I live in constant fear of my worst fears coming to pass. It is not just a mild paranoia or chronic anxiety; it is more like a profound existential dread. The source of this lies not so much in the natural world (though the threats there are by no means insignificant) but rather in the man-made realm. I think about trains, cars and planes, for example, and of elevators, cable-cars and subway systems. I think of bridges and flyovers and underpasses. I even think of boilers and heaters and nuclear reactors, of cranes and pulleys and mechanical levers, and when I think of all these, I mostly think of one thing: catastrophic failure. 

It is a strange obsession, one that I justify to myself as a means to constantly have my guard up- to be prepared at all times like a scout might. And yet, it is at the same time a crippling affliction; a state of mind so negative it is bordering on the macabre. Why does my mind fixate on such things? I’m not really sure. Of course, failure is an inevitability; all systems eventually fail. It is a random event that one plans to perhaps delay, but can never avoid altogether. Everything we make is, in a sense, both fragile and transient just like us, no matter whether it’s brick and mortar, or iron and steel. In the end, cracks appear in everything. 

To live in the midst of these without being at the very least slightly pre-occupied with their decay has always seemed to me a little naive; perhaps even reckless. Of course, to be obsessed to such a degree seems just as foolish, particularly since I can do nothing myself to prevent such eventuality. Still, I continue to spend my time (my fleeting, finite, precious time) seemingly at the edge of imminent destruction. 

My wife reminds me that there’s enough negativity in the world already, and that I should be spending my time spreading goodness, beauty and hope. And instead here I am, casually peddling unfettered panic, blithely tossing the seeds of future phobias into minds that might already be a little frayed just from the compounded exertions of our modern day-to-day existence. For this, I apologise. 

But I hope I have adequately explained my own state of mind. I am actively working on changing it, but I fear there is a core of permanence running through. Perhaps that too might crack eventually; but until then, every time someone tells me about efficiency and built-in redundancy, I remind them about human selfishness and indifference. 

How, I ask them, can we expect our creations to be somehow superior to their creators? No, they are at best merely replicas; at worst, cheap imitations with all our flaws and none of the self-awareness. I remind them also about the story of the King who asked his courtiers to each pour a glass of milk into a large jar over the course of the night and the next morning the jar was full of water because everyone thought everyone else would pour milk and no-one did. This is us. 

And so I think about the things we make; I think about how maybe one more person getting into that lift will cause the cables holding it up to snap, or how one more emergency brake will cause the train to slip off its rails. I imagine myself, in fact, standing and staring at some breathtakingly beautiful thing, maybe like the Eiffel Tower, and thinking just how many more people leaning, climbing, jumping can it take before it keels over. And from there it doesn’t take much for me to imagine myself watching this remarkable human creation come crashing into me and for a few seconds before I am flattened under its weight, I would feel, for maybe the first time in my adult life, complete and utter calm. 
Now that, that would be ironic.