On fear

ONE OF THE RHETORICAL moves I often observe in response to fear about work is a kind of casual dismissal. Someone will say to a friend or colleague that they worry about ageism in their industry, and the response will come that, oh, no, they shouldn’t have to worry about that, they’re so accomplished. Or, surely that’s paranoia or imposter syndrome talking; or, of course they’re privileged enough that they don’t need to concern themselves over that kind of thing. It can almost seem as if it isn’t respectable to admit being afraid, as if fear is irrational, nonsensical, uncouth.

I think those responses are, more often than not, well-intentioned. Dismissing fear is one way of diminishing it, keeping it small enough that we’re not paralyzed by it, unable to get through the day. And often the person who responds this way is also managing their own fear, keeping their own demons at bay. But in my observations, fear tends to get louder and more insistent when we ignore it. If we don’t attend to it during the day, it erupts into the night, disrupting sleep, sending nightmares. We expend a great deal of energy trying to keep it down, and end up exhausted from the effort, ever more paralyzed and fearful as a result.

I want, as always, to be plain here: there is nothing irrational about being fearful of our workplaces. A good job is our livelihood, our comfort, our needs being met; a bad one can bring incredible misery, and no job at all is often worse. Given the amount of harm that can emerge from work, it may in fact be more unreasonable to claim that fear is out of place, especially these days. Between the layoffs and RTO plans and the dystopian AI-fueled prophecies, the unmasked plans to resegregate our workplaces, the blatant misogyny and racism and bigotry—we’ve got a lot to be afraid about.

So, what then? What happens when we don’t dismiss those fears? When we don’t reach immediately for behaviors that numb or console? The fear doesn’t go away, I’m sorry to say. But with the right attention, it becomes a useful partner instead of a haunting. When you acknowledge a fear, when you name it and bring it into the light, you open up some space to think with it, to converse with it, to consider what it’s trying to tell you. When you admit in conversation with a friend that, yes, ageism is real and it’s coming for you, you don’t diminish the threat, but you do give yourself some space to consider what you want to do about it.

And, critically, you don’t have to occupy that space alone. The threats and dangers in our workplaces are collective, not individual. That does not mean that they are evenly distributed—they are not. But none of us is without risk, and none of us can thrive on our own; a risk to some of us is a danger to all of us. And our ability to respond and attend to those dangers is so much greater when we do it together. One person trying to navigate ageism or misogyny or the unholy alliance between them has only so many moves to make; but when several or dozens of people attempt the same, more opportunities emerge. Not only strategies for changing our workplaces or creating different ones, but also ways to practice collective care and support, to weave stronger connections, to produce an interdependence that’s creative, generative, constructive of something new—to plant the seeds for a different world.

Sometimes the best response to make when someone admits to being afraid is to say, “I’m afraid of that, too.” And then to sit with that for a moment, to let the connection between you spark and then settle in, to see where it takes you. It’s not that some brilliant solution will reveal itself, or that you will suddenly know how to defeat these interlocking systems of oppression. But that together you might start to explore where that fear is making itself known, what shape it’s taking for you both; you may be able to design some experiments or investigations to better understand it, to discover what paths are open for inquiry or study; to learn how others have moved through this terrain before you. Instead of letting your fear drag you around, kicking and screaming, you get to tell it where you need it to go. Because it’s oh-so-ready to walk alongside you, to be your guardian and co-conspirator, to warn you of the dangers ahead and to arm you against them. It just needs you to admit that it’s real.