Mastering the edge: How success raises the stakes for elite adventurers

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View our Twitter (X) feed View our Youtube channel View our Instagram feed View our Substack feed Search Popular SearchesCritical thinkingPhilosophyEmotional IntelligenceFree Will Latest Videos Latest Articles Mastering the edge: How success raises the stakes for elite adventurers

For elite climbers, divers, and explorers, mastery can fuel an escalation loop in which identity and danger rise together.

by Christopher Ferguson January 29, 2026 DeAgostini / Getty / Jacob Hege Key Takeaways

• Elite risk-takers are driven not just by thrill or biology, but by powerful social and psychological forces tied to identity, honor, and recognition.
• Cultural rewards for success — and the fear of public failure or shame — can distort how risks are perceived, making extreme danger feel rational or even necessary.
• When mastery and self-worth become inseparable, some individuals will push past reasonable limits in pursuit of meaning, even at the cost of their lives.

In the early 20th century, Western explorers became obsessed with the peak of Mount Everest. The roughly 29,000-foot-tall mountain had never been summited before, and the first person to do so would earn a spot in the record books. 

Among those who tried was George Mallory. In 1922, he was at the top of the mountaineering world, having just set a world altitude record on Everest; that expedition later earned his team Olympic medals for alpinism. But despite knowing the dangers of the mountain — several porters didn’t survive the 1922 expedition — he continued to pursue the summit, ultimately disappearing on Everest’s Northeast Ridge in 1924. 

Prior to his fatal attempt, a reporter asked Mallory why he wanted to climb the mountain, to which he famously replied, “Because it’s there.” But plenty of other people knew Mount Everest existed and had no desire to summit it. So what sets people like Mallory — we’ll call them “elite risk-takers” — apart from the rest of us?

Wired for adventure

Biology seems to play a small role. Men are over-represented in high-risk and adventure sports, and research consistently finds that men — especially young men — are more willing than women to take risks once they participate. It’s not surprising, then, that men account for 86.1% of mountaineering deaths in the Swiss Alps, 81.5% of fatal diving accidents, and roughly 80% of skiing deaths, many of which took place outside of marked trails and involved inadequate equipment.

But why are men more likely than women to take dangerous risks? The explanations appear, in part, rooted in our evolutionary past. Human males historically took on hunting and combat roles, protecting the females and young. This required greater propensity for risk-taking, and in indigenous societies, risk-taking was often rewarded with honor and status. As such, even in modern societies, young males tend to overperceive the benefits of risk-taking behavior and underperceive the hazards compared to young females.

I’m a man with a diving certificate, though, and you won’t catch me trying to dive deeper and deeper. Clearly, extreme risk-takers are driven by something beyond their biology, and evidence suggests that social and psychological factors also play into the willingness of some people to push themselves to go farther, higher, faster — even to the point of death. 

The social rewards of risk

Amelia Earhart is perhaps the best-known female elite risk-taker. By 1932, she was already famous for being the first woman (and second person overall) to cross the Atlantic in a plane solo. That accomplishment earned her the Distinguished Flying Cross, a medal typically awarded to military pilots — but Earhart wasn’t satisfied. She wanted to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, and while attempting the feat in 1937, her plane disappeared over the Pacific. 

Earhart was a champion of women in aviation and often said she was undertaking challenges to prove that women could accomplish them. It’s plausible that she may have felt pressure to keep achieving more as her successes may have been viewed as successes for all women at a time when they were pushing to be seen as more than mothers and housewives. The belief that their accomplishments have an impact beyond their own legacy could be what drives some elite risk-takers to keep pushing themselves. 

Another example of this is Dave Shaw, an expert cave diver who had already set several world records when he attempted a dangerous dive at Bushman’s Hole, South Africa, in 2004. In its depths, Shaw discovered the body of Deon Dreyer, who had died in the cave in 1994. Despite knowing how dangerous it would be, Shaw was determined to retrieve the body to give Dreyer’s parents closure. He died during the recovery attempt in January 2005, and his partner in the dive, Don Shirley, nearly did, too. The account of their effort is harrowing. 

The rescue of Dreyer would have been one for the record books — the deepest body recovery in diving history — and Shaw himself reportedly said prior to the attempt that he and his team were “doing this for the adventure of it.” However, he was obviously motivated by honor and bravery, too. He wanted to retrieve the body of a lost diver. “Dave felt very connected with Deon,” Shirley told Outside Magazine in August 2005. “He had found him, so it was like a personal thing that he should bring him back.”

