Our Stupendous Self-Inflicted Trials
What drives people to repeatedly put themselves in mortal danger?
Before beginning, I want to give a shoutout to the other newsletter which I have started. It delivers a song, poem and painting every day. Why?
“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
You are what you consume.
Becoming of the fine arts is, well, far better than becoming of the 7-second dopamine dispensary that every other social media platform wants of your brain.
I took Johann’s advice, and over the last two months permitted myself the luxury of a song, poem and painting every day. I noticed a greater sense of awe and contentedness with the world.
Full of shit?
Find out for yourself.
Okay, onto the stupendous trials!
“1 in 10 days [were] good, the other 9 days were bloody hard work.”
Beau Miles, a magnificently charming and spritely YouTube adventurer reflects on his enormous 123-day-long kayak voyage around Africa in a recent podcast.
“I had some of the saddest moments of my life, and some of the happiest.”
Tom Robinson, a 24-year-old Brisbane man reminisces about his one-year canoe voyage across the Pacific Ocean after being rescued, bare naked, by a cruise liner.
Humans have a peculiar sense for casting themselves into abject danger: Ultra marathons, base jumping, sky-diving, bull riding, and martial arts.
It’s funny, because when I read about people such as Beau and Tom, I understand them. I know the impetus they felt, the instinct that drove them so far from the warmth of their homes, and yet, it is still very difficult to properly articulate an answer to the question:
Why on Earth did they do it?
Beau, for one, has a young daughter to a loving wife.
Tom, well, has a whole life ahead of him.
Risking life and limb for these guys, is, for what?
History is littered with these individuals, going beyond reason, driving themselves out squarely to the conditions that could end their lives.
We cling to their stories like bees to a daisy. They’re great narrative, but more than that, they’re bastions that let us genuinely question the problems we face, problems we thought were unquestionable.
But why do they do it? Why have individuals spanning the annals of known history repeatedly cast their lives into a genuine question of doubt? Are we not animals of survival, our firmest, most foundational instinct, that immovable rock?
Why do humans still fight against the inhuman altitudes of Everest?
Why is there currently a man running the entire length of Africa despite a crumbling body and almost being kidnapped and murdered?
Why did another man run the width of Australia last year, clocking 84 km per day for 47 days straight, also despite a crumbling body and maggots festering in his feet?
Or another man who dove to 122 metres without scuba equipment?
Why do swathes run a 250 km ultra-marathon across the Sahra in 50-degree heat, every single year?
Boredom, stagnation, glory, existential dread, doing it for the plot, all viable reasons - but I don’t like any of them. None are comprehensive, all are disparate from person to person.
An all-encompassing reason is that taking risks is gratifying. It feels good, especially when you surmount the odds. I cannot count the number of times I have screamed and yelled in moments of burning joy while snowboarding, always after getting through some near misses that would've ruined me - my friends know all too well about the sounds I make on the mountain. The heart quickens, adrenaline courses, endorphins wash, and you feel the most present you have in a long time.
“Your anxieties melt away because you can be nothing else but here right now” - that’s Beau in his most recent video, a line he reels off in between exasperated breaths as he trudges through ruthless Australian bush in 30-degree weather.
Poetry in motion, if you will.
And yet there’s something that runs far deeper than the visceral, physical response, a feeling way down.
Right there in your heart, buddy.
It’s that these adventurers and boundary-pushers have actualised abreast those perilous trials, likely, in a more profound fashion than anything else in their life, meaning those very stupendous trials are precisely the place where they feel the most themselves.
They’ve perennially made their bed in far-off places - craggy peaks, ear-drum-destroying depths, melting sands, hermit-like isolation, because those are the places where they discovered an unmistakable sense of growth. Comfortability becomes an antithesis. Trial becomes the way.
In my own moments of taking risks and succeeding I am overcome with a feeling of surety, that of all the tangents my life could have taken, I have coalesced with the right one - that I’m saddled right up against the most authentic version of myself.
And rightly so - isn’t the brick and mortar of character laid at the point where we risked, and especially so, succeeded? Think of your own triumphs: winning in that sport, asking that out, chasing that passion, that career, standing up to that awful person, attaining that grade, starting that blog (go me), all despite.
Is ego not aptly captured in the blissful cocktail of self-reverement that happens when you win, despite the odds?
Those odds? Are you kidding me? I did it! No one else - me!
When you transport yourself to those fragile edges, you deliver yourself, to you.
This is why people like Beau embark on stupendous self-inflicted trials. Whether intuitively or neatly articulated, they understand those truly testing moments as the place where they feel the most themselves, and as the place which makes them.
And yet.
