There Is No Such Thing As 100% Safety, There Are Only Trade-Offs

There Is No Such Thing As 100% Safety, There Are Only Trade-Offs

January 17, 2021 · by The Escape Artist · in Investing ·

Like many other people, I get emails. One thing I noticed about these emails in 2020/21 is that many of them ask whether I am “staying safe”?  Sadly not…I have been involved in that dangerous activity called “life”. Scientific studies show that 100% of lives end in death.

Perspective

When I was at primary school we learned about something called “history”, a place in the past where many interesting things happened.  For those not familiar with history, it was not always safe. There were wars. There were plagues. There were papercuts. I don’t have enough space in a 1,500 word blog post to cover everything in “history” but a lot of dangerous stuff happened, health & safety be ******.

This makes me wonder. Did we get more risk averse in recent years? Did we come to take safety, comfort and convenience for granted? Has a cult of safetyism, an extreme form of desire for safety, taken over our schools, universities and our public discussions?

The problem with safetyism

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff say yes and wrote a book about it. In The Coddling of The American Mind, Haidt (a liberal psychology professor at New York University) and Lukianoff, a law professor, define safetyism as follows:

Safetyism refers to a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. “Safety” trumps everything else, no matter how unlikely or trivial the potential danger.

When children are raised in a culture of safetyism, which teaches them to stay “emotionally safe” while protecting them from every imaginable danger, it may set up a feedback loop: kids become more fragile and less resilient, which signals to adults that they need more protection, which then makes them even more fragile and less resilient”

The Coddling of The American Mind

Financial safety

If you are anything like me, you got interested in money motivated by a mixture of fear and hope.

In my case it was more fear than hope. Ever since my parents took out the biggest mortgage possible and interest rates then went to 17%, I’ve always thought of being in debt as a scary thing. After that, I spent much of my life visualising myself living homeless and eating catfood and cockroaches rice and beans to survive.

As someone smart once said: I have lived through many terrible things in my life…most of which never actually happened.

I can see The Dark Side

Monty Python famously sang: “Always look on the bright side of Life”.

But it was an ability to see The Dark Side that triggered me to save. It’s why I was always so keen to fix the roof whilst the sun was shining. You probably have enough to never work again when you have 25x your annual spending. Or to put it another way, a 4% withdrawal rate is probably safe. Sometimes this sparks debate and accusations of being TOO DANGEROUS. But when I see those debates, I can’t help thinking…what about this:

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:
https://theescapeartist.me/2021/01/17/there-is-no-such-thing-as-100-safety-there-are-only-trade-offs/