Alex Honnold's next summit: the rest of his life
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I certainly respect how much work and preparation he puts into his climbs.
The question is: how is he different to the Everest glory hounds that I personally find objectionable? These are the people who basically pay $50k to "climb" Everest and largely get carried by the sherpas. Ask an experienced tour operator and, weather depending, they'll tell you they can probably get anyone to the top.
There are some key differences:
1. I honestly think the Everest glory hounds aren't doing it for the experience, for the most part. They're doing it for the bragging rights. It's the next level of Instagram flexing. Like it's the same people who go to Greece and the only thing they do is get a selfie at sunset in Santorini before moving on to the next Instagram stop.
2. Alex is actually doing things that have never been done before and some thought impossible.
You may view what Alex does as unsafe (I mean, I'd never do it) but it really is his life. Where my attitude turns is when someone has children. You see these stories all the time of [amateur climber] pursues life long dream of summitting Everest and dies leaving [wife and 3 small children].
The defenders will say that person is following their dreams and teaching their kids to do the same. Me? It's purely self-indulgent rationalization. If you're a parent, your kids need you more than you need to be the 6000th person to summit Everest.
Alex has a partner. She can make her own choices though. But your kids? They don't get a choice.
And I think his media presence is drastically different from Everest peak baggers: the media comes to Alex because he is a 1 in 7 billion human being, he does not approach the media in an attempt to brag about an accomplishment. Can you point to anything that indicates he does what he does for “fame from other”? In the dozens of hours of interviews I have watched he never once presents himself this way...
Free soloing relatively easy routes is also fairly common. Both for the challenge and in the case of easier routes as shortcuts to avoid a long walk around.
I think a lot of the anger boils down to limited experience driving peoples risk perception coupled to their own risk tolerance.
You answered your own question.
Alex is not "anyone."
His bit about empathy and the fact that he’s, “just learning [his] lines” is probably relatable to many here.
His comments about deciding to solo mostly because he wasn’t comfortable asking anyone to climb with him, and didn’t want anyone to see him do something stupid, while ranking in the top 2% on the Mensa test.
I came away sympathetic — recognizing a kindred spirit who’s capable of a lot, but had a hard time fitting in with the world, while everyone else just saw a very impressive asshole.
Great article that builds on all of the personal dynamics present in the film.
The guy has done some amazing feats, but he definitely seems as if he is on the spectrum.
Which makes him relatable to me and probably quite a few other programmers.
Relationships have ended over a lot less than one person potentially ending the others career by being careless. It isn't a trivial thing where her technique was wrong, she fucking dropped him and he was lucky to only have a simple broken foot.
The more interesting quote to me was when talking about the guy they both knew who died free soloing. The gf said it must be awful for the wife, and Alex (iirc) said "well what did she expect?".
If there's one thing I've learned about HackerNews, it's that everyone here is an exceptional but misunderstood genius.
>while everyone else just saw a very impressive asshole.
I don't know a single person who came away from this film with the impression that Alex Honnold is an asshole. Seems like an odd take, but nothing in today's world surprises me.
He didnt ask those people to love him, their emotions are not his responsibility, he gets to live his life the way he wants to. That's his right of existence.
there is no time in the world when it wasn't full of crazy.
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Traffic is heavy, giving us time to discuss the parts of his Free Solo persona with which he disagrees.
"Oh, the daredevil," he says.
"The asshole," Sanni says.
"No, no, I don't think that's part of the public persona."
"I think it is."
As far as free climbing goes, he’s on top of his game, and should be able to climb as he wishes I think. It’s his life, let him live it. But the list of dead free climbers that were once the best in the world, grows every year it seems....
And our lives really are, ultimately, our own. Well, at least until we bring kids into the world. We can certainly choose to give up part of this autonomy, but we shouldn't demand it from anyone else.
Also, yes internet I understand that falling from a mountain bike at a slow speed can impact your head just as hard as falling from a high speed, that isn't the point, or even entirely true.
Reckless behavior increases the impact on anyone involved in an accident with you, mentally impacts anyone that might see your brains splatter, increases insurance premiums, uses hospital resources, etc.
As well, insurance and hospital costs are likely reduced since I'm more often just dead rather than maimed. Plus I'll have less diabetes and heart disease since I'm not sitting inside watching CNN and Fox news all day getting fat and being "safe"
How do you know this? Have you interviewed everyone ever on why they got angry? There are a variety of reasons and it's very highly unlikely that you are correct.
I'm sorry, I can't agree with this. There's plenty of anger and disdain for all those things. There's plenty of "fuck fatties", "fuck rich fat cats", and "fuck drunks" sentiment, and I don't go out of my way to engage in communities I know to be hateful or particularly negative. (Unless HN counts??)
