Work-Life Innovation |

These are worrying times - apparently. You can’t go a day without hearing on the news or reading in the paper the latest shocking crime statistics. Only two days ago we heard that within a 24 hour period 5 people had been stabbed to death on the streets of Britain. Worrying indeed. Add to this the threat of suicidal terrorists, rampant, flesh eating hospital bugs, train crashes, hordes of child abductors and marauding gangs of feral youths, and you could be forgiven for refusing to set foot outside your door ever again.

But is this really the case? Just how dangerous is it to live in modern Britain? Is this really an epidemic of danger, or is it a media fuelled panic? Well, Lets take a different tack. Let’s suppose (in some weird, perverse way) you decided you had had enough of this dangerous and trauma intensive world, and you make the decision to end it all. But not in just any old, pop a skip load pills, throw yourself off a cliff way. No, you decide to go for a truly modern death. One that pays tribute, if you like, to the varied and many ways we are told we are likely to bite the bullet in modern day Britain.

Let’s consider a few, totally contemporary ways we might attempt to shrug off this mortal coil.

• Dying in a plane hijacked by terrorists. To be sure this is how you kick the bucket; you would have to take one flight a day, every day for…wait for it, 26,000 years. During which, you would have already died a total of 20 times on the drive to the airport.

• Don’t like planes? How about a fatal train crash? Well, to be sure of biting this particular bullet you would have to go on approximately 42,000,000 train journeys before your ticket was finally punched by the great ticket master in the sky. Better pack some lunch.

• How about radiation death! Surely that’s a thoroughly modern way to go. Why not find a nice cottage that sits on the site boundary of a nuclear power plant? Surely, your risk of contracting a nice and exotic form of cancer must shoot through the (thatched) roof, right? Wrong! To equal the risk of cancer given by smoking 1 packet of 20 cigarettes, you would have to live in that cottage for 100 hundred years. I hope it’s comfy, ’cause your gonna be there a long time.

• Suppose instead you decide that in fact your life wouldn’t suck so bad if it wasn’t for your pesky and troublesome kids. Imagine for a second you were a truly awful parent (I know your not, but let’s just imagine for the sake of argument), and that you hatch a devilish plan to get rid of the little brats once and for all. Even better, you have hit on a cunning plan that would avoid any unwelcome attention by the local plod. Your devilish plan? Simple, get the little rug rats abducted! As we all know there are weirdo’s hiding behind every hedge and bus shelter out there, just waiting to snatch the first poor unsuspecting child that skips by. So, to effect your despicable plan, you decide to get your child up in the morning, serve breakfast, then simply push them out the door and let them stay there till the inevitable abduction occurs. How long do you suppose it will take before the unthinkable happens? A day? A week? A month? Actually you’re looking at about 200,000 years (and even then you would get them back within 24 hours). For the unspeakable to really happen (i.e. never found or found dead), the poor thing would have to be left on the street for several million years!

But enough of this madness. Actually I believe you are neither insanely suicidal nor wish harm to come to your children. Instead of letting yourself and the kids face the dangers on the street, let’s all stay home. Surely it’s much safer there? Sorry, but you couldn’t be more wrong:

In any one year you have a 1 in 650 chance of being injured by your bed, mattress or pillow (800 Americans actually died from soft furnishings in 2004!). Be careful in the bathroom also; you have a 1 in 4,500 chance of being attacked and injured by your toilet. And forget the garden; it’s a horticultural death-trap! Lawnmowers (6500 accidents in Britain each year), Flower pots (5,300), secateurs (4,400), Hoses and sprinklers (1,100), and the list goes on and on. You would actually be safer swapping each day in the garden for a day spent flying at 35,000 feet.

So what is the lesson here? Well, perhaps we are spending way too much energy being scared of the wrong things in life. It’s not the airplane crashes, child abductors, radiation in the environment that likely to carry us off. It’s much more likely to be the ordinary things that surround us in our day-to-day mundane lives that will one day turn round and bite us on the ass. If this is true, then perhaps we should start to live a bit more. Thrill ourselves a bit more often by doing the things we think are dangerous (but in fact, statistically, aren’t). Sure, the world can be a dangerous place, but it’s dangerous in all sorts of mundane and seemingly innocuous places and activities and not as dangerous in places and activities we are told are. We often fail to recognise that, and instead limit ourselves from doing what might really bring us to life because we pay too much attention to the hysterical ravings of the media, and the perceived riskyness of the out-of-the-ordinary things we could do if we dared.

When today is over its gone forever, and there’s only a finite number left. Let’s not get to our last one and regret the things we didn’t do.

** Most of the material and stats for this post was drawn from the excellent book by Warwick Cairns: “How to Live Dangerously“.

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