More opportunities to encounter a risk – more magpies on the move, you say.

How many decisions of meaning do we actually make, in our lives? I mean, how many that transform the course of who we are or will become, rather than ones that simply stretch the daily experience of being ourselves slightly further from the mean for a month or two, before the rubbery contours of the self make themselves known and spring back to their previous form?

I ask because it seems to have something in common with your question about how we think about risk. Decisions start feeling a little more watery as time passes and the realisation dawns that, provided you’re not a first responder of some kind, many of them can be undone or even will undo themselves with a little inattention or outright neglect. And so, in fact, the more of them we make the less individual concern we put into reasoning each to its conclusion.

Perhaps the problem with our mental risk processes is that we treat them sort of like decisions – because by the very nature of risk, most of the ones we’re aware of will land us, right back at ourselves, in the same kind of life we had before. I mean, are you just as haunted by this experiment as I am? What this tells me is that we (and I’ll throw myself under the bus with the rest of my fellow cyclists here, sans helmet and all), correctly or not, assess our social success as the primary threat to our wellbeing. In as much as we’re actually bothering to assess anything else at all, it rates considerably below ‘looking ok’. I write from the end of a day in late May, when the sun was out and the people in this slice of the world were sitting half naked in every park in the city, looking very ok, beautiful in fact, and for all the world like they were happy.

I could try to trace that idea of social success through Darwin to Malthus and the early political economists. But instead, going back to (paraphrase) your idea: that whatever they might look like, if they are taking reckless risks, they can’t be ok. Those decisions, where we look at risk and decide it isn’t likely to affect our trajectory – I wish I were wrong but I think those can be made with the confidence and self-satisfaction of a secure personality as much as they can be made by someone suffering and afraid.

I don’t mean this as some Nietzschean nightmare, where the happiness of the masses is the problem. When I think about what a collective of people being gentle and kind looks like, it is one which shares this feature.

It’s just we’re a mess. We set fire to things simply out of curiosity. Every generation in living memory has been at risk of running off the end of the S-curve, and we’re just the latest to spend our twenties flirting with it. I’m hoping (and it’s perhaps not my preferred vision but that’s just as it should be) that as this generation ages we’ll do what our parents and grandparents and all the rest did, and compromise just enough to stretch out the curve and pass it on.