we make it up as we go along.

Then Buddha’s Fourth Truth came to mind. Everything we set ourselves to do, and especially the way we do it, is the actual de facto application of his teaching: “whose self disappears before truth, whose will is bent on what he ought to do, whose sole desire is the performance of his duty.” Naturally, duty here is anything you sincerely feel a need to do right. This applies to any activity, physical or intellectual: ballet, sports, math, cooking, music, raking leaves, being in style, and of course religious practices. I can’t think of anything in life that is exempt. When we take something seriously and sincerely strive to do it right, we are essentially implementing this fourth truth to the extent humanly possible for us personally.

The fashion designer at the top of her peak. The day laborer doing his work with care. Both are, in this sense, living Buddha’s fourth truth without knowing it. Fear drove them there. And once there, if they are sincere, the self quietly disappears into the work.

Buddha’s first step on the Eight Fold Noble Path is Right Comprehension. Deep comprehension really rests on how honestly we face fear, especially recognizing all the downstream effects of fear. Doing so takes most of a lifetime to accomplish. But the wait is worth it: when you viscerally know that fear, and fear alone, drives your life, you can’t help but project that understanding out into the world around you. Deeply knowing that fear drives everyone makes it quite impossible to judge people for their “bad” behavior… or their “good” behavior for that matter. Such impartiality brings about a peaceful mind that would be otherwise unattainable. As chapter 16 concludes:

Knowing the constant allows, allowing therefore impartial,
Impartial therefore whole, whole therefore natural, Natural therefore the way.
The way therefore long enduring, nearly rising beyond oneself.

¹ The Connection between Fear and Need (and in humans, Worry and Desire)

In complex animals, specifically the major vertebrate groups, the amygdala is the part of the brain involved in processing pain and fear. When activated, stress hormones (cortisol, adrenaline (epinephrine), and noradrenaline (norepinephrine)) motivate behaviors needed to mitigate that pain or fear. In simple life forms such as single-celled protists, the ‘fear/need’ response is much more subtle.

In humans, fear and need also generate worry and desire, i.e., fear + thought = worry and need + thought = desire. As a result, human imagination (thought) easily complicates actuality, and we worry over or desire for security; worry over or desire for social bonding; worry over or desire for self-worth and life meaning; we worry over or desire for anything that imagination can conjure up.

To lessen imagination’s impact, chapter 71’s advice is the best ever given: Realizing I don’t know is better; not knowing this knowing is disease. Alas, due to the tight grip thought’s “reality” has upon us, this advice is also the most difficult of all to implement.