Being able to engage and succeed in high risk endeavors was much more useful in the past than today. Getting pregnant and giving birth was a high risk/reward pr

Being able to engage and succeed in high risk endeavors was much more useful in the past than today. Getting pregnant and giving birth was a high risk/reward proposition, much less so today. For men there were other avenues to engage high risk for high reward activities. Being in the hunting party for your tribe and being the one to go in close with a spear to make the killing thrust on a large animal. A bit closer to today: a poor young man with no prospects goes off on a two-three year whaling voyage. If he makes it back he would have enough experience to sign up from another two-three year voyage and get a decent share. If he returned from that one he would have enough capital to set himself up with a home and family. These days taking risk in the physical realm is highly discouraged and there is almost no highly rewarding outcomes for taking physical risk in wealthier countries. A crew hand on a crabbing boat can make good money, with low skills for high risk, but that is so strange we televise them on TV for entertainment. And even that type of work is going away as people decided it is too high risk and introduce individual fishing quotas instead of short open fishing seasons. Many more people do high risk activities unrelated to any productive endeavor (mountaineering, BASE jumping, wingsuit flying, etc). Maybe human space travel with open up high risk/high reward opportunities for people again.