The “Any Given Tuesday” Problem
An Article of the Modern Survival Guide
Every day, in every possible way, you will encounter risks. A “risk” in this sense is a potential problem — it hasn’t happened yet, but it might happen, and it might happen to you. There are risks you know about and risks that are invisible to you. How you respond to these risks will impact your life significantly, for better or worse. In some cases, your response to a risk (or lack thereof) will be the last thing you do. That’s just life, or in some cases, death.
In my personal experience, a lot of people get risk management wrong and consequently spend too much time worried about or trying to fix things that aren’t important. That creates two problems. The first is that they’re burning time and energy on a sub-optimal path. The second is that real, important risks are still out there, and aren’t being addressed. Let’s start with these premises and assumptions to help answer a larger question — how do you choose which risks to address?
The “Any Given Tuesday” Problem
I have a simple and effective metric that I use to determine which risks to worry about, and it is this:
If the risk is so common that it occurs on any given Tuesday, it’s probably not worth too much of your time.
There were some weasel words in that sentence, so let’s talk it out.
A “common” risk like this is one that occurs regularly or is always present, to the extent that mitigating it (reducing the odds it will occur) is either (a) impossible or (b) already done. Thus, there is very little you can do about it and you just have to live with it.
For example, dying in a car wreck is a constant “any given Tuesday” risk. The moment I venture out on the road, my risk of dying increases and that’s simply all there is to it: I have to drive to get anywhere in the US. I can mitigate the risk somewhat by maintaining my vehicle and practicing safe driving techniques, and the government and car manufacturers mitigate a lot more by requiring safe car designs. Beyond that, there’s nothing else I can do as an average person (if I designed safety features for cars or if I were a federal automotive regulator, that would be a different story). Dying in a wreck becomes something that could happen any given Tuesday, and therefore it isn’t really worth worrying about after I’ve taken basic precautions.
On the other hand, the risk of dying of COVID is not an “any given Tuesday” risk. It is a (presumably) rare epidemic event that will (hopefully) not recur on a regular basis, and my mitigation strategy can and must involve significant life changes in order to be useful. It is also statistically likely to die from COVID compared to, say, dying in a car wreck, by a couple of orders of magnitude.¹ COVID requires that I make changes, like getting vaccinated and wearing a mask, avoiding crowded areas, and distancing myself from infected persons and persons likely to be infected, to increase my odds of survival and avoid illness. I can and must take radical precaution to protect myself from COVID, it is a proven serious risk, and therefore it is very much worth worrying about.
One last example: in the US, the risk of getting shot by a stray bullet is an “any given Tuesday” risk. We have too many firearms in too many hands for it to be otherwise. Even when you completely ignore the risk of a rampage event or homicide, there’s still a non-zero risk that someone near you will accidentally discharge their firearm while cleaning it and lob a bullet through your window.
This risk increases with proximity to other people, but never drops to zero as long as there is a human within a mile or two of your location in the United States. However, it is not a common occurrence, in the sense that the overwhelmingly vast majority of people will go through their lives without getting shot by accident, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it short of wrapping yourself in Kevlar and strike plates, or huddling in a bunker. The risk exists, but isn’t worth your time and effort to mitigate, unless you are a gun manufacturer or member of Congress.
Getting it Twisted: Conflating Acute Risks with “Any Given Tuesday”
Based on the prior examples, we can see that “any given Tuesday” risks have some common features: they are common risks, in the sense that they apply to lots of people, but with low probability of occurrence, and they are difficult if not impossible to mitigate. Where folks get into trouble is when they conflate an “any given Tuesday” risk with an acute risk, like COVID.
So what is an acute risk? That’s a risk that is uncommon, in the sense that it’s novel or specific to your situation, with a high probability (comparatively) of occurrence, and that can be mitigated by your actions. Acute risks are things that can and probably will affect you if left alone, and therefore should not be left alone; “any given Tuesday” risks are things that might but probably won’t affect you, you can’t do much about them, and you just have to live with them.
Getting these risk types mixed up creates problems.
