Metaphors About Life

Just to refresh and clarify, a metaphor is a comparison or statement of the relation between two things that you wouldn’t normally associate with each other.  Metaphors simply state the comparisons, while similes use “like” or “as” to compare things. The technical distinction here isn’t important—the comparisons themselves are where the insight lies.

Alan Watts: The Universe ‘Peoples’

Much of our anxiety in life stems from seeing ourselves as individual islands of isolation, completely separate from the rest of the world. We look up at the night sky in awe, and most of us feel even more isolated and alone, seeing the vastness of things that aren’t us. We appreciate the beauty, but we feel apart from it.

In one of his most popular metaphors, Watts tries to help us overcome our feeling of separateness by comparing our arising as conscious beings out of this universe similar to how apples come from apple trees. He cleverly turns the collective “people” into a verb; trying to get across this idea that we aren’t separate from the universe at all. We are a process of the universe.

Logically, the metaphor makes sense. We are all composed of atoms that didn’t come from anywhere else but the very universe we inhabit. The beauty of the metaphor is that it conveys this profound and hopeful truth in such simple language.

Michael Pollan: The Mind is a Snow-Covered Hill

Michael Pollan discusses this metaphor in his excellent book, How to Change Your Mind (which features on my list of favorite books on psychedelics). As he admits in the book, it wasn’t Pollan himself who came up with the metaphor, but I’m crediting him for bringing it to my attention.

The essence of the idea is that the mind is a snow-covered hill, and the thoughts we have are sleds going down that hill. Certain thought patterns become habitual over time, and they lead to grooves in the snow hill of mind. When certain thought patterns become ingrained in the snow, we can’t seem to think without going into those grooves; those habitual thought patterns.

We can become stuck in rigid ways of thinking, whether about the world around us, our relationships, our selves. What psychedelics do, according to the metaphor, is they add fresh snow to the hill. It is for this reason that psychedelics can so profoundly change the way we think. Pollan discusses the metaphor in this clip with Joe Rogan.

Lao Tze: The Ego is Muddy Water

The full quote, which comes from the founder of the Ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism, is as follows:

“Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?”

In this quote, the sage, Lao Tze, is saying our conditioned, egotistic patterns of thought are essentially muddy water. The path to peace and inner stillness from mental suffering comes when we wait for the muddy water of ego to clear. Many Eastern traditions emphasize the importance of sitting meditation as a path to help end our suffering.

Terence McKenna: Western Civilization is a Loaded Gun

McKenna had a tendency to delve into quackery at times, but a lot of what he said was intelligent and insightful. In this metaphor, the full quote is that “Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at itself.” This metaphor relates to the constant anxiety of living in a world dominated by individualism, consumerism, selfishness, and access to nuclear weapons.

Anyone who takes a moment to read the latest news headlines can inevitably see the truth of this statement. It constantly feels like the world is on the cusp of something utterly disastrous to humanity; some existential risk caused by our own idiocy or carelessness. Much of this anxiety stems from Western powers trying to assert their dominance over the rest of the world and over each other.

Yes, there hasn’t been an outbreak of humanity-threatening violence in a long time, but it always feels just around the corner, especially with people like Trump getting voted into power and populist mass movements like Brexit surging across the Western world.

Mooji: The Fire of Self-Discovery

Mooji is one of my favorite spiritual teachers. I know ‘spiritual’ is a loaded word for the modern thinking person who approaches life with the thinking approach of a scientist, but the truth is I am agnostic to spiritual ideas, particularly those that delve into the nature of self and consciousness. Mooji is a master of communicating about the ego and its false identity as who we really are.

The full quote is:

“Step into the fire of self-discovery. This fire will not burn you, it will only burn what you are not.”

The metaphor communicates to us that discovering the true nature of the self is to step into a fire. But the fire of this discovery is nothing to be feared; it won’t harm who we really are at our core. I think this is a powerful and profound metaphor because people, myself included, often resonate with self-inquiry;  that there is something deeper to be found by looking within, but we find ourselves afraid to go that deep, lest we lose ourselves in the process.

