Archive for year: 2026

Risk isn’t just something we calculate or manage; it’s something we experience, interpret, and feel.

We often speak of risk as though it can be clearly calculated, assessed and managed. We develop matrices, controls, procedures and frameworks to make uncertainty more manageable. These tools have their place. Yet I wonder whether they sometimes draw our attention away from something more human.

We may sense risk before we (consciously) think about it, often without even realising it.

Fear, anxiety, hope, trust, familiarity, uncertainty, and even our sense of belonging (or not belonging) can shape how risky something feels, often before we have consciously considered the evidence. Because these responses operate partly outside our conscious awareness, we can easily mistake our judgements for objective descriptions of the world.

This is not an argument against evidence, analysis or disciplined decision-making. It is an invitation to notice that analysis never arrives alone. We bring our histories, relationships, cultures and expectations with us when making sense of risk.

Risk may have objective features, but our encounter with it is also subjective and social.

Risk begins in experience

I recognise this in my own life. As a child, I was afraid of the dark. That fear haunted me for years and kept me from doing things that, rationally, posed little danger. Knowing there was probably nothing hiding in the darkness did not make the feeling go away. The darkness felt unsafe, and in that moment the feeling mattered more than the evidence suggested.

I still notice versions of this today. Consider driving on an unfamiliar road at night. The road may be no more dangerous than the one I travel regularly, yet unfamiliarity changes how it feels. A bend seems sharper, the darkness more threatening, and uncertainty about what lies ahead makes me more cautious. Put me on a familiar road in similar conditions, and I may experience the risk quite differently.

That is what interests me most about risk. We do not encounter it as blank slates. Previous experiences, memories, assumptions, relationships and feelings shape what we notice and how we interpret it. Familiarity can make something feel safer. Uncertainty can make it feel more threatening. Trust can change our willingness to take a chance. Fear can make a possibility seem more probable because it is vivid and readily available to us.

The affect heuristic: when feeling guides judgement

Paul Slovic’s work on the affect heuristic gives language to this experience. Slovic describes how our overall feeling about an activity can act as a rapid cue for judging both its risks and its benefits:

“The earliest studies of risk perception also found that, whereas risk and benefit tend to be positively correlated in the world, they are negatively correlated in people’s minds… If their feelings toward an activity are favorable, they are moved toward judging the risks as low and the benefits as high; if their feelings towards it are unfavorable, they tend to judge the opposite – high risk and low benefit.”

Slovic (2010, p. 26)

This helps explain why people can experience the same activity so differently. A favourable feeling does more than accompany our assessment; it may shape the assessment itself. Benefits become easier to see, while risks recede. When our feeling turns unfavourable, the relationship can reverse: possible harms become vivid, while benefits are discounted.

The affect heuristic is not simply a defect to be corrected. Fast, feeling-based judgement enables us to navigate a complex world without calculating every possible consequence. As with all biases, it can be protective and efficient. But it can also narrow what we notice. The task is therefore not to eliminate feeling. It is to become more curious about how feeling is participating in judgement.

A Lamborghini, a waiver and a changing sense of risk

A drive in a Lamborghini brought this home to me.

I’ve loved cars since childhood, particularly fast ones, and a one-hour drive in a hired ‘lambo’ felt like a near-perfect gift from my wife. In the months beforehand, my best mate and I talked about how much fun it would be. We arrived feeling very positive about the activity. At that point, the benefits were immediate and vivid; the risks barely registered. This was going to be fun!

Then the context shifted. After the breath test, induction and paperwork and a series of lectures, I was reminded that the car had cost around $500,000 when new, was in pristine condition and had not been involved in an accident during the life of the (hire) business. I was then asked to accept responsibility for a $10,000 insurance excess if I were at fault.

The car had not changed, but the meaning of the drive had. I was about to operate an unfamiliar vehicle capable of accelerating from 0 to 100 km/h in 3.8 seconds, and a mistake could have an immediate and substantial financial consequence. My feeling shifted, and the risk suddenly seemed greater.

