Go on! Get out there and beak a fingernail. I’ve been listening to “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins followed by “Undeniable” by Bill Nye, a thoughtful gift from Edward Joseph Wheeler​. And I got the there from “Excuses Begone” by the late Wayne Dyer and “Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme” by Richard Brodie. And when you combine those books ideas on or current society with my recent love of 1800’s sea faring books like “Voyage of the Beagle” by Charles Darwin, “Empire of Blue Water”, “In the Heart of the Sea” and “Broadsides” it is enough to make your head explode. In short I think the problem is this. For millions of years we survived by honing our fear of things that would kill us. We became good at communicating threats and sensitive these warnings, like a tribe of prairie dogs. We carried it with us into the 1800’s but it was balanced by a harsh and fragile life. So much so that we lived our lives with the expectation and reality that death would come soon so live bold and die courage and honor. Even as recent as World War II our fathers lived on the front lines assuming they would be killed. And they leaned to live with their fear. Then we when to Iraq and Afghanistan, where we trained that we could control every outcome and nobody was expected to die. If we only focused on everything that could go wrong we could plan for our safety. And flash forward to today and we have a media and educational system, and cooperate bureaucracy designing messages directed at our primitive danger conditioned brains. We hear every news bit about every injury and tragic death. And gone is the realization that death awaits us all anyway. It’s pathetic. It really is. No wonder people think it’s so extraordinary that someone is building a sailboat without certified, inspected, approved, reviewed, top choice plans, materials, and workmanship. Well, IT’S NOT. It’s just a fucking boat! We’ve been doing it for thousands of years. And that is not the really sad part. The really sad part is to think about all of the shit we can not and have not gotten done as humans because we are so fucking scared of breaking a fingernail.