THERE has never been a safer time to be alive.

Human beings are living longer than ever before. Breakthroughs in medicine mean that many diseases that were once life-threatening are now treated with relative ease.

We have much greater sophistication at predicting the occurrence of natural disasters and improved plans to implement, should such disasters strike. Improvements in crop cultivation mean that even through challenging weather conditions, food can still be grown, and our knowledge of what foods are best suited to our bodies has advanced greatly in the past 50 years.

With these improvements, it would appear (and I have no empirical evidence to support this) that people are safer than ever before, but also more scared than they ever have been.

This fear, of course, is not completely illogical. There are many things to fear in the modern world. Global warming and changing weather patterns are things that previous generations didn't have to worry about; terrorism used to be something that, while it occurred, didn't occur in countries such as Australia or the US; and the fact that more countries appear to be able to build sophisticated weapons such as nuclear bombs means there are plenty of seemingly "new" things of which this generation can be wary.

However, knowing about these threats should, in fact, make us feel safer. Because we know that global warming is occurring, we can introduce an emissions trading scheme to combat it. Because of September 11, we can implement systems to limit the likelihood of terrorist attacks on our soil. And because we know there are countries out there eager to make nuclear weapons, we can monitor the movement of not only the fuel, but also the technology needed to make such weapons.

Of course, all of this illustrates the truth to the saying, "ignorance is bliss".

There was a period during my football career when I basked in such ignorance. I was unaware of the faulty movement patterns I'd developed that would later cause me grief. I probably didn't realise just how hard it was to win a premiership, and my knowledge of the opponents I was coming up against each week wasn't as good as it should have been. To solve the last of these problems (of the three, it was the only problem I was actually aware of at the time), I decided to sit down at the club computer each week and use the software that West Coast had at the time to analyse my likely opponent's recent performances.

The software I was using was very time efficient. You typed in a player's name from any club and every passage of play that that particular player was involved in during any given match would appear on the screen. The downside to this practice was that the players I viewed would either get a kick, a handball, a tackle and so on, every time they went near the ball. This caused the player to look like a genius because every time he went to a contest, he had an impact, leading me to worry more about him than I needed to.

In hindsight, I should have been looking at footage of the player my opponent played on the week before, which would have shown how my future opponent could be beaten. Now I take a broader approach, and usually just look at stoppages of the entire opposition midfield group and the way they move the ball through the midfield area, without concentrating too much on any one player.

To me, there is a balance between knowing enough to plan for what is coming up, and not getting so much info that you lose track of what it is you're trying to focus on.

This balancing act is a conundrum coaches deal with, and no doubt there are companies out there as well that get sidetracked focusing too much on what their competitors are trying to achieve.

In a way, it makes more sense to fear things that are unknown because something that isn't known can't be defended. However, as Dick Pratt puts it: "You don't know what you don't know, till you know it."