I had a very interesting conversation yesterday over New Year’s Day lunch with a family friend who’s a quantum physicist. We talked about age and risk. He argued very strongly that as you get older, you should take more risks because you have less to lose.

This bloke has his doctorate in Quantum Physics, he lives and works in Canberra and he’s at the cutting edge of quantum research. In his spare time he goes rock climbing. Like, hanging upside down four hundred feet off the ground clinging to the sides of a vertical cliffs with his fingernails.

I asked him if he ever got scared. He said yeah, all the time. But that’s the joy of it. That led to the conversation about risk profiles and age. Here’s a tidied-up transcript of the conversation:

PAT: Well, the theory centres around the fact that most people in their lives front load the majority of the risk to their younger years – then as they age, they risk less and less, even retreating into boredom and monotony as they get older, where the only risk is just time itself. That time is running out.

The average age of death for males in Australia is, what, 81 years. And so the idea is that you should, in fact, be risking more as you age, doing riskier things that you might die from, that give you some kind of exhilaration or life experience that has some value to you. Because when you’re 70, you’re gambling 11 years of your life to do this thing. If you do that thing when you’re 20, you’re gambling 61 years.

How much is time worth compared to the payoff of doing the extremely dangerous thing versus the possible outcome of you ceasing to exist? Not necessarily dangerous, but risky. So it could be financial risk, could be any kind of risk. But a lot of people just front load that, and then the last years of their life, they don’t take any risks at all, when the consequences become quite small.

I see this happening with people doing bucket lists when they’ve got some relatively short term life-threatening diagnosis or something. But then again I guess there isn’t even a risk then, is there? Because they’ve left it so late there isn’t actually anything on the table. Whereas if you decided to do that 10 years earlier, just on the chance, hmm? You’ve got so much more potential payoff if it all goes well.

Take the Camino. Somebody who’s got a heart condition at age 65 decides to walk the Camino. They’re gambling 81 minus 65 years – 16 years. The risk is that they’re going to die on this long walk. But if they don’t die, then the payoff could be huge. It could transform their lives. The walk could, in some way, heal them. Or prove that the doctors might have been wrong and you’re not as ill as they thought you were.

It also comes to the fact that life is very nonlinear in time. Some of your time is very short, and some of it’s very long, but the clock ticks at the same rate, all the way through your life. But it doesn’t in your head. So when you’re on the Camino, right, that could be a valuable time in your life.

Let’s say you do the walk in a month. You could have spent that month sitting on your couch at home. That would be the safe option. That would be the less riskier option. But sitting at home on your couch, have you gotten a month’s worth of value out of it? Whereas spending that month walking the Camino, taking the risk that you could die from heart failure, during that month you’ve experienced joy, a sense of achievement, you’ve made new friends, perhaps you’ve taken on new ideas.

Perhaps at the end of that month you’ve become a different person.

That one month walking the Camino, as against sitting at home on the couch, might be worth six months, twelve months. More. It’s all very nonlinear.

People should gamble more as they get older. But they don’t. They tend to withdraw. They tend to… sort of cocoon themselves. They tend to increase their protection levels, don’t they? They get comfortable, and I think a lot of society says that you’ve earned the right to be comfortable. Like, that’s what retirement is. You’re safe. There will be no big changes because you’ve done everything right. Because you’ve fought your way through life up to that point. But then… why?

Now, you’ve retired and you’ve got 20-maybe 30 years of doing nothing. Why not make that a time for taking risks – doing exciting things? The clock’s ticking down. And you’ve got less to lose. Instead of withdrawing as you get older, why not take some huge risks?