The other day I was talking with some colleagues about holiday plans, and how there is never enough time to do everything you want, and how some people try to solve this by planning everything down to the minute. Everybody at the table (myself included) groaned and laughed about this, because we all agree that over-planning takes the fun out of a holiday, but it set me thinking about the relationship between control and fun, and about the link between each of them and fear. Too much fear, and you may end up with an obsessive need for control; too little, and you can get recklessness, as if none of your actions have any consequences, and everything is just a game.
The trick, of course, is to find just the right balance between both extremes. On the whole, young people seem to be more on the reckless end of the scale, and the exasperated advice to "please grow up" often refers to their lack of responsibility. But the vast majority will “grow up” without any help or admonishments from others; for the most part, it happens all by itself. Going in the other direction (lightening up, when it feels like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders) seems harder, or at least it does to me. For many people, the fear curve is like the tension curve of most story plots: almost flat at the beginning, then steadily climbing towards a climax. For some people, this is where it all ends: like straws breaking the camel’s back, the fears (or more accurately, the negative effects thereof) accumulate until something gives. Anti-climaxes, when they happen, are often very recognizable: suddenly, many previous worries seem to disappear. People who experience this phase may cross the street without looking both ways first, or put on whatever they feel like, or speak their mind and are not worried about the consequences, or all three and more.
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In his book "Class", Paul Fussell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Fussell) claims that fear is mostly a problem of the middle classes, and that the people at the bottom and the top of the class scale are much less afflicted. Given the fact that working conditions for the lower classes were traditionally much more dangerous (think of mines collapsing, construction site accidents, dangerous chemicals in the factory, etc.) than for the middle classes - a correlation so consistent that Fussell even uses it as a quick-and-dirty way to distinguish between the two -, you would expect more fear in the lower classes, but I didn't make that connection until, in the course of reading up on something completely different, I was led - by the usual stream-of-consciousness type experience that I often have on the Internet - to a text of Freud's in which he discusses fear, fright and anxiety. Based on his text, I have come up with my own quick and ready way to distinguish between them, namely that fright is generally caused by a specific occurrence, that fear is linked to specific objects, and that anxiety is more of a general state, not specifically linked to either. And that in turn makes it easy - my usual de Bono lateral jump - to come up with the following rough and overly simplistic classification of fear: ordinary fear is for the lower class, anxiety is for the middle class, and fright is for the upper classes.
The trick, of course, is to find just the right balance between both extremes. On the whole, young people seem to be more on the reckless end of the scale, and the exasperated advice to "please grow up" often refers to their lack of responsibility. But the vast majority will “grow up” without any help or admonishments from others; for the most part, it happens all by itself. Going in the other direction (lightening up, when it feels like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders) seems harder, or at least it does to me. For many people, the fear curve is like the tension curve of most story plots: almost flat at the beginning, then steadily climbing towards a climax. For some people, this is where it all ends: like straws breaking the camel’s back, the fears (or more accurately, the negative effects thereof) accumulate until something gives. Anti-climaxes, when they happen, are often very recognizable: suddenly, many previous worries seem to disappear. People who experience this phase may cross the street without looking both ways first, or put on whatever they feel like, or speak their mind and are not worried about the consequences, or all three and more.
...
In his book "Class", Paul Fussell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Fussell) claims that fear is mostly a problem of the middle classes, and that the people at the bottom and the top of the class scale are much less afflicted. Given the fact that working conditions for the lower classes were traditionally much more dangerous (think of mines collapsing, construction site accidents, dangerous chemicals in the factory, etc.) than for the middle classes - a correlation so consistent that Fussell even uses it as a quick-and-dirty way to distinguish between the two -, you would expect more fear in the lower classes, but I didn't make that connection until, in the course of reading up on something completely different, I was led - by the usual stream-of-consciousness type experience that I often have on the Internet - to a text of Freud's in which he discusses fear, fright and anxiety. Based on his text, I have come up with my own quick and ready way to distinguish between them, namely that fright is generally caused by a specific occurrence, that fear is linked to specific objects, and that anxiety is more of a general state, not specifically linked to either. And that in turn makes it easy - my usual de Bono lateral jump - to come up with the following rough and overly simplistic classification of fear: ordinary fear is for the lower class, anxiety is for the middle class, and fright is for the upper classes.
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