Psychological Factors in the Failed World Depth Record Attempt 2015

Interesting read, thanks for posting this. I was flabbergasted to see that he had only been diving for 4 years when he made the attempt.

Two points in this article really rang true to me in particular:

- the tendency for divers to speed through increasingly more advanced dive certifications. Often I'll be at the dive shop waiting on a tank fill, and I'll overhear somebody talking about how they had such a fun time during their beginner open water certification that they signed right up for advanced and divemaster courses. There's nothing wrong with educating oneself, but I think the false sense of mastery instilled by these courses is clearly a potential danger. The material learned in the class must be complemented by real-world experience for the concepts to become second-nature. The dive shops make money on this mindset too and so share lots of the guilt.

- going deep for the sake of going deep. There's always that one guy (it's always a guy in my experience) whose goal is to get deeper than everybody else on the boat. As far as I can tell, it's pure machismo. Not only does it lead to accidents like this, but you have less bottom time, worse visibility due to lower light, and in most places the richest animal life is not at the deepest part of the dive. So it's stupid. This article seems like that mindset taken to the extreme.

I don't want to speak callously of the dead, but this guy appears to have had it coming. And I think the dive shop that sponsored him should bear a big chunk of the responsibility for this accident, as outlined in the article.

Very nicely written article. You could apply the principles discussed here to any other dangerous sports, like boxing, racing etc. It is sad that our society rewards egoistic thoughts. People are happy to applaud someone boasting how deep they have gone underwater, yet no one wants to tell them that greater depths poses greater risk on the physiology of the body and psychology of the mind.

Am I the only one distracted by the blogger's blatant misuse of the semicolon?