I used to believe people cared about self preservation but these days I’m not so sure.

Humans are very bad at assessing risk and understanding probability. People tend to, say, be very afraid of sharks despite sharks being, for all practical intents and purposes, harmless. People stubbornly refuse to wear hard hats, ear plugs, or safety glasses despite the chance of suffering a serious injury being nearly certain if you spend long enough in the trades or a factory environment. If you've ever tried to manage or team lead people who work with ladders; Trying to make people practice basic ladder safety is a fucking nightmare.

Another example would be gambling, where the law requires the exact odds of winning to be published so the punters should know that they are mathematically incapable of winning, but people still throw their money in to the machine anyway.

Combined with other factors like Boomer solipsism, Calvinist invidualism, the pervasiveness of the Just World Fallacy in capitalist cultures, and the simple failure to reckon with the immediacy and inevitability of death we arrive at a situation where many people are effectively incapable of gauging risk or appreciating how quickly their quality of life can be completely destroyed.