Taking risk aversion to its logical conclusion one will end up selling himself into slavery - a good slave owner will take care of housing and nutritional needs of his slaves in good or bad times because he has vested interest in the slaves being alive and healthy. It's easy to see drawbacks of slavery, and so it stands to reason that risk-aversion, like many other natural urges, must be controlled.
Employment in that regard is the same story - you are trading in part of your autonomy in exchange of lesser risk exposure. It's rarely a good trade.
I don't share your intuitions about opposites. Risk-management is in any case a middle-of-the-road position. A person might rationally decide that the best risk/reward balance, given their particular goals, was to get a job. (Especially if these goals include doing a lot of stuff outside of work, since startups don't give you much free time.)
1. I disagree that risk aversion is not the same as risk seeking. If you are not avoiding risk, you are exposing yourself to it.
2. Even if I accept your premise, risk-management is, as foldr says, a middle of the road proposition. I choose to manage my risk by safely working a job and allowing myself, and my children, to pursue other interests fairly comfortably. Besides, someone has to work jobs. To paraphrase Office Space, "If everyone did what they loved, no one would be a janitor because no loves cleaning up shit."
I should have made it clear - I was talking specifically about reducing economical risk by turning over your fate to a slave owner. The elevated risk to personal security is obviously a downside as you pointed out, although a sane slave-owner will never kill you because he has already paid for all your future work. In addition slave will forever forgo all chances of climbing out of that hole because he does not keep any of the surplus product he has generated. And hence my point is that someone seeking to reduce their exposure to risk can easily end up subjecting himself to a different risk he didn't think about.
The parallel with employment is direct - by trading your economic liberty for a paycheck you are reducing your exposure to risk of there being nothing to eat. However you are also eliminating your exposure to the upside of your work. You are also picking up the risk of having loaded on debt and then being laid off, ending up in a dead-end career and work-place hazards.
What Seth points out is that risk of there being nothing to eat is vastly exaggerated in our minds, thus many of us trade the very real upside of our labor for the risk-protection we didn't need.
Employment in that regard is the same story - you are trading in part of your autonomy in exchange of lesser risk exposure. It's rarely a good trade.