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

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

Martin Luther King did not stir his audience in 1963 by declaiming 'I have a nightmare'

High-consequence risks have a distinctive quality. The more calamitous the hazards they involve, the less we have any real experience of what we risk: for if things 'go wrong', it is already too late.

A lifestyle involves a cluster of habits and orientations, and hence has a certain unity - important to a continuing sense of ontological security - that connects options in a more or less ordered pattern. (...) [T]he selection or creation of lifestyles is influenced by group pressures and the visibility of role models, as well as by socioeconomic circumstances.

The flow of action continually produces consequences which are unintended by actors, and these unintended consequences also may form unacknowledged conditions of actions in a feedback fashion. Human history is created by intentional activities but is not an intended project; it persistently eludes efforts to bring it under conscious direction.

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