Risk Tolerance and the Search for Meaning

May 8, 2014

amsterdam biking
Each year I come to Europe for the month of May. Work brings me here. Delight keeps me coming back, as well as curiosity about the human condition. Take personal and social risk tolerances in different cultures as an example.

Everywhere in Europe I see young people smoking cigarettes. I see people on bicycles without helmets. In Amsterdam (I was there last year, not this year), cyclists overwhelm the number of cars. They bicycle (or ride scooters and motorcycles) without helmets in the tens of thousands every day. They carry young children without helmets in bicycle baskets without a second thought.In the United States, most of would not think of smoking. Few of us would ride a bicycle without a helmet. To ride a motorcycle without a helmet seems like the height of irresponsibility. And carrying a child with no helmet in a bicycle basket on a long daily commute in heavy city traffic? We would shake our heads in disbelief.

But when it comes to social risks—such as chemical contamination, carrying guns, fracking, accepting GMO foods, imprisoning vast numbers of peoples—the risk tolerances are reversed. Europeans look at us and think our willingness to take these social risks is beyond the pale.

Of course these risks are not all the same. But as a broad generalization, Europeans accept personal risk behaviors that seem bizarre to us while they resist U.S. efforts to force them (via compulsory trade agreements) to take on social risks that seem bizarre to them.

Yet while many Europeans smoke, they live healthier lives than we do in other ways. They have built walking and cycling into their transportation systems. They often eat healthier foods and they eat together and in leisurely ways. They work to live rather than living to work. Social and family time is at the center of their lives rather than at the periphery.

But one thing I find on both sides of the Atlantic is the hunger for meaning. The search for lived (not abstract) truth in our lives. The same struggles with the great questions of the heart, the head and the hands—how we love, what has meaning, and how we act and serve in the world. These are the universal archetypal questions that appear in different forms in different cultures. These struggles are the stories of our private dreams and our shared mythologies.

Tolerance for private and social risks vary. The great life questions find us wherever we are.

Related Posts

Mar 08 2023

The Long View: the Launch of Our Omega Website

Dear TNS Friends, What a strange time. Awareness of the global polycrisis—whatever we choose to call it—is deepening across the country and around the world. We've...
Feb 01 2023

The Year of the Polycrisis

Dear New School Friends: I want to thank each of you who contributed, or continued to contribute, to The New School in 2022. You've made a critical contribution to our...
Nov 30 2022

Fall Letter from Commonweal

Dear Commonweal Friends, I hope this letter finds each of you as well as you can be in these tumultuous times. Oren Slozberg: A Leader for Commonweal In September, I...

Angle of Vision Newsletter Signup

Pin It on Pinterest