When we think about risky behaviours, our minds often conjure up extreme scenarios: high-stakes betting at the bookies, deep sea diving, alpine mountain climbing, participating in chemsex parties, and so on. Movies like Uncut Gems (2019), featuring Adam Sandler as a volatile, gambling-addicted double-dealer, and the countless Instagram pages of intrepid adrenaline-junkies, compulsive thrill-seekers, and daredevil influencers like Chase Reinford, Oliver Nordin, and Lewis Stevenson make it is easy to equate larger-than-life acts of courage (or stupidity) with risky behaviour. The perpetuation of a ‘FOMO’ attitude – fear of missing out – characterised by the romanticised refusal to back down from life-affirming experiences has ensured that our common assumptions of risk are often inseparable from gendered codes of strength, dominance, and endurance. Against a cultural backdrop of FOMO, risk-taking becomes performative: an assertion of your ability to live on the edge – what has been called ‘edgework’ – in a precarious neoliberal environment where boldness, skill, and gumption must be demonstrated in the endless pursuit of approval via likes, shares, and monetisation. But do images of bombastic, daring feats truly reflect the reality of risk-taking for most of us in our everyday lives? HIDDEN RISKS Beyond the limit-pushing, public instances of edgework in the media, we know comparatively less about the quieter, less ‘visible’ and nuanced elements of risk embedded in the fabric of people’s private, pragmatic, and professional circumstances – like speaking out against a powerful figure in an academic article, choosing to delay medical treatment due to cost, changing careers later in life, or remaining in emotionally or financially precarious relationships. Even routine excursions such as going to the supermarket became fraught with risk during the Covid-19 pandemic, when leaving home was discouraged for fear of exposing yourself to the virus. Such instances help to reveal how risk is relative to individuals and their contexts. To truly understand how people engage and navigate their relationship with risk, we must shift our focus away from the dramatic, thrill-seeking forms of risk so popular in the media and look at the more subtle, mundane negotiations with uncertainty instability, and control. These less visible, yet significant decisions may lack the spectacle of highstakes edgework, but they require similar internal logics of justification, endurance, and skilful resourcefulness, demonstrating the rich ways in which we navigate and come across uncertainty in our lives. UNDER PRESSURES In many cases, the types of risk we choose to take and how we feel about them are not necessarily determined by the desire for excitement, thrill or extreme sensations and flow – rather they are a result of how life unfolds, with its circumstances leaving people with little choice but to engage in risky activities. For some, risky behaviours emerge as a direct response to the pressures and constraints placed on them, whether economic, social, or personal. This allows us to question the voluntarism of the action and consider how for a lot of individuals it might not be about seeking danger, thrill or feeling unstoppable, but rather about making choices that feel like the only viable path. Take, for example, students who, in the face of soaring tuition fees and the crushing weight of living expenses, resort to selling drugs to make ends meet. For them, this choice is not born from a craving for excitement and adrenaline but from a fundamental need to continue their education path and secure a future. Similarly, mothers, especially in times of economic uncertainty and the everincreasing cost of living, may turn to sex work to provide for their children. These examples showcase how individuals might find themselves in positions where risks are a necessity, 44 |
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