Safety at the End of History

The author, a safety researcher, argues that modern safety culture has both pathological and useful sides, and that the useful parts include capability-based approaches and psychological safety. The piece opens with a grizzly bear encounter and draws on Francis Fukuyama's "last man," who avoids risking his life for a cause, to frame safety as a new moral high ground. It credits social media with improving visibility of hazards worldwide, and it calls consumer wearables largely unrealized, needing better hardware standards. It says psychological safety is useful for reducing stress from long working hours, managing performance expectations, and treating near-misses as lessons.