Your rate of experimentation and appetite for risk should be inversely correlated with your age, but is this saying being misconstrued? We all can understand why the young can stomach bigger bets. Fewer obligations, more runway and more room to recover. That story holds generations. You leave home, you go to the big city, you try more. Today the world is, in many ways safer and more organised, which should favour smarter and more deliberate risk. That said, is this what is we are seeing in practice? What we see more often is the pull towards two extremes. Either spectacle and escalation or careful paralysis that feels like virtue.
Extreme risk behaviours that travel well in the media are on the rise and often glorified. Think sports betting, steroid use, experimental supplements, unvetted health advice, as well as risky punts with money. On the other hand there are many who are overly cautious of even the foods they eat, the age old advice they receive, or simply just stepping out of their comfort zone. People are in avoidance of anything that might shake their image. Both paths are validated by the same thing, social media. We have all observed how algorithms and viral content, nudge people towards dramatised ends. Social media puts failures up on a permanent poster-board, which makes the extremes at either end feel like the safest groups to align with.
Being in the optimal range probably feels bad because our failures feel viscerally public. I have seen people behaves as if everyone who looks at them already knows something that was shared online. The risk of the screenshot is strong and it seems to fuel the extremes and the validation surrounding them. Historically, the middle ground is where good risk actually compounds, but it looks worst online. If you expect one success out of ten experimental projects, you also expect nine public failures. Each has a timestamp and can easily be shared even by a third party. It has a lifespan beyond the moment. The audience sees only outcomes and any stumble looks permanent.
If you live in the now, future costs might blur and an extreme move feels like a statement of an identity rather than a choice with consequences. A camera captures a “moment” and not much more. A series of curated moments become an eternalised profile. For the extreme risk taker social media can help disguise risk by replacing long-term thinking with eternalised, thinking allowing one to live vicariously through these “moments”. This way there are no visible cracks in the glass, however this invites one reckless action to match the other, leading to an unbalanced life chasing these moments. On the other side, just the possibility for a public failure is daunting because it threatens to shatter the eternalised “moment”, so action never might never begin.
Striving for a healthy, balanced risk profile is something we should all do, but perhaps in our age, one should shift where it lives. Keeping projects and experiments small. Or perhaps findings ways to emotionally detach from the social media trap entirely.
Can better digital habits mitigate the problem or simply dampen it?