Anectdote: I was very into “extreme” sports as a kid and into adulthood. I eventually took up skydiving and had quite a bit of fun with it. Met a lot of old timers with a lot of jumps under their belt. An observation really struck me talking to them: the people at the top of “extreme” sports are not really adrenaline junkies, but control freaks.
survivor's bias? :P
But that’s exactly what a control freak would say ;)
The main reason is the temporary flattening of social hierarchies and true meritocracy where you are more valued for your skills than for your position in society.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/144344958X/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
The Ukraine situation by contrast had the contours of a crisis, and so did COVID-19 in the beginning. And in both cases we in the "developed" world watched our leaders squabble and foible and generally reveal their total unpreparedness. I can see how that's depressing.
Luckily, keeping up with that stuff day-to-day or even week-to-week is pretty pointless, so easy to avoid.
The knowledge of all those problems just goes on the pile of shit that I can't possibly deal with, so just have to try not to think about, along with things like existential dread, the fact that my living the way I do (so, like a normal developed-world person) is probably indirectly causing misery for someone somewhere (The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is, like much good speculative fiction, not about a fictional place but rather our current world), my hunch that cosmic horror probably comes about as close to capturing the nature of our existence and place in the universe as anything does (if only metaphorically), all that and the rest of the unhelpful crap that's probably true and real but also not especially actionable short of "kill yourself, or else devote yourself body and soul monk-/batman-like to some cause all the time every day, probably to no real effect except personal satisfaction".
I can't fight climate change, I can't fight COVID. I'm powerless against the specter of fascism. We have all these anxieties about what's happening, but no way we can do better. Frustrations and anger pile up but there's no catharsis. A lot of the time embracing the darkness in media is cathartic.
Perhaps we're simply missing having and being able to overcome pressing challenges as much as we're missing physical activity, nights without light pollution, or contact with nature?
And anyway, I only wrote that those kinds of things don't trigger that pleasant crisis-flow-state for me, not that I'm not worried about them.
Gotta be an acute crisis I can do something about, though. "Climate change" or whatever doesn't trigger that state.
If not for being pretty happy with being alive and having a body that's not broken and logically knowing how fast those things can change, I'd probably be really into extreme sports.