Comment by fnicfnac
4 days ago
I'm not sure if there is a word for people who choose high risk activities because they have less fear, because I'm not a coroner.. Perhaps because I'm not sure I have a healthy enough fear of death.
If you examine the stats with the assumption that you could be one who dies early and probably won't take up opioids then there is some logical reasoning to do about your relationship with cars and death. "Mistaking" that for fear is a defense mechanism.
The situation of the worse is better crowd and computer security increasingly looks like one of these things that I don't want to apply such a defense mechanism to.
Linux has not really gotten us closer to eliminating Windows yet it has eliminated a lot of the other approaches to eliminating Windows. Maybe it is only on par with the escooters that can now run me down on the sidewalk but don't seem to have reduced my risk from cars.
> I'm not sure I have a healthy enough fear of death.
You seem to have a very healthy fear of other things, like drivers or scooters running you over, and media buttons on computers launching life-altering software. I'm betting your fear of death might not be healthy, but possibly unhealthy in the sense you're spending your life worrying about things that... well, likely aren't gonna happen to you.
Left right left and all that.
No external compass, something the group views as (or probably unavoidably knows to be) dangerous. Overcoming the fear of it and then belittling those who haven't completed the same process. Psychologists call that the normalization of deviance. A commercial airline pilot has the external compass in your questionable aviation example.
You don't want a group with initial success with the left, right left and so much enjoyment from the sense of fulfillment in social deviance process that they think they can take over everything.
When did every mundane choice became a life-or-death calculation for you? Media buttons aren't footguns. Scooters aren't assassins.
The gap between reasonable caution and this kind of hypervigilance isn't wisdom, it's self-imposed paralysis.
Running pedestrian safety and keyboard shortcuts through the same catastrophic framework is a system that's eating itself - every interaction becomes a referendum on survival.
When people point out that you aren't serving yourself with this worldview, you seem to take the disagreement as proof that others just don't see what's coming.
That's not living... that's white-knuckling through existence, mistaking the grip for control.