For the first 15 or 20 minutes, I drove cautiously. I took time to develop a feel for the car and asked my passenger to help check before I changed lanes. As familiarity grew, tension eased. The engine, the responsiveness and the shared experience became salient again. Halfway through the drive, the $10,000 excess had largely receded from awareness. The benefit felt vivid once more, and the perceived risk softened.

This is the important point: my assessment did not remain fixed. Feeling, attention, familiarity and behaviour moved together. When concern was prominent, I drove conservatively. As comfort and enjoyment grew, the potential financial consequence became less psychologically available. The formal risk conditions had not disappeared, but my lived experience of them had changed.

Risk is not only something we think about

Daniel Gardner, in The Science of Fear, draws on Daniel Kahneman’s two-system understanding of judgement. Gardner writes:

“Every human brain has not one, but two systems of thought. They called them Systems One and System Two. The ancient Greeks arrived at this conception of humanity a little earlier than scientists – personified the two systems in the form of gods Dionysus and Apollo. We know them better as Feeling and Reason.”

The distinction matters. We like to imagine that judgement begins when we deliberately gather information, weigh probabilities, consider consequences and decide. Often, however, intuitive, largely non-conscious sensemaking is already underway. Stories, images, language, relationships, culture and social arrangements shape what feels safe, threatening, familiar or uncertain. By the time conscious reasoning arrives, the story may already have begun.

This does not make us irrational. It makes us human. It also means that understanding risk requires more than grasping probability. We need to remain curious about the social, cultural, relational, and psychological ways people experience uncertainty.

When feeling and probability part ways

A confronting example comes from Gerd Gigerenzer’s research on behaviour after the terrorist attacks of September 2001. Gigerenzer reported that air travel declined, interstate highway travel increased, and fatal highway crashes exceeded the previous year’s baseline the following year. He estimated that 1,500 Americans died on the road while seeking to avoid the fate of passengers on the four fatal flights.

From a distance, the contradiction seems plain. But distance itself is a kind of privilege. For those living among the images, stories, grief, and uncertainty of that time, risk was never merely something to calculate. Flying felt dangerous, and the fear of one threat shaped people’s choices in ways that made them vulnerable to another.

This is not evidence that feelings are irrelevant. It is evidence that feelings can be consequential. They shape what becomes salient, what we avoid and what we accept in its place.

Fear can alter what we perceive

The relationship between feeling and perception can reach beyond abstract judgement. Research by Tali Leibovich, Noga Cohen and Avishai Henik examined whether fear of spiders influenced estimates of their size. Participants with both high and low fear rated spiders as unpleasant, but only the highly fearful participants overestimated spider size relative to neutral animals.

As the researchers put it:

“We found that although individuals with both high and low arachnophobia rated spiders as highly unpleasant, only the highly fearful participants overestimated the spider size.”

The finding is striking because it suggests that emotion can shape how we perceive even a basic feature like size. A fearful participant is not necessarily choosing to exaggerate; rather, attention, relevance, and feeling shape how the world is experienced, making the spider seem larger.

I recognise the point. I dislike spiders (a lot!). When I see one, a response arises before deliberate thought. I know I am larger, that most spiders will not jump, and that I have more control over the situation, yet the body does not wait for a rational briefing. The feeling is already present, organising attention and action.

We do not encounter risk as blank slates

The same dynamic can occur socially. On an international flight not long after 9/11, I noticed two men seated a few rows ahead of me, and an association surfaced in my mind: they ‘looked like terrorists’. I had not carefully assessed the evidence. My mind had been exposed to repeated images, stories and cultural associations, and in an uncertain moment, that pattern became available.

I am not proud of the judgement. Yet pretending it could never happen again would teach me less than becoming curious about how it happened. Reflection doesn’t prove our innocence. It can help us notice how social narratives become embodied as apparently immediate perceptions.

Our judgements are never entirely detached from who we are, what we have experienced, the groups to which we belong, the stories circulating around us and the emotions those stories evoke. What one person experiences as threatening, another may barely notice. What appears unacceptable to one community may feel ordinary to another. Risk therefore has objective dimensions, but the human experience of it is deeply subjective, relational and social.

