I’m not one to go rock-climbing or bungee-jumping, but I have nevertheless longed, from time to time, for a taste of adventure in my largely unexciting suburban life. I therefore found the following comments on the subject most interesting:

Modern society, of course, has perfected the art of having nothing happen at all. There is nothing particularly wrong with this except that for vast numbers of Americans, as life has become staggeringly easy, it has also become vaguely unfulfilling. Life in modern society is designed to eliminate as many unforseen events as possible, and as inviting as that seems, it leaves us hopelessly underutilized. And that is where the idea of “adventure” comes in. The word comes from the Latin adventura, meaning “what must happen.” An adventure is a situation where the outcome is not entirely within your control. It’s up to fate, in other words. It should be pointed out that people whose lives are inherently dangerous, like coal miners or steelworkers, rarely seek “adventure.” Like most things, danger ceases to be interesting as soon as you have no choice in the matter. For the rest of us, threats to our safety and comfort have been so completely wiped out that we have to go out of our way to create them.

–Sebastian Junger, “Colter’s Way” in the collection Fire