Alan Watts: Be the Falling Cat That Lets Go of Itself

I can’t find the exact YouTube video in which I heard this Alan Watts quote, but its profundity always stuck in my mind as a cool metaphor. The fact I love cats also helps! Watts was discussing a Taoist approach to life and he used the way cats fall as a metaphor for how to live life in such a way as to be free of anxiety and in accordance with the Tao.

The reason cats can fall from quite impressive heights and not hurt themselves is that they completely relax their bodies on the way down. Watts advocated approaching life in that way. Resistance creates pain in life. If the cat clenches or resists when it falls, it hurts itself. If we resist the natural spontaneous flow of life and try to cling to it, pain in the form of mental suffering is inevitable.

That tops off my favorite metaphors about life. I really enjoyed writing this article and I will add to it over time as I remember more metaphors and become exposed to new ones, whether in literature or when going down a YouTube rabbit hole.

The post Profound Metaphors About Life appeared first on Cerebrotonic.

At the top, as the sweat drips from your forehead in Bangkok’s shirt-drenching humidity and searing heat, you feel the fruits of your labor were very much worth it. Greeting you is an open-air rooftop courtyard offering panoramic views of Bangkok as far as the vision stretches. At the center of the rooftop is a classic Thai Buddhist stupa.

Look in one direction and your eyes are drawn to the high-rise office buildings, condos, and shopping malls that dot the Sukhumvit and Silom areas of modern Bangkok. Gaze in another direction and you get a unique view of Bangkok’s most beautiful temples, lining up along the Chao Phraya River; from the Grand Palace to Wat Arun.

Start to examine what you see more carefully, and you’ll notice the oft-missed details of Bangkok to the casual visitor; its slums and canals teeming with life, and its abandoned buildings, all of which contribute in their own way to Bangkok’s gritty charm.

It’s natural to feel a wave of gratitude when you climb to the top of an underrated gem like Wat Saket. This gratitude stems from having the freedom to explore one of the planet’s great cities.

It’s a feeling of gratitude that’s particularly pertinent at a time in which the citizens of another huge city (Wuhan) are on lockdown due to the Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) epidemic. Some Wuhan residents have developed such cabin fever that they’ve taken to running entire marathons around their living rooms.

The Vultures of Bangkok

As you descend from atop Wat Saket, this time via a different flight of 300 steps, you come to one of Bangkok’s most eerie monuments. Greeting you are statues of four Thai people looking on with almost resigned expressions as huge vultures feast on a corpse.

Wondering what the fresh hell this monument depicts, you naturally read the description. In the late 19th century, circa 1890, a devastating cholera outbreak spread throughout Southeast Asia, reaching Bangkok via Penang in Malaysia.

Cholera is a relatively mild illness if treated early, although it was often fatal if you contracted it back in those days of relatively primitive healthcare. In Bangkok, thousands of people died, and many of their bodies were brought to Wat Saket for cremation.

The pace of deaths was too fast for the temple to cope with, and dead bodies were often left outside to decay. This is where the vultures enter the story. Historical records around the time detail huge swathes of vultures perched along the temple’s winding stairs, lunching on the dead with reckless abandon.

A Sense of Perspective

It would be hyperbole to assume a similar scenario will happen with the current coronavirus outbreak. Modern containment measures are excellent and healthcare authorities are much better equipped to cope with the worst outcomes.

Still, Bangkok’s eeriest monument gives passers-by a real sense of perspective about the havoc that epidemics can cause and the utter helplessness of humans when sh*t really hits the fan.

It also reinforces the gratitude I mentioned earlier; anyone reading this article can consider themselves charmed to live in an era of scientific progress such that even when outbreaks of new illnesses occur, we are typically spared from such horrible sights.

The post This Eerie Bangkok Monument is a Stark Reminder of Past Epidemics appeared first on Cerebrotonic.

