Insurance vs Assurance

Insurance is a safety net, there in case of the event in which you fall so that it can catch you.  Assurance is the feeling you get knowing the net is there, which fills you with confidence.  Assurance of knowing that should you fall you will survive is what leads you to take greater risks and accomplish tasks which otherwise you would never dream of doing.  Except, while all this revolves around possibilities, the only way you can actually know if the safety net actually works is to test it out, which involves consciously deciding to fall to see what happens.  In that moment your doubt is what comes to mind, the assurance of the net is suddenly taken away even though the net remains, you don't know whether it will work or not.

In life there are many times we seek assurances from others.  In love, in work, in finance, and even just from our friends and family through emotional and physical support when we need it.  The question is how do you know who and what is strong enough to support you, if you never test the net?  There are times when it's impractical or unthinkable to even engineer the scenarios where you would need the net to begin with.  For example the emotional support you would need in the event of a close loved one dying, there's no way in good conscience to actually test that net.  What you are left with is the realisation that some nets are never going to be tested until the moment you actually need them and if they don't work then you will hit the ground hard.

In these scenarios where you can't test your net, you place faith in others.  You do so blindly, and without assurance.  For many of us this comes to represent our lives and the choices we make as we walk along our tightrope.  No matter how close anyone is to us, we still walk alone.  They can't walk our path for us all they can do is offer encouragement and the promise of the safety net if you should fall.  There is of course another possibility in these scenarios one which we tend to avoid thinking about in advance of what can go wrong and only think about in that moment when we feel ourselves fall - do we want to be caught?

You might be asking yourself what is the point of having insurance if you don't use it?  What's the point of a net if you don't want to be caught?  The answer can be found when you look quite literally at insurance itself, specifically the insurance industry.  When taking claims against your insurance regardless of who was at fault, by doing so your premium usually rises.  If you translate that into the concept of insurance as a whole you could argue that perceptibly we believe the more we have to use our insurance the more it costs us in the long-run.  If this mentality takes over then even with a safety net in place there's no guarantee we'd ever use it even if we did fall which brings us back to the distinction between the two, insurance vs assurance.  If you know in advance that you probably won't use the net, or that you don't trust the net because it has never been tested, then you find yourself in the bizarre situation of having insurance without assurance.

That raises the question, what is the point of insurance if it does not reassure, and you don't actually use it when you need to?