Curiosity before certainty

Awareness does not make us immune to affect, bias or unconscious judgement. Knowing about heuristics does not turn us into perfectly rational decision-makers. Even Daniel Kahneman, in talking about his research on cognitive biases, said he was not immune to their effects.

Perhaps a more useful response is humility.

When something feels dangerous, threatening or unacceptable, we might pause before assuming the feeling tells us everything there is to know. We might ask:

• What am I noticing?
• What am I feeling?
• Where might that feeling have come from?
• What experiences, relationships, images or stories may be shaping my judgement?
• What has become vivid, and what may have faded from view?
• What might someone else be seeing or feeling that I am not?

These questions do not replace analysis. They deepen it. They invite Feeling and Reason into conversation rather than pretending that one can be removed from the other.

The practical implication is not that every felt concern is mistaken or that every risk is merely subjective. It is that how risk feels influences what we notice, how we interpret evidence and how we behave. If we want wiser conversations about uncertainty, we need methods that take both the measurable features of a situation and the lived experience of those involved seriously.

Perhaps the question is therefore not simply, How risky is this?

It might also be: Why does this feel risky to me?

Sitting quietly with that question may tell us as much about ourselves, our relationships and the stories around us as it does about the risk in front of us.

References

Finucane, M. L., Alhakami, A., Slovic, P., & Johnson, S. M. (2000). The affect heuristic in judgments of risks and benefits. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 13(1), 1–17.

Gardner, D. (2008). The science of fear: Why we fear the things we shouldn’t – and put ourselves in greater danger. Dutton.

Gigerenzer, G. (2004). Dread risk, September 11, and fatal traffic accidents. Psychological Science, 15(4), 286–287.

Leibovich, T., Cohen, N., & Henik, A. (2016). Itsy bitsy spider? Valence and self-relevance predict size estimation. Biological Psychology, 114, 138–145.

Slovic, P. (2010). The feeling of risk: New perspectives on risk perception. Earthscan.

ROBERT SAMS Author, Social Sensemaking robert@dolphyn.com.au  |  www.dolphyn.com.au

I find quiet satisfaction in getting things done. There is pleasure in watching a long list submit to ticks, bringing an inbox briefly under control, or completing a task and placing it behind me. Efficiency gives structure to the day. It offers the reassuring impression that movement is the same as progress. Perhaps you recognise this too?

There is nothing inherently wrong with efficiency. Life requires order. Work must be done, children collected, bills paid and meals prepared. Yet my own attraction to doing has taught me that completed tasks are not the only consequences of action. When I take something over because I want it finished, I may experience relief while another person experiences my help as control. What appears to me as competence may quietly diminish someone else’s autonomy, contribution or sense of worth. I explored this previously in Reflections of a ‘Doer’.

The difficult question is therefore not whether efficiency can serve us. Clearly, it can. The question is whether it continues to serve us, or whether we have begun to serve it.

Here lies the paradox. We save time and discover that we have no time. We multiply connections and find ourselves lonely. We expand our choices and lose the capacity to choose what matters. We become productive in ways that leave us strangely unproductive in the things we claim to value. We get more done and, in the doing, miss what is happening.

Could our efficient lives be working exactly as designed, yet failing the human beings who live within them?

Busy, but Where Are We Going?

Our modern problem is not simply that we are busy. Human beings have always worked, struggled and carried burdens. Something subtler is occurring. We inhabit systems that measure movement more easily than meaning. They record how quickly we respond, how many tasks we complete and how much we produce. They are less capable of recognising whether we were present, listened carefully, noticed another person or experienced something deeply human. Consequently, what can be measured gradually becomes what matters.

A conversation becomes an appointment, a friendship becomes a network and a walk becomes exercise. Rest is reinterpreted as recovery for further work. Reading becomes content consumption, and sleep becomes a performance metric. None of these descriptions is entirely false, which is what makes them seductive. The difficulty emerges when usefulness becomes the principal way we understand experience.

What happens when nothing is permitted simply to be?

