Good luck!

I probably shouldn’t tell you what your goals should be, that’s my bad. That said, you’ll eventually become less fearful on your path to fearlessness and it’ll be up to you to decide when it’s good enough.

If you’re afraid of therapy, I understand that. I don’t know you, but I was personally afraid of my inner thoughts causing people to reject me and I was also afraid that I may come to discover I’m worse than I thought. I’ll tell you how I came to see those things over time and maybe you feel something similar even if you can’t describe it and it may help. I unfortunately can’t do much more.

For the first fear (rejection) there’s two main things I clung on to: 1) There’s always someone worse than you out there and likely any therapist has already dealt with someone much worse than you or I. 2) Therapists are trained to deal with all kinds of people and manage whatever stress that may cause them. It’s why they cost so much money and that training is the difference between a therapist and a good listener. It’s also worth mentioning that they’re legally required to maintain confidentiality and unless you’re a danger to others, they’ll never spread anything you say.

For the second fear of realizing I was worse than I thought, that wasn’t really assuaged until I started. One thing most people come to realize as they become better at self reflection and self evaluation is that your imagination is almost always worse than the reality.

Whatever your particular fears are, it’ll take a measure of will power to overcome them no matter what. You should be proud then when you do go since you overcame your fear for your own betterment.

Generally when you start out, they have to get a feel for how you think and it’s mostly just you complaining about what stresses you out. After a few sessions, a decent therapist will have figured out some patterns in how you think and will be better able to direct the conversation so you end up talking about more of the situation than you typically think of on your own. From this it’s up to you to figure out how you want to solve the problem and/or what you want your goals to be.

I get the never ending struggle for more money. That’s a tough one let me know if you figure it out lol.

Fearlessness is probably a pretty unhealthy goal imo. Fear is a normal, healthy response that keeps you from making bad decisions. I think what you would really benefit from is: increased self-confidence, stress management skills, and good planning. You could definitely tell a therapist that you’re looking to become fearless or at least less fearful and they would be able to better look for what you might be hung up on.

I personally suffer from pretty bad anxiety and I know it holds me back, but I’ve become more confident in my own judgement and I’ve become better able to seek support from the people in my life thanks to therapy. Things haven’t turned around for me yet, but I feel better about the future and that’s a massive improvement on its own.

Therapy isn’t brain medicine. It’s different for lots of people, however to me it was an opportunity to practice skills I otherwise wouldn’t in a safe environment. The main skills I was able to practice were self reflection and emotional expression.

If I hadn’t gone to therapy, I would still be practically unable to open up to the people closest to me and I would still have my self image corrupted by delusions of self hatred from depression.

It’s sounds like fru-fru bullshit, but it does slowly make a difference. Eventually I realized that all my relationships became more healthy and my self confidence was significantly improved.

Lots of people -especially men in my experience- have no experience opening up and have a lot of deep fears about it and they end up self-isolating way more than is healthy. Therapy is the only real way where you can express yourself and get a sanity check without any kind of blowback.

USPS is unionized. No cameras, Way less micro-management, and you can pee when you want to.

There’s certainly a strained mobility in the country. I said it was a “caste system” primarily because from my limited understanding of the Indian caste system. Where people are born into their caste and experience an entirely separate culture from the other castes. It’s possible that I misinterpreted what classism is and that’s a part of it as well.

That’s a good quote and I’ll have to take a read of the book, but I actually think this perspective is actually part of the problem I’m talking about. To the eye of a famous accomplished author, it would appear that people below them glorify and aspire to the people of his class.

I mainly take issue with the gross oversimplification of all people below his financial status as poor and self hating. This was perhaps true at the time it was written, but I think the situation has changed since 1969 if this was true then. I think the problem isn’t really some kind of nebulous cultural inconsistency, but it’s a systemic failure in media like a said previously.

Middle-ish class people don’t talk about how poor people deserve to be poor; not even in the very conservative area I live in. They just don’t talk about them at all. That is except in the context of a news story they heard and every news story only covers poverty in two contexts: crime and societal decay. Poor people and their communities are only shown as dangerous things that people should avoid. This is unfortunately true in a lot of ways, but not the whole story and it turns every poor person into a potential junkie, gang member, or crazy person who should be avoided.

A lot of people here are looking for a philosophical answer, but I personally think it’s really just a class issue. Most people in the US don’t like to hear it, but our class structure is practically a caste system.

People generally despise the people of other classes (or castes), above or below. This is reinforced by segregation and media. Ultra Rich > Rich > Upper Class > Middle Class > Lower Class > Welfare Class > Homeless. All these groups live in separate communities with specific media environments that vilify the “others”. These groups only ever interact in ways with clear hierarchy. This is only exacerbated with the death of third spaces.

Having been middle class and sliding down the ladder to the point of imminent homelessness, I’ve been struck by the fact that the distribution of assholes for each group is pretty much the same. Over and over again, I’ve seen nearly no contact between classes to dispel the images projected by each class’s respective media ecosystem.

This country is so fundamentally segregated and divided that I really don’t know how it can be changed. There is really no clean and fair way to actually inform people about the similarities between people.