# Karen Thompson Walker: What fear can teach us

Imagine you're a shipwrecked sailor adrift in the enormous Pacific. You can choose one of three directions and save yourself and your shipmates — but each choice comes with a fearful consequence too. How do you choose? In telling the story of the whaleship Essex, novelist Karen Thompson Walker shows how fear propels imagination, as it forces us to imagine the possible futures and how to cope with them.

- Kind: Talk
- Year: 2013
- Runtime: 11 min
- By: TED.com
- Genres: Education
- Archive: [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/KarenThompsonWalker_2012G)
- Licence or status: [CC BY-NC-ND 3.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/) (as the archive states it)
- Who can watch: Tweens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/ia/KarenThompsonWalker_2012G?play=1)