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Death Odds: Anything Scares Me

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Last month when the fearbola epidemic was at its height, I began to wonder what the odds really were of dying from such a disease—not Ebola, mind you, because I wasn’t actually worried about it, given that ebola isn’t very easy to catch.

But there are many other diseases, like malaria and tuberculosis, that kill millions of people a year. Even the flu results in thousands of deaths every year in the U.S. (the CDC’s estimated range is wide, from 3,000 to 49,000—depending on which year and how you crunch the numbers). Ebola fatalities in the U.S.? One.

This is not to minimize the horror of a disease like ebola, or the fact that well over five thousand people in the world have died from it this year. It’s just to point out that, with all the hype, it’s hard to know what to be afraid of. Two schools in Ohio closed because a staff member flew on the same aircraft as a nurse who contracted (and later recovered from) ebola. Not on the same flight, mind you, but on the same plane later the same day. If we followed that policy concerning the flu, our schools would be perpetually shut down because chances would be high that someone would have been on an airplane that at some point transported a sick person.

Besides, what are the odds of dying from a flu you catch on an airplane as opposed to dying because that airplane crashes? If you compare the mid-range fatalaties of the flu in the U.S. in a given year and compare that to flying, flying is much, much safer than getting sick. The odds of dying in a commercial plane crash in a given year is one in 11,000,000. Even if you account for people who fly a great deal, or particularly bad years for airline safety, you’re still far safer on an airplane than most other things, like on a bicycle. My husband cycles for long distances, several times a week, and it certainly looks dangerous to me—partly because few people seem to have caught on that bicycles are actually supposed to be on the road (Did you hear about the St. Louis area mayor who purposefully hit a cyclist with his car? That’s another post). All of it, motorcycles included, is safer than riding in a car.

Yet we keep driving. According to David Ropeik in How Risky Is Flying?, “People are also more sensitive about risks that are catastrophic, which kill people all at once in one place, than we are about risks that are chronic, where the victims are spread out over space and/or time. Plane crashes, therefore, get more media attention than, say, heart disease, which kills 2,200 people in the United States each day, just not all in one place at one moment.”

Now many of us in St. Louis have been at risk of our own epidemic: Fergbola. With an announcement expected any day about whether or not officer Darren Wilson will be indicted for the shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in August in Ferguson (just ten miles from me), anxiety is pervasive. Restaurants are closing early, businesses are taking all their paperwork home every night, and I’ve talked to a number of families who plan to leave town when the mayhem starts. But will there be mayhem? How do we know whether we really need to be afraid?

Turns out we put too much stock in our imaginations. As Paul Slovic writes for The Washington Post, “People’s sense of risk has little to do with mathematical probability.” We judge risk based not on statistics, but on whether the activity or disease is unfamiliar, invisible, increasing, not adequately understood by experts and evokes feelings of dread. That would explain why we worry about a few ebola deaths when there are 32,000 gun deaths in this country every year. Guns in America are, sadly, not unfamiliar, invisble, or inadequately understood.

That also explains the far greater fear most people have of terrorist attacks than appliances. But it turns out that Americans are as likely to be killed by their own furniture as hit in a terrorist attack.

So what should we fear? I’ve included a fun infographic from SelectQuote Life at the bottom of this post, but here are the essentials I found in my research (not scholarly, I remind you—but I did my best to compare numbers from different sources):

Chance you’ll be killed in an airplane: One in 11 million

Bee sting: One in 5.5 million

By a shark: One in 3.7 million

Lightning: One in 1.9 million

Train: One in 1 million

Tornado: One in 450,000

Car crash: One in 5,000

Sadly, none of these death odds compare to the odds of dying of heart disease or cancer.

You have a one in six chance of dying of heart disease and a one in seven chance of dying of cancer.

Let’s compare that to a really depressing statistic: Odds you’ll win the Powerball grandprize? One in 175 million. We have a much better chance of being hit by an asteroid (one in 74 million). . . yet we keep rolling the dice, so to speak. We’re far more influenced by our fear of the unfamiliar or catastrophic than we are by probability.

For my part, I find the numbers reassuring. They remind me that much fear is perception. Putting too much stock in perceived danger is a waste of time and energy. America, like me, sometimes has an overactive imagination, and it’s human nature to get a little too caught up in the media and the chatter and the hype (the feartainment, shall we say? Okay, I’ll stop).

