Taking responsibility for your own safety means sacrificing something. You are always balancing a budget that includes time, money and other resources, and safety. If you are willing to accept any and all risks, your can save a lot of time and money, for now. The more time and money you put in, the safer you can be. If you don’t invest anything into your safety, then you don’t really have any. In that case, what you do experience of safety is because of the time and money invested by others into making society safer — which means that the terms, costs, and coverage are also determined by others. That’s why I say you don’t have any safety. It doesn’t belong to you. Really, you are merely affected by someone else’s safety — second hand. And that’s fantastic, truly. Our society is really an incredibly safe place to live, even after several years of irregular and regionally varied decreases in public safety, we’re still incredibly safe here in the States by global and historical standards. Not as safe as some places, but really pretty well looked after.

The question is: what do you want to create for yourself, your family, and the people around you? Do you want to accept the baseline affordances for your level of safety? You can take the tap water approach to personal safety and accept whatever the government and utilities firms provide. Similarly, you can accept the zebra approach to self-defense and blend in with the herd. Or, you can decide that what you and yours contribute to the world is worth a little more than that?

Invest accordingly.

Everything you say ‘yes’ to means that you are saying ‘no’ to something else.

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