I was listening to the radio the other day and one of my favourite feel-good tunes came on. It was Tom Petty’s Learning to Fly, which is a quite simple song based on four chords. One of the reasons I like the song so much is that it invokes a complex emotion in me. It is an obscure feeling of nostalgia for a time I’ve never known. 

What I feel when listening to Learning to Fly is a longing for a simpler life as a teenager in 1980s America even though my own teenage years were spent in early noughties County Dublin, Ireland. The song itself was actually released in 1991, however, to me its melody is strongly evocative of the 1980s. Upon listening to Learning to Fly, I immediately become nostalgic about different aspects of how I imagine life as a teenager was during that decade.

I miss driving on the open road with a pretty girl beside me in my second-hand Chevrolet Camaro, listening to Boston and Queen at full-blast on the car’s radio. I miss drinking foamy root beer with my friends. I miss the cultural euphoria of the beginning of the end of the Cold War in 1989, the excitement of the first IBM personal computer, and watching Live Aid on TV. I miss being present with friends, drinking a cold Coke on a balmy summer day; laughing together without the distractions of mobile phones or game boys. 

I miss all of these things even though I’ve never experienced them.

Tom Petty’s 1991 song is not the only thing that invokes this type of emotion in me; it happens when listening to certain other tunes or when looking at old photos from bygone generations. The beauty of language is that simple sounds can symbolize highly complex feelings and ideas, however, when I went looking for a dictionary-listed word for this unique type of nostalgia, I was left disappointed.

I then stumbled upon a video on YouTube with 3,000 views entitled Anemoia: Memories You Never Had. Someone must have coined the term anemoia for the exact feeling of nostalgia I’ve described. This was reassuring⁠—it showed me that there are other people who feel this same nostalgia, and that I’m not a complete crackpot :-). 

The fact that anemoia isn’t listed in any official dictionary doesn’t deter me; this type of word-play excites me. It’s always nice to know that despite the beauty of the English language, its official lexicon still doesn’t quite yet encompass the full diversity of possible human emotions. 

Nostalgia in Other Languages

There are, of course, approximately 6,500 other languages spoken around the world. And being someone who loves language, I felt writing this blog post provided ample opportunity to seek out words that describe this anemoia; this yearning for a time you’ve never experienced. 

Thankfully, my research was fruitful. Part of my professional writing work is to be a whizz with Google and unearth research, statistics, or insights that articles on similar topics have not yet mentioned. My Googling prowess transferred nicely to this bit of personal blog research, and I found two words that are somewhat sufficient in their definitions. 

What is Sehnsucht?

The first term is a German noun: Sehnsucht. This is described as an intense yearning or longing for something that you can’t quite pin down or explain. Sehnsucht kind of describes what I feel when listening to Learning to Fly.

I know I’ve mentioned longing for specific things about 1980s America, but the emotion itself is less concrete—it is a general nostalgia for life back then, and the examples I gave were just snippets of what that nostalgia encompasses for me. 

(As a random tangential tidbit of information, the German band Rammstein’s second album was named Sehnsucht.) 

Anyway, an interesting 2009 paper in the Journal of Research in Personality explores Sehnsucht from a scientific, experimental, and psychological standpoint. The paper is titled, “What is it we are longing for? Psychological and demographic factors influencing the contents of Sehnsucht (life longings).”

According to the authors of the paper, Sehnsucht is a word that captures feelings of an incomplete aspect of one’s past, present or future, coupled with the desire for alternative experiences. One of the central characteristics of this complex emotion is the feeling of lack or incompleteness in one’s life.

Relating this back to my original nostalgia, I guess I possibly spent too much of my teenage years playing video games, and not enough time being present with my friends. Certain songs and images can tap into this feeling of incompleteness, creating a longing for something different; a depiction of the lifestyle of American youths that was perhaps subconsciously idealized from reading Stephen King’s novels (you know, the background story before the killer clown kills everyone or the telepathic demon child destroys the place). 

The second interesting characteristic of Sehnsucht is that it invokes yearnings for utopian versions of what we lack. All of my examples above highlighting what I “miss” about life in 1980s America were not only strikingly positive; they were also utopian in nature. This nostalgia for times we’ve never known tends to entirely overlook the struggles specific to what we imagine we’re missing about a time we’ve never lived in.

