A smart, independently minded person, would do the following risk analysis:

- Planes fly through the atmosphere in varying conditions. - The conditions that lead to uncomfortable or dangerous turbulence are not at all uncommon. - These conditions are unpredictable and have little warning. - Wearing a seatbelt is a very minor inconvenience, and will protect me from the worst of the harms that can come from common turbulence. - I will wear a seatbelt.

This doesn't seem complex.

The argument about bike helmets, although nuanced, should have nothing to do with celebrities wearing them or not.

The chance of an airplane hitting major turbulence unexpectedly, while pretty small, are much higher than the chance of some random debris falling from a building while you are passing by. Ultimately it's all weighing the inconvenience against the possible safety improvement: when you are sitting in your seat in a plane, the seatbelt is a very minor inconvenience. Wearing a helmet all the time is a much bigger inconvenience, with a much smaller benefit.

We DO recommend that individuals with high risk of injuring themselves wear helmets. People have varying levels of risk tolerance before they take steps to mitigate them; I'm sure some people choose to wear helmets because they estimate the risk of falling to be too high. In your hypothetical, I would probably not care, because to I and to most people the risk of falling at any given moment isn't high enough to warrant mitigating it. On an airplane, your risk of encountering turbulence is markedly high, enough so that it is worth mitigating. If you disagree then feel free to take your belt off, but don't complain if you die a very avoidable death. (Not that you could at that point.)

Well, and in fact, helmet wearing at least in the US has become normalized in situations where no one other than competing athletes wore helmets for things like skiing or casual biking a few decades ago. Today you stand out by not doing so. Heck. Professional hockey players didn’t use to wear helmets.

yes, your example is still about risk mitigation, but it's also a not-so-effective slippery slope argument likely motivated by a contrarian anti-masking stance. the reason there is no social pressure to helmet at all times is that we generally agree as a society that the inconvenience is not worth the minimal risk reduction.

this risk calculation is messy of course, as we all have different tolerances for inconvenience and risk, and we also have different responses to individual vs. collective risks.