What are the dangers in your life?

Answer 1

To answer this, we must first try to define the various aspects of life to which dangers may be posed. To begin with, we can list:

Social status and contentment.

Health and well-being.

Wealth and prosperity.

These are not entirely inextricable; in fact, they depend upon each other in myriad ways. Your social status may be reliant upon your wealth. Your wealth may be reliant upon your health. Health may be affected by social status. A threat to any one of these things may have a knock-on affect for any other aspect of your life.

Ultimately, continuing life functions are an aspect of your health; a direct or indirect threat to your health may entail a danger to life functions. As personal contentment is important to mental health, and mental health is inarguably important to physical health, a threat to social status may pose an indirect danger to health. As prosperity is important to social status, a threat to wealth may also pose an indirect danger to health.

One should not ignore the importance of quality of life (an extension of contentment, potentially relying upon social status and wealth); something that poses a dire danger to health and well-being does not have to beterminal to effectively end your life, or the manner of living to which you are accustomed.

Imagine, if you will, that you are a perfectly healthy, happy, successful stunt man. One day you fail to make a jump properly and break your neck. Though you may survive, there is a great possibility that you will not be able to continue working as a stunt man. In fact, there is a substantial risk of being unable to perform a great many of the physical activities that you previously took for granted.

In this case, we can consider several items as dangers to life. A short list might be:

Your choice of profession was a danger to health (risk of accidents).

The accident was a danger to prosperity (loss of job) and social status.

The loss of social status (ex-employed) is a danger to your wealth and contentment (no money).

The injuries are a danger to contentment and social status.

In fact, the list could go on and on, with each aspect having multiple lines of influence (and posing danger) to each other aspect that defines your life.

The accident may have been a direct danger to life, but the job that increased the risk of an accident was an indirect danger to life in the first place.

On the other hand, if the movie stunt industry were suddenly flooded with perfect android facsimiles incapable of being permanently harmed, the bottom would fall out of the market for humans willing to endanger their health. Having been a stunt man for many years, you may find it difficult to adapt to an alternative form of employment- this poses a danger to your ongoing wealth, personal contentment, and however indirectly, health.

In short, the job was a danger to life. Not having the job is a danger to life.

The dangers in any one person's specific life (and way of life):

- result from their life choices (location, employment, hobbies) or are purposely pursued (base-jumping, rock climbing, riding a rocket sledge maintained by a mad engineer who hears voices and gets upset if you're not nice to the puppet)

- are inherent in their genetic constitution (predisposition to heart/lung disease, cancer, or other physical anomalies)

- posed by external forces beyond their control ('act of God'; sudden meteor/lightning/mutant-seagull strike for instance).

Of course, these interplay in complicated ways, and rely upon interpretation.

Taking base-jumping as an example; one might choose to see a base-jumper's chosen past-time as a danger, while they might see the banning of such a past time as a danger to their way of life (contentment) by denying them the freedom to throw themselves off of tall buildings with nothing but a thin layer of nylon to slow their descent. One's concern for their life functions may be of no greater import to them than the freedom to threaten those life functions in the way they see fit; to deny them that freedom leads to them having no regard for their continuing life functions at all, for these tie them to a life lacking contentment.

The long and the short of it? Everything is a danger in everyone's life; living is dangerous. It wouldn't be as much fun if it wasn't.