I want to live in DC, Alaska

Mental illness

Provincial attitudes

Just made a mean quesadilla

Odontology

Being in high school

DC in Alaska

Are good.

Mannequin head. Maps. (then and now).

Groups.

I'm not really a person who engages in stereotypical risky behavior. Thus, it might be a little surprising that I unequivocally believe that risks are overstated. Ulrich Beck wrote a critique of risk society. I didn't read it. But my understanding is that the crux of his argument was that we, as a society, spend too much time trying to avoid infinitesimally small risks at the cost of great reward.

Obviously, there are areas where this doesn't hold true. Drug use or financial speculation, for instance. But some places, it really does.

I cringe whenever I hear "safety is our number one priority" or "safety is why we're here." We're incredibly safe. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. The problem is that it begins to impede upon our experiences. People too terrified of poor people to enter certain neighborhoods. People too afraid of animals to enter an area.

Some of this sounds a little over the top. Don't go run into traffic or anything right now. I'm partially channeling my summer, where I went from one end of the risk spectrum to the other, while attitudes around me were shockingly nonresponsive.

I spent a month in Denali NP, AK. Lots of bears. Guy there just got eaten by one. Pretty risky, but we were chill about it.

Then I went to Stanford (NorCal) for two weeks. We weren't allowed to go into one of the parks because of animals. Really? Animals? As in, squirrels? We weren't allowed to walk alone (I can't count how many times I broke that one). Safety in numbers, they said. Safety from what?

So the point of my argument is that a life based on risk aversion is a sorry life indeed. There's no need to take pointless risk, but just because something entails a measure of risk shouldn't mean an automatic write off.