Way back when, long before YouTube put Andy Warhol’s words
to their most logical extreme, great feats of physical endurance were usually
carried out with some reward of societal achievement backing it: Swimming
unfathomably long stretches of water, navigating ungodly deserts and scaling
unimaginably high mountains; history has put a lot of weight behind the people
who did these things first. Now, humanity seems to have stopped caring as much
about discovering new frontiers to conquer (on Earth, at least) and now want to
share the experience as much as possible. It could be argued that this idea of
hosting events where these previously-superhuman feats are available to the
everyman cheapen the challenge of the event itself, but there is a feeling of
bringing the world closer together through collective experience that gives it
some urgency. This is why the idea of scaling Mt. Everest, barring my own
aversion to physical exercise, is weirdly appealing despite the very clear
danger involved. Something tells me that the idea is going to be substantially less appealing after sitting through
today’s subject.
