During a recent car insurance claim, I noticed on the nice letter from the AA that there was a number to call if you wished to recover your “uninsured losses”.

In my case, this would be much more than my policy was worth. Having spent some time on the phone to a very nice lady, I had to agree that she had a point. It was her opinion, gently delivered, that the responsibility for reversing our SUV into a stationary object (in this case a concrete pillar in a car park) really must rest with the person driving the car. The lack of luminous warnings on the pillar was not enough reason to claim damages.

It was, she said, really up to the driver to look where he or she was going.

Since I’d already made this point a number of times to my wife, I resisted the opportunity to repeat it. But it was nice to find out that there was someone, somewhere, who actually agreed with me.

Liability, responsibility, blame and reparations are the stuff of insurance. We are all insured up to our eyeballs in an effort to smooth over the ebb and flow of these irksome details. In the old days, insurance could be found only in an votive offering up to the gods. We prayed that they would allow misfortune to pass over our dwelling/ village/nation.

Now we can be more accurate; we micromanage misfortune. Actuaries quantify the risk of a certain expensive disaster, and we hedge against it. But what is the inner cost of this obsessive desire to damp down the waves of disaster? Responsibility is the first casualty. We take less care of stuff that we know others will replace for us. Liability, too, goes out of the window. If we run over a child, the insurers will pick up the bill.

Blame and reparations are taken away from us and handled by call centres, claims-adjusters or lawyers. We become unused to tackling the inner somersaults of being confronted by our fate. Even when events slip through our carefully constructed safety net, we demand action over our “uninsured losses”.

Nowadays, we get so used to the peaks and troughs of life remaining within narrowly defined bands that moving beyond these limits can quickly exhaust our capacity to cope. We are in despair about what is “happening to us” even though often it is quite obvious that we have done this to ourselves (a bit like reversing into stationary objects).

This comes up a lot in careers and relationships; two very difficult areas to insure against. When our work stagnates we blame the lack of opportunities, luck or assistance. When our relationships fail we blame the other (or others). We rarely see that we chose our career — we took that risk — or that we chose the people with whom we try to make a life.

The flip side of this lack of responsibility is a loss of capacity to delight in life (the limit of the upper band). As much as we take for granted the muting of the down side of our losses, we forget to appreciate the rest of life that doesn’t require an insurance claim: we take things for granted.

Do you dwell on your misfortunes or count your blessings when you look at what went well in life? Are you still blaming someone else or are you grateful for the people who didn’t let you down? I think I need to revise my own perspective. As amusing as it can be to disparage my wife’s driving, I’m being terribly ungrateful. After all, I have never once congratulated her on arriving home safe and sound with an unmarked vehicle full of unharmed children. How did such a precious event as that become so unremarkable and commonplace?

OVER TO YOU

If you would like to suggest a topic for Benjamin Fry to examine then send an e-mail to body&soul@thetimes.co.uk or write to him at Body&Soul, The Times, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 1TT. You can also discuss Benjamin Fry’s ideas at www.whatswrongwithyou.com or on 0845 2990299