There are scary things, and then there are scary ideas.

At this point I am compelled to inform you that I consider the class of ideas that I am going to describe in this essay sufficiently scary that they warrant, in modern parlance, a trigger warning. Mid-grade info-hazards. I do not take this lightly. If you do not wish to risk the rest of your day being consumed by low-lying irrational fears, then kindly avert your eyes and skip to the next entry. You have been duly warned.

Consider the following idea. Let’s call it Idea X.

Everyone around you is secretly terrified of you. They won’t admit it, but they spend a fair portion of their waking thoughts in constant worry of getting on your bad side. In your presence they choose their words carefully so as to minimise their chances of incurring your wrath. Perhaps there’s a whisper network out there where the people in your life secretly confide in each other their fears of you, and initiates of this network are overcome with self-validation that they’re not alone.

It’s a silly idea, isn’t it? Why would everybody be afraid of you in particular? What have you done? In truth, it’s overwhelmingly likely that they don’t even notice you, so focused on the travails of their own lives. (That’s also kind of hurtful, but in a different way.)

But then how do you disprove Idea X? Dispel it once and for all?

You observe your roommates at dinner. They seem moderately positively disposed to your presence. You make small talk with them, and they genially return with their own witty remarks. Pleasant, amiable conversation. So they’re not terrified of you, right?

Ah, says Idea X. People are very good at hiding their fear. They simply don’t mention it. If they’re counting down the days in uneasy anticipation of the moment when your fuse blows, their cold dread is silent.

You can ask your friends directly. “Hey Rebecca, silly question. Are you secretly afraid of me?” Or if that’s too forward, you can ask in a non-leading manner. “How do you feel about me?”

Are you that naive? asks Idea X. Of course they’ll lie! They’ll lie through their teeth, as convincingly as if their lives depended on it, because they’re so afraid that you’ll react badly if they tell you the truth!

You’re still convinced that Idea X is absurd, but maybe less so. Are there ways of testing Idea X indirectly? Could you, let’s say, catch people off guard and divine their true emotions in their split second of unstripped honesty? Or listen through the walls, wiretap your coworkers, probe for the fabled whisper network, infiltrate a support group for tuphobia*?

If people think you’re on their trail, they’re going to take extra precautions to hide it. If you don’t find that tuphobic whisper network, how sure can you be that no such whisper network exists?

How about the General Argument Against Conspiracies? The larger a conspiracy, the greater the chance that somebody will defect from the conspiracy. In a social setting of hundreds of friends, you ought to have at least one informant. One whistle-blower?

Would you? Really? Remember, in this scenario everyone is secretly terrified of you. They trust each other very highly because the alternative is dealing with you. And besides, listen to yourself. You are properly paranoid.

No matter how you slice it, you can’t seem to find a way to vanquish Idea X. It’s wormed its way into your head, set up headquarters, and metastasized. Whatever volleys of argument your memetic immune system throws at it, it has developed defences to reinforce itself, keep alive, grow stronger with every strike. There is no knock-down argument, no decisive blow you can conceive of which will destroy it for good, irradiate it into nonexistence once and for all.

Idea X is Unfalsifiable.

Unfalsifiable ideas are terrifying to me. I can spend hours lying awake at night trying to convince myself that they’re absurd, they’re not well-founded, it’s silly to care about them, I’m better off not knowing they’re there. But crucially, I can’t disprove them. I can’t prove them false. And so they lie submerged in the shadows, waiting to strike when I’m most emotionally vulnerable.

Here’s another. Sorry. Idea Y:

You’ve never really grown up. No matter how much you think you’ve grown up, there are ways in which you are still immature, and there are plausible situations which can bring your immaturity into sharp relief and leave you horribly exposed.

How do you disprove that?

If you can’t disprove an Unfalsifiable accusation, you can at least deal with it. There ought to be many coping mechanisms for things like these, and the best proposal I can come up with right now is to treat them like earworms. You don’t get rid of earworms by trying your darnedest not to think about them; you get rid of them by listening to other songs. And maybe you get rid of Unfalsifiable ideas by moving on to other thoughts, drowning them out in a sea of irrelevance.

Sleep is good for that. Also I need to sleep.

*From Latin tu, you + Greek phobos, fear. The fear of you.