EQUALISING
Why don't you quit diving and spend your money on playing tennis? Wouldn't it be a lot cheaper and easier to get into basketball? Why on earth would you spend thousands of dollars on scuba diving, when the actual event is only a fraction of all the time and effort spent on preparing and training? Why is it that a growing number of people see all that time and effort worthwhile? Is there something unique about scuba diving?

Stress kills
Every fifth death in western countries is caused by cancer. What does that have to do with this article? At this point I would like to offer some statistical data about the relationship of our life-style and the causes of cancer too. Or suicides. The long-term effects of stress are widely studied and accepted. Read on, I'll spare you from the statistics. 
What you need is balance. Our working lives are busier than ever before and the whole planet seems to be spinning faster and faster each year. Cash registers are crunching, telephones are ringing and TV images are flickering faster, more often and with more noise than ever before in the history of our race. The few lucky individuals who make it home before dusk will face screaming kids stressed by over-crowded child care centers, or at least beeping microwave ovens and a wad of overdue bills. You may feel that the road to de-stress lies in front of the TV. Maybe not. The same hullabaloo continues on your television screen while the worn-out buttons of your remote control keep you drugged in to a chaotic coma. The evolution is too slow and our species has encountered adaptation problems with its own "progress."
What do the modern Homo sapiens do to alleviate the problem? They get themselves a hobby. According to the ad-man, it provides much needed balance to the daily rat race. And so the hinges in the doors of sports shops, gyms and pottery clubs are wearing out faster, more frequently and with more noise than ever before. There's no time for eating your vegetables or do meditation, when the five o'clock rush hour threatens to shorten your gym session. After a rough hour on the tennis court your body feels, if not more relaxed, somehow different. The more intellectual hobbyists may find themselves briefly forgetting the price of petrol while pondering over the chessboard the position of the Queen in a Sicilian defense. What about that scuba diving thing?  I thought it takes an awful lot of time and hard earned money. 

Why would you bother with a $400 dive course followed by a $2000 kit of equipment when you can pick up a tennis racket for sixty bucks or a pair of running shoes for the same price? Why would you spend thousands on a Red Sea Dive Safari, when you can go for a jog around the park for free? Wouldn't it be enough to play a game of patience with a two-dollar pack of cards and then watch the evening news? Couldn't you relax with a ten-dollar yoga lesson or catch a movie with the same price? Could you not find internal peace doing bird watching with a $120 pair of binoculars? What about knitting? Would that remove the anxiety? I would think that a good session in your local karate academy would send your worries away. What about trekking? Would nibbling on a charred sausage by the campfire cause the mortgage payments to depart from your cranium? I'm sure that a good hour and a half on the footy field or a tough hockey game would bring you closer to a spiritual re-birth. Maybe not. Somehow you always feel like being chained to the ever scheduled and hectic mundane life. 

It seems almost impossible to get totally detached from the noisy and miserable world, even for a moment. 

Outer Space?
We should try to find a hobby where we could slide into a perfect weightlessness. It would be nice to leave everything earthly behind and step into another world. Imagine flying like a bird without having to flap your wings, move like in a dream or in outer space, and yet be fully awake. What if you could see untouched nature and still be away from the terrestrial world of ours? It would be amazing to be able to float like a fairy in some magical state of being. Oh, how I wish there was a place where everything but breathing is new!

I can see the pieces of this puzzle falling into place. A couple of thousand dollars spent on a dive kit is starting to make sense! Five hours spent to achieve a 45 min. dive is starting to tempt me. In fact, scuba diving is the only sport that fulfills all the requirements laid out above. (I leave out the shuttle missions, as I understand that NASA is not currently offering competitive rates on space walks. Besides, I think the experience of a space walk would take second place compared to being under the ocean.)

"Equalizing" is now getting a whole new meaning. How many times have you thought of your mortgage payments while equalizing? How many times have you thought of the hurdles of your last working day 20 meters under the sea? Have you been discussing mundane matters while flying over the ocean floor? Have you ever noticed the noise of the traffic while looking at the fish cruising between your legs? Does a diver need to worry about a lost game, unfair referees or pulled muscles? Do you have performance pressure? No. Scuba diving is such a total experience that it sucks in every sense and brain cell in your body. It provides a complete healing of the soul without having to read the bible or learn to meditate. (All right, I admit that a bungee jump will do the same, but to stretch it out to 60 minutes is bloody hard!) 

Some time ago I read an article about the current state of the planet. The report revealed that the combined health care expenditure of the 67 poorest countries of the world equals the sum that the so-called western world spends on tranquillizers. The pharmaceutical industry is booming. At the same time PADI, SSI, CMAS, NAUI and others are recording increasing numbers of new divers. It seems clear that the modern Homo sapiens needs either Valium, or diving. Which one would you choose?