Conquering Mt Everest: romantic adventure or personal status pursuit?

WASHINGTON - Enthusiastic adventurers these days are prepared to pay any amount of money to, say, conquer the Everest but a new study asks: Is it an adventure characterizing communitarian spirit or just a selfish pursuit?

“In order to escape the rules, contraptions, and stresses of daily life in the city, many people search for new and liberating experiences that transcend their normal bureaucratic and corporate existence,” said Gulnur Tumbat (San Francisco State University) and Russell W. Belk (York University).

But even a romanticized adventure like this one has turned into just another competition, a pursuit for being the best.

“Although we were initially guided by the expectation of more of a communitarian spirit, we came to realize that consumer behaviour scholars had failed to appreciate and understand the competitive, individualistic, and status-seeking aspects of such activities,” the authors wrote.

“What they have is a forced companionship for many, far from any real spirit of community,” they said.

“Money versus personal skill and experience compete as climbers argue that they deserve to summit the mountain while others there do not.”

Results of the study indicated that climbers cared more about individual accomplishments.

“What we found in the context of Mount Everest is individualism, competitiveness, contradiction, and power-seeking through extreme experiences purchased from what is now known as the experience economy,” the authors said.

“Our study finds that extraordinary experiences, when bought in the marketplace, can be destructive of feelings of camaraderie and reinforce an individualistic and competitive ethos that I, the climber, am the only one who matters,” they concluded.

The study appears in the Journal of Consumer Research. (ANI)