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NOTHING VENTURED... Annabel Rivkin examines the nature of risk-taking and how it infiltrates our everyday lives ife is all about risk management: the identification and prioritisation of jeopardy, danger, hazard, menace, threat. Risk is dynamic, kinetic, ever shifting and endlessly compelling. It operates in a continuum, stabilising the relationship between the gamble and the need to maintain a competitive advantage. From babies staggering about, to anyone crossing the road, to maniacs leaping from aeroplanes with only a fabric sack between them and a shattered skeleton – risk is at play every minute of every day. And what we manage is our relationship with it. We fizz with subconscious internal calculation every time we move a muscle. “What,” something in us asks, “are the chances?”
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The business of risk can of course be highly profitable. Emotional risk, in particular, can be leveraged with very little danger to the corporate protagonist. But let’s stop talking maths. Let’s talk sex – or the risk involved in trying to get sex. Sure, we can prowl bars and parties, take deep breaths and try to talk to prospective paramours. We might get mugged on the way to the nightclub, we might be spurned in front of everyone, we might have our drink spiked, we might get there and find that everyone is married or we’ve already slept with all the people there, dammit. Better, many of us have come to believe, to manage the risk from the sofa. And so we enter into the dance of death with the risk
vectors on Tinder or Bumble or Grindr or Muddy Matches. This isn’t a marketplace risk – although sometimes it feels that way because everyone is playing with his or her own set of emotional currency and expectation and history. The tender these apps and websites are monetising is that of endorphins (thrill) and the abstract, future-facing phenomenon of hope. Oof. Exhilarating and stirring. Addictive and
Risk-takers are responsible for our survival as a species; the reason we didn’t starve to death in our caves.
painful. The platform operates with virtually zero risk and we, the users, take the slings and arrows and run ourselves ragged on the metaphorical rollercoaster of acceptance and rejection. So we log off. Delete the app. Go about the more manageable risk of how many biscuits we can dolefully eat alone in front of a box set until our fingers itch once more and we dive back in. What, in life, is more compelling than risk. Only, perhaps, the risk-takers. They are responsible for our survival as a species; the reason we didn’t starve to death in our caves. As single women we may listen to a man droning on at dinner and think to ourselves that the entire evening was a waste of mascara until he declares an →