There’s some good advice in there, but I don’t much like the framing about how one should feel, as opposed to how one should think about risks.
The truth is, nobody’s actually perfectly safe, ever. The likely outcome for every current individual is eventual death. One can have a reasonable belief that it’s a long way off, and that there’s even some chance for it to be a VERY long way off. And there are much shorter-term risks as well, some of which can be mitigated, and some can’t. How one feels about that is less important than how one integrates it into their framework for action.
Thinking about and internalizing the threat imminence continuum idea is good. It probably does lead to better emotional stability—not “feeling safe”, but “accepting and mitigating risks”, but it’s not directly based on feelings, it’s upstream.
Feeling unsafe is probably not a free action though; as far as we can tell cortisol has a deleterious effect on both physical health & mental ability over time, and it becomes more pronounced w/ continous exposure. So the cost of feeling unsafe all the time, particularly if one feels less safe/more readiness than the situation warrants, is to hurt your prospects in situations where the threat doesn’t come to pass (the majority outcome).
The most extreme examples of this are preppers; if society collapses they do well for themselves, but in most worlds they simply have an expensive, presumably unfun hobby and inordinate amounts of stress about an event that doesn’t come to pass.
Yeah, things close to full-blown doomsday doesn’t happen very often. The most common is probably literal war (as in Ukraine and Syria) and the best response to that on an individual level is usually “get the hell away from where the fighting is.” Many of the worst natural disasters are also best handled by simply evacuating. If you don’t have to/didn’t have time to evacuate and you don’t die in the immediate aftermath, your worst problems might be the local utilities shutting down for a while and needing to find alternative sources of water and heat until they’re fixed.
The potential natural disasters for which I think doomsday-level prepping might actually make a difference are volcanoes and geomagnetic storms, because they could cause problems on a continent-wide or global scale and “go somewhere unaffected” or “endure the short-term disruptions until things go back to normal” might not work. Volcanoes can block the sun and cripple global agriculture, and a giant electromagnetic pulse could cause enough damage to both the power grid and to natural gas pipelines that it could take years to rebuild them. (Impacts from space might also be on the list, depending on the severity.)
Is your model that our thoughts come first, and feelings second?
I think that there are cases where that’s true, but that generally our emotional state exerts a strong influence on what kinds of thoughts we’re capable of having. So feeling safe (or at least not feeling unsafe) may be a prerequisite for being able to think clearly about risks.
(Though this gets complicated because there are influences going in both directions—if I thought that intellectual ideas had zero influence on feelings, it would have been pointless for me to write this post.)
Is your model that our thoughts come first, and feelings second?
Not exactly—there’s more feedback loop than that. I fully agree with “this gets complicated”.
I would say that intentional changes to mind-state tend to be thoughts-first. I don’t know if that’s tautological from the nature of “intentional”, but it does seem common enough to make it the best starting point for most people.
And to clarify, as I tried to say in the introduction, the post is mostly intended to counter the thought that “I shouldn’t feel safe”. So if someone is having thoughts that it’s wrong to feel safe and they should stop doing so, then the intent of the post isn’t to say “here’s how you should feel”. Rather, it’s just to say “if you do feel safe, I don’t think you need to take a metaphorical hammer and hit yourself with it until you feel unsafe (nor do you need to believe people who say that you should); here’s why I think you can stop doing that”.
So I think that if you are saying that one should focus on how they think about risks, and I’m saying that here’s one way to think about them, then we agree?
There’s some good advice in there, but I don’t much like the framing about how one should feel, as opposed to how one should think about risks.
The truth is, nobody’s actually perfectly safe, ever. The likely outcome for every current individual is eventual death. One can have a reasonable belief that it’s a long way off, and that there’s even some chance for it to be a VERY long way off. And there are much shorter-term risks as well, some of which can be mitigated, and some can’t. How one feels about that is less important than how one integrates it into their framework for action.
Thinking about and internalizing the threat imminence continuum idea is good. It probably does lead to better emotional stability—not “feeling safe”, but “accepting and mitigating risks”, but it’s not directly based on feelings, it’s upstream.
Feeling unsafe is probably not a free action though; as far as we can tell cortisol has a deleterious effect on both physical health & mental ability over time, and it becomes more pronounced w/ continous exposure. So the cost of feeling unsafe all the time, particularly if one feels less safe/more readiness than the situation warrants, is to hurt your prospects in situations where the threat doesn’t come to pass (the majority outcome).
The most extreme examples of this are preppers; if society collapses they do well for themselves, but in most worlds they simply have an expensive, presumably unfun hobby and inordinate amounts of stress about an event that doesn’t come to pass.
Yeah, things close to full-blown doomsday doesn’t happen very often. The most common is probably literal war (as in Ukraine and Syria) and the best response to that on an individual level is usually “get the hell away from where the fighting is.” Many of the worst natural disasters are also best handled by simply evacuating. If you don’t have to/didn’t have time to evacuate and you don’t die in the immediate aftermath, your worst problems might be the local utilities shutting down for a while and needing to find alternative sources of water and heat until they’re fixed.
The potential natural disasters for which I think doomsday-level prepping might actually make a difference are volcanoes and geomagnetic storms, because they could cause problems on a continent-wide or global scale and “go somewhere unaffected” or “endure the short-term disruptions until things go back to normal” might not work. Volcanoes can block the sun and cripple global agriculture, and a giant electromagnetic pulse could cause enough damage to both the power grid and to natural gas pipelines that it could take years to rebuild them. (Impacts from space might also be on the list, depending on the severity.)
Is your model that our thoughts come first, and feelings second?
I think that there are cases where that’s true, but that generally our emotional state exerts a strong influence on what kinds of thoughts we’re capable of having. So feeling safe (or at least not feeling unsafe) may be a prerequisite for being able to think clearly about risks.
(Though this gets complicated because there are influences going in both directions—if I thought that intellectual ideas had zero influence on feelings, it would have been pointless for me to write this post.)
Not exactly—there’s more feedback loop than that. I fully agree with “this gets complicated”.
I would say that intentional changes to mind-state tend to be thoughts-first. I don’t know if that’s tautological from the nature of “intentional”, but it does seem common enough to make it the best starting point for most people.
Right, that makes sense.
And to clarify, as I tried to say in the introduction, the post is mostly intended to counter the thought that “I shouldn’t feel safe”. So if someone is having thoughts that it’s wrong to feel safe and they should stop doing so, then the intent of the post isn’t to say “here’s how you should feel”. Rather, it’s just to say “if you do feel safe, I don’t think you need to take a metaphorical hammer and hit yourself with it until you feel unsafe (nor do you need to believe people who say that you should); here’s why I think you can stop doing that”.
So I think that if you are saying that one should focus on how they think about risks, and I’m saying that here’s one way to think about them, then we agree?
Yup, thanks for the clarification.