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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm trying to finish Alan Watt's The Wisdom of Insecurity. I wasn't impressed the first time I tried it, but his work on Zen changed my image of him in a positive way. Still slowly going through my backlog.
The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker (1998). The main premise is that if you have a negative gut feeling about a person or situation, go ahead and follow it out of the situation, don't try to come up with a bunch of justifications for why things are actually alright, there's no reason to worry. There probably is a reason to worry, you're picking up on something, even when you aren't able to articulate what or why in the moment. He says he's spent a lot of time interviewing victims, or close misses after violent incidents, and they usually eventually tell him details that explain some of the signals that made them nervous after the fact, and sometimes do manage to get out before the going gets bad -- for instance a man who asked into a convenience store, and then immediately out again shortly before a shooting.
It seems plausible enough. I've never been in a really bad situation, but every time I haven't liked someone immediately, tried to make up excuses for them in my head, thought and thought about it, tried to like them, it turned out that, no, we actually could not live or work together. Probably most people, most of the time, do really have reasonable instinctive boundaries.
There's a risk of conflating serious danger with personal discomfort and using the first to justify the second, and also a parallel risk of using the second to dismiss the first.
In the first case you end up avoiding everything that isn't immediately pleasant and personally gratifying, and in the second case you fail to avoid a dangerous situation because you haven't given it the chance to prove your intuitions
wrongright.It's not without merit but I think the advice to "trust your fear instinct" is another one of those messages that is more likely to appeal to and reach the wrong audience and reinforce their fearfulness rather than attenuating their fearlessness.
I really liked Scott's Different Worlds post, and wish that he (or someone) would investigate that further.
De Becker seems to think there are people who are always being stalked, and have to be super cautious all the time, and may often be in dangerous situations. He worked with celebrities and abuse victims, so maybe that's true for them.
I'm not that far in, but de Becker just mentioned that if someone is jogging in the park and gets an uncomfortable feeling, they shouldn't try to use peripheral vision, they should take their headphones off, stop for a second, turn, and make eye contact with anyone looking at them. I'm not subtle at all, and probably give off that vibe anyway.
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