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.
Anthony GiddensThe thesis that risk assessment itself is inherently risky is nowhere better borne out than in the area of high-consequence risks.
Anthony GiddensRegimes are modes of self-discipline, but are not solely constituted by the orderings of convention in day-to-day life; they are personal habits, organised in some part according to social conventions, but also formed by personal inclinations and dispositions. Regimes are of central importance to self-identity precisely because they connect habits with aspects of the visible appearance of the body.
Anthony GiddensApocalypse has become banal, a set of statistical risk parameters to everyone's existence.
Anthony GiddensA 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.
Anthony Giddens[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.
Anthony Giddens