Your Sense of Fear is the Enemy

If you're not scared to death while driving, your emotions are lost.

I hate rock climbing.

As a white upper-middle-class kid in my 20s, I’m surrounded by friends who adore it. Getting to scale beautiful mountains and getting ridiculous views, it’s the sort of nature-esque vibe hobby that’s hard to hate, like hiking. Unlike hiking, however, I’ve never even got to see the pretty view. Every single time I start to ascend at a rock-climbing gym, my hands start to sweat. I start shaking. My heart rate quickens. I hug the wall for dear life. Every time I move my foot up to the next hold, I feel more miserable than I’ve ever been in my entire life.

Thirty minutes before I arrive at the climbing gym, I’m in my car listening to music. I notice I don’t like the song, and I lazily look at my phone, turn it on, and skip the song while lightly paying attention to the road. I don’t even think about it. No adrenaline. No fear. Another commute.

This is wrong.

The number of deaths in the last 10 years from climbing-gym accidents while on belay is almost certainly in the single digits. It’s difficult to find reports of more than one. In 2021 there seemed to be two from not clipping onto the belay properly: one death in Colorado and one death in Australia. I also found one from 2014, but that’s not within the last 10 years. All of these are from auto-belays, and I’ve actually only ever done manual belays with a person on the other end. I couldn’t find any deaths while on manual belay. If you spend an hour rock climbing at the gym, your odds of dying are somewhere in the one-in-a-hundred-million range, or better. Rock climbing is an overwhelmingly safe activity; my sense of fear was wrong. Fixate on that word: my sense of fear was incorrect, insofar as fear is useful to avoid threats. Fear is an emotion that theoretically should make us avoid bad things.

Driving, on the other hand, is a bloodbath. The number of deaths from car accidents, just in the US, in the past 10 years is around 412,000. That’s around 40,000 a year, 3,300 per month, 800 a week, and around 110 people dead every single day—around 5 every hour, or one person every 12 minutes. It’s probably more likely than not someone will die in the US from a car accident by the time you finish reading this article. But of course, this data needs to be normalized; far more people drive than rock climb. Only 19 people have died in space; that does not mean it’s safe. It’s best to imagine—if you spent an hour at the climbing gym versus spending an hour driving—which is more dangerous? We’re just going to look at deaths here, but in an ideal case you’d also look at other unfavorable possibilities, like major injuries.

We have good data for cars: Americans drive about 3 trillion miles per year; there are around 40,000 car accidents in a year, so that’s a 0.00004 % chance of death every hour you drive. Rock climbing, on the other hand? Likely around 0.0000015 % chance of dying every hour you climb. That many zeroes will make anyone’s eyes glaze over, so from now on let’s just use comparisons: Driving is around 25× more dangerous than indoor rock climbing. That’s not actually as big as I might have thought. But still, if you drive an hour, then rock-climbed at a gym an hour, the vast majority of the time, if you die, it’d be on the road.

I think about hourly death rates a lot. If I have a three-hour drive today—oop—I’m orders of magnitude more likely to die. It’s not a perfect metric; most people die from health complications related to things like obesity and smoking. Here they don’t drop dead after the first bite of a Big Mac, so it’s not going to give you true danger for things like this. In fact, there’s a case to be made that even driving is a red herring compared to consistent healthy-living decisions like these. But one thing this metric is very good at is seeing which fears are irrational and which are not. Driving, as you may imagine, would be one of the most rational fears from this angle—of course, most people do not have it.

We can look at other things—roller coasters? Around 2× safer than driving; fear takes a loss here. Skydiving? About 7× worse than driving, assuming a jump takes an hour, so fear seems fair here. Of course, that means that driving seven hours will have the same death rate as skydiving, so I can work remotely for a few days and have enough “death lotto points” banked to skydive. Maybe not super rational then. An hour on your bike in the city? Right around as safe as driving. Free-solo climbing on the side of a mountain is about 500× worse than driving, which sounds a little better than I thought, except the only people who do it are very capable; if I did it, it would probably be suicidal. BASE jumping is around 1,100× worse than driving; I can’t make that up—those death lotto points—in a week of remote work. This section would be incomplete without me acknowledging outdoor roped rock climbing is roughly 10× more dangerous than driving. Pretty bad, but not overly so. I also need to point out that space is about 100× more dangerous per hour than driving; seems justifiable to avoid. Scuba diving though? Roughly 5× more dangerous than driving. Seems fine. Bungee jumping? About 5× more dangerous. Snowboarding? Around 3× safer. In a plane? About 13× safer.

The last few are so safe compared to something we do every day that the risk basically doesn’t exist at all. This point is an instant-win argument for anyone worried about the risk of one of these activities (except maybe for snowboarding, where you have to do dangerous mountain driving to get to the slopes!). Worried mothers shouldn’t care if their kid takes up any of these activities; they should care how far they have to drive them to school!

Some of the figures above are misleading. BASE jumping’s figure assumes one jump is one hour long (so instead of only BASE jumping, we’re including the prep). For roller coasters—which should probably also be “per coaster ride”—this trick is not used. If you’re comparing one roller-coaster ride to an hour of driving, it’s 65× safer, not 2×! These are important distinctions and of course matter, but for real people in the real world, if something is 30× safer than driving or 3,000×, it might as well be arbitrarily high for how much value you’d get out of skipping that activity: almost zero. If you still drive, anything that you do less than driving that’s safer than driving is a rounding error in your risk evaluation.

Fear is good in some cases. Specifically, it’s good if it’s what you want to feel! I won’t put watching scary movies on the list because, shockingly, most people want to feel fear during them. Roller coasters have this same sort of sleight of hand; the fear is a bonus here because it adds to the thrill. But the human brain is not so good at putting intellectual barriers around its emotions (that will be the defining point in part 2). When you are terrified, it overwhelms your logic. It tells you, “You will be the one in a billion.” And the best response, bar none, is to use every ounce of your brain to tell your sense of fear that it’s incorrect. There’s a certain twisted emotional logic to saying something has “bad vibes,” that the fear doesn’t matter because “love is irrational too.” No. Kill your fear as much as you can; divorce yourself from the shackles that bind you. Not doing something because you’re afraid of it is OK. But do not ever let your fear think it has a point: “It looks dangerous,” “the statistics might be off,” “the vibes are off,” “I have a bad feeling about it,” “Better safe than sorry,” “You never know what could happen,” “Why risk it?” These are false, incorrect, wrong.

The reason why fear is so badly miscalibrated is obvious: we evolved in an environment where we were likely to be killed by bears or whatever, not driving cars. All of our emotions are ways to get ahead in an environment that passed us by more than a thousand years ago.

Now, will killing your fear work? Probably not.

Aella

is one of the people most committed to rationality I know, and she’s put out a post on how she got over her fear of needles—and the #1 thing that didn’t work is “just stop being afraid lol.” You will still sweat. I will still be terrified while rock climbing, and that fear will consume me. But you desperately need to have some part of you fighting tooth and nail, telling your fear that it is WRONG. Your entire stream of consciousness should be focused on the fact that this is the incorrect emotion to feel. Otherwise you’ll fall further than you thought.

(I’m trying to grow my Substack community, and the #1 thing you can do to support me is subscribe and restack this. I also selfishly like comments, but only because discussions are fun and always interesting.)

This is part one of a two part post. Part two, titled “Your Sense of Morality is the Enemy” will release soon.