The 1980s, of course, were not all fine and dandy. Raegan’s economic policy caused a terrible recession in early 1980s America, which the country admittedly recovered strongly from towards the middle and latter part of the decade. America in the 80s went through a huge cocaine and crack problem. There was a global AIDS epidemic to contend with, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster caused serious, widespread damage both to the environment and to human life. 

Life longings like these seem to hint at an individual’s reflection on their imperfect stages of development. Playing the role of a self-diagnosing amateur psychologist for a moment, maybe my nostalgia for the 80s arises because I feel my teenage years were not what they could’ve been or what I wish they were. But don’t we all have regrets about some parts of life?

Maybe there’s no need to analyze my anemoia or Sehnsucht so deeply⁠—it could be a latent feeling that everyone has the capacity for, even those who feel like all stages of life have gone well for them. 

Saudade

The second word I found is Portuguese in origin, and it probably describes even more succinctly the type of nostalgia that is the topic of this article. This is a deeply emotional state of longing that is difficult to translate into English. 

According to a really nice blog post on the Rosetta Stone website, saudade is “a yearning for a happiness that has passed, or perhaps never even existed. It carries with it a touch of melancholy, yet in that wistfulness, there is love as well.”

This more accurately encapsulates the emotion I feel when listening to certain songs or viewing certain images. I gave some utopian examples above of what I felt like I miss about 1980s America, but what those examples neglected to convey was a kind of bittersweet undertone to the nostalgia. 

Whether Sehnsucht or saudade represent this feeling better, I haven’t quite decided. Both words are great, and it has been fascinating to explore this intersection of complex human emotions and linguistics. 

I don’t know if I’m shouting into the void on this blog or if I have readers, but if you have read this and it resonates, I’d love you to share some of your own personal experiences of nostalgia for a time you’ve never lived in. Write a comment below the article.

Thanks for reading. The below suggestions are some excellent books set in the 1980s that kind of influenced my perception of growing up during that era, particularly in America.

The post Exploring Anemoia: Nostalgia for a Time You’ve Never Known appeared first on Cerebrotonic.

Originally launched on Christmas Eve 2009, the Joe Rogan Experience is one of the world’s most successful podcasts. Rogan himself wears many hats; aside from running his JRE podcast, he is also a UFC commentator, a standup comedian, and a martial arts fanatic.

His work ethic is tremendous. This is a man who embraces putting himself under mental and physical stress. As Rogan himself once said, “One of the most fascinating lessons I’ve absorbed about life is that the struggle is good.”

Joe gets a lot of unnecessary flak from certain quarters. He is often accused of being a gateway to the alt-right even though he has several times said he leans to the left on the political spectrum. He has also offered opinions that back that up. I think he also doesn’t get enough credit for being able to hold intelligent discussions with some of the smartest people on the planet.

Even though it is marketed as a primarily comedic podcast, in my opinion, by far the best guests have been non-comedians. Rogan often recruits people at the top of their game in fields other than comedy, some of whom have veered between being really fascinating to downright educational. Rogan really shines as an interviewer because he asks intelligent questions and lets the other person do most of the talking.

I’ve decided to write here about five JRE episodes I found to be incredibly informative. I’ll also provide some key takeaways from each episode for those of you who don’t have the time to go and listen to them.

1. The Science of Aging with David Sinclair – Episode #1234

David Sinclair is an Australian biologist who works at the forefront of anti-aging science. It was insightful to hear Sinclair describe how he approaches aging as a disease to be treated rather than an inextricable part of life.

