[saiya-jin]

Hold your horses a bit, you can't make such blank statements about somebody who you don't know at all. People are so vastly different and unique inside that what works for you and defines you might have little to no meaning to next guy. What you consider an important marker of some aspect of personality might be lacking elsewhere, yet the aspect itself might be very well there.

Psychedelic drugs can give you perspective on, well almost everything that nothing else in western culture comes even close to. Or might not, as said we are so unique that no blanket statement can express the truth.

As for me, doing some rather extreme sports puts me to situation with imminent fear of death (ie climbing hundreds of meters above ground, used to have strong vertigo all my life), that one becomes well-aware and content with it. Maybe not every climber, but definitely me.

If I experience my parents/life partner passing in my hands, it will be a tough moment. But I will manage it, no doubt there. Same goes for rest of close people. If you expose yourself to extremes, you become familiar with how you react to them, and also in managing them.

[fapjacks]

I agree with what you've said about extremities of life experience, and I agree that people fundamentally experience life differently from one another. As an exception among most of my peers, I support the notion that someone hardly exposed to danger could become affected by e.g. PTSD. But that being said, I can assure you that there is nothing that comes close to the experience of combat, and nothing-er still that comes close to experiencing it continuously across years. It's not like being in the same room when grandpa passes away. It's being consumed by human terminality, every conceivable permutation of mortal extreme. Surely you've read about the continual shelling of the trenches, and at least intellectually understood there's a difference. But even then, I'm sure there have been folks who, through their own relative existence and differential experience, have stumbled high on mushrooms on the same tacit wisdoms as those realized by ascetic monks who spend their entire lives on the edge of existential crises. I'm totally sure it happens, but it doesn't happen often. I'm surprised all the time, but just based on his reply, I made an educated guess, which turned out to be right. I don't have children, but I know enough people with kids to understand that having kids flips a bit in the human brain. It's an experience with a tacit component that can't be got by other means, though I'm sure someone's been there somehow that didn't involve creating a child. There are exceptions to every rule, but they are exceptions.