As a Mac user since the original iMac in 1998, I haven’t ever bothered with antivirus.
Never had a problem.
As long as you are sensible with what you download, don’t open unexpected email attachments or load software from strange sites then you should be fine, MacOS has a lot of protection built in (maybe even too much now but not a bad thing) that will give lots of warning signs that what you are about to do could harm your computer.