Wingsuit BASE jumping is one of the most dangerous sports in the world. Studies indicate that it has a fatality rate of nearly 1 in 500 jumps. This means that every active participant faces alarmingly high odds of meeting with a fatal accident.
I always wondered why did these jumpers took such enormous risks for tiny amount of thrill? Couldn’t they see statistics? To me, the answer was obvious: they were adrenaline junkies. Addicted to the sport just like an addict is to his drug. For them, nothing could replace the rush of skirting the edge of death.
However, reading Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, I came to another conclusion. In the section called Paradox of Control, he explains.
It is usual to explain the motivation of those who enjoy dangerous activities as some sort of pathological need: they are trying to exorcise a deep-seated fear, they are compensating, they are compulsively reenacting an Oedipal fixation, they are “sensation seekers.” While such motives may be occasionally involved, what is most striking, when one actually speaks to specialists in risk, is how their enjoyment derives not from the danger itself, but from their ability to minimize it. So rather than a pathological thrill that comes from courting disaster, the positive emotion they enjoy is the perfectly healthy feeling of being able to control potentially dangerous forces.
So yes, thrill-seeking may be part of their motivation. But that explanation alone is too simplistic. BASE jumpers often believe they are in control, and that they are better at it than everyone else. It’s not that they don’t feel fear, but rather that they see their abilities as equal to the dangerous forces they’re confronting.
Alex Honnold, the renowned rock climber best known for free solo-ing El Capitan, touched on something similar.
I differentiate between risk and consequence. Sure, falling from this building is a high consequence, but, for me, it’s low risk.
So, yes, Alex realizes the stakes are high (death), yet believes his control is so complete that falling would be practically impossible.
Fear is Perceived Inablity to Control
Fear is obviously a useful mechanism that keeps us safe from genuine dangers. But fear is also a limiting force, stopping us from doing things we might enjoy when the actual threat is minimal.
Most of us assume that our fears are deep part of our personality. The endless catalog of phobias doesn’t help: acrophobia, arachnophobia, aquaphobia. By giving every fear a clinical name, we make it seem like it is hardwired and immutable.
I believe most fears don’t come from the danger itself, but from our perceived inability to control a situation.
We fear water because we imagine ourselves drowning. We fail to see that once swimming skills are embedded in muscle memory, drowning becomes almost impossible (at least, in normal conditions).
We fear heights because we can’t control the intrusive thought of falling even when we are super-safe.
For the longest time, I was dead-scared driving because I was sure I would run into an accident. I had a deep-seated fear of (Indian) traffic. I couldn’t see that once I learn driving and practice enough, I can drive on auto-pilot basis just as million others do on daily basis.
I did exactly that. Over a period of time, the fear dissipated, replaced by a trust in the ability to control any situation even in chaotic driving conditions of India.
From this perspective, even BASE jumping starts to make a strange kind of sense. It’s not as if someone wakes up one morning, straps on a wingsuit, and leaps off a cliff. They likely progressed through various stages, grew more and more skilled, and then started the penultimate sport of BASE jumping. They understand the risks, but they also think they have the skills to minimize it.
Of course, it’s not for everybody. And no matter how confident the Wingsuit flyers are, it’s undeniable that not everything will be under their control. But what’s interesting to me is how humans can learn to minimize fear even in the riskiest of situations.
Over the years, I’ve come to see fear not as an ingrained trait, but as a shifting relationship with control. Fear is there because we perceive ourselves to be powerless in certain situations. No surprise how quickly fear dissipates once we acquire enough skills to understand and control the situation.
Most of our fears require only a tiny amount of skills, or tweaking our thought process, before we realize how misplaced they were.