Is Fear Motivational? Should We Be Afraid to Feel It?

And as long as you’re up, please dead-bolt the door

By Ed Goldman

My late brother Stuart was neither short of subjective judgments nor shy about making objective pronouncements, each in an emotion-free monotone. He told me more than once that our immediate family’s unifying ethic was fear. 

It struck me as slightly off-center. Our dad had been a courageous New York City firefighter. Our mom was frequently an all-but-single mother, raising three strapping boys in a two-room apartment while our dad could be gone for days at a time (being courageous). 

Meanwhile, Stu’s and my eldest brother Jerry, now retired, was a teacher, and baseball and football coach in sometimes shaky Texas neighborhoods.

Stuart himself was a business entrepreneur who had helped create, then become the sole owner of, a successful dimensional inspection company in the highly competitive Bay Area. He liked to say his company ran “tolerance” inspections on everything from Barbie dolls rolling off assembly lines to rubber O-rings used in space shuttles. (He was not yet in the business when frozen O-rings were cited at the cause of the horrifying Challenger Space Shuttle disaster of 1986.) 

I’m leaving myself out of my brother’s fear equation because even he did. He begrudgingly admired my freelance-everything life and, prompted by our mom, came to realize that living solely by one’s alleged wit(s) is not for the faint-hearted. I’m not sure if it was bravery that kept me working for myself or a serious aversion to attending Christmas office parties and sampling Midge-from-Accountings “famous” rumballs year after year—or to pretending to find it hilarious if, upon asking a co-worker how things were going and receiving this response: “Okay—for a Tuesday!” 

Oh, the daily repartee of the workplace! The wit, the wordplay, the bonhomie! —Take me now, Dear God. 

I should point out that a few years after Stu advanced his familial fear theory, he had plenty of reason to feel afraid. He was diagnosed with Hepatitis C, which he’d contracted from a contaminated gamma-globulin transfusion. Eventually, he joined a civil suit against Baxter Laboratories, which distributed the fatal fluid, and personally won  a $2.2 million settlement, $1.1 million of which went to his legal team. He died a few months later. 

But Stu had been thinking about this conviction of his for years. He was a muller and a seeker (raised Jewish, he first turned to atheism in his 20s then, in his last years, to Buddhism). 

He cited chapter, verse and anecdotes to support his view that anything our family had ever achieved—which certainly wasn’t much, financially—had been motivated by fear. 

This wasn’t one of those contemporary fears like the stylish Imposter Syndrome, FOMO (fear of missing out) or “abandonment issues,” but rather a rock-ribbed sense that we felt we were always being pursued by figurative grizzlies, and that our actions were simply reactions to prevent our becoming figurative appetizers.