Many people seem to consider death as the opposite of life, but I don't think of it like that. Death is simply the very last stages of life, not some kind of "counterlife" or much less some romantic force acting as a personality. Kind of like the opposite of 1 is -1, not 0. Death is 0. It is cold, impersonal, and in it self meaningless. It's not something you can look into to the eye and tell it to "stuff it".
Kind of like water. You cannot fight the water, because it doesn't care, or feel - it just is. If you dive too deep and get hurt, the water or sea didn't do that you, YOU did. I hate it when people say “the sea wasn’t ready for me”, when they mean “I wasn’t ready for the sea”.
At some point life ends for all of us, but there's no reason to be all weird about it. Death is the unimportant end of the life arch, not in it self worth of worship. Life is everything, the only thing. Worth conserving.
For me the whole “mystical side” of freediving is a huge red flag. That’s why I also reacted to this article a little strong (which as we might have guessed is not probably even close to what Will actually said).
To me freediving really is “just diving” just as death is “just dying”. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate diving, or life, on the contrary, these things are very special to me.
I can see where Eric is coming from (maybe). It’s a very different thing to do something as the first in the world, and in those conditions, than to do the same years later in good conditions. In a weird way I kind of agree, the “death wish” probably made the dives possible, giving you such an intense flow experience…But would I be right in guessing it kind of burnt you out too? That's the important difference in diving without the death wish. The aim is what ever you did you can reproduce, even improve. More importantly, you WANT to do it again, not killing your will to dive. There once was a diver that might have used the metaphors of "light side" and "dark side". I'm not saying this is what happened to you, it would be hypocirtical of me to claim I understand what you went through...
But what bothered me in the article and this discussion was the strange glorification of death. Like it was something to seek for or somehow an essential part of the sport. That flirting with death was somehow required, or cool…I don’t think it is.
Like Dave said, bearing extreme physical and mental uncomfort and putting your self in deliberate extreme danger are (to me) two different things. There is a difference in having an accident and asking for one. The kick comes from taking part in a potentially hazardous activity and doing it right, so that it becomes not hazardous. It is true it’s sometimes a fine line, but I really do hope we don’t see more and more people diving with a “death wish”. Of course to the outsider we all probably are “asking for it”, but I think there’s a lot of shades of gray in there.