In The Pathway of Loneliness, I distinguish between a genuine meeting and a gathering organised around production. A genuine meeting requires “presence, trust and risk” and needs no agenda, minutes or formal record. An efficient gathering assembles people to produce an outcome. Both may have a legitimate place, but perhaps productive gatherings have begun to consume human meetings.

This reveals a troubling incongruence. We say relationships matter, yet offer them only the fragments of time left after the important work is done. We say family matters, yet remain half-present while checking the device in our hands. We say health matters, yet organise our days in ways that leave us depleted. We praise community while pursuing independence, convenience and “the privatisation of the self” (Long, 2013).

This is not hypocrisy in a simple, moralising sense. We may sincerely believe the values we profess. The deeper problem is that we live according to another set of values embedded in our culture, technologies and institutions. Our diaries, devices and patterns of attention may disclose our practical commitments more honestly than our words.

Efficiency was once a means. Its promise was compelling: spend less time on what must be done so that more time becomes available for what matters. But what did we do with the time we saved? We filled it. We then acquired tools to manage what we had added. Those tools created further capacity, so we added more again. Faster communication did not necessarily reduce communication; it multiplied it. Labour-saving technologies did not always liberate us from labour. They often raised expectations about how much could be accomplished and how quickly we should respond.

Attention Is Not Merely a Personal Problem

In Stolen Focus, Johan Hari presents the contemporary loss of attention as something more complex than an individual failure of self-discipline. His central claim is that powerful external forces have acted upon our attention and that an adequate response requires both personal and social change.

This does not mean that individuals have no responsibility. It means responsibility cannot be reduced to blaming ourselves and trying harder. If our environments are designed to interrupt and accelerate us while converting attention into economic value, personal discipline alone cannot explain our predicament. Nor is another productivity technique likely to rescue us.

Indeed, the search for a perfect productivity method may be part of the problem. We respond to excessive efficiency by seeking a more efficient way to manage it. When overwhelmed, we download an app. When unable to focus, we watch a short video about focus. When lacking time, we schedule rest. When disconnected, we increase digital connection. Even our resistance is converted into another technique.

Jacques Ellul challenges the assumption that technological means remain neutral instruments under our control. In The Technological System, Ellul (1980) argues that technology is not simply an instrument people can use however they like because it possesses its own momentum and direction.

His point is not that every technique is evil or that we should retreat into an imagined past. Rather, technological thinking encourages us to interpret human difficulties as problems awaiting technical solutions. It teaches us to place our faith in method, measurement and control, even when these are poorly suited to the human reality before us.

Sometimes a technical solution is appropriate. But grief is not inefficient sadness. Friendship is not an information exchange. Love is not a successful transaction. Silence is not a communication failure, and a human being is not a faulty machine awaiting optimisation. When the means become the end, the tools intended to support life begin to define what life is permitted to contain.

Attention Is How We Spend a Life

We often speak about attention as though it were merely a cognitive resource. We ask how we might concentrate for longer, eliminate distractions and produce more in less time. These questions remain contained within the framework of efficiency. A more confronting question is: what is our attention for?

Attention is not simply something we use to complete life. Attention is how we participate in life. What we repeatedly attend to becomes, in a practical sense, what receives our presence.

Here our incongruence becomes difficult to ignore. I may say the person in front of me matters more than the message on my phone, yet my eyes repeatedly drop to the screen. I may claim to value contemplation, but after a few unoccupied seconds my hand reaches automatically for stimulation. I may desire a rich inner life while rarely remaining still long enough to encounter what is within me.

This is not offered as condemnation, because I recognise myself in each example. The empathetic question is not, “What is wrong with you?” It is, “Can we notice what is happening to us?” Can we recognise the distance between what we profess and what we practise without retreating into shame, blame or another self-improvement programme?

Efficiency also enters our inner lives by teaching us to understand ourselves as projects. We monitor our output, assess our performance and invest in constant self-improvement. We build personal brands, turn leisure into development and convert experience into material for public presentation. Even vulnerability can become content. The self is no longer simply lived; it is managed, measured and marketed.

