Risk and Opportunity, Caring Just Enough

This Time article is a pretty interesting reckoning of the dangers, perceived and actual, that humans encounter daily. We make a series of choices every day and ascribe some to fate, some to chance, some to our nature/nurture. This essay makes them all seem quite arbitrary.

Economic and social forces have creased Americans' brows in ways not precedented; we are living with fears more and more similar to the rest of the world, for better or worse (mostly better).

We fear absolute relativism since we can't control it; we fight the entropic tendencies of our surroundings with religion, cigarettes, phone sex. How do we find the point of caring "just enough" in the rest of our lives, that we manage to achieve in Las Vegas, or at St. Maarten? What is it about the removal of (the appearance of) chaos that calms us so? George Carlin says the Earth could shake us off like a bad case of fleas; so why worry? is it the human condition that checks and balances the riches we otherwise enjoy? That sounds way too ordered to be true.