If you saw the thing that you were most scared of, what would it be? I mean something like you’re looking out of your back door. Day or night. What would really scare the shit out of you? You are making hot cocoa and you glance at your kitchen window. And THERE IT IS! Your worst nightmare.
If I need to give a serious answer, and it needs to be a physical thing that you can see in the wandering near you, spiders are a good choice. Snakes are relatively easy to avoid, but spiders are small and quiet enough that I could never be certain they went away and not just hiding under the bed, and any one of them can be deadly as far as I know.
We are lucky in that as far as I know, there is no animal on earth that likes humans as food. All those animal attacks we hear about are either the animal mistaking the human for something else, attacking because it feels threatened, or a desperate and starving animal stooping to eating a thing it would rather not touch.
Pretty consistent response, spiders big enough to win, call it labrador or bigger. They look alien, they move alien, they have weird weapons, etc. Everything else, including arachnids like scorpions, somehow feel more readily handled.
In my head I see @RichVR in a dimly lit room scribbling furiously as he notes all of our greatest fears in order to use them against us some day. Just in case I’m wrong, I’m terrified of hot, naked women holding a PS5 controller in one hand and a slice of pizza in the other.
I don’t know what scares me the most because I don’t dwell on it, but I can tell you what my personal kryptonite is.
Have a doctor look at me with sad eyes? Yeah, no.
Bitey type creatures with claws? Mere child’s play.
You want to get me worked up? What makes my head ache and my blood pressure go through the roof. Easy. Car trouble. I turn into a puddle of goo the minute an idiot light comes on.
More specifically, people who lack the ability to consider the long term consequences of their actions, or people who are capable of that but just don’t care.
Oh wait.
Worse than that: Sleep Paralysis and the Old Hag that seems to go with it for whatever reason.
Jesus. I thought I was dying every time I had one of those.
Not had one in years now, thankfully.
Nothing scares me as much as a Trumper, and I am being totally serious here. Seeing them become fascist, their insane level of hate, being divorced from reality, and wanting to destroy our Democracy is terrifying.
After some thought, I’d say a nuclear mushroom cloud. Those things used to terrify me and still do, apparently, after watching Threads last year. Used to have frequent nightmares about them.