Perpetual

First of all, anyone can deny anything – but let’s not play the semantics game ad nauseam. 😉
Second, ‘accident’, ‘failure’, and ‘fear’ are by no means synonymous. On the contrary, they are highly distinct concepts that can but need not be applied simultaneously.
Third, we are not in a driver seat of anything. That which we call ‘I’ or personality is a seemingly perceivable and thought to be perceived illusion of the unity of our fragmented minds. We are only consciously aware of a few things that more or less need our attention while everything else flies on auto-pilot. The choices we make are based upon emotions rather than cognitions, usually ill-informed or even misled because of wishful thinking, and often made without even having taken into account all relevant factors. We choose to our best actual knowledge, but not even remotely as to our best possible knowledge.
I’m not sure the concept of ‘blame’ can even be properly applied unless the concept of responsibility and the possibility thereof can be properly established first.
I suppose you are referring to fatalism in its distinct sense, which is to be distinguished from determinism, although it admittedly depends upon what, exactly, we wish to understand by the term ‘fate’.
Furthermore, I have become wary of the concept of free will, as it now seems to me that with the scientific research results concerning the human brain, the term is not so much wrong as it is meaningless. The concept is devoid of a meaningful application if there is no such thing as an indivisible subject, whatever we may wish to call it, in the first place. A decision is reached not by a singular will carefully considering all rational arguments, but by the interplay of connected but physically non-identical parts of the brain carrying out different functions and operations, where emotional responses easily outweigh any plethora of rational arguments speaking for the opposite decision. Fear is simply one of those emotional responses, it is caused by individually specific stimuli and in its turn (one of the) cause(s) of further responses. The causal chain doesn’t start in the Cartesian theatre, mostly because such a thing does not exist, but it would also introduce (as historically speaking it has always done) unnecessary issues as to how a causal chain can be started by something supposedly free of the bindings of cause and effect.
Failure is the result of multi-layered circumstances; let’s leave the question whether chance is involved aside, in order not to blow this discussion out of proportion.
You are right, at any rate, in that we can never accept our own choices, for we are always capable of considering possible alternatives, leaving us wondering what we may have missed by choosing road X instead of road Y. We inherently think in terms of gains and losses, and the more options we are given, the less content we can be with whatever we choose, as we always value the actual gains lower than the theoretical losses because of those options we decided against.
Psychological experiments have indeed demonstrated that our risk aversion is so strong that we evaluate the same situation completely differently depending upon whether it is worded in terms of gains or in terms of losses.
I disagree with you with respect to the abstraction and concreteness of carelessness and fear: the former is the absence of something, whereas the latter is the presence of something. Fear is usually easy to describe and thus to be made concrete as it has one or more object(s) to which it pertains, even though the object(s) may themselves be concrete to varying degrees. Carelessness, on the other hand, can translate both to a lack of dutifulness and a mere matter of priorities. We may disagree as to whether someone is careless, but we cannot earnestly disagree as to whether someone who displays all symptoms of fear in a terrifying situation (unless we aspire to radical or global scepticism), only as to the degree of fear and which individual factors actually cause the fear the person is experiencing.
I need to stop here as it is already late at night and I need some sleep. I hope my remarks above make enough sense to be worthy of being read. Otherwise I apologize in advance for wasting everyone’s time.

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