I still say climbing Yosemite without a rope is stupid.

Nevertheless, as our host points out, skydiving is orders of magnitude safer than driving. Law of averages, splat, etc. etc.

The law of averages explains why he eventually went splat.

Sam, clearly you’ve never experienced the love of a climber chick.

I prefer extreme sports requiring exotic machinery, myself. Kite surfing, paragliding, that sort of thing.

If you want something fun but pretty safe check out OpenPPG. It’s also the least expensive way to get into aviation.

I take a slightly different viewpoint on that issue; it’s not just the “need to face danger”, it’s also a timing thing during the maturation process.

I think that there are “behavioral gates” akin to the ones we know exist for language acquisition, relating to behavioral patterns and so forth in the human psyche. If you don’t hit those gates while your brain/mind is still plastic, then you’re going to be lacking in those regards for the rest of your life.

You want to see a fully rounded, well-balanced young man, you have to ensure that they learn and experience specific things during the process that takes them from child to man, or you’re not going to get functional fully-realized men out of the process.

Same factors no doubt go into the process of creating fully functional women, but since I don’t know that from the inside, I’m not gonna comment on what they are.

If you don’t socialize a male child properly, that child is never going to connect well with others. If you fail to provide him with a challenging environment, then he’s likely to be an out-of-balance whacko who tends to irresponsibility. At some point, you really have to present his ass with an existential threat, a real one, and he has to survive it in order for him to assess and react rationally to other such events in his life. You don’t do that, by a certain point, then he’s never really going to “get” that the environment he’s in can kill him. I think that there’s a really good chance that the thrill-seeking idiocy we see in a lot of males these days stems not from some innate drive, but from the fact that these idiots have never seen or experienced death at close range while their minds were still plastic enough to process the reality that they, too, can die. A lot of the thrill-seeker types I know are guys who grew up in environments of benign boredom, without threat or challenge. As such, they’ve never had to “grow up”, and recognize that they stand a chance of dying from their avocation. They simply cannot comprehend or process the risk rationally.

Guy I went to high school with was a climber, and he was not one of the thrill-seeker types. He had friends of his who were, and who settled around where we went to school. What was interesting talking to a couple who managed to get themselves killed doing what I’d term “stupid sh*t” was that they’d never run into a situation that came close to killing them during their early days climbing. My friend I went to school with had, in his early twenties. His risk-assessment instincts kept him off of a couple of high-risk climbs that led to extensive deaths in the climbing teams doing them, because he had a solid handle on “Hey, this could kill me…”, and he had a wife/kids to stay alive for. Several of his climbing friends did not develop that recognition of their limitations, and they’ve left behind wives and kids after they were killed in the pursuit of glory.

You see the same thing in a lot of military veterans–Risk aversion is something you see in certain categories of age/experience, while there are others who are blithely oblivious to the tactical facts of life. Same-same with intel operatives–The guys who let that IED-vest guy into the CIA camp in Afghanistan a few years back? Blithe spirits all, who failed to develop a healthy paranoia about the risk of trusting the locals too much.

I was put in harm’s way frequently as a child, and I never went for extreme sports. For me there was no point. But I knew guys who went in for skydiving and the like, and they seemed oddly innocent to me, as if they’d never been close to death growing up.

I’ll risk death for a good reason. I won’t do it for its own sake.

The only explanation for him free climbing at that level was status. I can’t image giving that much of a shit what people think of me that I would do something so stupid.

Well, then, considering the risk of automobile travel, I can now stop running around in service to the wife’s vanity projects!!!

I’m not too keen about the girls keeping up with the boys in this type of endeavor.