In this JRE episode, Sinclair presents some of his main research and discoveries on how aging can potentially be slowed down. Here are some key takeaways you might find useful:

• Intermittent fasting, where you stop eating for 14 to 20 hours each day, helps slow down the aging process and improve longevity.
• Resveratrol shows great promise in fighting aging. This plant phenol is perhaps best known as a component of red wine, however, Sinclair recommends supplementing with resveratrol at 500mg per day. Here is a link to a high-quality resveratrol supplement on Amazon.
• Another supplement David Sinclair recommends as being helpful for slowing down the aging process is Nicotinamide Riboside (NR). He takes 500 mg each morning. Here is an NR supplement you can get by an excellent company named Tru Niagen.
• Exercise and putting the body under temperature stress can help to fight aging. Stress doesn’t mean doing something silly like climbing a dangerous mountain in freezing temperatures. Sinclair recommends going to the sauna once or twice per week in addition to exercising daily. You could also try cryotherapy if it’s affordable/available to you.

2. Nutritional  Science with Dr. Rhonda Patrick – #1178

Rhonda Patrick has appeared several times on JRE at this stage and each time she has been really interesting to listen to. The latest appearance came in episode 1178, during which the nutritional health expert revealed the details of hordes of interesting studies and the latest research in the field of nutritional science.

Here are some of the key takeaways from Rhonda Patrick on JRE episode 1178:

• The gut microbiome plays a hugely important role in human health and disease. Fasting has positive benefits for the gut microbiome. Most likely, a prolonged 48-hour fast three to four times per year will be of best help but intermittent fasting also brings positive changes.
• Sulforaphane, a compound found in high concentrations in broccoli sprouts, has incredibly potent benefits for many aspects of health. Dr.Patrick revealed research showing sulforaphane lowered biomarkers for prostate cancer, it promotes excretion of harmful contaminants from air pollution, and it decreases oxidative DNA damage.
• Fish oil can lower cardiovascular disease risk by up to 30 percent.
• Using the sauna before working out reduces muscle soreness. Furthermore, saunas can provide anti-inflammatory benefits to the body.

3. Mushrooms and Mycology with Paul Stamets – #1035

I challenge anyone to listen to this podcast and not feel like you could listen to Paul Stamets speak about fungi for eternity. This is a man who has spent his life studying the mysterious and frequently mind-blowing world of fungi.

Here are some of the main interesting things learned from listening to Paul Stamets on JRE:

• Lion’s mane mushrooms promote neurogenesis, which means they help produce neural stem cells and reduce cognitive decline.
• Humans are remarkably similar to fungi, in fact, we descended from them and we share more traits in common with them than any other kingdom.
• The largest living organism in the world is a type of honey mushroom which is an incredible 2,200 acres in size.
• Enoki mushrooms have potentially potent anti-cancer effects. One epidemiological study conducted in Japan uncovered a marked decline in cancer rates among people who consumed enoki mushrooms regularly.

4. Physics and Cosmology with Brian Cox – #1233

Brian Cox is a physicist hailing from Oldham, England. Not only is he incredibly intelligent, but Cox is fascinating to listen to and he seems like a genuinely nice person to speak with. Cox drew inspiration for learning about physics from Carl Sagan’s critically-acclaimed television series and book, Cosmos.

Here are some of the more interesting cosmological takeaways that Brian Cox gave us as food for thought in JRE number 1233:

• There are an estimated 20 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way alone. The Milky Way is one of an estimated one hundred billion galaxies in the universe! So, where the hell is everybody and why haven’t they contacted us? At this point, I’ll take the opportunity to link you to one of the best articles on the Internet – The Fermi Paradox.
• The universe is composed of 5 times as much of a mysterious type of matter known as dark matter as there is normal matter. Dark matter interacts extremely weakly with normal matter, which is why we can’t notice it.
• The universe is made up of 70 percent dark energy, which is responsible for the universe expanding at an accelerating rate, completely contrary to what scientists thought. The presence of this dark energy aligns with Einstein’s original equations which featured a so-called cosmological constant.

5. Psychedelic research with Michael Pollan – #1121

Michael Pollan is an award-winning journalist and author who appeared on JRE back in 2018 to coincide with the release of his new book, How to Change Your Mind, which explores some of the profound positive impacts that psychedelics can have on a variety of mental illnesses. The book itself is an amazing read, and the podcast discussion is based on much of the book’s material. However, Pollan is as interesting to listen to as he is to read.

