Screwing the fear is a great philosophy. Unfortunately it only really applies to situations that you can control. We just need to learn the difference between what we can control and what we can’t. Right now, most of us are dealing with the Covid 19 pandemic, which is probably the scariest thing I’ve seen in my lifetime. And for most people on the planet, they’ve never seen anything like this. The last time that this happened was coincidentally, roughly a hundred years ago with the Spanish flu. While many people think this was a flu outbreak in Spain, it was a worldwide pandemic much like what we are having now. Over 500 million people were infected with the flu at that time. At the turn of the last century the Earth’s population was about 1.8 Billion. So this represented almost 30% of the Earth’s population.
We know that a minimum of 17 million people died and the number is probably quite a bit higher than that. So what can you do to screw the fear when there’s nothing that you can do to make the fear less real? Well, simply dealing with it, knowing that it’s there. Try to have as normal an existence as possible is really about all you can do. We have to be vigilant in terms of habits. Do stuff that makes sense. Don’t go out into large groups. Don’t touch things unnecessarily. Thinks like that.
Attitude is Everything
And most important don’t focus on the negative. As long as the pandemic exists, the fear is going to be there. Focus on the positive because the reality is that according to the CDC, over 97 percent of people who get Covid 19 get better.
As with most things, we can’t control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond to what happens to us. And that’s really the probably the most important takeaway of this. If you’re going to screw the fear, don’t give it any more power than it already has. This is a serious situation and we have to deal with it. But how we deal with it is up to us. You know, we can face it with some degree of normalcy and still take the proper precautions. Getting crazy and starting fights in the store or on the airplane is not a productive way to deal with this. There are shortages of things right now. We just need to plan accordingly and improvise if necessary. So, try to be smart, try to be practical and try to be hopeful. And to the best extent possible, screw the fear.