Fun tends to be highly personal, for example some people find free soloing fun, and others find it terrifying. Some people enjoy strategy games and others much prefer action games. So it seems surprising that you’d give an unconditional “should have” criticism/advice based on what you think is fun. I mean, you wouldn’t say to someone, “you should not have used safety equipment during that climb.” At most you’d say, “you should try not using safety equipment next time and see if that’s more fun for you.”
It’s not just about thrill-seeking though. A bit of courage can improve quality of life by making you less scared of events that happen, like the event habryka described.
Free soloing is fun for some and not others in large part for reasons like “skill in climbing”, which cannot be expected to hold the same optimal value for different people. Courage, on the other hand, is pretty universally useful, and can help in ways that are not immediately obvious.
It’s not always obvious how things could be better through the exercise of courage for two reasons. First, the application of courage almost inevitably results in an increase of fear (how could it not, since you’re choosing to not flinch away from the fear). If you’re not exceedingly careful, it can be easy to conflate “things got scarier” with “things got objectively worse”. In situations like this, it can often escalate things into explicit threats of violence which are definitely more scary and it can be easy to read “he threatened to fight me” as a turn for the worse. It’s not at all obvious until you follow through that these threats are very very often empty — so often, in fact, that displaying willingness to let things escalate physically can be the safer thing to (at least in my experience it has been).
Secondly, it’s not always clear what one should do with courage. All the courage in the world wouldn’t get me to free solo climb for the same reason it wouldn’t get me to play Russian roulette; it’s just not worth the risk for me. In situations like this, cousin_it suggests responding with “no, you”, but I actually think that’s a mistake. I’d actually advocate doing exactly what habryka did. Say nothing. Don’t back down, of course, but you don’t have to respond and what do you get out of responding other than encouraging that kind of bad behavior? The jerk doesn’t deserve a response.
Of course, it’d be nice to do it with less fear. It’d be nice if instead of seeing fear he sees someone looking at him as if he’s irrelevant and just waiting for him to leave (which is a pretty big punishment, actually, since it makes the aggressor feel foolish for thinking their aggression would have any effect), but that’s an issue of “fear” not “courage”, and you kinda have to accept and run with whatever fear you have since you can’t really address it on the fly.
I wouldn’t say “you should have more courage” both because I don’t see any obvious failure of courage and because you can’t “should” people into courage or out of fear, but I do think courage is an underappreciated virtue to be cultivated, and that the application of courage in cases like these makes life as a whole much more pleasant and less (invisibly and visibly) controlled by fear. This means both holding fast in the moment despite the presence of fear, as well as taking the time to work through your fears in the down time such that you’re more prepared for the next time.
I think living with courage and dignity is more fun in any social circumstances.
Fun tends to be highly personal, for example some people find free soloing fun, and others find it terrifying. Some people enjoy strategy games and others much prefer action games. So it seems surprising that you’d give an unconditional “should have” criticism/advice based on what you think is fun. I mean, you wouldn’t say to someone, “you should not have used safety equipment during that climb.” At most you’d say, “you should try not using safety equipment next time and see if that’s more fun for you.”
It’s not just about thrill-seeking though. A bit of courage can improve quality of life by making you less scared of events that happen, like the event habryka described.
Free soloing is fun for some and not others in large part for reasons like “skill in climbing”, which cannot be expected to hold the same optimal value for different people. Courage, on the other hand, is pretty universally useful, and can help in ways that are not immediately obvious.
It’s not always obvious how things could be better through the exercise of courage for two reasons. First, the application of courage almost inevitably results in an increase of fear (how could it not, since you’re choosing to not flinch away from the fear). If you’re not exceedingly careful, it can be easy to conflate “things got scarier” with “things got objectively worse”. In situations like this, it can often escalate things into explicit threats of violence which are definitely more scary and it can be easy to read “he threatened to fight me” as a turn for the worse. It’s not at all obvious until you follow through that these threats are very very often empty — so often, in fact, that displaying willingness to let things escalate physically can be the safer thing to (at least in my experience it has been).
Secondly, it’s not always clear what one should do with courage. All the courage in the world wouldn’t get me to free solo climb for the same reason it wouldn’t get me to play Russian roulette; it’s just not worth the risk for me. In situations like this, cousin_it suggests responding with “no, you”, but I actually think that’s a mistake. I’d actually advocate doing exactly what habryka did. Say nothing. Don’t back down, of course, but you don’t have to respond and what do you get out of responding other than encouraging that kind of bad behavior? The jerk doesn’t deserve a response.
Of course, it’d be nice to do it with less fear. It’d be nice if instead of seeing fear he sees someone looking at him as if he’s irrelevant and just waiting for him to leave (which is a pretty big punishment, actually, since it makes the aggressor feel foolish for thinking their aggression would have any effect), but that’s an issue of “fear” not “courage”, and you kinda have to accept and run with whatever fear you have since you can’t really address it on the fly.
I wouldn’t say “you should have more courage” both because I don’t see any obvious failure of courage and because you can’t “should” people into courage or out of fear, but I do think courage is an underappreciated virtue to be cultivated, and that the application of courage in cases like these makes life as a whole much more pleasant and less (invisibly and visibly) controlled by fear. This means both holding fast in the moment despite the presence of fear, as well as taking the time to work through your fears in the down time such that you’re more prepared for the next time.