Those are some very interesting thoughts, votes. I will be watching for those manufactured solutions, too.
I have a story about fear. Decades ago, I used to have this shrink, Angela. I went for self-exploration reasons, and I think everyone who can afford one should do this for precisely the reason I'm going to explain.
So since I was going for self-exploration reasons, I asked Angela what we should talk about and one thing she suggested was that I should confront my fears. That sounded good to me, as I had legitimate fears at that time.
At the session where we were to discuss fears, I brought up two of my fears. One was of losing my home and being homeless and the other was of losing my parents. At that time my dad was having heart problems.
So as we went through the session, I had to talk about what I imagined would happen at each stage of this loss. This in itself was pretty interesting as it forces one to confront how one might handle such a situation.
In the end, I came away with a couple of things and I never forgot them. Angela reminded me that I'd always been able to handle rough situations in the past so why wouldn't I be able to in the future?
I walked away with a visual metaphor of a lumberjack working floating logs:
That's what it might be like sometimes but I've always managed to jump from one log to the next.
In regard to the second fear, the loss of my parents, Angela helped me see that what I feared was that their absence would mean I would have no one to love in that way. It wasn't hard for me to see that there will always be someone to love. Our world needs love and those who have it to give will always find a place for it.
Thirty years and one quadruple bypass later, Dad's still around! :)
I will not tell you my sessions with Angela have helped me escape negative emotions.
Rather than fear, I feel sadness: sadness that our beautiful oceans are acidifying. Sadness that as a people, we can't stop putting CO2 into the air so we can stop this problem. The saddest thing of all is that we could solve this problem but with the leaders we have now, we're not going to.
So to return to my point about confronting fears: over time, these problems solved themselves or I learned a way with which to work with them. I've been able to build up enough "firewalls" between me and homelessness that I don't think it will happen. In the case of the fear of the death of my parents, I've learned enough about death now that I don't fear it at all and I view death as just a crossing over to another form of existence.
Fear is a wasted emotion. There are other, more fruitful ways to deal with it.
Cher