What did everyone fear?
Answers
Fear is triggered by one or more of your fundamental needs (details below) being threatened:
- loss of control (real or potential)
- loss of connection (real or potential) to others, to oneself or to one’s activities
- inconsistency (real or potential) between expectations and reality.
Human behavior is driven by three fundamental needs: control, connection and consistency.
Those of our ancestors who answered those needs survived long enough to reproduce and pass on their genes to their children.
Thanks to evolution, the needs are still with us today. Individually or combined, they drive everything we think and do. They express themselves in infinite ways in a world that has become generally less threatening to survival and reproduction, but more complex.
Understanding and satisfying those three needs, both in yourself and in others, is key to navigating today’s world, to communicating effectively (or influencing if you prefer) and achieving what you want. The three needs are:
* Need to feel in CONTROL of one’s life. This explains people’s taste for things like knowledge, freedom, choice, power, insurance, property, contracts, astrology, novelty, numbers and money. Losing one’s control over one’s life or loss of any kind, whether real or potential, is something we avoid and act on.
* Need for CONNECTION. There is very little, including reproduction, that we can achieve alone. Evolution has hardwired us to assume we can achieve much more by collaborating with others and being sociable (watch how babies attract attention). We also need to feel emotionally connected to the world around us, to what we do in it, to what things mean, to who we are and to who we might become. Important: numbers rarely help anyone connect with anything. Feelings do. Isolation or exclusion, whether real or potential, are situations we instinctively fear and may go to extremes to avoid.
* Need for CONSISTENCY. This need supports the first two. How do we spot threats to our control and connections? How do we spot opportunities to test and improve them? By constantly checking our surroundings for consistencies and inconsistencies. Consciously or not, we can’t stop ourselves filling gaps, spotting patterns, inventing or finding explanations (through religion, for example) and drawing conclusions. The world might seem to be in a turmoil of change, but most of life is actually consistent. We know from observation and learning that the same causes have the same effects and that reality in its millions of tiny details, including our own thoughts, actions and identity, is mostly consistent with our expectations and remains so from one timeframe to the next. This means, crucially, that anything that we know to be consistent can be safely ignored in most cases. This in turn frees up our mind to pay attention to inconsistencies, which signal threats to our control and connections or opportunities to improve them.
Answer:
Everyone feared that one day she might fall down from the tree.