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

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

The difficulties of living in a secular risk culture are compounded by the importance of lifestyle choices.

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

[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.

In a world of alternative lifestyle options, strategic life planning becomes of special importance. Like lifestyle patterns, life plans of one kind or another are something of an inevitable concomitant of post-traditional social forms. Life plans are the substantial content of the reflexively organised trajectory of the self. Life-planning is a means of preparing a course of future actions mobilised in terms of the self's biography. We may also speak here of the existence of personal calendars or life-plan calendars, in relation to which the personal time of the lifespan is handled.

The body is thus not simply an 'entity', but is experienced as a practical mode of coping with external situations and events.