Don’t Spend Your Summer Being Scared

Fear doesn’t have to be your new normal

Illustration: Laurie Rollitt

We’ve grown accustomed to being afraid. Since the 1980s, according to the sociologist Barry Glassner, Americans have lived in a state of low-level panic. Some social scientists would even describe fear as addictive, he says. While the jury’s out on that, it’s certainly contagious: If you tell me about your fears, I get them too. Then I pass them on.

Let’s be clear: No one’s saying that you shouldn’t be afraid right now. Between a global pandemic, ongoing police brutality and institutional racism, and the looming 2020 election, there are plenty of things to worry about. But there’s a difference between reasoned concern and naked fear. The first might keep you safe; the latter could actually kill you. After 9/11, for instance, fear of plane hijackings prompted many people to take long road trips instead of flying. Planes weren’t hijacked — but many more people died in traffic accidents.

But fear doesn’t have to be your new normal, even in a time when some amount of it is warranted. This is not the first time that humankind has been collectively scared, nor is the unexpected joy that some quarantined people are finding in confinement unprecedented: As bombs rained down on London in the Second World War, bomb shelters became centers for community and merriment: In…