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.

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

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.

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.

The body is an object in which we are all privileged, or doomed, to dwell, the source of feelings of well-being and pleasure, but also the site of illnesses and strains. (...) [I]t is an action-system, a mode of praxis, and its practical immersion in the interactions of day-to-day life is an essential part of the sustaining of a coherent sense of self-identity.

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

Risk concerns future happenings - as related to present practices - and the colonising of the future therefore opens up new settings of risk, some of which are institutionally organised.