On an interpersonal level, fopicre operates more subtly but no less powerfully. Here, the "concrete" is not steel and cement but rigid ideologies and unchallengeable social rules. The fear of rejection solidifies into a persona of aloofness. The fear of failure hardens into perfectionism—a psychological concrete that prevents any risk or vulnerability. Families and organizations often pour their own fopicre by establishing strict protocols and taboos based on past traumas, forgetting that the rule once designed to manage a specific fear now exists as an immovable object stifling growth. We mistake the coping mechanism for the truth, and the wall we built to keep pain out ends up keeping life out.
The most visible manifestation of fopicre is found in urban planning and national borders. Consider the rise of gated communities, the proliferation of surveillance cameras, or the construction of border walls. These are not born purely of logical necessity but of a hardened, collective fear of crime, migration, or economic collapse. An abstract worry about safety becomes a seven-meter-high fence. A vague unease about cultural dilution becomes a visa regime. In this state, fopicre creates a paradox: the barrier intended to protect becomes the primary source of the division it sought to remedy. The concrete wall does not eliminate fear; it validates it, making the phobia a permanent feature of the landscape. fopicre
The tragedy of fopicre is that it is self-reinforcing. Soft fears are fluid; they can be reasoned with, examined, and dissolved. But once they solidify into fopicre, they demand obedience. A person afraid of public speaking might practice and overcome that fear; but if that fear builds a fopicre of complete social avoidance, the structure itself generates new fears—of loneliness, of atrophy. To dismantle fopicre, one must remember that it was once only air and feeling. It requires what the philosopher Gaston Bachelard called "a poetics of space"—the courage to see our barriers not as permanent structures but as temporary sediments of emotion that can be chiseled away by empathy, reason, and the deliberate act of vulnerability. On an interpersonal level, fopicre operates more subtly
Ultimately, the study of fopicre is the study of how we betray our own potential. We pour our anxieties into the world, let them set like concrete, and then complain that the path is too narrow. The great human task is not to build better prisons for our fears, but to leave those fears in their original, fluid state—acknowledged but unbuilt, felt but not fossilized. Only then can we tear down the false walls and remember that the horizon was always open. The most visible manifestation of fopicre is found
In the lexicon of human emotion, fear is often described as a shadow—formless, shifting, and dependent on light to exist. But what happens when that shadow condenses, hardens, and becomes a wall? This process, which I term fopicre —from the Greek phobos (fear) and the Latin creare (to make solid)—describes the alarming transformation of psychological unease into physical and systemic obstacles. Fopicre is not merely a metaphor for anxiety; it is a social and personal reality wherein the intangible dread of change, the other, or the future is rendered into concrete barriers that shape our cities, laws, and minds.