When exhaustion arrives, we treat it as another personal failure. Perhaps we failed to prioritise, establish boundaries or maintain the correct morning routine. These explanations may contain some truth, but they can conceal a larger question: what kind of life requires so much private effort merely to remain human?

The Shortages Created by Abundance

The technological world promises abundance and, in many respects, delivers it. We have extraordinary access to information, communication, entertainment and convenience. It would be unwise and ungrateful to deny these genuine benefits. Yet abundance can create its own forms of scarcity.

Ellul observes that technological affluence is “counterbalanced by the creation of new ‘shortages’: of space, air, time, and the like”. The more information we possess, the harder it becomes to decide what deserves attention. The more ways we have to communicate, the more difficult sustained conversation may feel. The more entertainment we can access, the less capable we may become of inhabiting an unfilled moment.

We are not starving for content, but we may be starving for depth. We are not lacking connection, but may be lacking communion. We are not always short of time; we may simply be absent from the time we have.

Ellul’s warning is particularly relevant because he argues that the technological system transforms communication itself. Technology may support contact between people, but communion can be reduced to technological communication when mediation replaces encounter. The quantity of connection may increase while the experience of meeting another person becomes rarer.

The Courage to Be Inefficient

What might resistance look like?

Perhaps it does not begin with rejecting technology, abandoning responsibility or pretending modern life can be unwound. It may begin more humbly, with a refusal to judge every moment according to its output.

This could mean having a conversation that goes nowhere useful, sitting with someone without trying to solve them, reading slowly enough to be changed, walking without measuring the distance, or listening without preparing a response. It might involve eating without simultaneously consuming information and allowing boredom to remain long enough for something unexpected to emerge.

Such practices invite us to regard attention as hospitality. When we attend to someone, we make room for that person to exist beyond their usefulness to us. We suspend, however briefly, the demand that the encounter produce something.

A real meeting is costly, which is why the cheaper substitute is attractive. Yet the cost of cheap connection may be loneliness. An encounter organised exclusively around utility may produce an outcome without creating a genuine “us”. Its apparent efficiency may be exactly what prevents it from becoming fully human.

There is a danger, however, in transforming this argument into another efficient programme for living less efficiently. Five steps to presence, seven habits of unhurried people or a thirty-day attention challenge would be too neat. The point is not to master life through a superior method. It is to recover our freedom to ask what our methods are doing to us.

The question is not whether efficiency is good or bad. It is whether efficiency has remained in its proper place. Does it serve life by creating room for love, reflection, play, relationship and genuine rest? Or has it become an unconscious object of devotion, requiring every activity to justify itself by producing something else?

We know how to move faster, but not always why we are going. We know how to remain connected, but not necessarily how to meet. We know how to fill time, but not how to inhabit it. We know how to make a living, yet may be losing touch with how to live.

What If We Are Not Behind?

Perhaps you are not behind. Perhaps the feeling of being behind is one of the ways an endless system maintains its hold upon us. There will always be another message, task, improvement, purchase, article or demand. There is no finishing line at which the modern person is finally permitted to say, “Now I have done enough. Now I may live.”

Living must happen before the list is complete. It must happen among unfinished tasks, uncertain relationships and unremarkable moments that cannot be converted into achievements. This requires something more confronting than time management. It asks us to relinquish the comforting illusion that a well-managed life is necessarily a well-lived life.

It also asks whether busyness protects us from questions we would rather not hear. Who am I when I am not producing? What remains when I stop performing? Which people receive what is left of me rather than the best of me? What values does my diary reveal? What am I postponing until life becomes less busy, and what if life never does?

I do not ask these questions from a place of mastery. I remain implicated in them, attracted to the satisfaction of accomplishment and the reassuring rhythm of doing. Yet perhaps we can pause together without turning even the pause into a technique.

Life is not waiting at the end of our efficiency. It is occurring now, quietly and inconveniently, without an agenda. While we have been busy saving time, there is every chance that life has been trying to get our attention.

References

Ellul, J. (1980). The technological system (J. Neugroschel, Trans.). Continuum. (Original work published 1977).

Hari, J. (n.d.). Stolen focus: Why you can’t pay attention and how to think deeply again. Official Stolen Focus website.

