Everyone has fears. It’s just that what keeps one person awake at night might not even cross someone else’s mind. So when a post on Reddit asked users to share what they’re most afraid of, the replies poured in by the thousands.

From the depths of the ocean to incurable illnesses, advanced technology, and beyond, the discussion reminds us that, for all our progress, we have yet to become the masters of our fate, not to mention the universe.

#1

Deep ocean pressure is the only thing that actually makes my skin crawl. The idea that something that massive and hostile is just sitting there in the dark is wild.

© Photo: lategoblin404

#2

Prions. Misfolded proteins that can randomly occur, turning your brain to mush.

© Photo: Ambitious_Traffic530

However, when scrolling through a list like this one, we need to remember that our anxieties very rarely come true.

Researchers at Penn State University had people write down their specific worries for ten days whenever they noticed they were concerned. Four times a day, they were prompted by text message to record any worries from the past two hours to ensure that as many as possible were captured.

The participants then reviewed their list of worries every evening over the next 30 days to see if any of them came true. The researchers focused on worries that could be tested in the 30-day period; for example, “I will fail my math exam tomorrow” would be testable, whereas “I’ll develop cancer at some point in my lifetime” would not. The average person reported three to four testable worries per day.

#3

Alzheimer’s. Everyone & everything you have ever loved being erased slowly by your own self. And the ones that you loved still love you, but you cannot perceive that love. A nightmare that does not even have the decency to be a fast one.

© Photo: DaniJHollis

#4

Aneurysms. You can just be having a totally normal day, feeling fine, and then suddenly with no warning you’re gone. It can happen to anyone at any time. No thank you. .

© Photo: CaptainFartHole

#5

In my opinion, Rabies is the scariest disease.

The post by u/Blargle33 In r/copypasta really makes you realize how scary it is

“
Rabies is scary.

Rabies. It’s exceptionally common, but people just don’t run into the animals that carry it often. Skunks especially, and bats.

Let me paint you a picture.

You go camping, and at midday you decide to take a nap in a nice little hammock. While sleeping, a tiny brown bat, in the “rage” stages of infection is fidgeting in broad daylight, uncomfortable, and thirsty (due to the hydrophobia) and you snort, startling him. He goes into attack mode.

Except you’re asleep, and he’s a little brown bat, so weighs around 6 grams. You don’t even feel him land on your bare knee, and he starts to bite. His teeth are tiny. Hardly enough to even break the skin, but he does manage to give you the equivalent of a tiny scrape that goes completely unnoticed.

Rabies does not travel in your blood. In fact, a blood test won’t even tell you if you’ve got it. (Antibody tests may be done, but are useless if you’ve ever been vaccinated.)

You wake up, none the wiser. If you notice anything at the bite site at all, you assume you just lightly scraped it on something.

The rabies will multiply along your nervous system, doing virtually no damage, and completely undetectable. You literally have NO symptoms.

It may be four days, it may be a year, but the camping trip is most likely long forgotten. Then one day your back starts to ache… Or maybe you get a slight headache?

At this point, you’re already gone. There is no cure.

(The sole caveat to this is the Milwaukee Protocol, which can’t save most patients anyway, and the survivors are left mentally disabled, and is seldom done).

There’s no treatment. It has a 100% mortalityl rate.

Absorb that. Not a single other virus on the planet has a 100% mortality rate. Only rabies. And once you’re symptomatic, it’s over. You’re gone.

So what does that look like?

Your headache turns into a fever, and a general feeling of being unwell. You’re fidgety. Uncomfortable. And scared. As the virus that has taken its time getting into your brain finds a vast network of nerve endings, it begins to rapidly reproduce, starting at the base of your brain… Where your “pons” is located. This is the part of the brain that controls communication between the rest of the brain and body, as well as sleep cycles.

Next you become anxious. You still think you have only a mild fever, but suddenly you find yourself becoming scared, even horrified, and it doesn’t occur to you that you don’t know why. This is because the rabies is chewing up your amygdala.

As your cerebellum becomes hot with the virus, you begin to lose muscle coordination, and balance. You think maybe it’s a good idea to go to the doctor now, but assuming a doctor is smart enough to even run the tests necessary in the few days you have left on the planet, odds are they’ll only be able to tell your loved ones what you died of later.

