Unlucky

Do most people experience a completely normal life? How much does luck have to do with it?

While the probability of any single bad unfortunate event (e.g., being a victim of terrorism) occurring to you is very low, so low you rationally shouldn't worry about it, what is the probability that some low-probability horribly life-altering event will occur to you sometime in your lifetime? This may be one of those situations involving summing (and appropriate subtraction if not independent) of a large number of very small probabilities, an operation which humans find very non-intuitive. In the simplest case, people have a hard time estimating the value of (1-epsilon)^BIG for given epsilon and BIG.

As opposed to trying to enumerate and quantify all possible low-probability events (and their joint distribution!), a totalistic method to get at the answer to the question is to survey the population -- "Are you the victim of a low-probability horribly life-altering event?". One must take into account a person's age. One must also make a correction for those people for whom their life-altering event resulted in death, or being otherwise unable or unwilling to respond to the survey.

Armed with the answer, we can then ask the question, are people behaving optimally in the face of this total risk? If so desired, what actions can people take to hedge against this total risk whose every component is small enough to be negligible?