ABSTRACT
Do you sometimes wish that your life was more exciting and challenging, yet when such opportunities arise you decide not to grab them because the risk of your decision back ring is, in your mind, too horrible to contemplate? Your watchword is ‘better safe than sorry’ but your yearnings do not disappear: a continual tension exists between being cautious and wishing to take chances. A risk-averse outlook keeps you disgruntled as you accumulate a lifetime of ‘if only . . .’ regrets (for example, ‘If only I had asked her out when I had the chance but I lost my nerve’; ‘If only I had gone on that training course, I could have been higher up the company ladder by now. I didn’t want to take the risk of failing the course’). In an echo of Socrates’ famous remark that an unexamined life is not worth living, Hauck states that ‘the life that has no risk in it is not worth living’ (1982b: 57).