The shame loop

Within the cultures of adventurers and extreme sports, high (but not necessarily foolhardy) risks are part of earning recognition, and participants are willing to push themselves in order to cultivate a reputation for daring or bravery. In some instances, they may also be motivated by a desire to avoid shame. 

Shame — the sense of having failed in the public sphere and becoming an object of ridicule — is a powerful emotion. It can even play a role in suicide, though this role is nuanced — the effect is dependent upon cultural contexts and whether the feeling of shame is mixed with guilt and internal evaluation of lower worth due to failure. This is not to say that risky adventurism is akin to suicide, but rather that fear of shame for attempting and failing an endeavor may alter the risk/reward calculus of elite risk-takers — even if the odds of success may be low, the risk of death can seem like a worthwhile price to pay to avoid the shame of failure. 

In the 19th century, failures were often satirized in cartoons, which may have motivated some elite risk-takers to push on with their attempts past the point of reason rather than face social ridicule. That hasn’t entirely vanished in the modern world. Witness, for instance, the vitriol that marked the implosion of the Titan submersible near the Titanic’s wreck, or the concept of Darwin Awards for those who die in extreme ways, including extreme sports. In a social situation where a single behavior can lead to accolades (if successful) or public ridicule (if failed), pushing risks past all reason may be understandable, particularly for individuals who have already built their identity and reputation around being an elite risk-taker. 

A cartoon published in Puck magazine in 1881. Credit: Puck

Identity at the edge

So far, this data focuses on external factors: how biology has wired men for higher levels of risk-taking and the social consequences of success or failure. But what is happening with individuals psychologically? 

Case studies of elite risk-takers reveal a pattern: The excitement and thrill of challenge, as well as the allure of feeling like part of a community of like-minded individuals, draw a person to an extreme activity. The person has initial successes, which lead to greater status in the adventuring group and perhaps even a level of renown in society at large.

Then begins a pattern of escalation. Mastery of the extreme sport requires seeking more difficult challenges. Confidence in one’s ability to meet those greater challenges grows. Perception of risks diminishes, perhaps not entirely, but enough to misperceive the balance of challenge versus ability. Faced with potentially insurmountable obstacles, the individual pushes on where others might turn back, and not only out of a desire for accolades or a fear of shame: By this point, their very sense of self may be on the line. 

In 2015, researchers in the U.K. conducted a small study of elite winter climbers that found that they felt like taking on potentially dangerous non-established routes was necessary to confirm their views of themselves as “masters in their field.” They identified as elite, but believed they must continue to push themselves in order to maintain that identity. When achieving the summit or the darkest depths becomes essential to self-worth, death can become a worthwhile risk for an extreme adventurer. 

Final thoughts

It’s hard to imagine that at least some elite risk-takers don’t regret their decisions when the writing is on the wall — during their free fall off the mountain or as they take their last breaths in the ocean’s depths, some must think that they would give anything to have just stayed at home. But surprisingly, that’s not the case for all.

British Royal Navy officer Robert Falcon Scott was already a well-respected Antarctic explorer when he led an expedition to the South Pole in 1911. The men had hoped to be the first to reach the destination, but arrived five weeks behind another group. If that wasn’t already devastating, they ran out of fuel and food on the return trip. Scott and his surviving companions were starving, riddled with frostbite, and experiencing hypothermia. “We shall stick it out to the end,” he wrote in his diary, which was later recovered, “but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.”

As their health failed, it became evident to all five men that they were doomed. One effectively committed suicide, walking off into the frozen waste to die. But even in his last diary entry, Scott appeared to stand by his expedition’s decision to push themselves to the limit, and express hope that — even if they weren’t able to master the frozen tundra — they might be remembered as courageous men:

We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last. But if we have been willing to give our lives to this enterprise, which is for the honour of our country, I appeal to our countrymen to see that those who depend on us are properly cared for. Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.

It’s easy to read these stories and shake our heads, but that misses what they reveal about the pursuit of mastery. Mallory, Earhart, Shaw, and Scott weren’t chasing death. They were chasing meaning — and in a culture that rewards daring and remembers only the winners, meaning can demand a staggering price.

Christopher Ferguson Christopher Ferguson is a PhD psychologist and professor at Stetson University. Full Profile

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