Came across a scholarly paper titled ‘The Four Horsemen of Fear’ (how cheery!) published back in 2020 - remember then? Boy, was that a strange time. I think I was jolted back, catching Geoffrey Lewis’ amazing song ’It could be worse’ yesterday, and must have been primed to spot another writer referencing the title of this missive.
Interestingly the author’s work was about the virus’ effect on our experience and lives outside of the actual infection effect. The four fears they identified were fear of or for the body, for significant others, of not knowing and fear of taking action (or the wrong action.)
It even comes with a lovely diagram (and thank you Giovanni Fioriti Editore s.r.l.for open-sourcing it), crafted with care I’d guess in Word. Or some arcane scientific bit of software.
Anyroad, the little matrix of riders (representing bodily, interpersonal, cognitive, and behavioural effects) could, perhaps with one small stand-in of ‘ability’ for ‘bodily’ be apt for navigating our work here.
Any one of these four characters can be pretty much relied on to canter into your field of view on a daily basis. Fear you can’t answer the brief. Fear of the CD or account team or your peers. Of wishing you’d learnt that piece of software as you could really have done with it. Right. Now. Fear that any minute now someone will see what you doing and be thinking ‘uh-oh’.
Does it help knowing they’re lurking? Of course it does. But why not think of them as a strength?
Your fears don’t care about the answer; all they really care about is progress. Toward better work, or a career, or colleagues or all the things in design or without.
So stop fretting about finding the answer. The work(horse) will show you the way.
