I’ve changed my view on this over the years as I’ve got older fwiw. I remember the Sunday Times Magazine led with a feature one year where they had profiles of every rider who’d died - I think it passed a landmark that year, 200 probably, and it was just so sad, I was devastated reading it. I couldn’t believe this thing still existed and was allowed to keep going.
But now I recognise there’s some really deep male need for danger and risk-taking that I don’t really understand but still recognise even in my middle-aged self, taking small pointless risks in my mundane life just because. I don’t know if you could ever quantify it or even properly rationalise it, but it seems pretty obvious to me that the whole trend towards safety and management, and indeed the general niceness that’s been increasing throughout my conscious adulthood, is absolutely killing us in other ways that don’t show up quite so obviously, like suicide stats or addictions, or the birth rate. There’s plenty of talk about a crisis of meaning, but you could just as simply call it something like boredom.
Just musings, like, and they might not even belong here - I just feel like it’s really important on some almost-spiritual level that things like the TT still exist. At the most basic level, there are clearly people who just have to live like this, and there always have been.
