Miscellaneous Shellfish

Enrico and I recently applied for life insurance, which was an odd experience. Do we engage in skydiving? Parasailing? Scuba diving? Mountain climbing? Piloting small aircraft? Bear wrassling?

Getting life insurance is one of those things that makes me question so-called reality in modern American society. For two years, our financial advisor has been telling us to get life insurance. It's conventional wisdom, that you should have it. And yet, as Enrico likes to point out, insurance is a gamble that we are designed to lose, statistically speaking. Between homeowners' insurance, car insurance, disability insurance, and now life insurance, we're spending well over $3,000 a year on insurances of various sorts - and that doesn't count medical/dental insurance which is fully covered by Enrico's employer but probably costs six grand a year. Would we be better off just setting all that aside for a rainy day?

Not that it's really an option. I'd never go without the medical, the homeowner's is required by our mortgage lender, and auto is required by law. But it's more than the money - is the conventional wisdom about insurance just a scam? Something that everybody has misguidedly accepted as unavoidable, like the wedding industry and the two-party political system? Have we been pushed unthinkingly into yet another cattle chute of the modern world?