It adds nothing to the sum of human achievements. It's hardly a personal triumph. If you want to get very fit - a worthy goal - there are plenty of other ways to do that. It's also selfish, expensive and dangerous, for you and others.
I believe you have missed the short term vs long term risks. Most people think "selfish, expensive and dangerous" is a fantastic lifestyle, as long as the risks are long term.
The short term risk of dying on Everest is really low, like 5% or so (depending how you fudge the numbers, for example the death rate of people who summit is way higher than people who nope on the way to 3rd camp and come home, but on average someone who takes a leave of absence from work to "climb Everest" has about 95% chance of returning). Note that your very long term risk of death is approximately 100% so 5% isn't all that impressive.
The short term death rate from "selfish, expensive and dangerous" like smoking, drinking alcohol, eating fast food, watching TV is about zero plus or minus drunk driving. The long term death rate is far higher than climbing Everest.
So they just have a set of tradeoffs different than your own. More people have been killed watching TV shows about Everest because they sit on the couch and get fat and have a heart attack, than people killed actually climbing Everest.
The only thing sadder than people who died climbing Everest is people who died because they like bacon cheeseburgers too much, or they drink too much beer, or they got fat sitting on the couch watching Oprah reruns.
Its a grind game for stats like MMORPGs, a real physical grind.
For example, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2152659/I-strong-fee... lists 'overweight French journalist – a small woman weighing around 80kg, who had used her entire supply of oxygen before she'd reached any height at all, and an American of Turkish origin who was carrying his bicycle with him because it had always been his dream to take it to the summit and insisted on fulfilling that dream at whatever cost'.
http://failuremag.com/feature/article/into_sin_air/ includes "Since we’ve decided to measure everything on the planet against Everest there’s a group of people that feel incomplete without having climbed it. Consequently the majority of the people that go there aren’t seasoned mountaineers. Many of them have no interest in climbing any mountain other than Everest."
I can easily find other references if you wish.
I don't believe there are good numbers for the amount of experience that people who climb Everest have, compared to (say) K-2 or Annapurna, both of which are more fatal than Everest, or Cho Oyu, considered the easiest of the 8,000+ meter mountains.
But that suggests you might also not have a strong basis for your statement.
On the other hand I do agree that you have a sound theoretical argument that a famous summit like Everest is going to attract proportionally more crackpots than Cho Oyu.
I was thoroughly unimpressed by the Mail story and its implications. Here's a picture of about 100-200 climbers. Here's an explanation of why I think a whopping 2 of them don't belong there, although that's not very impressive. And here's a past glamour pic of two climbers who died but I very carefully avoid identifying the dead ones as being unqualified, which is bizarre because if they were unqualified it would certainly fit the predetermined conclusion of the article. So what the Mail implied was most of the climbers are noobs who die, but the facts of what it actually reported were very few climbers are unqualified or weirdos and deaths don't seem to correlate with qualification or lack thereof, so there really isn't much of a story. Just profiteering off tragedy.
I don't think anything can be learned from infotainment. Actual stats from reputable sources would be informative. Linkbait, eh, not so much.
But honestly, it isn't that hard to find people who weren't mountaineers who decided to climb Everest. In http://reachingbeyondtheclouds.com/?page_id=18 , "I became drawn to climb that mountain: the beauty, the challenge. Please realize that at the time I had climbed only Mt. Kilimanjaro and was no mountaineer." Due to medical reasons, "I had do it as soon as possible. ... I had to climb as many mountains as I could in a short amount of time." She started training in 2006 and was at the top of Everest on 2010. She only lists a few mountains that she summited before then.
http://mirandaluby.writersresidence.com/samples/on-top-of-th... describes someone whose "first ascent, up [Kilimanjaro], happened purely on a whim." Some time later, after experience 'backpacking at a high altitude for weeks', Simon "decided to give Aconcagua a go to see if I would get sick again", and then going through the tallest peaks for each continent. "Between expeditions, he kept his day job as an anaesthetist, and outside of work hours trained by running and riding" .. that is, not by climbing a large number of other mountains.
http://www.avagacser.com/ViewContent.aspx?mode=v&mediaID=23 describes Medvetz who, a year after a near fatal motorcycle accident which left him temporarily wheelchair bound "That's when I just decided ... I'm gonna climb Everest." "I lived in the Himalayas for about six months in villages and all around the Everest region," Medvetz explains. "I climbed all the smaller peaks around Everest, just training and preparing for it." I don't see evidence that he climbed even a hundred challenging mountains before trying Everest.
As it turns out, the group he went with was being filmed for the Discovery Channel. That, combined with other factors, let him to start a foundation to help wounded veterans do things like climb Everest. One of these in the near future is at http://theheroesproject.org/2013/11/sgt-thomas-charles-linvi... . I see no evidence that Linville has any mountaineering experience.
