Twelve: Living With Risk

Whether you are aware of it or not, you are a gambler every moment of every day. If you are like me, and do not live on the ground floor of your apartment complex, you are immediately faced with a staircase. Do you ever think about how dangerous going up and down stairs can be? According to the National Safety Council, falling is the third-leading cause of unintentional injury-related death in the United States—nearly 29,000 people die every year in falls. But this time, you made it down the stairs without incident. Now you get behind the wheel of your car, start it up, shift it out of park…in 2014, 33,736 people died in motor vehicle traffic-related accidents. In 2024, it was 39,254, fully 16.3 percent more (the population grew by 6.8 percent in those ten years). You were safer when you were walking down the stairs. So now what? You turn off the car, go back up the stairs (again, without incident) and decide your life is not worth the gamble. You’ll stay home instead…not so fast. You could slip in the bathtub, choke on your food, drown in your swimming pool…

All right, perhaps this is starting to get morbid for your (and my) taste. But the point is made: life involves risk. Those are some of the easier risks to calculate. Living with risk is often not so amenable to calculation…