Here are some of the most interesting tidbits from Pollan’s appearance on JRE:

• It’s highly likely, according to Pollan, that psychedelic use influenced the development of religious ideas. He makes reference to the example of the Greeks who had profound psychedelic experiences after drinking wine, which was most likely fortified with an as yet unknown psychedelic substance.
• Ingesting psilocybin while terminally ill has profound impacts on patients’ fears about death. In fact, the vast majority of people in a particular study showed marked alleviation of death anxiety after their psilocybin experience.
• When researchers imaged the brains of people during psychedelic trips using fMRI technology, they found a huge reduction of activity in a region known as the default mode network. This region can be regarded as the “location” of our egos. The fact that activity is reduced here upon ingestion of psychedelics coincides with what many trip reports describe as the disappearance of boundaries between self and other.

Closing Thoughts

I’m going to wrap up this post now on my favourite and most informative Joe Rogan Experience podcast episodes. I hope you’ve learned something interesting in this article but I’d really recommend listening to the above podcasts in full if you have the time.

Even if you have no interest in the normal eclectic mix of standup comedians or fighters that Rogan invites onto his podcast, it’s definitely worth keeping an eye out for scientists, authors, journalists and intellectuals who frequently appear on the show.

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“People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’ There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever.” – George Mallory

Mount Everest, the highest point on the planet, was in the news again for all the wrong reasons recently after an Irish university professor’s assistant named Shay Lawless was killed while descending from its 29,029-foot summit.

In some even more disturbing news, another Irishman – Kevin Hynes – died on the mountain just a few days after I wrote this post. The cause was severe overcrowding near the summit of Everest.

Being from Ireland myself, this story caught my interest to the point that I went and bought two books about Everest expeditions and watched a ton of Everest documentaries.

The uncomfortable background to this tragic death is that Shay’s wife was pregnant when he summited the mountain that local Nepalese people call “Goddess of The Sky”.

But Shay is not an enigma in this regard; each year, hundreds of people with loving husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, siblings, and children attempt to scale dangerous mountains like Everest and K2. Quite often, these ambitious thrill-seekers have minimal climbing experience.

There seems to be an innate drive in certain people to climb the most treacherous mountains that causes them to recklessly discard reason or logic.  

So, where does the desire to climb to almost the altitude of a cruising commercial jet come from?  

This question gives much food for thought to a naturally quite cautious person like myself. Trying to answer it reveals much about the human condition and the way to live life.

People Climb Dangerous Mountains Because They Can

The opening quote to this article was written by George Mallory, a famous English mountaineer who almost summited Everest back in 1924. Mallory’s corpse was discovered on the mountain almost 75 years later. The quote seems to give no good reason for any person to put their worldly duties on hold and risk their lives to climb a mountain.

However, Mallory did elaborate further on what draws mountaineers, both inexperienced and masters, to places like Mount Everest. When asked during a 1923 New York Times interview why he wanted to climb Everest, Mallory quipped, “Because it’s there”.

I believe that deep down, many climbers would agree with Mallory’s attitude to extreme mountaineering and to life in general. There is no good reason to do it except for the mere enjoyment of the activity. This is quite a Zen-like outlook that we could all apply to our hobbies.

Many people who go to the gym, for example, do so in pursuit of validation or a better body. However, the people who stick with it are those who actually enjoy the pain and challenges of exercise; those other nice things are byproducts of the activity. 

Conquering Internal Challenges

Not everyone has the same outlook and inspiration, of course. In his excellent and thrilling book about the 1996 Everest disaster, Into Thin Air, journalist Jon Krakauer provides valuable insight into the motivations of a person who wants desperately to get the best of one of Earth’s eight-thousanders.

“I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking, above else, something like a state of grace.”

Above 8,000 metres, climbers enter into the aptly named Death Zone. At this altitude, there isn’t enough oxygen in the air to support human life. The conditions on the Death Zone are so extreme that if you or I were transported from sea level directly to this altitude, we would collapse and lose consciousness within two to three minutes of exposure to the air. Hence the need for oxygen masks on airplanes. 

