Extreme Spiciness
After reports of a teen dying after taking an extremely hot spice challenge, it made me think about the machismo around extreme experiences. In the Peak End Cognitive Bias, people remember the most intense and the end parts of an experience. Maybe this is why they we’re driven to being extreme. There’s the adage “what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger” but in many instances, it makes us weaker. In a recent interview, Nassim Taleb commented that you don’t become anti-fragile (resilient) by exposing yourself to things that will break you but by limiting exposure to those things that can end up having catastrophic outcomes.
In my own journey with heat, I’ve learned that there is a fine line between enjoyment and taste and something being intolerable and ruining dinner. I’ve, shamefully, had to throw away a dish of broccoli and cheese because a cayennetta decided to overreach on the Scoville chart.
Challenges like eating hot peppers without water or consuming too much water aren’t really character building. They’re not going to build grit like breath work, mindfulness, fasting, or going without a phone for a few days. Even those seemingly safe things need to be done with the downside in mind.
We can still embrace the Peak End bias for building our own fantastic and life altering experiences but we need to assume that even mild things can create disaster and prepare for them. There’s nothing to show off if you can’t live to tell about it.
