The human brain worries about many, many things before it worries about probability. If we really were just concerned with preventing the most likely causes of death, we would worry more about falling down than we would about plane crashes. The nightly news would feature back-to-back segments on tragic heart-attack deaths. And we might spend more money on therapists than police. (In the United States, you are almost twice as likely to kill yourself as you are to be killed by someone else during your lifetime.) It’s as if we don’t fear death itself so much as dying. We fear the how, not so much
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