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We change jobs, leaping into the employment void, imagining rich opportunities everywhere. The quit rate, a measure of those who voluntarily left their most recent job, is at 14.5%, the highest in a decade. Even among those schooled in risk management, hotshot M.B.A.s who previously would have headed to Wall Street or Main Street, there is a predilection to spurn Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble in order to take a flyer on striking it rich quickly in dot.com land. "I didn't want someone in 20 years to ask me where I was when the Internet took off," says Greg Schoeny, a recent University of Denver M.B.A. who passed up opportunities with established technology firms like Lucent to work at an Internet start-up called STS Communications. Schoeny is a double-dare sort who also likes to ski in the Rockies' dangerous, unpatrolled backcountry.
A full 30% of this year's Harvard Business School graduates are joining venture-capital or high-tech firms, up from 12% just four years ago. "The extended period of prosperity has encouraged people to behave in ways they didn't behave in other times--the way people spend money, change jobs, the quit rate, day trading, and people really thinking they know more about the market than anyone else," says Peter Bernstein, an economic consultant and author of the best-selling Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk. "It takes a particular kind of environment for all these things to happen." That environment--unprecedented prosperity and almost a decade without a major ground war--may be what causes Americans to express some inveterate need to take risks.
There is a certain logic to it: at the end of a decade of American triumphalism abroad and prosperity at home, we could be seeking to upsize our personalities, our sense of ourselves. Perhaps we as a people are acting out our success as a nation, in a manner unfelt since the postwar era.
The rising popularity of extreme sports bespeaks an eagerness on the part of millions of Americans to participate in activities closer to the metaphorical edge, where danger, skill and fear combine to give weekend warriors and professional athletes alike a sense of pushing out personal boundaries. According to American Sports Data Inc., a consulting firm, participation in so-called extreme sports is way up. Snowboarding has grown 113% in five years and now boasts nearly 5.5 million participants. Mountain biking, skateboarding, scuba diving, you name the adventure sport--the growth curves reveal a nation that loves to play with danger. Contrast that with activities like baseball, touch football and aerobics, all of which have been in steady decline throughout the '90s.
The pursuits that are becoming more popular have one thing in common: the perception that they are somehow more challenging than a game of touch football. "Every human being with two legs, two arms is going to wonder how fast, how strong, how enduring he or she is," says Eric Perlman, a mountaineer and filmmaker specializing in extreme sports. "We are designed to experiment or die."