I just decided I wanted to do something really cool...the music
inspired me. I gave up my apartment and stored my stuff with
friends. I had been reading about the South Pacific Islands and
how they do the traditional navigation, you know by the stars.
I was totally fascinated by it so I went out and I booked a ticket on
a plane. I decided I’d be gone for a year. I got to Samoa and I started
talking to some people who were about to set sail and asked if
I could come along. It was pretty cool, it’s like something you
might daydream about, but I did it.”
Why wouldn’t most of us pack up for an adventure holiday
to Samoa or a year of CouchSurfing around the world? For me it’s
because of the fear that it could go terribly wrong, you know,
Gilligan’s Island-orLost-style wrong. That’s not how high sensation-
seekers see it. They tend to have positive expectations about their
interactions with the world. Robert Franken and his team from the
University of Calgary surveyed both high and low sensation-seekers
and discovered a negative correlation between sensation-seeking
and the tendency to see the world as threatening.^27 That means the
higher the sensation-seeking score, the less likely one was to see the
world and situations as potentially dangerous. Anne is no excep-
tion, like the time she encountered a snake on a recent trip.
“Last year I was traveling in Joshua Tree National Park and
there was a big snake crossing the road, so I pulled my car over,
stopped all the traffic behind me so they wouldn’t run over the
snake. Once the snake was at the side of the road I ran over and
grabbed my camera, and I took pictures of it. The snake started
striking at me. I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ve never seen a striking
snake.’ I’m getting all these good shots of it. Then someone pulled
over and rolled down their window and said ‘You’re really brave!’
That moment I realized I was actually in danger.”
When I asked her what compels her to throw herself into
unfamiliar and potentially dangerous situations she seemed
puzzled by the question. “I trust myself,” she said matter of factly.
“No matter what situation I get myself into, I always find a way out.”
Anne’s examples are extreme but it’s not that unusual for
high sensation-seekers to travel spontaneously and immerse them-
selves in the cultures they visit. In 2004, Abraham Pizam and his
team conducted a survey of over 1,400 people in 11 different coun-
tries and found that high sensation-seekers were pretty different in
both their travel behavior and preferred activities as compared to
low sensation-seekers.^2857 / The Everyday Life of a High Sensation-SeekerDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:18:13, subject to the Cambridge