From scary movies to roller coasters to extreme sports, there are ways we can scare ourselves—for fun. Why do some people enjoy uncertain, risky, or dangerous situations? In this Believer essay, Elisa Gabbert reflects on her fear of heights, and also explores fear as pleasure, the philosophy of games, and anxiety as a luxury.
I collect this kind of story, the kind that reveals a crack in reality. They give me that skin-tingling feeling, a flutter in the chest. We tell ourselves that roller coasters are perfectly safe and that planes don’t crash. I don’t want it not to be true; I don’t want to die on a plane. So why do I like the stories? It’s like I want my sense of reality to be destabilized. It’s like I’m playing some kind of game, a game in which the complex world falls away and I focus on a single threat. A single strange-but-very-real threat. I can stop riding roller coasters, obviously, but it’s harder to avoid planes or other forms of transportation. Trains do get derailed. Bridges do collapse. So the threats are very real—but not immediate. Not for me, when I’m reading the news, when I’m sitting at my desk.
Is there anything useful about that feeling, I wonder? That artificial fear, or fear at a distance? Might practicing fear be a good idea? It seems more useful than anxiety—if anxiety is just the brain burning energy it doesn’t really need, because you’re not currently starving, or trying to outrun a lion. These may be just concepts, words I attach to agitation, but when I call the feeling anxiety, I’m mapping it alongside paralysis and existential dread. I associate anxiety with stasis, with insomnia, lying supine in bed. Fear, on the contrary, is a vertical feeling. It’s activating. If I’m scared, I want to be moving.
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