Running with Skateboards 9

Knowing that the things one loves are dangerous lends indulgence a kind a piquancy, the drama of teasing at the far edges of danger. After a hard day of pulling cheese out of prepared sandwiches and ordering my salad with dressing on the side, I enjoy my gin martini with a twist of all the more knowing it's bad for me. As a result, for most of us, life is a weird mixture of bottled water, whole-wheat bread and complex dietary supplements broken up by reckless bouts of coffee drinking, dessert consumption and car travel.

With each overturned caveat, risk avoider and risk seeker alike set adrift, and modern life loses its familiar contours of virtuous abstinence and delicious indulgence. The progress of scientific inquiry is, in the end, contrary to the process of human expectation: science establishes a proposition, then seeks to disprove it. The rest of us establish a proposition then cling to it. My mother, once an avid study tracker, lost her faith in risk altogether when cholesterol was ruled back in and oat bran turned out to lack life-saving properties. It's true: oat bran broke my mother's heart.

Eventually, in the face of so many contradictory studies, we'll all have to give up our happy play of care and heedlessness and revert to viewing risk as a mysterious, otherworldly force, an evil god without a name or a number. When risk is revealed to be general and ubiquitous, the fragile delusional economy of modern life is shaken. With each overturned result, things make a little less sense. Even irrational surrender to temptation loses its savor when there is no rational way to behave instead.

~ Mark Kingwell, A Shock to the System, New York Times Magazine, August 8, 1999