Even those acclimatized to high altitude find it a struggle to navigate this terrain. Each step is exhausting, your thoughts slow down, your heart thuds rapidly. Expeditions to Everest typically take two months to complete, most of which is spent teaching your body not to die at high altitudes.

There is not a person on Earth to whom the Death Zone doesn’t sound fucking terrifying. It is a place beyond the limits of humans to survive for much longer than a day. It is the pinnacle of mental and physical stress.  

Mountains like Everest act as an external objectification of our greatest internal challenges. When certain personalities confront Everest, they vividly see their fears and limitations in front of them, transformed from the inner secrecy of the complex mind to raw, brutal physical objects they can conquer.

Getting to the top of the mountain is getting to the top of yourself, and it is easy to see why it’s so alluring in this light.

Egoic Delusion  

It’s impossible to answer this question without reference to those who are deluded into thinking it will satisfy their ego to say they’ve climbed Everest or any huge mountain. As Jon Krakauer describes in Into Thin Air, “Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics, and others with a shaky hold on reality.”

It’s an undeniable truth that a significant proportion of Everest climbers want to do it because of their egos, particularly those people who know deep down they don’t have the skills or the experience. It is often the default position of the cynic to tar inexperienced mountaineers with the same brush as deluded reckless and selfish people but not everybody is in it for the Instagram likes and the congratulatory messages.

Summiting Everest is no mean feat, but it is also nothing novel. Over 4,000 people have gone to the top of the world since Sir Edmund Hillary first arrived there back in 1953 alongside Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. One has to ask how much can it satisfy your ego to be the 4,131st person to reach the peak of a mountain? The much more technically demanding K2 has been summited by well over 300 people at this point so while it is an excellent feat, it is no longer ground-breaking.

I believe it’s important for more people to show humility when considering climbing any big mountain. People need to take a long, hard look at themselves and be honest with their shortcomings as climbers. People need to look outside themselves; to their families, to others who may experience the ripple effects of something going wrong. It’s not only the climber who suffers.

This is particularly pertinent considering inexperienced climbers endanger not only themselves; they also endanger other climbers and their guides. The Nepalese ethnic Sherpa group have suffered most as a result of the commercialization of climbing Everest; one-third of deaths on the mountain were Sherpa climbers.

Lessons Learned

It’s easy for me or anyone else behind a keyboard to castigate people who seemingly abandon their families and risk their lives just to climb a mountain. The common critic of extreme mountaineering tends to conclude that those who fall victim on their expeditions got what they asked for.

However, delving further into this topic, I have learned valuable life lessons from these risk-taking climbers. There is much more nuance involved than attributing it as mere reckless thrill-seeking. Reading extensively about Everest served as a thumping reminder of how crucial it is that we all try to find activities and hobbies in life that bring us joy merely from the act of doing them.

That doesn’t mean you or I need to go to Nepal and climb to almost 30,000-feet, but it might be a good idea to reconsider how we use our leisure time. For me, that means less social media use or pointless Internet browsing and more guitar, more recreational soccer; two activities I enjoy doing for the sake of doing them.

I was also reminded of how powerful the human ego can be to the point that one person’s desire for recognition or fame can destroy many lives. It’s always good to keep our egos in check. Seeking recognition or validation is the polar opposite motivation to doing something for the joy, for the sake of it.

Lastly, we all have things in life we fear, both mental and physical obstacles, whether they be heights, public speaking, flying, or spiders. Some people fear discomfort—they avoid doing anything outside of their own comfortable bubbles.

I believe we can draw much inspiration from people who climb dangerous mountains in terms of beating our inner demons. I’m not saying it is necessary to go to such extremes, but join a local Toastmasters, learn a martial art, take a short flight. Never forget the importance of actively seeking out discomfort if you want to experience true personal growth.

As Mallory put it after he summited Mont Blanc in 1918, “have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves.”

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