You’re twitchy, shaking, and scared. You have the normal fear of not knowing what’s going on, but with the virus really damaging the amygdala this is amplified a hundred fold. It’s around this time the hydrophobia starts.

You’re horribly thirsty, you just want water. But you can’t drink. Every time you do, your throat clamps shut and you vomit. This has become a legitimate, active fear of water. You’re thirsty, but looking at a glass of water begins to make you gag, and shy back in fear. The contradiction is hard for your hot brain to see at this point. By now, the doctors will have to put you on IVs to keep you hydrated, but even that’s futile. You were a goner the second you had a headache.

You begin hearing things, or not hearing at all as your thalamus goes. You taste sounds, you see smells, everything starts feeling like the most horrifying acid trip anyone has ever been on. With your hippocampus long under attack, you’re having trouble remembering things, especially family.

You’re alone, hallucinating, thirsty, confused, and absolutely, undeniably terrified. Everything scares the literal you at this point. These strange people in lab coats. These strange people standing around your bed crying, who keep trying to get you “drink something” and crying. And it’s only been about a week since that little headache that you’ve completely forgotten. Time means nothing to you anymore. Funny enough, you now know how the bat felt when he bit you.

Eventually, you slip into the “dumb rabies” phase. Your brain has started the process of shutting down. Too much of it has been turned to liquid virus. Your face droops. You drool. You’re all but unaware of what’s around you. A sudden noise or light might startle you, but for the most part, it’s all you can do to just stare at the ground. You haven’t really slept for about 72 hours.

And there’s not one… thing… anyone can do for you.

Then there’s the question of what to do with your corpse. I mean, sure, burying it is the right thing to do. But the virus can survive in a corpse for years. You could wipe out every rabid animal on the planet today, and if two years from now, some moist, preserved, rotten hunk of used-to-be brain gets eaten by an animal, it starts all over.

So yeah, rabies scares me. And it’s EVERYWHERE. (Source: Spent a lot of time working with rabies. Would still get my vaccinations if I could afford them.)
“.

© Photo: -Huskii

According to the study’s results, a whopping 91 percent of worries were false alarms.

“These findings underscore ‘worry’s deceit,’” psychologist Dr. Seth J. Gillihan commented on the data.

“‘Deceit’ is a good word to describe the nature of worry, implicitly demanding that we pay attention to it because the threat is real. In reality, it’s nearly always a false alarm.”

#6

Right now? AI. It’s freaky af how real that can look.

© Photo: Local-Contact4639

#7

Ticks – they are everywhere and can mess up your life in ways you would never imagine.

© Photo: Smooth-Shower290

#8

Honestly, i think for me the scariest thing to exist is probably the unknown. Like how we really dont know or understand the universe or even our own minds. It’s not a specific thing, but more like the idea that there is so much happening to us or to our environment we can’t see or fully explain.

© Photo: SpiceItSoftly

#9

Radiation. Besides it’s essential medical advances (such as xrays and imaging), the horrors and realities of the chernobyl disaster, Fukushima, and the absolute nightmarish results of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nothing holds a candle to levels of sheer horror, in my opinion.

© Photo: ModernAutomata

Another important finding in the study was that individuals whose worries were less likely to come true were more likely to benefit from treatment for their worry and anxiety.

Thus, keeping track of how one’s worries turn out seems to be an effective way to release compulsive worrying.

The authors of the study propose that people who worry a lot “view worry as a valued means of coping.” They may see it as being useful for spotting and preventing true threats, or for avoiding being blindsided when bad things happen.

So, looking at the actual data about their worries likely changed their beliefs about its usefulness.

Maybe sharing your fears online helps, too?

#10

Climate change. It’s coming. We can’t stop it, anymore. We were too stupid to even try.

© Photo: bort13

#11

As an American….Maga. Not so much the civilians because they’ve been manipulated into puppets without knowing what they’re supporting. That is what’s scary, how they somehow manipulated millions into being almost as in control as slaves, how they manipulate these people into violence (January 6th) THEN MANIPULATE THEM INTO THINKING THEY’RE THE HEROES! They’ve manipulated even members of the government to let Trump and the other leaders get away with anything (look at the billions of dollars in payouts Trump just paid out to himself from his own IRS and made himself immune from any persecution). I know I’m going to get some of these people in my replies which just helps proves my point.