Confusing an “any given Tuesday” risk for an acute risk leads to poor allocation of resources, and potentially creates or exacerbates other risk factors.
Confusing an acute risk for an “any given Tuesday” risk leads to a much higher likelihood of poor outcomes, particularly injury.
For example, lots of Americans own guns, and a significant portion of those people cite home defense as their rationale.² However, the odds of death due to home invasion are pretty low; only about a hundred people a year die during a burglary.³ In contrast, more than a thousand people die from firearms-related accidents every year in the US, and more than 20,000 people use firearms to take their own life on an annual basis.⁴ Indeed, simply having a gun in the home increases your odds of death by homicide and suicide.⁵
At the same time, most gun owners in America own between one and five guns, and the most common guns owned in America are the Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm for handguns, the Smith & Wesson M&P15 for rifles, and the Kel-Tec KSG shotgun.⁶ At a retail price of $654, $812, and about $800, respectively, if a person were to own one each of the most commonly-sold guns in America they would expend about $2,200. Meanwhile, the average American household cannot afford a sudden expense of $1,000.⁷
Owning a gun for home defense is a clear violation of the “any given Tuesday” rule; you are massively more likely to die from your own gun than from a home invasions, thus creating an acute risk by owning a firearm if your objective was to defend yourself from home invasions. At the same time, gun owners tend to own more than one gun, representing a resource expenditure that is larger than the average American’s rainy day fund, leading me to suspect that a greater threat to the average household is a malfunctioning appliance.
On the other hand, to come back to COVID, about half of the people in the US have confused an acute risk for an “any given Tuesday” problem by downplaying the risk of the virus. The anti-mask, anti-vax crowd seems to think that COVID is no worse than the flu, or that masks and vaccines don’t work, and consequently COVID is an “any given Tuesday”-type risk. Unfortunately, this has had the effect of increasing their death rate, largely along political party lines.⁸
We may never know how many of the now more than 900,000 deaths attributed to COVID or COVID-exacerbated illnesses might have been prevented if more people had recognized and acted on this acute risk, but the number would doubtless be considerable.
Dealing with “Any Given Tuesdays”
To sum up, there are risks that are common, unavoidable, and unlikely. If you’re equally likely to encounter this risk any given Tuesday, and there’s nothing you can do about it, just go on with your life. It’s not worth your time and effort to try to fix it. The way you deal with an “any given Tuesday” risk is to acknowledge it, accept it, and move on.
There are also acute risks which are rare, avoidable, and probable. Focus your attention on those. Those are the ones that are most likely to get you. Under no circumstances should you ignore, accept, or try to live with an acute risk, if you can do anything at all to mitigate it.
It is also true that what constitutes and acute risk vs. an “any given Tuesday” risk is a moving target. Dying in a car wreck is an acute risk if I drive like a maniac and haven’t changed my oil in 70,000 miles. The moment I practice safe driving techniques and get my car maintained, it drops into the “any given Tuesday” category. Similarly, an “any given Tuesday” risk for me might get upgraded to an acute risk if changing circumstances allow me to mitigate it.
Finally, note that “mitigating” a risk doesn’t mean that you completely solve the problem or remove the risk forever. It simply means that you lower the odds. We spend most of our lives playing the odds, so this shouldn’t be a hard concept.
Lower your odds of bad things happening to you when you can, accept that bad things may happen when you can’t. Or to put that another way, let’s close with a prayer.
Dear Lord, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference!
¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19#Mortality
²Whether or not they are telling the truth is questionable. I would argue there is a significant portion of the firearms community who own guns simply because they think they’re cool, or to prepare for a zombie apocalypse. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/13/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/
³Which is a really hard stat to find, by the way, but Politifact handles it https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/oct/25/michael-moore/michael-moore-flubs-stats-people-killed-guns-durin/.
⁴https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
⁵https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15522849/
⁶https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/most-popular-guns-in-america/19/
⁸https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34226856/, https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/as-cases-spread-across-us-last-year-pattern-emerged-suggesting-link-between-governors-party-affiliation-and-covid-19-case-and-death-numbers
