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Key points
- Determining how safe is safe enough depends on one's particular risk assessment as well as one's tolerance for risk.
- The notion of complete safety in life is highly controversial—if not illusory—as unforeseen misfortunes occur in every life.
- Taking the time to reflect on one's core values and what risk level best suits them can help people construct a rewarding life.
Before undertaking something, do you need to feel “completely safe” about it—or “safe enough”? That’s a question well worth considering, particularly as it affects your baseline anxiety level and sense of self-control.
What needs to be recognized here is that which of these two safety alternatives you select depends on your particular risk assessment (i.e., risk/reward ratio), as well as your tolerance for such risk. And undeniably, all such estimates are personal, subjective, and inextricably correlated with your value system. It also must be acknowledged that the notion of complete safety is highly controversial, if not illusory, since it lacks a basis in reality.
The Impossibility of Being Completely Safe
Not only can you do only so much—if anything—to protect yourself from a natural disaster, but there are all sorts of things in life that will remain precarious, despite whatever you might do to avoid them.
For example:
- Your parent, child, or best friend could experience an untimely death from an asymptomatic disease never diagnosed; or, seemingly out of nowhere, they might reveal an untrustworthiness you never could have expected when you confided in them;
- Your financial portfolio could tank, though it had been painstakingly diversified and assembled by a highly recommended economic advisor;
- Despite your being a super-cautious driver, in stopping for a traffic light you could get rear-ended by a truck, totaling your car and leaving you with a bad case of whiplash;
- An object in your kitchen that you placed right next to your stove because you never believed it combustible suddenly bursts into flames, causing a fire to spread all over your kitchen and leaving you with a huge repair bill, plus third-degree burns;
- and so on... (And personally, what terrible incident might you recall that you never dreamed could happen to you?)
Such random, unforeseen misfortunes occur in all our lives, regardless of how prudent we may be in trying to protect ourselves. Ironically (and very few people realize this), those who endeavor the most to be completely safe rarely can feel safe. For they’ve developed a habit not simply of appropriate vigilance toward possible threats to their safety but hypervigilance. This over-the-top cautiousness compels them to constantly worry about, or ruminate over, all the contingencies that could potentially harm them.
Despite the unlikely odds that any of the hazards such individuals imagine could actually take place (which could be less than 1 percent ), in their minds, they’re still possibilities they can ill afford to ignore. That’s why obsessively security-minded individuals generally suffer from problems with chronic anxiety. Not permitting their super-sized fears to escape consciousness, their endless quest to create a risk-free existence carries inordinate costs.
And, too, it’s not much fun to be a “worry wart”—nor are such individuals viewed positively. They may think that regularly worrying about something minimizes its future occurrence. But researchers on this subject have repeatedly found that worriers customarily don’t take concrete, commonsensical action to safeguard themselves from what they’re incessantly worrying about. In the end, their supposed “action” is merely to diligently continue worrying about it.
Moreover, their implicit, self-deluding belief about the precautionary function of all their worrying can approach the paranoiac. And this conditioned overreaction generates its own distress, leaving their stress baseline permanently elevated.
In short, pursuing complete safety is (as the saying goes) an “exercise in futility.” Which is why the ability to discern what you can control—as opposed to what, realistically, you cannot—is so vitally important.
How Do You Determine What’s Safe Enough?
Deciding what’s “safe enough” is also problematic. For ultimately this, too, is more or less subjective. For you could slightly, or grossly, underestimate—or, for that matter, overestimate—how much risk is involved in something you wish to pursue.
The advent of COVID-19 and its exceptionally scary Delta variant requires that you decide for yourself the level of risk you’re willing to take to avoid being inflicted with this so-contagious virus. Making a judicious decision is especially difficult, since you must decide—and at times re-decide—whether the information you’re receiving from your physician or the media is accurate and trustworthy, speculative, misleading, or perhaps downright false.
Doubtless, what one individual might deem “safe enough” to defend against ending up in a hospital (or morgue) may differ considerably from another’s ideas of ample self-protection. And those who strive for complete safety wouldn’t permit themselves to leave home and would conscientiously swipe and re-swipe anything they’d arranged to be deposited outside their front door. Yet reliable news sources have reported instances of such people contracting the virus notwithstanding, ending up on ventilators struggling to breathe.
Still others—many others—have been guilty of making overly optimistic forecasts of what was necessary to adequately defend themselves against the disease. And to their great dismay, they, too—located at the extreme pole of safe-enough thinkers—were “smitten” by it. Unquestionably, their more lenient safe-enough attitude placed them at greater risk than those having a more rigorous regard for this menacing virus.
The Solution (if, Indeed, There Is One)?
It’s safe to say that those who are quite aware of life’s inevitable perils, yet nonetheless choose—discriminately—to take “measured” chances, live lives more spontaneous, independent, adventurous, and joyful than their more vigilant counterparts. And this even though their greater willingness to take on risk may carry (in certain respects at least) a higher price tag than those more wary individuals.
In life, like so many things—most things?—any decision you make here involves certain trade-offs. If you take more chances, you may well incur more incidents of loss, rejection, and failure. But on the other hand, if you do everything you can think of to avoid undesirable outcomes, you’ll forfeit an abundance of opportunities, gratifications, and pleasures that life is ready to offer you.
Finally, it’s up to you to determine how much ambiguity, or uncertainty, you can comfortably live with. But it’s still worthwhile to ask yourself whether—when you’re on your proverbial death bed—you’re more likely to have fewer regrets about what you let yourself experience (maybe incorrectly underestimating their risks) than about what you didn’t.
The choice, of course, is yours. So take the time to reflect on your priorities and core values, and what level of risk best mirrors them. That way you can construct a life that’s optimally rewarding for you.
Note: In doing background research for this post, I could find no literature taking a person-centered approach similar to my own. Rather, the articles, academic in nature, discussing this intricate issue of “how safe is safe enough” centered on technological matters—foremost of which was the comparative safety of autonomous [i.e., self-driving] vehicles (AV).
© 2021 Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
