This is a medical condition, not just a bad habit. It is very treatable but will probably benefit from psychiatric treatment, not just counseling or friendly advice. As with OCD, this can include cognitive behavioral therapy as well as medication.
The “pretending to be wise” answer is that it’s easier to deal with mass extinction than with individual mortality; that the thought of your own death is weakened by the thought of gigadeaths.
More seriously, though:
Major disasters have always been a large part of human cultural experience. Cities have been destroyed by earthquakes, volcanoes, or hurricanes. Within recorded history, plagues and famines have reduced prosperous civilizations to desperate stragglers living in ruins.
Preventing or surviving disasters is, therefore, one of the most important things humans can work on. Disasters loom large in our cultural consciousness because they really are large and because we can actually do stuff to make these problems less bad.
Disaster preparedness is, in fact, no-kidding, really important for you, your family, your city, your country, and the world as a whole.
Preventing avoidable disasters, including manmade ones such as nuclear war, is a major part of what makes world politics morally significant. Avoiding the devastation of war is a really good reason to get good at politics, diplomacy, peacemaking, mutually beneficial relations among peoples; and the high stakes of “shit, we could actually kill off humanity if we fuck up politics too badly” is a pretty good motivator.
So … we think a lot about bad shit that could happen, because bad shit really can happen, and we can do something about quite a lot of it.
It is certainly possible to adjust some measurable elements of personality. For example, use of psilocybin (magic mushrooms) has been shown to alter measurable personality factors.
It’s not tuition, but rather openings for students and residents. If you want more people to receive more health care, you need more doctor hours. Which means more doctors. Which means there need to be more spots in medical schools and residencies. These are currently scarce.
Randomness doesn’t really save traditional free will. A robot that selects its actions by rolling dice is not any more “free to choose” than a robot that selects its actions according to a deterministic program. There isn’t any free-will juice that gets introduced by adding randomness.
Your “free will” is the process by which you select actions. For humans, that’s a bunch of physics and chemistry happening in your brain; it receives influences from your senses, your body, and its own self-awareness (i.e. its model of you, your actions, tendencies, etc.). Whether that process depends closely on QM, or is boringly classical, doesn’t control how “self-determined” it is.
“Ah, then my decision to shun you and tell everyone I know to do the same … that is also preordained, and you mustn’t hold me responsible for doing so.”
“Groot” is also the Dutch cognate to the English word “great”.
There are plenty of Dutch words and names that are close enough to English to sound really funny to English-speakers. Like, Vroom is a real Dutch surname, but to American kids that’s the sound a cool car makes.
(In one of the Baroque Cycle books, Neal Stephenson needed a name for a Dutch shipwright who built really fast sailing ships. Who else could it be but Jan Vroom?)