JUNE 27 — Brexit is the new word for panic. Last Friday Britain, due to "irreconcilable differences", voted to get a divorce from Europe — and all hell and purgatory broke loose. 

Nigel Farage was bragging about Britain’s Independence Day, but everybody else was acting as if an alien mother-ship just broke through the clouds.

I opened up Twitter and everyone was either slitting their throats or about to. I turned to Facebook and all my Brit friends were making plans to migrate to Mars. As for the non-Brits, they starting writing with a British accent and posting “Bollocks! WTF just happened??!!” on their walls.

I was walking along Jalan Raja Chulan, minding me own business, when suddenly — SMACK! — a body fell right in front of me. He must’ve fallen from like the bad-ass 100th floor or something because his limbs were splattered across three cars and I could even see the remnants of his nasi lemak exploded on the pavement. As his brains were oozing out, he whispered through his mangled larynx, “The Pound Sterling…it’s gone.”

Such was the fate of anyone who had gone long with Sterling. If you were holding on to a pile of those notes with the Queen’s face on it, congratulations, you got some pretty high-class toilet paper now.

Maybe that’s why our Singaporean neighbours — in good old-fashioned kiasuness — were rushing to buy up the GBP. It was a frickin’ MEGA-sale, wasn’t it?

Finally, if your name is Boris Johnson or Brex you better pack five years’ worth of food and run to a cave – lest you end up like the dude who fell in front of me.

The risks we over-estimate

We’re strange creatures. We go into zombie-shock panic mode over events which will, in all likelihood, have at best a minimal effect on us. We attach a disproportionate amount of fear and trepidation to occurrences which far out do NOT deserve them.

Take the GST. How many Malaysians have had their lives transformed to a nightmare overnight because of it? I’m not saying it’s a good thing (in fact, it sucks) but c’mon how many people require trauma therapy over the 6 per cent rise in prices?

As a thought-experiment, try re-reading last year’s papers on the GST. Don’t the despair and Doomsday scenarios seem a little overdone in hindsight? Again, I’m not trying to justify GST. The point is how over time we adapt, we’re not hit that hard and society generally "rolls with it" even as we continue to fight against unjustified increases in taxes. 

Life goes on and, for a lot of people (judging from casual observations in malls, in pasar malam, on the road, in the office, etc.) it’s still a good life.

Sure, things are more expensive, but Malaysians are still eating food the way vampires suck blood — like they’re having really hot sex.

Or take terrorist attacks. How many Malaysians have been victims of suicide bombings of late? Heck, even Paris — after suffering terrible violence in November — are even now hosting Euro 16. I’m also guessing the folks in Brussels and Istanbul and wherever are, as we speak, adjusting to life.

My point is that there is really no rational reason to get all "pumped up" about an event like Brexit. Whatever the consequences, we’ll survive. And this is only assuming that those apocalyptic predictions of Brexit’s consequences will occur. Knowing the dismal record of human prophesying, very likely the future will not look anything like what people are speculating about.

It’s like SARS or water-shortages or, basically, anything given sensational media coverage. These events give the illusion of inevitable and severe destruction, when in all likelihood the impact is slow, heavily mediated (by other events) and much less injurious than we imagine.

A big bad fuss is raised, people go into psychotic fear-mongering but after a while a few things become clear:

1) The casualty list is way lower than predicted

2) Most of the sufferers can and do adapt to their situations

3) Life goes on

The phenomenon of affective forecasting, in fact, suggests that we’re horrible at guessing how we will feel in the future after unfortunate events. For example, right this moment if I were to imagine losing a hand or a loved one or my job and so on — I would probably think it’s the worst thing ever. 

I may feel my life would be hell, I should kill myself, blahblahblah. The strange truth, though, is that — like thousands of people who go through these tragedies — I will very likely adapt, life would continue and I would continue to experience much joy (despite the sadness of what happened).

Moral of the story: Read less news, keep calm and don’t fret over an occurrence simply because the CNN anchor reports it with a frown and it gets looped every two minutes.

The risks we under-estimate

If we over-react to flight disasters, to threat of diseases and to "global events", we also have a tendency to under-react. There are some things that we always under-react to or whose power we underestimate.

For example, our emotions. Every outburst or uncalled for action which is later regretted is usually grounded in our anger or fear or jealousy and so on. Human emotion is the cause of a lot of pain in the world, yet its everyday frequency is testimony to precisely how little attention we pay it. If society gave half our attention towards managing our emotions and/or developing stronger EQ than we did towards freaking out over Brexit, dammit, the Earth could tilt on its axis.

Then there are ideas. Our biggest threats today (e.g. terrorism, rape of the environment, etc.) began with a corpus of thoughts and doctrines. All major wars are rooted in ideologies i.e. narratives which seek to maintain a certain regime’s hold on power.

Bottom line: Don’t play-play with theory, with concepts, with thoughts. Hitler, Mao, Mandela, Gandhi – all of them held on to die-hard ideas which, in their hands, shook the world more powerfully than any EU referendum could. 

Finally, a pet subject of mine: Investments. Malaysians can be total suckers for bad investments which, initially, looked so beautiful they could win Miss Selangor. Money-making, get-rich-quick, "can’t go wrong" deals — all of these include risks which are regularly underestimated.

That’s why we end up betting the bank or our full-blown nest-eggs. That’s why Ponzi schemes still occur. That’s why if a huge chunk of your assets is in the property market, you are one political event away from losing everything.

If you take a nonchalant view about risks you should care more about? Then, yes, Brexit could break you.

You’re welcome.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.