3 ms·

> I've never met an irresponsible soloist who wasn't a beautiful soul. Romanticizing suicide is gross.

• ke88y 3y ago
  Demonizing people connecting with one another through shared pain is even worse.
• sneak 3y ago
  Explicit suicide, while every adult's human right (in my view), is not precisely congruent with irresponsibly climbing things. There is an inequality between doing something explicitly to die and doing something that may cause death but probably, usually won't. Equating them is a mistake.
  • klipt 3y ago
    Maybe the probability of dying per climb is only a few percent. But probably goes up as the climber gets older. And if you are exposed to that high risk repeatedly, it's almost certain to kill you eventually. Of course everyone dies eventually, but I'm guessing the life expectancy of free soloers is significantly below average.
    • skeeter2020 3y ago
      Once you get beyond measuring the extremes like childhood & maternal mortality I think life expectancy is such a dumb stat, especially in developed countries where we rarely lead subsistence lifestyles. It should be about the contents of your life, and if you love climbing so much that you keep free-soloing to the age that it literally kills you I can't accept that as any sadder than quitting and then dying of old age.
  • taneq 3y ago
    If you do something potentially fatal enough times then fatality becomes a statistical certainty, just like Russian roulette.
  • bennyelv 3y ago
    Quite - free soloing and eating bacon are on the same scale just at opposite ends of it. Neither can really be classed as committing suicide - it has an explicitly different intent.
• pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  "they died doing what they love" is often used to soften the blow of someone's death for those left behind. Is there not some sort of romanticism in choosing how one dies?