Precarity:
the state of being uncertain or likely to get worse:
The older brother raised the younger one, a responsibility that gave him a perpetual sense of life’s precarity.
Despite the looming precarity ahead, I’ve found my time at grad school to be quite rewarding.etc… [Cambridge Dictionary]
Noted in “Gripping account of how plants and animals shaped each other,” Simon Ings, NewScientist (1 March 2025, paywall):
[Author Riley Black] excels at conveying life’s precarity. Life doesn’t recover after extinction events, nor does it regenerate. It reinvents itself. Early on – 425 million years ago, to be exact – we find life flourishing in strange lands, under skies so short of oxygen, fires can only smoulder and dead plants can’t decompose.
