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What Fear Can Teach Us

By Karen Thompson Walker
2013

Karen Thompson Walker is an American writer and the author of The Age of Miracles. In this
TED Talk, Walker discusses the connection between stories and fear and explains how fear
influences the decisions we make. Walker uses the experiences of the sailors on the whaleship
Essex to further explore the effects of fear on decision-making. As you read, take notes on the
positive and negative effects of listening to fears.

[1] One day in 1819, 3,000 miles off the coast of

Chile, in one of the most remote regions of
the Pacific Ocean, 20 American sailors
watched their ship flood with
seawater. They’d been struck by a sperm
whale, which had ripped a catastrophic hole
in the ship’s hull.1 As their ship began to sink
beneath the swells,2 the men huddled
together in three small whaleboats. These
men were 10,000 miles from home, more
than 1,000 miles from the nearest scrap of
"TG12_22961_D32_4700_1920" by TED
land. In their small boats, they carried
Conference is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
only rudimentary3 navigational
equipment and limited supplies of food and
water. These were the men of the whaleship Essex, whose story would later inspire parts of
Moby Dick.

Even in today’s world, their situation would be really dire,4 but think about how much worse it
would have been then. No one on land had any idea that anything had gone wrong. No search
party was coming to look for these men. So most of us have never experienced a situation as
frightening as the one in which these sailors found themselves, but we all know what it’s like to
be afraid. We know how fear feels, but I’m not sure we spend enough time thinking about what
our fears mean.

1. the water-tight body of a ship or boat

2. a slow, regular movement of the sea in rolling waves that do not break
3. Rudimentary (adjective) basic, not very advanced
4. Dire (adjective) extremely serious or urgent

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 As we grow up, we’re often encouraged to think of fear as a weakness, just another childish
thing to discard like baby teeth or roller skates. And I think it’s no accident that we think this
way. Neuroscientists5 have actually shown that human beings are hard-wired to be optimists.6
So maybe that’s why we think of fear, sometimes, as a danger in and of itself. “Don’t worry,” we
like to say to one another. “Don’t panic.” In English, fear is something we conquer. It’s
something we fight. It’s something we overcome. But what if we looked at fear in a fresh
way? What if we thought of fear as an amazing act of the imagination, something that can be as
profound7 and insightful as storytelling itself?

It’s easiest to see this link between fear and the imagination in young children, whose fears are
often extraordinarily vivid. When I was a child, I lived in California, which is, you know, mostly a
very nice place to live, but for me as a child, California could also be a little scary. I remember
how frightening it was to see the chandelier that hung above our dining table swing back and
forth during every minor earthquake, and I sometimes couldn’t sleep at night, terrified that the
Big One might strike while we were sleeping. And what we say about kids who have fears like
that is that they have a vivid imagination. But at a certain point, most of us learn to leave these
kinds of visions behind and grow up. We learn that there are no monsters hiding under the
bed, and not every earthquake brings buildings down. But maybe it’s no coincidence that some
of our most creative minds fail to leave these kinds of fears behind as adults. The same
incredible imaginations that produced The Origin of Species, Jane Eyre and The Remembrance of
Things Past, also generated intense worries that haunted the adult lives of Charles Darwin,
Charlotte Brontë and Marcel Proust. So the question is, what can the rest of us learn about fear
from visionaries8 and young children?

[5] Well let’s return to the year 1819 for a moment, to the situation facing the crew of the
whaleship Essex. Let’s take a look at the fears that their imaginations were generating as they
drifted in the middle of the Pacific. 24 hours had now passed since the capsizing9 of the
ship. The time had come for the men to make a plan, but they had very few options. In his
fascinating account of the disaster, Nathaniel Philbrick wrote that these men were just about as
far from land as it was possible to be anywhere on Earth. The men knew that the nearest
islands they could reach were the Marquesas Islands, 1,200 miles away. But they’d heard some
frightening rumors. They’d been told that these islands, and several others nearby, were
populated by cannibals. So the men pictured coming ashore only to be murdered and eaten for
dinner. Another possible destination was Hawaii, but given the season, the captain was
afraid they’d be struck by severe storms. Now the last option was the longest, and the most
difficult: to sail 1,500 miles due south in hopes of reaching a certain band of winds that could

5. a person who studies the development and function of the nervous system, which includes
the brain, the spinal cord, and nerves throughout the body
6. Optimist (noun) someone who is hopeful and confident about the future
7. Profound (adjective) having or revealing great knowledge
8. Visionary (noun) someone who has unusual foresight and imagination
9. to overturn in the water

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 eventually push them toward the coast of South America. But they knew that the sheer length
of this journey would stretch their supplies of food and water. To be eaten by cannibals, to be
battered by storms, to starve to death before reaching land. These were the fears that danced
in the imaginations of these poor men, and as it turned out, the fear they chose to listen
to would govern whether they lived or died.

