Loss of Challenge
2 Dec 2015 12:44 PM
One of the clear victims of social progress in my opinion has been the loss or removal of challenge from our lives. We have got to the stage where everything we do is risk assessed to assure that anything we do is predictable. I am sure that this loss of challenge is being driven by the need to mitigate liability, but I can’t help wondering what it is doing to us and in particular younger people as they seek to develop their identities.
When I grew up we actively played sport in all manners of structure. It wasn’t uncommon for us as a group to get together and play soccer anywhere we wanted or to climb trees at will. Nowadays if a kid wants to play soccer or another sport he or she has to be escorted to a highly structured team or environment, constantly supervised and where risk is predictable. Unfortunately it doesn’t allow kids the benefits of unstructured “play” or the ability to push healthy physical boundaries and try and “experience what’s out there”. It’s now common for me to see mature age people seek to do our events so that they can discover challenge and experience its benefits as in the past. One of the most common questions I get to see asked is “am I still capable of doing what I did when I was 22?’ well the only way it seems that this question can be answered is by doing something that challenges the individual to get outside their norm.