Saturday, February 27, 2021

The Trouble With Normal Is It Always Gets Worse

Talking with youth the other day we got onto the topic of types of fun, the now ubiquitous three types of fun first made popular by Kelly Cordes who has had more type 3 fun adventures than most people alive today.

If you go back and read Sketchy Kelly's original article on the three types of fun it is quite clear that anything beyond type one fun involves significant risk to life and/or limb. After all, Kelly's description of type two fun is "swimming up sugar snow that collapsed beneath us, roped together without protection." Anyone with any climbing background immediately feels their sphincter tighten and recognises that this is a high consequence activity and is in no way analogous to just having a hard day out in the outdoors.


Storm bound on the Lillooet Icefield, PC. S. Fiddes


The youth I meet, who have never "enjoyed" any type two fun, argue that because most people don't do anything difficult or dangerous, the scale should slide down to accommodate the reality that type two fun for the bulk of the population is now having to walk into Maccas to order junk food instead of using the drive through.

This, I suspect, describes exactly how modern society has brought us to the place wherein we now reside. As physical and mental standards slip instead of asking why they are and how we can remedy that, we simply slide the bar of what is average down lower.

No comments:

Post a Comment