Random Thoughts on Risk Taking - Read at your own risk
I'm lucky enough to be surrounded by people who I find to be a lot smarter than me. Because of this, I'm constantly trying to learn, trying to be open minded enough as to not allow my own ego to get the best of me. To be honest over the years, as I've gotten more and more grays on my beard, the process of accepting I don't know something has become a little easier, but that is probably because I keep on practicing.
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Very few things in life are transacted in absolutes. Humans and their extreme emotional complexities add layers of biases, lens of perception to otherwise simple observations. It's probably because of this I find subtle solace in math, charts and statistics. Being someone who wants to be a practitioner of honesty, arguing with rock solid evidence goes against this one desire.
However I'm not one to deny the emotional spectrum of my own existence, and I can say in that same breath that because of this I've learned to cope with reality. This is to say, that I'm attempting to operate within the realm of verifiable facts always taking into account my ability to embrace them. It is at this metaphorical fork in the road where I find myself staring at choices in risk. To aim high, lose little, yet all. To aim low, lose little, not all. To try or not even bother.
Everything has risk, there is absolutely no denying that. What is my level of comfort, might be the only relevant question and then again it might no be relevant at all. Yes there are no guarantees when one plays the lotto, but to those who have never bought a ticket, not winning is guaranteed. The lottery of life in a sense does operate in absolutes.
Don't worry if you don't understand my words, I have a hard time understanding them myself. What I know could not even be knowledge, but pretty distorted ideas of bias perception. Where was I? Risk, should we take them, should we not? Is there an option after all? There might not be and yet... here we are making a fool out of ourselves.
Two more nails for the coffin of confusion....
Other posts by yours truly
• our cat acting stoic
• So apparently
• Calculating Social Profits
• My Steemit Friends
• Who knows if its good or bad
AH! Great topic!
The brutal truth is that every single day that we awaken in this meat-suit is a risk. We don't know when our number is up. We could be eating our breakfast and choke on an almond, or walk out the front door and get hit by a B-double semi-trailer, or walk past a work construction site and the crane drops a 2 tonne block on our head, or our heart just hits a point where it can't push the blood carrying the oxygen through the hardened fatty tissue in our arteries and stops suddenly.
There is no such thing as security.
Mainstreamers cling to their 9-5 jobs thinking that it provides security, but it doesn't. The corporation's stocks could take a hit and they make thousands of jobs redundant or automation takes over the job you once had. Boom!
The banking cartel stuffs up (deliberately), gets bailed out whilst millions of people lose their homes.
Security gone!
It's the secure insecurity or the insecure security.
Every day is a risk.
Which is a liberating understanding because it means we can take risks..
We can take the old idiom "he who hesitates is lost" and just jump in the deep end and live our life to the fullest...
Or not... And still be prayed upon by the 'risk monster.'
No guarantees equals freedom.
I loved this one bruthaman!
Blissful blessings and smilesin joyNathanNK
I'm a big risk taker but I always say, and not being sarcastic, don't copy me. Some of my risks have payed out big (not just financially, this includes friendships, jobs, etc.) and some have lost big as well. I'm comfortable in loss, drama, jungle-mechanics, the streets, - AND- comfortable without. I've felt all that could be felt on extreme sides of the neurological spectrum. I've had a near death experience. Basically, I'm resolved already. Which is kind of SAD if you really think about it. This has helped me in sooooooo many ways in life, but also not so — because my desensitization often leaves me in a colder, less compassionate-seeming, disposition and well, sometimes it feels like life is has no magic anymore. Knowledge grants great control, power, and leads to wise choices — yet, comes with a world of responsibility, sadness, disappointments, throws of compassion for the misled, few opportunities for outrage, no victim card. There's pressure, there is weight, there is accountability to those who depend on your decisions, there is no room for sparkles, rainbows, fate, destiny, mystery... I think too this is what sucks most agnostics and atheists into pessimism, apathy, and depression. Its so much simpler to accept the meaning of life from any number of sources and just continue on living it in a preformat. Every question is answered. No thinking required. Nothing further to be curious about. But what a risk to think outside the box, and even more so to learn what's outside the box and see demonstration of it, it is both wonder and wonderouslessness... inexplainable dichotomy.
You should write a post in this style... its like music with an undecipherable beat...
The older I get, the more I realize that there is much I do not know.
I very often say, the only thing I can know for certain is that there
is a lot I do not know. I, like you, love learning, and one thing I have
learned is that the people you surround yourself with, both physically
and virtually contribute greatly to the things you learn, and to the
beliefs you have about yourself, other people, and the world in general.
Many people have a negative relationship with risk. To some, it is another
four letter swear word. You are very correct in saying that there is risk in
all things, nothing is a guarantee. The reason we hate risk is because we
have a fear of the unknown. The fear of the unknown is the source of
most fears. There is risk in playing it safe, and there is risk in giving it a
shot. It is better to play and risk losing, than to not play and lose anyway.
Or as Theodore Roosevelt puts it.
"Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."
As always dropping those truths!!
Reading this post for understanding is already a risk because you so much confused the post to the extent that we can't know where you are standing, whether for or against risk taking.... Lol
Well, life itself is a risk, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, everyone is taking risk.
Any attempt to do anything at all involved risk, even when you are 100 percent certain of the outcome, stepping out to do them involved risk taking
Though, the level of risk differs, but everyone is taking risk....