I would say losing your eyesight and/or feeling the pain of snowblind for months on end are hazards we should be averse to. You have no idea how important your vision is until you start to lose it, and snowblindness in particular feels like rubbing sandpaper on the back of your eyes with no way to stop it. I can see why someone who experiences either of those symptoms from an elective surgery that they were told is "safe and effective" would want to kill themselves.
I don't think society is becoming more risk averse. We still do a ton of drugs, drink, drive, fly, fight and commit crimes.
As we learn the dangers of things people start the arduous process of protesting them. See bpa, Teflon. Both got phased out after years and years of denials and lawsuits. Bpa and Teflon may have been mostly phased out, but they have been replaced by unknowns, which are reasonably expected to be about as bad as their predecessors.
Rather, I think the stakes for equivalently sized day to day risks are getting bigger because lives are getting more complicated, and bad bets can snowball a lot easier now.
Want to see risk? Take a good long hard look at the speculative and corporatedebt markets. hardly a risk adverse market.
Teflon (PTFE) and BPA are nowhere close to being phased out. Every single metal can in America is lined with BPA, and there is pretty much nothing that used to use PTFE that has stopped using it.
