What factors do you expect have the highest likelihood of severely compromising your own quality and/or duration of life, within the next 1, 5, or 10 years? How do these risks change your behavior compared to how you expect you’d act if they were less relevant to you?
If those greatest personal risks are not things you categorize as existential risks to all of humanity, how do you divide your risk mitigation efforts between the personal-and-near-term and the global-and-long-term ones?
(I ask because I keep catching myself trying to generalize about the personal risk profiles of the kinds of people who concern themselves with x-risks, and I’d rather generalize from self-reports of humans in a community which attracts that demographic than from wild guesses inferred by reading a bunch of blogs)
The risks I worry about in the short-term (next decade) are mostly NOT existential (for myself or civilization). I think about income disruption ( due to industry changes or personal circumstance ). I consider lifestyle or relationship changes that cause significant pain. I worry about suffering or death of close family and friends.
Almost all of these are personal risks of reduction in my future expected utility. I think there are risks of government/societal change that would impact me, and some species-level existential risks, but I don’t spend a lot of time on those, as I don’t think I have much influence over them.
A family member dying.
Contracting a serious disease, or becoming severely injured from an accident.
Some incident (medical or otherwise) will use the rest of my savings and put me in financial instability.
I basically never think about these risks. I guess the money one I do a bit. I use far less money than I could to protect against potentially very costly events.
I rarely think in terms of risk mitigation. Maybe I should more.