My mum believes that people who do very dangerous scary things for a living are not ‘brave’. They are merely unable to feel fear. Their brains are deficient in the area which registers danger.
My definition of bravery is being fearful of something, and doing it anyway. IMO doing something because you feel no fear from it is not bravery.
So what do you think? Is a Formula1/Indycar driver just lacking the ability to be scared sh*tless or is he or she doing it despite having a very real fear of it?
One of my hobbies is whitewater kayaking. I’m solid on Class IV water and have done a little Class V.
I have paddled many rapids that have claimed lives. Trust me, I can feel fear just fine. For me the pleasure of the river running experience overpowers the fear. I tend to feel the fear more when not on the river, once I’m in the boat I’m focused on staying sharp and enjoying the challenge.
Hopefully this is along similar lines becuase I’m not trying to hijack this. But I’ve always wondered about the guys on Jackass (and other similar shows). Do they deal with the pain (they clearly seem to feel it) well, or do they get off on the pain.
I wouldn’t call my self an extreme sports person. I used to rock climb, and do some aggressive skating. I still do some activities where there is considerable risk of injury (speed skating, and bike racing).
You notice, through time, that people have WAY different assignments of risk for the same task, and make totally different decisions about assuming a risk even if they measure it the same.
I think almost everyone gets nervous before a bike race. Once a race started, you’d get a lot of guys who just go to the back, and keep their eyes open for trouble. I guess they simply can’t clear their minds of the possibility of a crash. Then, some people just get in there and race shoulder to shoulder in high speed turns. Both groups know that crashes happen a lot in bike racing, but some just aren’t willing to take the risk of being in one for the rewards (however small they may be) of finishing well in a race.
Shit, some people won’t eat rare meat. I don’t think it makes people who do “brave”.
Fearless? Brave? I don’t know. Sometimes I just see different evaluations of risk and reward.
Why do two people look at someone skiiing down a mountain and one person thinks “that would be cool as shit to do” while the other is Lobsang’s mom?
A big part of suppresing “fear” is preparation and understanding your own limitations. Yeah, if you take any normal person and stick them in an Indy car, they would crap themselves. A professional Indy driver OTOH spends years racing and training.
I don’t quite get the Jackass guys or the thousands of retarded teenagers who imitate them in their backyards though.
This is mostly what I was going to say. As the OP’s example - no one starts out in an indy car. Most probably started out in go carts that top out at 40MPH. As their skill level gets better, they have less to fear and they can handle more speed.
When I first started snowboarding, beginner (green circle) hills scared me. I thought anyone bombing a black diamond or a superpipe on a snowboard was crazy.
Now, 5 yrs later, I do both. Neither of which scare me, but it took years of practice to be able to do.
So a few weeks ago, my doctor said “Muffin, you should get some more exercise if you don’t want to get a heart attack. Why not try cross-country skis.”
So I put on some cross-country classic skis, cross-country slippers/boots, took the chair lift to the top of a black diamond alpine run, and WHEEE!
Unfortunately, I’m going to have to tell my doc that cross-country skiing may give me a heart attack.
Back in my skydiving days I knew plenty of people who did it for a living. I wouldn’t call any of them “fearless” - they all had a very calculated approach to risk which is what keeps you safe when you participate in “high risk” activities. The skydivers I met who tried to project a “I’m not scared of anything” vibe were the folks you didn’t want to jump with, they didn’t give off a safe vibe.
My high-risk “sport” is aviation. Yeah, I know how to feel fear. There are certain situations you SHOULD be afraid of. I’ve known a couple pilots who truly seemed to be fearless, and they’re all dead now. The old farts who fly for decades may look cool as a cucumber but that’s training and self-control, they also feel fear just fine.
The more you know and the better prepared you are the better you can manage risk, which may make a particular activity acceptable to the prepared soul where it wouldn’t be for someone else. A lot of the joy comes from mastering fear and mastering a difficult task.
But in all the “extreme” sports/activities no one likes to see the fearless idiot show up, or a fearless genius for that matter.
I’m hardly an extreme sportsperson, but I have bungee jumped from a bridge. I felt the fear, believe it. I just wanted to see what it felt like to do and thought it would be fun. It was.
Second for management of risk. I’ll ski pretty much anything, from black diamonds to cliffs to avalanche chutes. But I won’t do the same on my snowboard.
Reason why? I’m a far better skier than snowboarder, and I know the risk is higher on a board (for me) than on skis.
It’s neither risk free nor totally fearful; it’s the fear that makes the accomplishment better IMO.
I work with wild animals, and frequently handle large and… serious dogs.