I found these with very little effort. While it's true that these people are physically fit, and have some training, it's pretty obvious that they are not highly experienced mountaineers who worked up to the Everest challenge by doing even a score of other technically difficult peaks first. Thus, it suggests that the anecdotal evidence from those "infotainment" articles has some basis in fact.
Does that satisfy you? ;)
There's another interesting wrinkle. Attempting to summit Everest unprepared is not a modern thing. Consider Maurice Wilson's 1934 attempt, based on little more than fasting and prayer. Or the 1962 attempt by Woodrow Wilson Sayre and 3 colleagues, described by Sayre in "Four Against Everest." One review says "This is a true, almost unbelievable story of a daring attempt by four amateur mountaineers - a college professor, a school teacher, a lawyer, and a geology student - to climb the highest peak in the world!"
A more correct analysis might look to see if the percentage of attempts by inexperienced has increased over the decades.
VLM claimed "Most of them have climbed a zillion other mountains." (I'll interpret 'zillion' to mean "very experienced mountaineers, with years of mountain climbing and 50+ difficult peaks summitted." Perhaps you have a better definition?)
I was curious of the evidence which might back the validity of that claim. It's certainly true that some people who climb Everest are not highly experienced mountaineers. While VLM rejected my original references, I quickly found some counter-examples which show that it is not the case that all Everest climbers are very experienced mountaineers. ("Not all" is obviously not the same as "not most".)
My point stands, which is there is no data backing the claim that "Most of them have climbed a zillion other mountains."
It might be that 95% are very experienced, in which case VLM is justified in making the assertion. It might be that only 30% are so experienced.
Ahh! Here's one possibility. http://www.wemjournal.org/article/S1080-6032%2806%2970297-6/... has in table 1 information about some of the people attempting in 2003. Of the 108 people surveyed, on average there were about 1.47 previous attempts at an 8000 meter peak, of which about 0.7 were of Everest.
The standard deviation is 2.03, which means the distribution is very skewed. One person who did all 14 eight-thousanders balances out a lot of first-timers.
They also asked about the highest previous climb, and report:
> A histogram of previous altitude ever attained (Figure 1) shows a distinct peak at about 7000m. This is likely because of the influence of Mt Aconcagua in South America, a popular training ground for would-be Mt Everest summiteers. Although highest previous altitude ever attained initially appears to be a good measure of a climber's experience, the natural paucity of high-altitude peaks and the strong bias of climbers summiting Mt Aconcagua means that it is not possible, with our data, to determine depth of experience. Many of the climbers in this study may have climbed only once at high altitude, with very little other experience.
That paper agrees with my belief, which is that there isn't enough information to meaningfully claim that "Most of them have climbed a zillion other mountains."
I've found greater satisfaction in parachuting than anything else I've tried in life. Parachuting was never a goal for me, but I found myself doing it one day and enjoying it. I kept doing it. It's rewarding in the same way as sports are, you find small goals and you reach them. You improve. You have a raison d'être. You feel things. Good things, horrible things, but you feel! You're not passing time. You're alive!
Had I been exposed to mountaineering earlier on in my life, maybe I would've been doing that instead. One should probably not underestimate the social aspect of such activities either. You do meet some great people.
People do it because it makes them happy.
People do things for a lot of reasons. "Because it makes them happy" is very low on that list of reasons.
Like, say, drug addicts and wife beaters, don't do what they do because "it makes them happy", the same thing applies to a lot of other stuff.
Other reasons: getting away from a situation that makes them unhappy instead of confronting it (e.g easier to risk death than deal with their family), trying to prove their "manhood", fashion for rich people, wanting to belong to an exclusive club, etc.
You seem to be surprised that someone can talk about other people's psychology. You know, there is such a thing as people having motives and hidden motives and other people discussing them.
In any case, I was speaking on aggregates. If you really want to learn about your specific psychology, visit a psychologist and tell him more about you. If you even browse relevant bibliography though, you'll find that "because it makes them happy" is quite low on the list of explanations for why people do things (or, more accurately, doesn't tell even half of the story, with the important part being: "WHY does it make them happy").
Being good and helping each other instead of climbing stupid mountains for machismo?
Its very much a personal triumph, as with endurance running and most other things it is not just (or at all) about fitness, there is a mental barrier that you have to cross in order to be able to do something like that. There is also the wonder in standing on top of the tallest place on earth.
I would definitely love to do it.
No, under the definition of having loved ones who will be terribly upset in case you die or irrepairably injure yourself.
I think it is rational to classify certain voluntary highly dangerous activities as selfish if others will suffer in case an accident happens to you.
By that definition all dangerous activities are selfish, I dont think thats useful.
Only proves that working on a startup can be selfish too.