Is that because you agree with his explanation, or well, yknow, Douglas Adams.
Yup, it’s more than just an urge. There’s a fairly vivid imaginary component, which often involves the step of throwing yourself off the edge, and imagining what the fall would be like (I know, I know. Nasty, brutish and short), but…
…it does not involve fear. Or at least anymore fear than is reasonable. I have no problem with heights at all.
I am very afraid of being near a steep drop that I could jump over, because I get this feeling, and I don’t like it at all.
I relate to this so much. I also hate it when I’m faced with a number of fragile objects, like porcelain or glassware. I get a terrible to urge to crush them all.
I also deal with kittens from time to time, and holding them when they’re small terrifies me. Mind you, I would never harm an animal, but when it’s so small it fits in your hand… Guess it’s my own power that frightens me.
One place I worked, we used multi-megahertz ultrasonics to atomize liquids. When run in an open bath, the sound would cause water to form a stalagmite like structure with mist and drops of water coming off of it.
If you touched that cone of water with your finger, the sensation was remarkably close to hitting it with a hammer, and took nearly a minute to fade. Myself and all of my colleagues had at one time or another given in to our curiosity and discovered this first-hand. Interestingly NOBODY ever spoke of this until one evening in a pub over beers.
I often get that feeling when crossing streets with heavy traffic.
I have this, the worst place I have it is in rail stations where it’s tremendously difficult on occasion not to launch myself in front of trains - the faster they’re going the harder it is.
My father has it too. I think it’s part of the human condition.
This is what I came in to say. Here is the Wikipedia article on it.
I assumed you were invoking Nabokov.
Anyway, I like the explanation you gave. You could answer the objections that others have mentioned, by pointing out that the difference with jumping from a height is that the “effort-conequence” ratio is so astoundingly skewed, more even than sticking your hand in a woodchipper, or jumping in front of a bus, etc.
For me, the urge seems to be rooted in the very real and present sense of death and injury, which is usually ephemeral or unrealized. But when we’re in one of the circumstances in which our demise is so clearly within reach, we find ourselves contemplating it, and, realizing that we are really that close to death - that it is actually at that moment within our power to actually die that type of death - we stun ourselves with that awareness. Obviously, at any time in our life, we could assemble the wherewithal to do away with ourselves, but we don’t attend to those thoughts usually. Standing on the edge of a cliff, however, there it all is - within easy reach. And we freak at the incredible closeness and ease with which death could occur.
We had a thread about this a couple of years or so ago that got locked. The OP made the mistake of asking whether or not these types of thoughts were pathological. It set off the panic strobe on one of the mods’ desk, and the mod promptly locked it, thinking that the OP was asking for psychiatric advice. The OP got his panties in a bunch and called out the mod, and everybody kinda agreed with him and dogpiled the mod. Anyway, the best answer that came out of the whole affair is that this is OCD. It seems that we all carry around the software that causes it, but fortunately for 99% of us it never runs. But every once in a while it likes to run a little applet, and this is where these weird thoughts of self-harm come from. Apparently they’re ridiculously common, and they’re more prevalent in intelligent people.
I have the urge to drive into a tree occasionally. I never do, but the urge is peculiar and real.
Sometimes I feel an urge to escape. You know, when there is so much stuff going on in life that I could really use a break. Optimally, a vacation on a beach somewhere. But sometimes it pops up at the edge of a cliff. Not suicidal, just an urge to have total freedom for a couple of seconds.
The problem of the landing always squelches that idea.
Like just about everything else, this has been discussed.
No, she hasn’t posted for ages.