[canadianfella]

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

Romanticizing suicide is gross.

[ke88y]

Demonizing people connecting with one another through shared pain is even worse.

[sneak]

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]

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]

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]

If you do something potentially fatal enough times then fatality becomes a statistical certainty, just like Russian roulette.

[bennyelv]

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]

"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?