They have a name for it now, a nice, clean, scientific-sounding name they cooked up in some university basement: “The Universal Fear of the Unknown.” It’s the kind of thing a man in a sweater-vest tells you about while you’re lying on his couch, paying him two hundred bucks an hour to listen to your sad, boring story.
It’s bullshit. All of it.
People aren’t afraid of the unknown. They’re terrified of the known.
The man with the mortgage and the 2.5 kids and the wife who’s started to look at him with a quiet, simmering contempt… he’s not afraid of the unknown. He’s afraid that tomorrow will be exactly the same as today. He’s afraid of the 6 a.m. alarm clock, the sour taste of instant coffee, the traffic on the freeway, the fluorescent lights of the office, the lukewarm dinner, and the dead, crushing silence in the bedroom. That’s his “known.” And it’s a cage. A comfortable, predictable, soul-crushing cage with wall-to-wall carpeting and a two-car garage. He’s not afraid of the door opening; he’s terrified it will stay locked forever.
The unknown, for him, is a beautiful, glorious fantasy. It’s the blonde at the end of the bar he’ll never talk to. It’s the one-way ticket to Mexico he’ll never buy. It’s the dream of burning his whole goddamn life to the ground and starting over as someone else, someone who isn’t so fucking tired all the time. He doesn’t fear that. He gets a hard-on just thinking about it. He prays for it in the quiet, desperate moments before he falls asleep.
You want to know what a man like me is afraid of? My “unknown” is their “known.”
My “known” is the bottom of a bottle. It’s the back of a woman’s head as she walks out the door for good. It’s the rejection slip in the mail, the eviction notice taped to the door, the sound of a landlord pounding on the wall. I know that landscape. I’ve walked every inch of it. There’s a strange, ugly comfort in that kind of chaos. You always know where you stand, and it’s usually in a pile of your own shit.
The real unknown, the thing that makes my gut clench and my hands shake? It’s a quiet Tuesday night with nothing to drink and no one to fight with. It’s a clean house and a balanced checkbook. It’s a woman who looks at you with honest, uncomplicated love and doesn’t have a single, beautiful, ugly scar on her. That’s the real terrifying shit. That’s the foreign country I’ve never visited.
That’s a world where my survival skills are useless. What do you do when the enemy isn’t the world, but your own goddamn happiness? What do you do when you finally have something to lose?
So don’t talk to me about the “fear of the unknown.” The only thing people are really afraid of is losing their chains. They’ve worn them for so long, they’ve forgotten what it feels like to walk without the weight. They’ve mistaken the cage for a home.
The real bravery isn’t in facing the unknown. Any fool can do that; it’s called desperation. The real, quiet, ugly, beautiful bravery is in facing the known, day after goddamn day, and still finding a reason to pour another drink instead of putting a gun in your mouth. It’s about enduring your own particular brand of hell, whether it’s a quiet one with a well-manicured lawn, or a loud one with sirens and broken glass.
That’s the whole show.
