Column:

New study shows we're all going to die

By Charles Austin

Published Sept. 11, 2007

Lately, I've been thinking about what's going to kill me. And, if everything is believed, it turns out just about everything is going to kill me.

Cell phone usage might cause cancer, there are pesticides in the drinking water and we all eat too much Trans fat. It occurred to me, somewhere in this stream of indirect death threats, that no living thing should ever have this many means of dying to worry about. Although James Bond might live twice, most of us only live half that many times. This also means that most of us only die half that many times, and I will probably only die of one cause, unless I'm incredibly unlucky and manage to have a heart attack while getting hit by a bus or something.

Thus, technically speaking, we each need only worry about one thing killing us. But the world doesn't work that way, because most of us aren't clairvoyant, and most of us live in bacteria-infested houses on the verge of being bombed by fundamentalist terrorist hijackers. Our wives are always on the verge of being raped, our children are always on the verge of being kidnapped, and local street gangs are always on the verge of breaking into our homes to rob and murder us if the carbon monoxide doesn't kill us in our sleep before they break in.

Maybe I just know boring people, but I have never known anyone who was killed by carbon monoxide, SARS, bird flu or the T-Virus. The only reason we're supposed to be afraid of so many things is that society has gotten more complex.

Thousands of years ago, you only had to fear God, armies from warring states and perhaps dragons. These things never went away. People still fear God, still fear our enemies and I can only assume that a few misguided nerds still fear dragons. None of these fears are as universally compelling as they were in the past, though, and thus we need a whole slew of new fears to keep us in check.

I worked at a hospital in the summer and lived in constant fear of contracting some horrible disease that has not existed since the 1920s, because that's probably the last time most of those patients saw daylight. But after months of realizing I wasn't getting sick, maybe because I washed my hands more than Howard Hughes,

I eventually realized that nothing was going to happen to me. Hospital workers don't contract polio, bird flu isn't going to wipe out the human race and McDonald's coffee isn't really all that hot.

The odds are overwhelmingly in my favor that I will never contract AIDS or die in a plane crash over the Bermuda Triangle. But it's in my best interest that I fear these things, and it's in our collective best interest that we all do.

Franklin Roosevelt famously said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, but he had everything entirely backward. Fear keeps us in check, and the only thing worse than a society scared of everything is a society scared of nothing.

Fearlessness is always played up in movies and on television as a noble quality, but in the era of nuclear weapons, bravery and Herculean strength don't amount to anything.

Absolutely everyone you know can be killed in the time it takes to download a PDF file, and that is frightening.

But, maybe we as humans need to exist in constant fear of dying, because it's really the only thing that reminds us we're alive.