Just because something is POSSIBLE doesn't mean that it is LIKELY/PROBABLE. This is a great example. - At first glance, the statements may appear contradictory. In fact, I'm a bit worried that some science deniers are going to see it and go "Aha! Proof that NASA is out to dupe us!". However, both sentences are true to the best of the top experts in the world's knowledge. - Here's how. The earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old. Presuming that we don't nuke it into non-existence, the planet will survive for another 7.5 billion years before the sun expands enough to absorb it. Yeah, life will be gone loooong before then, but the hunk of rock that is Earth will still be circling the sun for an incomprehensibly long time. That means that events (like major asteroid collisions) that are extremely unlikely to happen at any particular moment in time are essentially guaranteed to happen eventually. - So why am I talking about this? What does it have to do with OCD and mental health? Great question! Anxiety disorders tend to include overestimation of threat/risk. We make the mistake of thinking that because something is POSSIBLE. It is also PROBABLE. Then we start acting as though the feared event is going to happen for sure very soon instead of responding according to it's actual probability of happening. Helloooo compulsions! To function effectively in our lives, we need to respond to actual risk, not imagined risk. In this example, yeah, an asteroid will collide with Earth and cause major wreckage. But it's definitely not worth the average person worrying about or preparing for. Dedicating energy, time, and money towards asteroid doomsday prepping (or whatever other unlikely event you dread) will likely interfere with doing the activities we want and need to do to have meaningful and enjoyable lives and relationships. - What slim possibilities are you treating as highly likely events? What consequences does that have on you, your loved ones, and your life? - Side note: climate change is a super high risk. It's already happening. Addressing that is not only reasonable, but imperative - Citations for statistics: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.express.co.uk/news/science/1174815/nasa-asteroid-chance-of-impact-earth-space-2019-end-times-nasa-asteroids-news/amp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth

You lost me!

I mean, I fully get that consciousness is a subjective experience, but I don't know how that relates to relativity or to the post exactly?

@Scoggy Relativity as we know it exists only due to consciousness, which is subjective. You can either say that the end is extremely near, or you can say that it is extremely far away and both would be correct depending from where you look at it. Relative to the lifespan of a human, 7.5 billion years is extremely long, but relative to the total lifespan of the universe until heat death, it's less than a picosecond in our time.

@ｆｅｎｎａ I'm... Not sure what you mean by relativity. I'm going to assume that you mean some generalised concept of relationality, rather than the special or general theories of relativity. As for relationality, otherwise known as perspective, it doesn't really have anything to do with consciousness. You're comparing celestial events to the lifespans of humans, but you could also compare them to the lifespans of trees, which are not conscious, or to quicker or slower celestial events. Similarly, we can say that 500 miles might be a long way to walk for a human, or a tree for that matter, but not such a huge distance for a plane. It still doesn't require consciousness and I'm not seeing why that came into the mix for you. Anything can be described relationally, yes, but that isn't due to consciousness and it isn't due to consciousness being subjective, it's due to the laws of physics. I figure you're trying to say "it's all relative", and that's a good point to make, but I'm still not sure that it was what this post is about, unless you were talking about things being inevitable? To be fair, Katie's example was a bit flawed, because it still suggests that things will happen eventually even if not immediately, which doesn't line up with the possibility-probability dichotomy :/

@ｆｅｎｎａ Sorry, relationality isn't otherwise known as perspective, I meant that your use of it is. The comparison of timescales or anything else doesn't require any sentient beings in it to have personal perspectives.

@Scoggy I was trying to find the most extreme example I could-where a fear isn't just possible, it's guaranteed, to drive home the point that it's still not worth putting energy into. I guess I wasn't clear. If I could, I'd edit based on your advice, but I don't think the app allows for that

@NOCD Advocate - Katie I gotcha. Oddly enough though, I'd disagree about it not being worth putting energy into- we are in fact making efforts intended to lead to colonising other planets precisely so that apocalyptic events don't wipe out the whole species, and that's Elon Musk's raison d'etre. Even the inevitable heat death of the universe is something worth taking into account when you're planning resource management for your stellar disassembly procedures, so as Fenna said, it's all relative. I also don't think people spend much time worrying about things that they don't think will effect them, and most people think that, on balance, they're going to be dead long before heat death, or asteroids, and that's why they don't think about it. Or, more likely, they don't know about those things or think they're science fiction. So, yeah, I suspect that's it might be more about whether a threat feels personally relevant, than how probable we feel it is. After all, we know for a fact that children are still starving in Africa, but it's not going to affect our lives, personally, so it's not a threat. The probability part is just another unknown, just like how bad the consequences of a threat could be, which provokes anxiety. I suspect that's why a lot of us have compulsions around trying to figure out how probably our fears are.

@Scoggy **how probable

@Scoggy I see what you're saying. I wasn't trying to say that coordinated efforts to plan for extremely rare events aren't justified. Only that for an individual, it's not worth it.

@NOCD Advocate - Katie That's interesting. As a species we plan for rare events if we would rate the impact of them happening as intolerable, which admittedly is a big of a motivated cognition (like, emotional reasoning), but we pretty much agree on it and you imply it seems justifiable. But when you say that it's not worth it for an individual, that's actually for a different scenario where the thing happening isn't just rare and awful (like being hit by a car or something) but is actually unlikely to happen *at all*. Like, the asteroid example you gave is something we do address, it's both highly probable (inevitable) and rare. But when it's an OCD obsession, your post points to the notion that our fears are actually improbable themselves, and that's why it's less justifiable to sacrifice a lot of time and happiness trying to do something about them. So from what I can tell they are still two different things and I definitely take your point. I've been thinking about whether there's a commonly shared collorary in the human experience, for that inevitable but rare asteroid, where it's good to take action if you can, and the only thing I can think of is death. Highly improbable on any given day, happens very rarely (once in each lifetime), but is statistically inevitable as far as we know. Personally I'm a big advocate for cryonics, because I think we should do what we can about that, just the same as asteroids, but most other people don't seem to see it that way.

@Scoggy ***a bit of a