So often, I hear people rant on about how crypto is "too risky" for them, and I have to admit that it's likely that most of their inner narrative is driven by stuff like memecoins and play-to-airdrop tokens on Telegram and such.

I suppose that's to be expected; it's the "big stories" that make the news, and subsequently those stories end up shaping the narrative in an unbalanced way.

It's a bit like deciding that my town is "a dangerous criminal hellhole" because some guy got baked on crack and killed his wife by whacking her over the head with a cast iron skillet. Why? Because a "tragic domestic squabble" gets reported with a giant headline reading "Vicious Bloody Murder!"

It's not balanced. It's not proportional.

Perhaps we forget that ultimately everything is risky. But we become conditioned to pay attention only to the worst-case outcome, without adding the framework of everything around it. Context matters.

Sure, the batteries in your new EV might catch on fire and endanger your life. Sure, the next flight you take might have a catastrophic engine failure and plummet into the ocean, killing everyone. Sure, you might trip on the stairs leaving your house, crack your head and have to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair.

So, are you not going to buy an EV? Will you never fly again? Will you not even leave your house?

Begs the question of whether life actually is any riskier than it was — let's say — 50 years ago? Or is it actually safer?

Maybe it's just our perception that has changed because we spend so much time watching "fear pörn" and "doom scrolling" through the screaming horror-filled newsfeeds on our phones.

If there's a real pandemic in the world, perhaps it's our addiction to being fearful of everything, from the additives in our food, to Big Brother watching, to being poisoned by CO2 in our sleep, to the 5G of our phones killing our brain cells.

I may be overly naive here, but I don't think LIFE is any more intent on killing you than it ever has been!

Maybe actually less so. I look outside, and the air does seem clearer... and there are likely fewer airborne carcinogens in 2025 than there were in 1975.

I don't think everything and everyone is "out to get us," either. The vast majority of the people on this planet are simply not important enough" to warrant being gotten.

Sorry, you're just not that special!

Unless you have seriously perfected cold fusion in your basement, the white van parked down the street does, indeed, belong to a local house painter, not some government organization!

Of course, the challenge we face is that we can always find "some story" to prove our point, while we wear cognitive blinders to the 10,000 stories of "Nothing At All Happened."

Getting a little closer to home, one could argue that the government might find some way to outlaw crypto... but is that one-in-1000 possibility sufficient reason why I would abandon blogging on Hive, effective immediately?

I don't think so!

The point there being that most of us here has a higher degree of familiarity with the subject matter, and therefore can put some context around the risk, and act accordingly.

Because everything is risky, right?

It just behooves us to understand what we're looking at, and what we're being told to be fearful of! What do YOU think?

Feel free to leave a comment — this IS "social" media, after all!

=^..^=

**5% @commentrewarder bonus activated for this post!