K comments on a slate star codex post about the curious way people react to failing rebreathers.  Deep divers use a rebreather rather than just an oxygen tank, because it decouples length of dive from amount you have to carry.  Rebreathers can fail; that’s okay, you bring an emergency oxygen tank with you, enough to get back to the surface.  The problem is noticing; oxygen deprivation is hard to notice because noticing requires oxygen.  So they put a monitor in that beeps at you if the oxygen content of the air gets low and you need to switch to your emergency tank.

All your incentives are aligned here.  You want oxygen.  You have a source of oxygen.  You have a clear signal as to when you need to switch.  Switching is not hard, you just need to swap your mouth pieces.  And yet, people are horrible at this.  They panic and in their panic they can’t detach from the thing that has been your source of air, even if intellectually they know it is no longer a good source of air.

Some people do this even when they are on land in a room full of normal air when they knew they’s need to switch at some point.  It is just too hard.

This is a great metaphor for anxiety.  Even if you intellectually know the cause of your stress it can feel too dangerous to separate from it long enough to introduce a healthier replacement.  You have to get the rebreather working first, and then you can switch sources.  It is related to but not quite the same as a sick system, although I can’t quite articulate the difference.

So “clinging to the rebreather” is a thing now, please introduce it to your lexicon