I’m not afraid of them, though I am cautious and never take unnecessary risks. I remember the protagonist in some book or another getting a piece of advice akin to “if you feel afraid, you’re doing something wrong. You need to stop and think about your actions”. In my experience, for me, that’s true. If I find myself in a situation where I am feeling fear, I immediately re-examine my actions and my game plan and every single time it’s happened I’ve caught myself doing something, or about to do something, in an unsafe manner, or that I wasn’t prepared to handle. Despite all caution, things could always go wrong, but I will never purposely go looking for trouble.
When I’m working with an animal that could hurt me and badly, I need every fiber of my being focused on the situation. There’s no room for fear in the moment. Afterwards I might freak the f*k out
Also, as Broomstick said:
I have only skydived once, but I don’t have a fear of heights, at all. I was never, not once, during the whole time, scared. I was exhilarated, excited, and happy. When we were getting out of the plane, I was just fascinated and interested and excited. When we were free-falling, I was euphoric. During the flight up, I was maybe a little nervous for a second because I heard the pilot say something about fuel – I think it was either that he thought there should be more fuel or less fuel, and then I heard the other guy say, “These gauges don’t mean s*** anyway.” Hmmm. After that, I was more afraid of being in the plane than out of it. I sort of hope they were sort of joking? Anyway, I think for some extreme sportspeople, they really don’t feel the same kind of fear. I am scared of lots of other things – going around curves too fast in car, for instance – but heights is not a fear of mine, for whatever irrational reason.
I doubt if there’s a single answer to the question, but at least some of them are courting the taste of fear in the same sort of way people play with the ostensibly painful chemicals in hot peppers - they’ve trained themselves to love it.
Take for example this guy - he jumps out of a plane almost naked, relying entirely on his companion skydivers to get him safely to the ground. I just can’t comprehend it, but I think he must have been feeling some kind of fear, but liking it.
Objective risk – depends on the severity of the external conditions as well as the skill/experience of the participant – e.g. mountaineering or wild water paddling.
Perceived risk – when the pucker factor is different than the objective risk – e.g. bungee jumping.
Folks who earn their keep at extreme sports are either very good at determining the difference between objective and perceived risk, and acting accordingly, or else they don’t last too long.
Some folks need the rush from pushing the envelope, so they take on greater and greater objective risk so as to pump up their perceived risk – e.g. wing suit base jumping.
However, most folks who are into extreme sports simply are very good at what they do and do not need to test to destruciton.
The gas gauges in small, general aviation airplanes - among them, the sort used by skydivers - are notorious. They are required to be accurate only when the tanks are empty. That is, if it says “no gas” then there is no gas, but otherwise they can be off. Which is why most GA pilots actually look inside the tank before tank before take off, use calibrated dipsticks, and the like to visually assess the amount of fuel on board.
Which is not to say the gauges are useless - they can give an indication of fuel on board, fuel remaining, and fuel use but I do like to confirm the information given. Also, if the needles on the dials abruptly start falling You Have A Problem. I did have that happen on one flight on one of two fuel tanks and sure enough, there was a leak and it drained dry. Well, that wasn’t good, but we did have the other tank that was just fine and made sure we landed well before that one ran out.
More like “addicted”, at least in my cousin’s telling, only he hates being told he’s addicted to adrenaline. He says “if that was it, I’d go bungee jumping, do you see me bungee jumping?”
He’s “addicted” to mountains. He’s loved the mountains ever since my uncle would take all three eldest sons for a walk to a mountain nearby, to let their mother get some “me time.” The other two would be saying “how much further?” as if they’d never been up that mountain before; this one would be saying “when are we coming back?” as soon as they got in the car again.
His mountains have simply been getting bigger with time.
He’s definitely not fearless. If he was, he would have stopped coming back a long time ago. Knowing your limits is one of the most important parts of any sport.
He loves solving the path up a mountain like I love solving the best way to do a process in a way that makes everybody involved happy. It’s what he does, and a big chunk of what he is.
As a military parachutist after the learning phase which was a fear/adrenaline experience we were forced to do so many jumps in so many enviroments that I became very unexcited about it .
I had a couple of not good events in the air where I felt totally as though I had all the time in the world to sort the problems out and did so,I suspect that my thinking was operating at Light Speed at the time.
After the first event I was bollocked by a superior for being too calm.
I just think that we were bloody well trained.
I wasn’t as cool calm and collected as even I thought I was because once I tried reading a Western on the run in and read the same page five times without remembering a word of it.
I didn’t bother with books in the plane after that.
