As your unselected quip about bodies on Everest points out, there is survivorship bias in these kinds of stories. The explorers who died ignominiously from an infected toenail before they even made it very far up the Niger don't write books. Neither do the sweetest sorts of men who die face down.

What is it that adventurers like Wade Davis and Sebastian Snow, or Rienhold Messner or William Vollmann have that allows them to do these things? Is it a disregard for the future? Or the opposite: an insane belief in some grandiose future that is really more of a fantasy than anything else. Because some of it is that they tell us about it. They are telling the story.

Still: I know that I've managed to stop myself from adventure. Maybe it is the love of comfort or that I am unwilling to face fear, but somehow I don't seem to seek it out anymore. I think I've settled for a maintenance dose of much smaller adventures.