There’s still something deeper…
There’s gotta be!
It is ultimately instinct that steers us toward stupendous trials because that’s exactly what it’s made for, longs for, and does so through its elusive yet compelling sway over us.
Let’s define instinct - in the least scientific way possible.
Gotta have some whimsy now and then!
The dense foliage of the subconscious is like a bustling rainforest, sprawling and spasmodic, where gazing too closely on one specific element leaves you subsequently blind to the whole, and where observing the whole gives you nothing of the greater, finer detail.
Instinct is the soil this confusing forest is embedded in, trunk and branch and leaf and even the petals of the flower, all glancing out into the observable world from that bedrock.
Our instinct directs our subconscious, indeed, is the birth of it, and much of the time steers it autocratically.
Like being at home alone, and, without thinking, beginning to check over your shoulder once night has set in - all from a perfectly secure house in a superbly safe city.
Or feeling tremors of anxiety as the sensations of hunger begin to flare up, despite sitting three metres from a pantry and fridge stocked with abundant food mass.
Or putting on a nice and approachable demeanour to people you don’t like or even care for, because somewhere way back when, for your ancestors, community was survival.
Or when you hit the age of 22 and find an unnerving and unavoidable pull to throw yourself at the harshest and most trying physical challenge, rowing the Pacific Ocean, because your life up until that point had been nothing short of coddling comfortability and something about that felt wrong.
I’m looking at you, Tom!
The takeaway is that the behaviours of our ancestors live on in us whether we like it or not, ancestors who spent their entire life forces trying to survive.
Wouldn’t it be terribly odd for accounting software to be used for visual design?
Or a GPS navigation system as a recipe book?
How about a survival machine that spends day in and day out basking in a warm pool of safety?
But why would our instinct, survival at its core, steer us to abject danger?
Well, for survival.
Because for our instinct, safety and comfort are a death in of itself, a lighthouse without night, a fireman without fire, policeman without crime, sword without attacker, a pen without believing there is something wrong with the world.
Its existence is wholly dependent on those trials.
So it drags us out there, beyond rationale, face to face with stupendous trials so that it can exist again, so that our mind and body can do nothing but flow under its sway.
That same instinct which fervently glances over the shoulder at night, that propagates anxiety from hunger, that makes us pleasant communitarians, must also partake in that archaic portmanteau of which it was solely built and coded and engineered for - surviving.
Otherwise, the soil of the subconscious loses its life, then the trunks their sturdiness, the branches their elasticity, the leaves their colour, and the flowers from flowering at all.
Without genuine trials humans fall into drudgery and cynicism, the bottom of booze bottles and acidic drips in the back of the throat, unexplainable outbursts of temper, fighting and mistrusting, apathy and depression.
The soil of our being needs to crash against the harsh trying of survival.
Why is there a man running the entire length of Africa despite a crumbling body?
Why did Beau spend 6 months alone on a kayak, 90% of the time not enjoying himself, all the while in danger and away from his young family?
Why did a 22-year-old cast himself into the whim of the Ocean for two whole years, that unruly and moody beast, when a whole life lay ahead of him?
Or Chris McCandless, who famously pursued independence and adventure unto his lonesome death in an old mining bus in the Alaskan wilderness at 24?
The hearts these men hold, the tempers that defiantly burn inside them, and the tempest and unruliness of their spirit, were all forged in the fires of those stupendous trials.
The fabric of their genome calls out to them, steering them so that mind and body can flow under that same instinct which so stewardly shepherded their genes for aeons past.
They understand that denying this call in the name of life and safety only guarantees a different type of death.
A beckoning comes from some far-off place
It is tangible yet intangible
Here and un-here
Invisible yet unavoidable
Creeping slowly out of that unknown
Until it stares you right in the face
And in your heart of hearts
You know
There is no other way
So down to those crushing ocean depths! The scorching sands of the Sahara, the eddying waters of Africa and the Pacific, to a lonely bus in the Alaskan wilderness that would only ever prove to be a steel coffin!
Because that’s exactly where taking a chance at anything really is.
Did today’s post strike a chord with you?
Or am I off the mark?
Are these thrill seekers just loons trying to get a buzz?
Let me know.
An interesting thing to consider would the neurochemical make-up of these people. Certain make-ups will predispose people to seek the adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, etc to light their brains up or even make them feel more normal compared to their base state. It remind me of Marc-André Leclerc (The Alpinist) who free-solo'd mountain climbs. He also frequently took 6 tabs of acid...I find this interesting. By no means is an out-of-balance chemical make-up the only reason for someone to seek the thrill of putting themselves in danger (far from it), but I am sure there would be a correlation