Now we might just as easily call these fears by a different name. What if instead of calling them
fears, we called them stories? Because that’s really what fear is, if you think about it. It’s a kind
of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do. And fears and storytelling
have the same components. They have the same architecture. Like all stories, fears have
characters. In our fears, the characters are us. Fears also have plots. They have beginnings and
middles and ends. You board the plane. The plane takes off. The engine fails. Our fears also
tend to contain imagery that can be every bit as vivid as what you might find in the pages of a
novel. Picture a cannibal, human teeth sinking into human skin, human flesh roasting over a
fire. Fears also have suspense. If I’ve done my job as a storyteller today, you should be
wondering what happened to the men of the whaleship Essex. Our fears provoke in us a very
similar form of suspense. Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question
that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next? In other words, our fears
make us think about the future. And humans, by the way, are the only creatures capable of
thinking about the future in this way, of projecting ourselves forward in time, and this mental
time travel is just one more thing that fears have in common with storytelling.

As a writer, I can tell you that a big part of writing fiction is learning to predict how one event in
a story will affect all the other events, and fear works in that same way. In fear, just like in
fiction, one thing always leads to another. When I was writing my first novel, The Age Of
Miracles,10 I spent months trying to figure out what would happen if the rotation of the Earth
suddenly began to slow down. What would happen to our days? What would happen to our
crops? What would happen to our minds? And then it was only later that I realized how very
similar these questions were to the ones I used to ask myself as a child frightened in the
night. If an earthquake strikes tonight, I used to worry, what will happen to our house? What
will happen to my family? And the answer to those questions always took the form of a
story. So if we think of our fears as more than just fears but as stories, we should think of
ourselves as the authors of those stories. But just as importantly, we need to think of
ourselves as the readers of our fears, and how we choose to read our fears can have a
profound effect on our lives.

Now, some of us naturally read our fears more closely than others. I read about a study
recently of successful entrepreneurs,11 and the author found that these people shared a
habit that he called “productive paranoia,” which meant that these people, instead of dismissing
their fears, these people read them closely, they studied them, and then they translated that

10. Karen Thompson Walker’s first novel

11. a person who organizes and operates a business

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 fear into preparation and action. So that way, if their worst fears came true, their businesses
were ready.

And sometimes, of course, our worst fears do come true. That’s one of the things that is so
extraordinary about fear. Once in a while, our fears can predict the future. But we can’t possibly
prepare for all of the fears that our imaginations concoct. So how can we tell the difference
between the fears worth listening to and all the others? I think the end of the story of the
whaleship Essex offers an illuminating, if tragic, example. After much deliberation, the men
finally made a decision. Terrified of cannibals, they decided to forgo the closest islands and
instead embarked on the longer and much more difficult route to South America. After more
than two months at sea, the men ran out of food as they knew they might, and they were still
quite far from land. When the last of the survivors were finally picked up by two passing ships,
less than half of the men were left alive, and some of them had resorted to their own form of
cannibalism. Herman Melville, who used this story as research for Moby Dick, wrote years later,
and from dry land, quote, “All the sufferings of these miserable men of the Essex might in all
human probability have been avoided had they, immediately after leaving the wreck, steered
straight for Tahiti. But,” as Melville put it, “they dreaded cannibals.”

[10] So the question is, why did these men dread cannibals so much more than the extreme
likelihood of starvation? Why were they swayed by one story so much more than the other?
Looked at from this angle, theirs becomes a story about reading. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov
said that the best reader has a combination of two very different temperaments,12 the artistic
and the scientific. A good reader has an artist’s passion, a willingness to get caught up in the
story, but just as importantly, the readers also needs the coolness of judgment of a
scientist, which acts to temper and complicate the reader’s intuitive reactions to the story. As
we’ve seen, the men of the Essex had no trouble with the artistic part. They dreamed up a
variety of horrifying scenarios. The problem was that they listened to the wrong story. Of all the
narratives their fears wrote, they responded only to the most lurid,13 the most vivid, the one
that was easiest for their imaginations to picture: cannibals. But perhaps if they’d been able to
read their fears more like a scientist, with more coolness of judgment, they would have listened
instead to the less violent but the more likely tale, the story of starvation, and headed for Tahiti,
just as Melville’s sad commentary suggests.

