I recently had an assignment for one of my Psychology classes about death anxiety. It had me thinking about my past struggles with death anxiety and how my adventurous lifestyle is somewhat contradictory to anxious feelings about death. After writing the assignment, I thought it would be valuable to write out my thoughts here, specifically relating to adventure.
Also, as an aside, the tile image for this post is of a place that gave me refuge during the initial COVID lockdown. I learned to develop sport and trad routes, deep water soloed for the first time, and got through a breakup there. I don't have any pictures associated with these ramblings, so I thought I'd pick a place close to me for the tile!

When adventuring at pretty much any level, death is everpresent. While death is everpresent for most adventuresports, the more serious you get about adventuring, the more obvious it becomes. Just a few weeks ago, a woman died while cragging in Joshua Tree NP due to an anchor failure. Most adventurers have a host of stories they could tell you about someone who died to a preventable accident.
Which brings me to my personal experience and my personal thoughts on death, risk, and why we partake in such adventures at all.
I've only had one near death experience in my 4 years of adventuring, and, as with most, it was very preventable. It was the first canyon I had ever done, and the last drop was 150 feet long; ~40 feet through a large tube, then ~110 feet free hanging to the ground. There had been several other, shorter drops that we had done, but this one was long enough to necessitate a pull-cord with a 'biner block, making it a single strand rappell rather than a double strand rappell, as the others had been. 10 feet into the rappell, I realized that my prussik backup was totally useless as it didn't have enough loops to catch the rope. I wrapped the rope around the rappell device (a piranha) several times to hold me in place as I untied and retied my prussik. As I was working on retying the prussik, my wraps came undone, and my heart leapt into my throat. I scrabbled with my feet against the wall and snapped my hand to the break strand to keep me from whizzing down the rope to the ground over 100 feet below. I got it. I held the break strand down with a vice grip as I finished tying my prussik one handed, then finished the rappell.
Weirdly, I wasn't as shaken as I thought, or perhaps should have been. I knew what I had been getting myself into, I should have known to tie more loops in my prussik, and I should have known to tie a reliable knot to hold me in place as I fixed the prussik. No if's and but's about it, I messed up, and I got away with it. However, I easily could have been a Yahoo! News article reporting a regrettable canyoneering accident in Escalante NP.
This experience, combined with the many accident reports I've read, really drove home how dealing with heights and adverse conditions in rock climbing, canyoneering, or caving can bring you incredibly close to death. A single error in judgement can bring it all to an end. Yet I still do it. I do it not because I’m young, dumb, and missing the awareness that life can be ephemeral. I do it because I know that life can be ephemeral. I gain a unique appreciation for life by getting in touch with its fragility, which allows me to appreciate how lucky I am to be living and experiencing life as I am.

Every choice you make has risk. Even everyday choices, like whether to have a daily soda, can be life threatening, but those risks in adventure are often a lot more in-your-face with the risks. If I had a life insurance policy I'd have a higher premium as soon as I wrote down my hobbies. I still have these hobbies because I want to have a life well-lived. I want to be an old man with a lot of memories to look back on and crazy stories to tell. This goal justifies the risks. If I were to put down adventuring to ensure I lived to an old age, what kind of life would I look back on? I would have hidden from my drive to explore and experience everything the wilderness has to offer; I would have hidden from the person I want to be. Dying in that pursuit would be a huge bummer, because I'm looking forward to being old one day, but that is still better than the alternative: living a life untrue to myself.

Footnote: I don't mean to imply that all risks are inherently present in adventure. I made a point of mentioning that most accidents are entirely preventable. Compared to rappelling accidents, accidents from rockfall (an actually unpreventable accident) are exceedingly rare. I fully intend on growing to a ripe old age while adventuring by doing my best to mitigate every risk possible while still engaging in the activities I want to do.
For example, I love to climb alone, but I'm not a huge fan of bouldering. I love being by myself high up on a rock face, alone with my thoughts and nature. Yet, free soloing is too risky to justify climbing alone. For that reason I go through the whole hassle of rope soloing, where, if I were to fall, it's a lot less likely to be game over.

All of life is calculated risk. It's up to each and every one of us to decide for ourselves what level of risk we can tolerate when making a decision.