Fear of Cold

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The cold story that has most stuck with me is probably "The Little Match Girl" by Hans Christian Andersen. It is about a girl freezing to death while hallucinating from her matches' fumes which she lights to stay warm. It's utterly terrifying.

“He feels his nose begin to freeze, although this doesn’t bother him too much.” A professor last year explained me that the brain doesn’t register the same pain/cold/hot from your skin after a while that you’ve been feeling it. The brain almost “filter” it because it isn’t something that you can apparently avoid and the body already told you that you’re in danger. She even told the class that she almost lost her nose once because she didn’t cover it in her scarf and hat and etc. while in a very cold place (maybe Siberia…?) and she didn’t even realise it until she got into an house and someone told her that the nose was getting black- she was laughing and we were horrified.

Jacob: “True frigophobia, or cryophobia, fear of the cold, is relatively rare.” Also Jacob: LET’S FIX THAT

During the Texas freeze I was living with my partner at his mom's house about 15 minutes from my parents. Each house intermittently had power so we were driving back and forth to bring food and supplies to each other. A pipe burst in my parents house and my brother slipped on the wet tile dislocating his shoulder. He was at the packed ER all night waiting for treatment, so i drove some hot food up to my parents who had to wait in the car outside due to covid restrictions. Driving back, it was late at night and the power was out everywhere for miles leading to my parent's house and in most of the city. Not a single street light, home or business with light. Everything was absolute pitch black like it was deep into the middle of nowhere and i could only see as far as my weak headlights shone. I remember thiking just how chilling it felt to drive down this familiar road that was so deathly still, silent and dark. I felt like I was in a horror game.

I’m an astrophysicist that works with instruments cooled to around one kelvin, and it absolutely blew my mind when you mentioned that being unique in the context of the universe. You’re completely right, but those temperatures have become so mundane to me that I forget how wild they are. At work, heat is just an annoyance that interferes with measurements - we call it thermal noise.

I remember seeing a video a long time ago about a guy who falls to his death from the side of a cliff because he was goofing off. Someone in the comments said something that has stuck with me ever since then: "If you make a mistake, your friends will forgive you, the church will forgive you, your family will forgive you. But nature never forgives."

"Cold itself, in terms of physics, is defined by absence". This makes cold somehow...Poetic. Like something tragic, but also beautiful, in a very special way. It's like...The quiet, the loneliness, the silence...The stilness. Almost like the real concept of "Nothing", but yet still, there is something. Just found this channel today and it's just incredible and beautiful. Thanks.

The freeze in Texas was a really interesting thing to bring up! My neighborhood lost power several times and we had no running water for 6 days. One of my friends lives in an older house, and they barely even had insulation in their walls. I remember one story in particular of an old man who died alone in his house, in his bed, buried in blankets. It just seems like such an awful way to go.

“The cold will find the weakness in infrastructure” Very accurate.

I've often thought of a line from Richard Adams' "Watership Down," during the winter. Adams says, to paraphrase, that many people who claim to enjoy winter are wrong. What they enjoy is the feeling of being protected against it. I've often thought about that line when walking around on days where every inhaled breath freezes the hairs inside my nose. There is a great satisfaction in staring the cold in the face, feeling its fingertips reach out, and turning back to a well heated home. It's important to remember how easy it is for that final step to fail.

when i was a kid, i was obsessed with the titanic (and i admittedly still am), and one of the most terrifying aspects of its sinking to me was the absolute hopelessness of the people in the water. it was so agonizingly cold, and every single person who froze to death that night knew that they would succumb to it. they listened as the screams around them grew fewer and far between. their last moments were spent surrounded by others but at the same time so isolated, with nothing that could save them from a slow, excruciating death.

Exposure, the war poem is the one that stuck with me. I am autistic, and in my case this comes with a drastically decreased sensitivity to several sensations, particularly pain, hunger and cold, and as a result of this I have experienced hypothermia and frostbite more than most people have had to nowadays- simply due to the fact that I do not notice when things are bad enough that countermeasures must be taken. As a child I did so much dumb shit because I didn't realise it was dangerous; I would go swimming in the Atlantic ocean fully clothed with no towel nor change of clothing nor even a jumper, and some of my fondest memories are from those times splashing around when it was too cold for anyone else to risk it, the solitude of swimming and exploring alone appealed greatly to me, likely also due in part to that same mental difference. The number of times I was declared potentially lost at sea, searched out by the authorities in a desperate attempt to save me from my own stupidity is absurd, though through no fault of my poor parents who tried their absolute level best to keep me from running off (I was a leash child, unsurprisingly). The paramedics knew me by name, and had my parents contacts readily available, and the local police weren't fond of me to put it lightly. The most prominent thing I associate with the cold is that dangerously blissful point in which the discomfort seeps away and it become so easy to slip into the soft, liquid heat you now believe is your reality. It feels like a warm bath after a chilly day, like a hot water bottle on a winter's night only all-encompassing, and it's even easier to succumb to once your hesd stops working. You feel dizzy, and warm, and the closest comparison for me is being pleasantly drunk surrounded by good company. It's deceptive, and you don't realise the danger until you're falling over, passing in and out of consciousness and incapable of basic problem solving. You can no longer accurately answer 2+2, you can't remember what a noun is. It's insidious, and until you realise how far you've slipped you don't even feel afraid. Once you do, it is terrifying.

This is fascinating to me as a Vietnamese and an Australian. I have never known temperatures colder than maybe five degrees celsius. In my country, cold never kills. In my country and my culture, heat kills. Heat is what makes your local government tell you to check in on your parents; heat is what keeps kids home from school. Heat is what can destroy your health, kill your children, invade your home and make it uninhabitable.

"The monster might kill them, but the cold will" What a good line.

I can vividly remember the day in 03 when my 3rd grade teacher told us we were going to read the short story “to build a fire” and a few of us including me took turns reading some paragraphs and I vividly remember how after we finished the story, I was absolutely infatuated and obsessed with this story. It never scared me, I just absolutely loved it the second I’ve heard it. The story about a man trekking through the Yukon Territory with his dog through the day and night and as my little 3rd grade mine read it, I could just picture the beautiful Yukon/ Alaskan wilderness with snow covering the ground and trees and the lakes he comes across and the mountains. It was man vs wild and to this day, still my all time absolute favorite story. Jack London has made banger after banger.

I'm glad you mentioned how cold doesn't really have to be that cold in a place that's typically warm. My brother hiked the PCT and he said that the coldest he ever felt was in the Mojave desert. The temperature went from around 100 during the day down to about 40 something at night. I don't think the human body is well equipped to make adjustments to ambient temperatures like that.

perfect timing. my heater broke today.

When a person becomes hypothermic, an interesting reaction can happen. I think its called "paradoxical undressing". From what people involved with search and rescue have told me. Many cases of people who have frozen to death have undressed themselves down to their underwear or birth suit. At a certain point in the process of hypothermia, the nerves telling you that you're freezing are actually sending the opposite message. You're unbearably hot, even burning. The last gift, or trick the cold grants you before you're dead.

I've only watched two-ish minutes of this video so far but the "scariest short story without it being in the horror genre" is so real. I read this one story at fifteen, maybe sixteen, called "to kill a child" and it has not left me since.