In response to Laura Keynes: Thrill-seeking youngsters expose the emptiness of their everyday lives, Bugle wrote:
Sorry, Dr Keynes. As much as I admire this site and those who write for it, I think you’re wrong. The thing I most observe about young people is that they are full of life, and have an appetite for raw, irrational excitement. I think the time I would most like to have lived would have been the 1920s and 1930s – if you had a few quid especially – when amateurs raced primitive cars and flew primitive aircraft (including not a few women), and did so without the suffocating blanket of ‘health and safety’.
In my mind danger, in whatever form, is something humans need and enjoy; hence young people bungee jumping. This may indicate but does not prove that young people’s lives are hollow; it may indicate a certain banality of mind, but surely the answer to this is not to become overly cautious but to supplement raw excitement with some great culture.
I would add to this that part of the ‘feminisation’ of the world, which this site deplores, is the desire to make the world perfectly safe and risk-free. I’m not suggesting people should take absurd and uncalculated risks, only that risk is part of life and a part of life that fulfils us.
