Deep Dive – Original Thought #36 – If you create only safety, young people will try to create danger

This idea came to me when thinking about how much dumb and dangerous activities we do as young people and why. As a child growing up in the suburbs, we had to turn an unexciting and predictable place into an exciting and adventurous place. Often we would find ourselves repurposing places meant to be safe and orderly and turning them into places to skateboard or jump off of. We snowboarded down overpasses (with no snow on them), ollied down stairs (the bigger the better), jumped off roofs, and rode couches dragged behind cars. The rare “original and abandoned” places became sanctuaries – like under the overpasses near the train tracks or old empty pools.

The counterfactual would be if we didn’t grow up in the suburbs, but instead an ultra urban environment, we wouldn’t try to create so much danger because the danger would be inherent in living – taking the subway, homeless and visitors as well as locals passing by constantly, heavy traffic, close quarters. All of these things force you to be more diligent and less carefree and therefore try to minimize danger in your life, or at least neutralize the worst of it through your best effort to avoid.

Either way, danger is part of a young persons life, by choice or by happenstance. There are several questions that come to mind. Which one is the better version to raise kids in? That seems best answered on a individual basis – for example, if you are in a rural town without much fun and you drink and drive and get into a bad wreck, would you have been better off in a urban city where you get to parties by subway, taxi, Uber, or even biking/walking? It seems in cities there is more general danger that can be mitigated by growing up there and recognizing/being diligent whereas in more suburban area the risks are more specific and often self inflicted (like falling off a roof rather than jumping, or drinking and driving).

Although not originally posed as a question, the phrasing of the thought was meant to comment on the futility of manufacturing safety. However, as a parent I do find myself doing my best to manufacture safety, or at least remove the most dangerous outcomes. Way too soon there will be a time when my children grow to an age where they will look around and decide how much danger they need to manufacture vs how much exists around them. I think they are coming into a world, and if we stay around Austin, a city that has good balance of innate danger and manufactured safety. It is likely that self-driving cars will be the ubiquitous mode of transport in 13 years when driving (and therefore driving drunk) could happen and therefore we can manufacture the safety of some of the worst offenses. However, we are close enough to the danger innate in the urban city that they will need to be on guard. Add to this scenario an unbelievable neighborhood that is a beautiful mix of rich, poor, age, and culture and I think where we are raising our kids is as close to perfect as one could get so that boredom does not drive them to the most dangerous activities, but let me tell you, they will find their fair share of trouble.