Sporting Dreams… and Delusions (podcast $)

As individuals, and as a species, we distinguish ourselves by envisioning things we haven’t experienced. It doesn’t always work to our advantage.

“How adventure sport participants make decisions in very challenging, ever changing natural environments… has implications for how people make decisions in finance, medicine, and other fields.”
— Audun Hetland (Stringer 2023), psychologist at The Arctic University of Norway

I’m an explorer and I’m working on a book about people who are drawn to do things beyond what’s safe and familiar. The book will be about the motivations and rewards that drive alpinists, BASE jumpers, and backcountry skiers. These are three sports that have expanded our notion of what’s possible and, in the process, resulted in a lot of dead alpinists, jumpers, and skiers…

I’ve been interviewing people who do these things, reading academic studies about extreme sports and the memoirs of introspective practitioners. The mindsets of these people have much less in common than you might think but, once you think beyond simply taking risks, this makes sense…

I want to explore what these sports have in common with things that normal people do, which is take risks, seek exuberance, creativity, reward, and generally advance our world view. The risks and rewards are obvious, and while they make for exciting stories they don’t explain anything. I’m most interested in the question of how we expand our thinking, and that invites the question of what real change these sports offer, if they offer any.

Seeking Adventure

Not “Because It’s There”

Ologists Are Just Ogelers

Pay No Attention to Explanations

Attraction, Compulsion, Addiction

Of Chemistry and Consciousness

If You Don’t Know What’s on the Menu, You Are

Will You Take Life Seriously?

You’ll Never Be Enough