Long, G. (2013). Love over hate: Finding life by the wayside. Slattery Media Group.

Working in the community sector, especially in mental health and suicide prevention, I am regularly reminded of Graham Long’s words, former CEO of The Wayside Chapel, who lived by the principle that “people are not problems to be solved, but people to be met.”

While it is common to hear people suggest “I’m broken”, they don’t often ‘break’ in predictable ways, and they cannot simply be repaired with tools, checklists, or quick fixes. Yet the temptation to “fix” people is strong, especially when we care deeply and want to lessen pain, distress, or risk.

I often think of my good mate Brian. He’s a talented tinkerer. If a machine isn’t working properly, Brian is the person you want by your side. He can analyse, adjust, and repair nearly anything mechanical. I once took him a second-hand lawnmower that barely sputtered. After a few hours with Brian, it ran like new.

But as much as I value Brian’s skill, I would never want him, or anyone, to try to “fix” me when I’m not quite right.

Because I am human, when I’m not feeling quite right, I need space to feel, to struggle, to learn, to grow. We need time to make sense of our own emotions, our own pain, our own stories. We are not objects to be tinkered with. We are beings to be understood, accompanied, and met.

In mental health and suicide prevention, this distinction matters deeply. People don’t reach out to us because they need fixing; they often do so because they’re seeking connection.

Pain Is Part of Being Human

In our sector, we hear constant messages about fixing, helping, preventing, and intervening. These all have their place. But so do pain, suffering, confusion and grief. These experiences are part of being human, part of how people develop resilience, meaning and identity.

As Harold Kushner writes:

“It may be that instead of giving us a friendly world that would never challenge us and therefore never make us strong, God gave us a world that would inevitably break our hearts, and compensated for that by planting in our souls the gift of resilience.”

(Kushner 2007, p.55)

When someone is amid pain, a parent grieving a child, a person facing a frightening diagnosis, someone carrying the weight of trauma, it can be hard to see suffering as any kind of “gift”. And yet, pain often shapes us in ways comfort never could.

Nonetheless, the urge to fix persists. We aim to remove pain because we don’t want people to suffer. However, sometimes, in our haste to fix, we may unintentionally silence, minimise, or override the very experiences people need to share.

The Trap of Reductionism

Another reason we try to fix people is because our systems are built on reductionism. We break problems into parts, identify causes, and apply solutions. This works well for machines, but it may not work so well for people.

Sidney Dekker describes this clearly:

“Newton and Descartes’ ideas have pretty much set the agenda for how we, in the West, think about science, about truth, about cause and effect… much of the thinking and work we do in safety and accident prevention is modelled after their ideas.”

(Dekker 2011, p.53)

Reductionism assumes that once we identify the broken part, we can fix it. But people are not just parts. They are stories, relationships, histories, cultures, emotions, and contexts. When we treat people as objects, we dehumanise them, even when our intentions are good.

Responding Differently

If we recognise that pain can build resilience and that reductionism dehumanises, then the question becomes: how do we respond differently?

• Notice the cues of reductionism – when we start talking about people as problems, cases or risks, we may already be slipping into objectifying them.
• Prioritise relationship over repair – compassion, empathy, listening and presence are far more powerful than solutions.
• Be conscious of binary thinking – pain is not “bad”; growth is not “good”. Life is rarely that simple.
• Honour the humanity in every interaction – in mental health and suicide prevention, our greatest tool is connection, not expertise.

Please Don’t Try to Fix Me

If you ever feel I’m not running quite right, I would welcome your time, your compassion, your presence and your conversation. But please don’t try to fix me.

I’m not a machine. Neither are the people we serve.

We are human beings, messy, complex, resilient, vulnerable, and capable of extraordinary growth when we are met, not repaired.

 

Author: Robert Sams Email: robert@dolphyn.com.au Web: www.dolphyn.com.au

References:

Dekker, S. (2011). Drift Into Failure: From Hunting Broken Parts to Understanding Complex Systems. Ashgate Publishing.

Kushner, H. S. (2007). Overcoming Life’s Disappointments. Anchor Books.