You’re walking out of a restaurant on a balmy spring evening. It’s been a lovely night and you’re heading to your car for the drive home. Just as you open the car door, a hand grabs your shoulder, forces you on the ground and a hood is placed over your head. You are bundled into a van, bound and gagged. This is the start of a terrifying kidnap ordeal. Hours later, you wake up on a cold metal trolley. It’s an autopsy table and you are in a morgue… That’ll be 900 Euros, please!
This is the latest experience on offer for thrill-seekers from French company Ultime Réalité. Forget bungee jumping or skiing down avalanches, the latest trend for adrenalin junkies is to pay to be kidnapped, without warning, and for an extra charge they’ll even throw in helicopters, escapes and ransoms. I know. I couldn’t believe it either. How can there possibly be a market for this sort of thing and isn’t it all in the worst possible taste? But, according to the firm’s website, since opening for business in January they are now receiving two requests a day from high-powered executives looking for the ultimate ride.
In a bid to make sense of this, I spoke to Psychologies’ psychotherapist Lucy Beresford. ‘Stressful times definitely make both sexes more likely to take more risks – a sort of “what the hell” attitude – but, as with many behaviours, the more you do the more you need to do to get the same ‘fix’. Hence the draw of ‘extreme’ pursuits.’ This makes sense. Once you’ve skydived out of a plane or swum in a cage surrounded by great whites, what’s left?
There’s something exciting about putting ourselves in a dangerous position, adds Dr Michael Sinclair, a City of London-based psychologist, ‘and it does sound quite exciting’, he admits to me.
He agrees that living in mentally tough times such as these have made their mark on our psyche. When we’re feeling fearful and under-confident, the reasoning goes, we seek out scary experiences that we can ultimately control (like a planned kidnap where you know it’ll be over by 10pm since you only paid for four hours), which can leave us feeling empowered and in control again.
I’m starting to understand the draw. Why spend time crippled with worry when a high-octane blast will relieve your anxiety? But I’m troubled by Lucy’s point about our need to ratchet up the risk each time to get our fix. When waking up in a morgue loses its thrill where can you possibly go next?
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