Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
By most accounts and metrics, we in modern Western nations live in the wealthiest, safest society ever. We have some of the broadest and strongest social "safety nets" in history, and lower inequality than most large societies of the past. Thus, the downsides to risk-taking are presumably the lowest ever; never has "the price of failure" been so low.
So, why then, do we seem to be some of the most risk-averse people ever? Why do we appear to be more terrified of failure than our ancestors who were one bad harvest away from starvation?
(I wonder about this, because it seems to me to be a factor in our modern allergy to authority, specifically how scared people seem to be at the idea of stepping up and taking charge of something.)
While we are safer, we also have more to lose. Advances in communication technology also means we are more exposed to stories of people who do lose it all, or simply slip down a level in SES, often generationally. While we may have an objectively higher standard of living in the working class in 2024 than the much of the upper class from 1924 did, very few people have a real internalized sense of this. Its why the cost of college has ballooned out of control while the number of people attending college is higher than ever; people are desperate to make the middle-class somehow hereditary.
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