Black widows bite somewhere around 2,500 Americans a year. Out of those, roughly 10 percent need emergency medical care. According to a review on black widow bites, about 34 percent of people need treatment of some kind, and 1.4 percent face likely death. It's interesting how these patterns keep showing up when it comes to threats on our lives. It's always those 1-2 percent who have the most to lose, and everyone else just shrugs it off.
So, it's not surprising to see how the world has reacted after we found a black widow rappelling from the attic into the hallway outside our daughter's bedroom. Me? I trapped it in a jar.
At first, our pest controller didn't even believe us. They insisted that black widows don't nest in attics. So, we sent photos.
We were right.
After conceding that, yes, it was indeed a black widow, and yes, they recommended treatment, it's been four days and they haven't sent us... anything. Meanwhile, the internet is telling us to chill. Don't do anything, they say. If we see more, we should just get into the habit of shaking out our shoes before we put them on.
Apparently, treating your house for black widows makes you a hypochondriac fearmonger now.
And then there's the guy who tells you he grew up with black widows everywhere, and he turned out fine.
Yes, someone actually said it.
At any rate, we're not waiting. We're doing our own treatment plan, based on the best information we can find. In 2025, it doesn't feel acceptable to tell my family to deal with possible black widows in the house by crossing their fingers.
All this points to a vexing paradox we're running up against: Society takes a threat seriously. It reduces the threat. Society takes the reduced threat for granted, and stops taking it seriously. The threat level returns, but the public continues to ignore it.
People prepare for disasters. They survive the disasters. They regret preparing for the disaster. Next time, they prepare less. Or they don't prepare at all. Some of us call this the paradox of preparedness. We've seen it. We've even lived it.
But it gets worse.
Maybe you've noticed a change in how everyone around you responds to threats over the last few years. You wouldn't be the only one. We seem to be moving backward.
Ever since the public was conditioned to dismiss an airborne virus that causes longterm disability and death in a significant portion of the population, not to mention tripling your risk of a heart attack, a disturbing number of the people around us are throwing up their hands in general. They can't or won't take any kind of threat seriously anymore. The first thing they do is downplay it and then gaslight you. In fact, the more serious the threat becomes, the more stubbornly they refuse to do anything about it at all.
We've lost the middle ground.
In my view, you wouldn't necessarily be overreacting if you saw a black widow outside your bedroom and promptly left the house. It depends on how many pets you have. It depends on how many kids. It depends on your own age and the condition of your health. After a Covid infection or two, none of us really know how our bodies would respond to a bite from a spider with venom 15 times stronger than a rattlesnake. Alas, someone who's convinced themselves not to care about Covid will also find it easier to blow off black widows.
But the most reasonable position is to treat them promptly, seal gaps in your house, and keep your guard up.
One day, maybe we won't have pest control services anymore. We'll have to deal with black widows and rats the best we can.
As collapse deepens, as threats to our lives multiply, I think we're going to see more of this behavior. We're going to see increasing demonization of proactive stances as "overreacting." At one point, I used to think growing threats would prompt everyone to wake up and help us prepare. Instead, it looks like the opposite is happening. Everyone is getting more complacent.
Is conditioned indifference displacing our normal fear response?
I'd say so.
It's a strange world when the default response to black widows is to just let them nest in your attic or garage, and to tell your kids to shake their shoes out every morning, because doing anything more than that is overreacting. To me, that seems strange.
We'll have to get used to this complacency. People are forgetting what to be afraid of. They're letting mass media condition them to treat emergencies with indifference.
It's spilling over into... everything.
Don't let it happen to you.
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