We’re all going to go, and we don’t know when or how. We can prepare. . . a little. But the best we can do is trust our highest instincts, not our basest fears. As Gertrude Stein said, “Anything scares me, anything scares anyone but really after all considering how dangerous everything is nothing is really very frightening.”

What’s Your Story?

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With the number and variety of personality quizzes these days, it’s easier than ever to determine vital information about yourself, such as what city you should actually live in, whether you’re a pirate or a ninja (sadly, you can be only one), or how you would survive the Hunger Games. The web has helped such quizzes to flourish as a form of entertainment, and algorithms make it easier than ever to process answers and share them on social platforms, enabling us to immediately compare ourselves to others. Because we don’t do that enough already.

Ever since the 19th Century, when phrenology used skull measurements to determine personality types, we’ve been seeking ways to categorize each other. These days psychometric tests, like ones based on Myers-Brigg, are part of a several billion dollar industry that offers insight about how people work together in companies and organizations.

But there’s a deeper need behind the popularity of personality tests, a real sense of searching in our desire to find clues about human behavior. Who hasn’t felt the relief of identifying and naming the particular brand of crazy in one’s family: Oh! Grandma’s a narcissist—that explains so much! We are comforted by knowing where to place that person in the narrative of our lives.

And thinking in stories is what we do as humans. Learning from what’s happened is how we endure. In Wired for Story, Lisa Cron explains that neuroscience reveals how, “the brain constantly seeks meaning from all the input thrown at it, yanks out what’s important for our survival . . . and tells us a story about it.” This has been true since we heard about the guy in the next cave who ate the wrong kind of mushroom. It’s true now when we read about the girl who caused her father to lose his $80,000 bonus because she bragged about it on Facebook (her actions violated his non-disclosure agreement).

In fact, now more than ever, we’re desperate for guidelines as we navigate the information wasteland. The more access we have, the more we need to pare down the input and weed through it. What should we buy? Who should we like? Where should we live? In the Privileged World, we are overwhelmed by the luxury of self-determination. We can change jobs and social levels. We’re not condemned by class or parentage, or isolated by extreme poverty or lack of transportation. We can even choose to be a pirate or a ninja, or at least engage in cosplay as one.

Our stories are shaped less and less by forces beyond our control—tyrants, class differences, poverty— ‎and more and more by information. Information we desperately seek to curate as social platforms necessitate the management of our own personal brands. Whether we want it or not, we are being evaluated through the new media. I’ve been at a party and had someone google me as I was standing there with him. Apparently, it wasn’t enough to engage the actual person; he needed to simultaneously evaluate my persona.

Intentionally or not, we’re all marketing ourselves to our network—to family and friends, future employers and future spouses. Media savvy parents are even reserving websites for their kids before they are born. It’s the Age of Content Marketing, and the content is us.

So don’t feel bad next time you put off answering work emails to take the quiz that will finally elucidate what is secretly killing you inside. We need all the help we can get as we try to understand and craft our stories. Just remember, assessments are only a tool. As illuminating as it can be to know whether you’re really an idiot, you don’t want your story to be a tale told by an idiot, or an algorithm. Be wary of relying too much on the markers that help you on our journey, for the path—and the story—is ever-changing.

In a world where more and more emphasis is being placed on personal marketing, let’s hope the question doesn’t change from “What’s your story?” to “What’s your brand?”

Too Small to Fail

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There has been a great deal of discussion lately about whether protecting our kids from adversity prevents them from developing the much needed ‘grit’ that helps them live successfully as adults. But I believe it’s equally crucial that we allow our children to fail because doing so enables them to develop something just as important: creativity.

I’m not talking about pastels and poetry, though both those endeavors rank high on my list. I mean the kind of creativity that permeates every day existence: the ability to solve problems and adapt to changes. As a writer I know that the lifeblood of any good story is the character who finds a way, small or large, to affect change, to push back on the forces of fate. If the plot is too full of events that carry the main character along without her active participation, the reader gets bored. There’s nothing interesting about passivity, yet much of our culture today promotes passivity. Whether it’s a TV show being delivered into our brains, or teenagers ordering lattes to be delivered to their school parking lots, we’ve taken convenience to the point of absurdity. We order books off Amazon because it’s easier than stopping by Barnes and Noble half a mile away. We text our kids rather than walk halfway up the stairs and yell to them to come down for dinner. Please take note of the essential disclaimer here: I love watching TV and drinking lattes and Amazon Prime! Oh, how I love Amazon Prime. This isn’t about demonizing any of those things, but about being aware of the patterns that develop over time until one day we’re automatically taking the easy way in everything we do. Instead of getting creative, we get comfortable.

