The body is in some sense perennially at risk. The possibility of bodily injury is ever-present, even in the most familiar of surroundings.

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.

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

To a greater or lesser degree, the project of the self becomes translated into one of the possession of desired goods and the pursuit of artificially framed styles of life. (...) Not just lifestyles, but self-actualisation is packaged and distributed according to market criteria.

Apocalypse has become banal, a set of statistical risk parameters to everyone's existence.

[C]ultivated risk-taking represents an 'experiment with trust' (in the sense of basic trust) which consequently has implications for an individual's self-identity. (...) In cultivated risk-taking, the encounter with danger and its resolution are bound up in the same activity, whereas in other consequential settings the payoff of chosen strategies may not be seen for years afterwards.

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