People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron… If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.
Climbing Everest: The Complete Writings of George Mallory
So I hauled my ass up 14,505 feet via the Mountaineers Route, the one that says “fuck your switchbacks” and points straight up the mountain’s throat, and all I left you with was this: one self-portrait, one dead Englishman’s quote about joy, and a title that admits the whole thing might just be you talking to yourself.
Which, let’s be honest, is exactly what it was. Every step of it.
The Mountaineers Route. Fuck. I scrambled up chutes and gullies and across that god-awful notch where the wind tried to erase me, where my hands were doing as much work as my legs, where every part of my body was screaming the same question Mallory tried to answer: “Why the fuck are we doing this?” And I did it in one day, which means I started in darkness and ended in darkness, which means somewhere around hour eight or nine, when my quads were molten and my lungs were two paper bags full of broken glass, I had a real genuine come-to-Jesus moment about whether sheer joy was really worth all this suffering.
But here’s the thing, and Mallory knew it, and I know it, standing there at the summit looking like every other exhausted pilgrim who ever pushed themselves past the point of reason, the question itself is the con. “What’s the use?” There is no use. That’s the whole fucking point. We’ve built a civilization that demands justification for everything, that needs ROI and metrics and purpose statements, and then we go out and do something completely, gloriously pointless, something that exists only in the doing of it, something that disappears the moment it’s over except for the ghost of it that lives in your legs for the next week.
I climbed it alone, that’s what solipsism means, right? Not just that maybe reality is all in my head, but that some experiences are so fundamentally interior, so completely my own private apocalypse, that even trying to share them is an act of failure. This photo is evidence that I was there, but it can’t transmit what it felt like when I topped out and the whole Sierra Nevada spread beneath me like proof of something I couldn’t quite name. It can’t show anyone the specific quality of my doubt at 13,000 feet, or the weird transcendence that happens when my body becomes just a machine I’m operating, or that moment of pure animal satisfaction when I made it and knew I’d made it.
And then you post it with Mallory’s words about joy being the end of life, about not living to eat and make money but eating and making money so we can live, and yeah, okay, that’s the romantic version. But the truth is messier. The truth is that you also did it because you’re fucked up in the exact right way, because there’s something broken or beautiful in you that needs to answer stupid questions like “Can I do this?” with your body instead of your brain. You did it because doing hard things for no reason is one of the last truly honest acts left to us. No career advancement, no likes, no audience except the mountain itself, which doesn’t give a shit whether you summit or die trying.
The struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, Mallory wrote that before Everest killed him, which maybe tells me something about the cost of that philosophy, or maybe just tells me he died doing exactly what he meant to do. I made it down. That’s the difference between a good story and a tragedy. But up there, for those hours, I was in the same conversation with the mountain that every climber has ever had, the one where the mountain asks “Why?” and I don’t have an answer except “Why not?” and somehow that’s enough.
Sheer joy. Sure. Joy and pain braided together so tight I can’t separate them. That’s the use of it. That’s what makes us human instead of just comfortable.