"That will be a problem for old Jesse"

-- Me, nearly every year up until I hit 35.

When you are young, risk is a part of the process of growing. You don't think about it, and you don't get a choice in it, you just do it. Every decision, whether wittingly or unwittingly, is a step towards discovering something new. You may fail, but in most cases failure isn't actually failure, it's just the next part of the experiment.¹

Something changes as we get older though. There are two processes. The first is conscious - risks get riskier, and stakes grow higher. Much has been written about loss aversion and I don't think I can tread any new ground there. The second, the one that I'm really concerned about, is the unconscious one - the build-up of experience in navigating life.

Your lived experience shapes things into things that feel comfortable for your lived experience. Your decision-making hardware calcifies into something that makes you almost deterministic. You get a handy trusty toolset for solving your problems - an internal model of you and when combined with general loss aversion most people (especially people who never had much of a safety net) just stop taking risks.

But life never stops being an experiment. But you never stop taking risks.

You just trade one set of risks for another. The risks that you can qualify become your focus; You lean on the relatively strong muscles and known procedures of handling those - as you reduce the things that put you out of your comfort zone - you let atrophy your ability to handle the things out of your comfort zone.

The reality is that there is no perfect outcome. If I wanted to get philosophical, I'd say all life has the same general outcome. We don't get very much choice in it, there is just the outcome and all that really leaves us is the process.