Like pretty much every other personality trait, high sensa-
tion-seeking can help or it can get in the way. And like pretty much
any personality trait, it all depends on how it’s folded into your life
and how extreme the behavior becomes. Take extroversion. We
don’t think about extroversion as a problem to be fixed. In fact,
extroversion is encouraged and celebrated in our culture. However,
if you take extroversion to an extreme you end up with an over-
powered extrovert with few boundaries and so eager to fill their
social interaction tank they annoy the people around them.
It’s the same with sensation-seeking, just because someone
is a high sensation-seeker, doesn’t mean they are irresponsible and
out of control. In fact, for some, it’s precisely the opposite. It is their
deep love of life and the almost desperate knowledge that it is
fleeting that drives them to live close to the bone and “suck the
marrow out of life” as Thoreau once put it.^1 I have friends who
when trying a new food might take a small bite to see if they like it.
They nibble at the smallest piece to get the tiniest taste of it. My
high sensation-seeking friends are different. They’ll chomp like
hungry goats filling their mouths with an unfamiliar food and
decide to accept the gustatory consequences once it hits their
taste buds. Just like with food, high sensation-seekers take the
biggest bite out of life they can. They want to savor and intensify
their experiences, perhaps because they are deeply aware this
moment, right now, may be their one shot at doing something
extraordinary, and they are serious about collecting those experi-
ences for the “museum of the mind” that Victor described in
Chapter 3.
At the same time, it’s clear that in some cases the behaviors
just go too far, and high sensation-seekers who become too extreme
can harm themselves and others. Stalling a plane over the Gulf of
Mexico and expecting your new date to pull you out of it isn’t safe.
Driving too fast and too close, because you feel like you can is
dangerous. And, as you have learned, high sensation-seekers have
an increased risk of drug use and addiction, go through divorces
more often, and sometimes will take their behaviors to the very
edge of death.
With that said, I have rarely met a group of people so
friendly, so generous with their time, or so willing to explain and
share their experiences. Indeed, most of the high sensation-seekers
I met wanted, more than anything, for me to understand them,
even to be one of them. They wanted me to feel the rush that comes158 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:18:43, subject to the Cambridge