© Photo: TheRealBaeleth

#12

The Yellowstone Caldera. If it erupts it could be a major life threatening event all over the planet. When Mount Tambora erupted in 1815 there was so much ash emitted the following year was known as the year without a summer, with massive crop failures and food shortages. An eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera would be exponentially larger.

© Photo: Zoraji

#13

Fatal familial insomnia.

arnoldlopezqw: The absolute worst part is that sleeping pills do absolutely nothing to help.

Because the disease physically destroys the thalamus, sleeping pills and sedatives will knock you unconscious, but your brain still won’t actually go to sleep. You just end up chemically paralyzed and trapped in a waking nightmare while your body slowly shuts down from sleep deprivation.

© Photo: j_turn2000

#14

Realizing you’ve been overthinking a situation that never mattered.

#15

Nuclear weapons

© Photo: ConsiderationThat780

#16

The lifecycle of stars.

© Photo: Deaths_Smile

#17

The ocean. esp at night. it just a giant mouth that can swallow you whole.

© Photo: salty-snax

#18

Bed bugs are the scariest after living with them.

© Photo: tanyarastafari

#19

Eternity…Or the expected lifetime of the observable universe before all atoms, molecules and energy is completely exhausted and nothing is left besides complete darkness. Even black holes evaporate eventually (hawking radiation).

Granted this is estimated to take at least 100 trillion years. These thoughts creep me out.

© Photo: SeahawksWin43-8

#20

At this point, its man. Man is the scariest thing to exist. Thats where we are.

#21

Scary is subjective, but survivors will tell you that there’s nothing more scary than a tornado ripping your house and life apart.

© Photo: TunedAgent

#22

Being stuck in a cave with rising water and there is no way out and it fills completely and you shriek for a miracle with every fibre of your being but it fills anyway and you drown in panic.

© Photo: 052-NVA

#23

Getting sentenced to life in prison for something you didn’t do.

#24

Ebola Zaire.

The little ebola virus gets into one of your cells. There, it replicates and replicates until that cell can’t physically hold it anymore, and the cell ruptures, sending all those strands of the virus into *many* cells….

……where they replicate and replicate until all those cells burst open, sending ebola into exponentially more cells….

Your body bursts from the inside out. Cell by cell. You “bleed out.” From your mouth. Your nose. Your eyes.

Mortality rate of 83% on average. Up to 90%.

The thing that’s saved the world until now is that it usually hits small villages that are far from others, and those who catch it feel so awful they don’t leave to visit other villages.

When it hits a big city?

The world has a BIG problem.

#25

Broken Arrow. I don’t know what’s scarier, losing nuclear weapons, or that it happens so often there’s actually a movie about it.

#26

The sun could just burp and vaporize us in an instant at any time.

#27

That all these countries got nuclear weapons ready to use on eachother.

#28

Black holes .

#29

The universe, all things listed under this post are byproducts of the universe – so existence itself is terrifying.

#30

Racist vigilantism in the aftershock of a natural disaster.

The combination of emboldened white supremacy, relaxed gun laws, effects of climate change, and depleted public services are all coming to a head.

#31

Microplastics.

#32

Viruses. They are technically not even alive, they are just “organic”(?) machines. Think about it for just a moment, they are not alive but makes copies of itself!

#33

The size of the universe and what horrifying things could potentially exist and lay in waiting for us.

#34

Vivid and recurring nightmares.

#35

The deep forest at night.

#36

The New Apostolic Reformation. The incredibly massive amount of Christians that want to build the literal Kingdom of Heaven in the United States.

#37

Psychopaths with money, especially male, especially in politics.

#38

Cancer. Can affect anyone (my mom, my 20 year old friend) – rich, poor, young, old, plans for the future – it does not care.

#39

Caves… getting trapped in a narrow cave terrifies me. People who go splunking are different. The story of that guy who got stuck upside down in a cave and passed away there is nightmare fuel.

#40

The moment you realize nobody is coming to save you, and it’s completely up to you.

#41

*If* it is possible, false vacuum decay.

#42

Glioblastoma. My dad passed away from it last year and it’s hands down the most horrific thing I’ve ever experienced.

#43

Time scares me. Just always ticking away.

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