And maybe if we all tried to read our fears, we too would be less often swayed by the most
salacious among them. Maybe then we’d spend less time worrying about serial killers and plane
crashes, and more time concerned with the subtler and slower disasters we face: the silent
buildup of plaque in our arteries, the gradual changes in our climate. Just as the most
nuanced14 stories in literature are often the richest, so too might our subtlest fears be the
truest. Read in the right way, our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination, a kind of

12. Temperament (noun) a person’s characteristic attitude, mood, or behavior

13. Lurid (adjective) causing horror or disgust
14. containing many small and subtle details

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 everyday clairvoyance,15 a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there’s still time to
influence how that future will play out. Properly read, our fears can offer us something as
precious as our favorite works of literature: a little wisdom, a bit of insight and a version of that
most elusive16 thing — the truth. Thank you. (Applause)

"What Fear Can Teach Us" from TEDGlobal by Karen Thompson Walker. Copyright © 2013 by TED.
This text is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Unless otherwise noted, this content is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license

15. the ability to see or know about things outside of the range of ordinary observation, such as
predict future events
16. Elusive (adjective) difficult to find, catch, or achieve

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 Text-Dependent Questions
Directions: For the following questions, choose the best answer or respond in complete
sentences.

1. PART A: Which of the following best identifies a central idea of the text?
A. While stories are usually based on fiction, fears are based on facts and
allow us to adequately prepare for threatening situations.
B. Fears operate through the imagination much like storytelling does, and we
can learn from our fears just as we can learn from stories.
C. Because the human mind is naturally attracted to dramatic narratives, the
most elaborate fears usually draw the most attention.
D. Basing decisions off of a fear or a story can have disastrous consequences
for ourselves and others, as neither are based on fact.

2. PART B: Which quote from the text best supports the answer to Part A?
A. "at a certain point, most of us learn to leave these kinds of visions behind
and grow up. We learn that there are no monsters hiding under the bed,
and not every earthquake brings buildings down." (Paragraph 4)
B. "just as importantly, we need to think of ourselves as the readers of our
fears, and how we choose to read our fears can have a profound effect on
our lives." (Paragraph 7)
C. "Terrified of cannibals, they decided to forgo the closest islands and
instead embarked on the longer and much more difficult route to South
America." (Paragraph 9)
D. "Maybe then we'd spend less time worrying about serial killers and plane
crashes, and more time concerned with the subtler and slower disasters
we face" (Paragraph 11)

3. PART A: Which of the following statements best describes how fear impacted the
Essex sailors' decision to sail south, according to the text?
A. The fear of death led the sailors to choose the option that they believed
would offer the highest chance of survival.
B. The sailors' fear of cannibalism overshadowed their sound judgment, so
they refused to sail to nearby islands.
C. The sailors decided to sail south because that was the only option that did
not arouse any fear.
D. The sailors invented stories instead of analyzing their situation, and they
chose to sail south because that was the best story.

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4. PART B: Which quote from the text best supports the answer to Part A?
A. "The time had come for the men to make a plan, but they had very few
options... these men were just about as far from land as it was possible to
be anywhere on Earth." (Paragraph 5)
B. "To be eaten by cannibals, to be battered by storms, to starve to death
before reaching land. These were the fears that danced in the
imaginations of these poor men" (Paragraph 5)
C. "When the last of the survivors were finally picked up by two passing ships,
less than half of the men were left alive, and some of them had resorted to
their own form of cannibalism." (Paragraph 9)
D. "perhaps if they'd been able to read their fears more like a scientist, with
more coolness of judgment, they would have listened instead to the less
violent but the more likely tale, the story of starvation" (Paragraph 10)

5. How does paragraph 3 contribute to the author's argument?

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 Discussion Questions
Directions: Brainstorm your answers to the following questions in the space provided. Be
prepared to share your original ideas in a class discussion.

1. In what ways do our fears prepare or fail to prepare us for future events? How much
do you agree with Walker's argument about the effects and the value of fear? When
might fear negatively impact a person's decisions?

2. When have you feared something that was unlikely to happen? How did it influence
your actions? How does it feel now to look back on the fear you experienced?

3. In the context of the speech, how does fear drive action? How are people influenced
by fear when making important decisions? What types of fears are they more likely to
listen to? Cite evidence from this text, your own experience, and other literature, art,
or history in your answer.