Fear of Loss

Share

We hear every day over the news outlets about how much everyone lost financially over the last few months of economic turmoil. What we don’t hear is that some people, like Warren Buffett, Jamie Gorellick, and Franklin Raines, made out like bandits. Except for the last year, most of the people criticizing the Bush Administration’s economic policies actually did pretty well during the last eight years. However, this isn’t meant to be directly political as I wish to deal with the bigger issue of how in fearing to lose something, we virtually guarantee it.

When I took radiation safety training and handling of biohazardous organisms, the instructors took great pains to dispel illogical fears. I remember how in the former course, the instructor passed a Geiger counter over the banana one person brought for a snack and how it registered high degrees of radiation. He went on to explain that some 20% of the potassium on earth is radioactive, but completely harmless, so chances are by eating bananas you’re getting some exposure. A virologist I know spoke with me once about how the most virulent disease outbreaks occur in civilized societies because we fear sickness so much that we overscrub our children. Then, when exposed to some germ, their bodies lack any modicum of front line defense and they languish much more than children in the third world from comparable infections. Many of my coworkers panicked earlier this year and pulled their retirement funds from the market after they took “losses” when the value was a projected imaginary value and not a true number. Stocks only have value when they are sold, if you can find someone to buy them. History also teaches us that things happen in cycles- light, sound, economics, politics, etc. Yet, if you haven’t seen anything other than the peak of a particular cycle, it can be trying to overcome your fear and hope for the future. Much people’s fear in losing something is truly irrational. In many instances the things we fear losing aren’t things we possess at all.

Chief among these on my mind of the things we don’t control is affairs of the heart. I know a girl I really like who, like so many others in my lifetime, refuses to date a close guy friend in case she loses the friendship if the relationship doesn’t work out. This past week, she tried in vain to pay me a visit while she was in town for other business during a gap in her schedule of activities, but it didn’t work out with my schedule and responsibilities, but she did set up time on her next visit, knowing that if I schedule it, it gets done. Many of these women genuinely want a good, true, decent guy friend in whose company they can feel safe, they just don’t want to date that kind of guy. We constitute what appears to be more of a fallback option to whom they can turn if things don’t work out. Ergo, if they date us, to whom do they turn if things don’t work out?

Ironically enough, either way, they are destined to lose us as a friend. If we date, and it goes horribly wrong, yes there’s a chance that it will end on a sour note (though not usually on my part, with rare, rare exception), and that we’ll part ways without future confluence of interaction. However, in every instance where old female friends of mine married someone else, despite promises to the contrary, the guy they ended up with won’t hear of them hanging out with me. In their husband/boyfriend’s defense, most guys would be exactly what they feared and pursue some underhanded scheme, and I can’t say I’d be any different. Well, actually I know I have been in the one serious relationship I ever had, but that’s not to say I would be different from these guys with every girl and every old guy friend they have. Eventually, we drift apart because we’re forbidden to see one another by an unspoken disproval and because they are horrible at writing.

Fear keeps us from greater rewards. Remember the parable of the talents, where the one man buried the single talent for fear of losing it. For many people, fear of failure keeps them from fruitful relationships, whether in business or in love. If you don’t ask the girl out or start a business, you will never sow anything. How many people, for fear of losing what they have, buried their treasures and couldn’t find them again? If you spend all your time and money shoring things up against thieves, which shows thieves you have something worth stealing, you will inevitably be robbed. Thieves know no fear. I was involved heavily in a business that failed, and so I know how reticent I feel to repeat the endeavor, but I also accept that as a result I am unlikely to ever become a rich man, because nothing great was ever won without sacrifice.

Just as without sacrifice we cannot have things of value, we little value the things we have that we obtain without sacrifice. Said a great patriot, “That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly.” Consider also what we value. Often in my experience, we value continuity and familiarity over that “animating contest of freedom”. For fear of being different, we conform to particular standards and habits. For many years, my family went without television in Florida, and although we didn’t know what was going on in the sitcoms and cartoons our peers watched, I feel richer for the experience. I shake my head at the lavish expense on aesthetic beauty for fear of not being appealing, and on all the money spent buying friends and companionship. Remember that prodigal son who spent his money in riotous living, and when it was spent, his friends abandoned him. Like that man, many people in society spend money they don’t have to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.

Right here in Nevada, however, we have an ironic and iconic symbol of how risk and return work. Note on slot machines and table games that the payout for statistically unlikely outcomes is very high. It’s because you have to risk quite a bit for that to become a possibility. So too, if there’s something you really want, you have to be willing to put everything on the table to obtain it.

I wrote before about people I try to help who show that they do not really want to be better off tomorrow than they are today. None of them want to trade their current life for the one they want. If you don’t like the way your life is, it is within your power to try and change it. Yes it might be risky, but if you’re not willing to risk what you have for it, you don’t really want it. Like many of you I appreciate the comforts of every day routine- the security of the familiar, the tranquility of repetition. I enjoy them as much as any Tom, Dick or Harry, but the truth is that there’s something terribly wrong with this country. In return for peace and order, we sold the birthright of liberty for a mess of pottage. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, disease, economic ruin. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and this November you may lose everything.

This is probably the only time I will ever write specifically any intentions on my ballot this November. If you love continuity more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude more than the animating contest of freedom, then vote for Obama. I would rather die.

Remember, remember on the 5^th of November…