> In my state there are no helmet laws.
I still find that one wild.
When I commuted I wore full high viz motorcycle specific textiles (jacket/trousers), proper boots and a helmet with the highest safety rating (on the SHARP system), as with everything in life you can mitigate the risk (in the case of a motorcyle by riding sensibly and appropriate equipment), you can't remove it and riding a motorcycle is inherently more risky compared to other forms of commuting not least because you are sharing the road with much bigger/much heavier vehicles and you are rare enough that a lot of drivers just don't consider Motorcyles - hell one of our road safety campaigns literally had the slogan "Think! Bike".
Never had an off (riding on the road, many times offroad but that's different), had two near misses - one was sand/crap on the road and the front end started to go and the other was a lady pulling straight out into the road from a blind exit (literally a hole in the wall completely blocking her view), I'd gone past that many times on the way home from work and I always slowed down because I'd flagged it as a "yeah, that's just dangerous" so I had time to stop just, she was very apologetic but that wouldn't have helped me much after I'd ploughed into and over her car.
I enjoyed riding motorcycles but they were always fundamentally a tool to me to get from A to B, my friends who ride strictly for pleasure and much less safely have way more crashes (in one case one of them wrote off two bikes in six weeks...).
I disagree with the way they ride and didn't ride with them even when I had a bike, there are literally track days for that stuff, keep it off the public highway where you risk hurting other people for your "fun".