Though I don’t like to admit it, my husband’s obsession with soccer actually led me to an epiphany about failure and creativity.  Normally I refuse to devote any brainpower to sports. I get my kids to their games, I make sure they have clean uniforms and filled water bottles, and I praise them for working hard. But I don’t know what the score was the last time we played that other team, or what bracket we’re slotted in at the next tournament. I figure my husband spends so much energy thinking about, coaching and participating in athletics that our family simply can’t afford to allot it any more mental real estate. I did, however, read an article he recommended about why pushing our kids to play highly competitive, ‘select’ soccer is actually ensuring mediocrity and causing early burnout. Gary Allen of the Virginia Youth Soccer Association writes, “Instead of being able to experiment and really stretch him or herself, there is always present the consequence of failure, which promotes practicality, not flair, in his or her play. . . These players are given roles that do not have so much to do with their development as how to use the one or two extraordinary abilities they have while masking their less-developed attributes.” (Stifling the Development of the American Soccer Player).

In order to avoid failure, we stick only to what we already do well. It dawned on me that the same was true twenty-five years ago when I became an actress. It’s extremely tempting in that field to make it all about the results. First of all, you want to prove to yourself and everyone else that you can do it. No one cares if you spend three months doing Ibsen, but they lose their minds when they see you in the background of a Taco Bell commercial. Just as urgently, you want out of your waitressing job before you turn into one of those ‘old’ thirty-somethings who have been there so long that they remember what it was like to place orders on the old computer system, before the upgrade.

When you are actually ‘in the mix’ of auditioning and getting work, the process is so fast that casting directors and producers look for people who can perform at a moment’s notice. Especially in TV, it’s not uncommon to audition for a role and start the job the same day. When I worked in soap operas, an entire episode was shot in less than ten hours, and actors who could get the scene right in one or two takes were highly prized. You hit your mark, say your line, cry as the red light on camera three indicates it’s your close up. And moving on. Just like with athletes, you begin to put all your energy into the one or two things you do well, and you never develop the other parts of yourself.

I sometimes wonder what my career would have been like if I’d taken the time to write and perform in my own projects instead of trying to get legitimized by others hiring me. Even if it meant ten years of struggle to produce one quality role, I would still have escaped the restaurant at age thirty, and instead of a string of silly ‘love interest’ roles, I’d have something original to show for my time and effort. Now, I’m a believer in the big picture. And in the big picture, my acting career took me where I needed to be–I even met my husband as a direct result of that first soap opera job! Still, I can imagine a path that contained more balance between results and process. And that’s what I’m talking about here: balance.

It’s hard not to go for the results. I see this now when I talk to other parents. Everyone is so worried about test scores and grades and rankings; we feel we need to apologize for our late bloomers. If we’re not pushing our kids to do club sports and private music lessons, as well as having them tutored in math (not because they are struggling, but to stay ‘ahead’) then we worry they’ll be left behind. With our words we encourage our kids to be kind people who leave a legacy of good feeling and positive deeds in their wake, but in our actions we push them to seek validation and credentials. It’s a cultural pressure but WE comprise our culture. It’s up to us to change it.

So, if it’s about balance, it doesn’t mean that I’ll always shrug when they screw up. But I’m going to try to be more aware of ways I can allow my kids to do things badly. When I can I’ll steer them toward situations they can experiment in and even fail at. It doesn’t mean I won’t push them to work hard. If anything, what I’m talking about is process, and hard work is process. What I want to ease up on are the results.

Now is the time. If we don’t let them fail when they are small, when they still have the safety net of our loving arms, what will happen when they fail out in the adult world? As long as they are safe, letting them make mistakes will help nurture their creative responses on the field of life, and they will not only improve and grow–they will truly enjoy the game.