My own suspicion is that the drive toward goal establishment and goal completion is “hard wired.” Humans, like most animals and even plants, are maintained by complex arrays of homeostatic mechanisms that keep the body’s systems in equilibrium. Many of the miseries of mountaineering, such as hunger, thirst and pain, are manifestations of homeostatic mechanisms that motivate people to do what they need to survive . . . the visceral need for goal completion, then, may be simply another manifestation of the organism’s tendency to deal with problems—in this case the problem of executing motivated
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