Is is normal to be so fearful?

I'm a 19 year old male. Since I have been looking into the alternative sites such as ATS I have been absolutely scared #less at night. I want to find out if others on the board share this same fear? I check my door locks like three or four times and I have security cameras all around my property? Is that a bit overdoing it? Or is it just being vigilant?

I'd say you're overdoing it a bit. The initial paranoia hits everyone when they first start reading sites like this one I think. Just take a deep breath and remember that not everything you read is 100% true.

'normal'.

Lets just say there is allot of fear mongering on this site. There is allot of good information too.

Just take it all with a deep breath and-unless real proof is given-a grain of salt. If not, you will certainly get paranoia if not worse.

I'm more than twice your age and I find fear ebbs and flows with time and circumstance.

Recently I've felt a sharp uptick of fear in both myself and others. I think its the general atmosphere of the economy, the expectation that things are going to be worse and worse. This brings out the "brace for it, everybody!" attitude and then people start applying this background attitude to other aspects of their lives. There is feedback, where the increased fear creates more fear in different areas and so on. You don't even have to be paying attention to the "original cause" (say, the economy) itself to be impacted by the crawling paranoia of a society in the grips of a fear epidemic.

I think people are just now waking up to the fact that a lot of the things, institutions, certainties about life, sources of information, etc. they trusted are flimsy and cannot be trusted. Some of us have known this for decades, of course, and are now in our element after years of feeling like crusty cranks on the outside. Now we can be smug know-it-alls

Beyond the current circumstances, of course, fear is a deep part of being human. In a way, our fear is "mis-wired" in modern society because our nervous systems evolved to face very different threats and situations. We once spent most of our time running from predators, hunting and gathering ourselves, and so on. Now its realy only 50 years since this brightly-lit halogen-bulb world of offices and Wal Marts took hold. Our nerves aren't really able to handle it so on some level we are "wigging out" all the time because our environment is so unnatural relative to the way we evolved. Just like animals pacing neurotically back and forth in a zoo, we are out of our element in the steel-and-glass world of modern society.

reply to post by silent thunder


I don't think anyone could have explained it better. You summed up perfectly what I am feeling.

reply to post by DragQueen4Peace


Well that's the nicest complement I've gotten all day...thanx.

Take a deep breath, have a sense of humor, look at stuff philosophically. Get exercise and eat right. And so on and so forth. You already know all this stuff anyway, don't you? Its the "actually doing it" part that's hard, isn't it? That never changes.

If your feeling fearful then perhaps you need to question whether the fear mongers and alarmists on this site are actually empowering you or taking strength away from you.

I would suggest being a bit more skeptical and wary of the people and threads which have this debilitating effect. Unfortunately, there are members here who feed off other peoples fears and that is what is empowering to them.

Don't fall for it! Don't let them make a meal out of you. Empower yourself and turn the table in your own favor now.

IRM

[edit on 16/2/09 by InfaRedMan]

With all the calls to 'breath' in this thread.. Does that mean there is some sort of silent accord that some posts are caused by oxygen deprivation?