The risk climate of modernity is thus unsettling for everyone: no one escapes.

To live in the universe of high modernity is to live in an environment of chance and risk, the ineveitable concomitants of a system geared to the domination of nature and the reflexive making of history. Fate and destiny have no formal part to play in such a system, which operates (as a matter of principle) via what I shall call open human control of the natural and social worlds.

High-consequence risks form one particular segment of the generalised 'climate of risk' characteristic of late modernity - one characterised by regular shifts in knowledge-claims as mediated by expert systems.

The risk climate of modernity is thus unsettling for everyone: no one escapes.

Achieving control over change, in respect to lifestyle, demands an engagement with the outer social world rather than a retreat from it.

'Taking charge of one's life' involves risk, because it means confronting a diversity of open possibilities.

Lifestyles are routined practices, the routines incorporated into habits of dress, eating, modes of acting and favoured milieux for encountering others; but the routines followed are reflexively open to change in the light of the mobile nature of self-identity.