1. Public health campaigns - They don't get outraged by junk food, sports cars, etc. because there isn't advertising telling them it's unequivocally bad. Government will tell you that not wearing a helmet, smoking a cigarette, etc. is universally bad so it's easier for people to see someone "doing a bad thing". People get angry when other people "break the rules".
2. They know someone who was affected. I'm guessing if your cousin got hurt because they weren't wearing a helmet, you might carry some emotions that could be released when you see someone else taking the same risk.
3. Human nature. Back in tribes, if our Uncle was trying to scale giant cliff faces for fun, we'd be at greater risk of less food / losing a war if the tribe let him risk his life for little to no tribal gain. Especially if the young kids thought it was cool and wanted to try it too. People are persuadable and can be influenced. It's not unreasonable to think that glorifying death defying sports or financially rewarding them will result in more people risking their lives.
4. Bullying. If you see someone doing something different or not fitting in, some humans feel compelled to yell at that person to increase conformity and cohesion.
5. Low self confidence. They might be highly critical of themselves and see an opportunity to criticize others.
For me, #3 is the most common answer. People in strong, healthy communities feel safer so they probably don't want what they consider a "risky" behavior to spread.
No, please stop. This canard has been repeated by the anti-helmet crowd for decades, despite having been disproven countless times. Even if you're a number-crunching robot and care for nothing except how much cash it will cost today, helmets are a huge win.
> Also, yes internet I understand that falling from a mountain bike at a slow speed can impact your head just as hard as falling from a high speed, that isn't the point, or even entirely true.
You're riding so slowly that a fall won't impact your head much, but merely kill you?
In fact, my bike-loving, safety-loving friends never say they're angry at someone riding without a helmet. Usually someone just calls them an idiot.
But as others have said, in any country with a social safety net, someone's injury/death ends up taking resources away from others (hospital bills, loss of productivity, loss of repaying the cost of your childhood, not taking care of parents or kids, etc.)
There's nothing bizarre about seeing someone who abuses their safety net as selfish or irresponsible.
First of all, helmets dramatically reduce risk of injury[1]. Why do American football players wear them if they aren't protective?
Second, much of the bike riding done in the US is on roads shared with cars, and most of our accidents involve cars. We likely have more accidents per mile here than any place with dedicated bike infrastructure.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/sep/22/bicycle...
People aren’t angry at you for riding without a helmet, they’re angry at you for riding on the sidewalk
Neither of those is exactly a glowing recommendation in my book, though. If anything, they tend to make me suspicious, since it's hard to imagine any arenas where stability and sustainability are less valued than America and internet forums in 2019.
In specific contexts, even the most libertarian people seem to agree that complete autonomy simply isn't viable, e.g., in a spacecraft, or a military group in battle. When the survival of the group's members depends on everyone working together in a certain way, autonomy is surrendered.
I wonder if even America will come around on this issue in the future. As Buckminster Fuller said, we're all on Spaceship Earth. Its capacity for supporting human life looks more fragile now than any time I've been alive. I don't think Honnold's climb was particularly irresponsible, but there are countless actions that people do every day that are.
50 years ago, you could sit on your own land and burn a million gallons of oil, right up into the atmosphere, and we'd call that independence. Today, you're destroying our spaceship. (You didn't choose to live here, but neither did I.) There are many such issues that we once thought were only about individual freedom which have turned out to be global issues that affect us all. Every year, there seems to be less that I do that doesn't have far-reaching consequences.
The choice between Individual and Group isn't a binary decision -- almost nothing is -- but I've come to realize the sustainability threshold is much closer to the Group side than I ever before appreciated. We're way past Adam Smith.
I don't think it's that. In some video online it covers Alex getting a brain scan, to determine if the part responsible for fear is maybe broken. It turned out that it wasn't, it was just that Alex was such an experienced climber that he knows with full confidence what he has to do and what his limitations are. Him failing doesn't really factor in the calculus of his mind as a possibility.
http://nautil.us/issue/39/sport/the-strange-brain-of-the-wor...
As a climber who's met Honnold and many other extremely high-end climbers, it's a pretty common thread that they don't feel 100% alive except for when they climb. You may be able to argue that they're all depressed people trying to get their fix, but I don't think that's true. The thing is though, it can be hard to explain this phenomenon to people who don't have some sort of hobby that gives their life such purpose. I really enjoy my life outside of climbing, I honestly do. But it's the stories of adventure and hardship (even if self-imposed) that really enrich my life and have made me who I am. Honnold is similar, just a lot more so.
"No More Worlds to Conquer: Sixteen People Who Defined Their Time – And What They Did Next"
by Chris Wright