Yeah. My goal is for my death to inconvenience the minimum number of people. It’s just called being considerate.
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I’d be interested to know how much poking has been done at what else it is, chemically speaking.
I’d be very surprised if it is just adrenaline, if the adventures of Team Psychopharmacology and Team Looking-for-Weight-Loss-Drugs teach us anything it’s that trying to tease out craving and reward pathways in humans is an ugly, complex, slog.
That said, given the common medical uses of adrenaline, including relatively urgent administration of very roughly calibrated doses because anaphylaxis sure does inspire urgency, I’d have to imagine that (by the standards of human medical experimentation without obvious therapeutic application, at least) a “just see if ‘adrenaline junkies’ actually like or respond differently to adrenaline than other people do” study wouldn’t be the hardest thing to get past an IRB. I suspect that the answer would be “no, there’s more to it than the adrenaline”; but it couldn’t be that hard to find some BASE jumpers who would be willing to have some measurements taken while being shot full of epinephrine and an otherwise analogous group of non thrill-seekers to do the same to (for extra credit and more variables to control; a group of not-primarily-physical thrill seekers, like financial services volatility junkies, would also be an interesting sample).
Such a study would be more or less entirely about satisfying curiosity; I can’t imagine that there’s either much interest or a viable business case for “Jumpex™”, the base jumping cessation aid, but given the central role of reward pathways in making anything we do seem perceptually worth doing; and the role of seeking to stimulate those pathways in making us do things, it wouldn’t be idle curiosity.
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No, mostly because it’s considered littering.
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I totally relate, but dude was 33 when he said that. Maybe a steady diet of cigarettes and wine isn’t that good for you.
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Only the people bad at BASE jumping die. I know I’m not going to die because I’m good at it.
/s (I would never do it, but that’s the attitude BASE jumpers have in my mind.)
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Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff describes exactly that attitude among US test pilots, who would gather after every fatal crash to tell each other what mistakes the deceased had made, and why they would never make the same ones.
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I have linked to it before, and it doesn’t onebox, which limits its visibility, but I found this article really insightful into the psychology of wingsuit BASE jumpers, which is even more dangerous than regular BASE jumping. One interesting thing is that many of them don’t actually live the cool Xander Cage (xXx) lifestyle. The guy it is about lives with his mother and doesn’t have a job, the wingsuit is the only thing in his life, even as his friends drop dead around him.
https://www.dagbladet.no/arkivert/magasinet/the-flight-of-felix/68879283
ETA: Since they use his full name in the article, I just checked his Instagram. His last post was 157 weeks ago. Make of that what you will
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