The focus above is only on the negative effects of fear and the positve effects of being excited, on the contrary:
Sustainability: Humans reproduce fast compared to other mammals with a similiar size. This describes human condition within the last 50.000 years. Humans died early and often.
Robustness: Fear is an awesome motivator. Fear can optimize situations and can help overcome stumbling blocks, produce heightend situational awareness over long periods of time and is a motivation to not fail.
Unclear or over thinking: Shock or surprise (elements of fear) can make you just act and stop rationalizing.
Long term: Being excited in a care free enviroment that optimized scarsity causes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestyle_disease and may cause the use of fear to be politically and culturally manipulated b/c there is very little to be afraid of.
Indeed, a specific mix of fear and excitement is probably much better for certain problems than either of the two. Fear to ground you and remind you to be sober about the problem, excitement to provide a lasting and powerful motivation.
But empirically, it seems to me that a lot of people are operating on fear/excitement mixes that are skewed too much towards “fear”, unproductively so.
The focus above is only on the negative effects of fear and the positve effects of being excited, on the contrary:
Sustainability: Humans reproduce fast compared to other mammals with a similiar size. This describes human condition within the last 50.000 years. Humans died early and often.
Robustness: Fear is an awesome motivator. Fear can optimize situations and can help overcome stumbling blocks, produce heightend situational awareness over long periods of time and is a motivation to not fail.
Unclear or over thinking: Shock or surprise (elements of fear) can make you just act and stop rationalizing.
Long term: Being excited in a care free enviroment that optimized scarsity causes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestyle_disease and may cause the use of fear to be politically and culturally manipulated b/c there is very little to be afraid of.
Oh, I agree that some amount of fear can be useful in some circumstances. As Richard noted, the law of equal and opposite advice still applies here.
Indeed, a specific mix of fear and excitement is probably much better for certain problems than either of the two. Fear to ground you and remind you to be sober about the problem, excitement to provide a lasting and powerful motivation.
But empirically, it seems to me that a lot of people are operating on fear/excitement mixes that are skewed too much towards “fear”, unproductively so.