I love hiking! I love being outside, in large part because my work largely keeps me inside, and inside a city at that. Every time I go to the mountains my batteries get recharged.
Maybe it's just due to Facebook, but boy there seem to be a lot of people for whom hiking has become work. They post about their "goals for the winter." They post the number of the mountain before even the name--and many of these folks are doing so having hiked barely a dozen mountains. Maybe it isn't true, but I get the sense that those folks will not repeat a mountain before finishing off their 48, not for anything.
I read the question carefully and then I read the entire thread and the first response that came into my head was, what difference can it possibly make? (my tone here is friendly) Each person hikes for their own personal reason and the role that lists play is a bit different for each one. Nevertheless, just like with anthropology, I find the commonalities between people and populations to be of greater interest than the differences, which have been compared to as just different foam on the same beer. The sense I get from reading TR's of people who are completing peak lists is that the list itself becomes a sort of meta-experience that binds the individual hikes into a unified goal. And, humans are DNA-bound to be goal oriented in order to have survived. The list is a modern-day fun facsimile for actual survival. (we'd have to put hikers into functional MRI to verify that
) So, for first-timers, all caught up with the thrill and excitement of the "chase" of the list it's easy to understand not wanting to do "off-list" hikes.
And then some people like creating (contriving) really big goals, such as monthly and even weekly grids.
One indication to the power of the draw is that a list may serve to galvanize so many people into going out and hiking peaks of lesser interest in order to complete the list (no views, bad trails, long feature-poor approaches) or in bad weather. The boring peak gives increased meaning to all the other peaks. I think this is a great window that informs us as to human nature.
Also, we are a highly social species so doing a list serves to bind people into a community. There's that common experience that can be shared and talked about.
I think there is a difference between saying, "I love hiking, and I use a list to get me out to mountains I otherwise wouldn't hike." and "I'm hiking a list, and don't even think of asking me to hike a mountain when I've already checked the box off my spreadsheet."
It feels like the longer I'm in the hiking world, the larger the percentage of people I see in the latter category.
Without an actual unbiased survey I think this is speculative.
Maybe this is a loss, or maybe it's just inevitable if one goes to the mountains a lot. It just seems to me that there are a lot of people who don't go to the mountains a lot and still take the latter approach, for better or for worse.
This takes me back to the first answer I gave above. The reason I don't think it matters is that the thought processes that underlie other hikers' motivations and hiking experiences have no impact upon my own experience. Perhaps their attitudes will, in some convoluted way, affect my own experience down the road but I don't see how on first view.
As for Facebook, that's a whole 'nuther thread on its own. I see FB more as "look at me" whereas forums are more about sharing of info. Nevertheless, FB is also about keeping in touch with non-hiking family and friends. But as more and more forum people join FB they end up becoming friends and next thing you know rather than post on the forums and on FB they choose FB. The potent networking of FB does the rest. It's impossible to predict where people will take social media over the next few years. Who would have predicted the selfie and the selfie stick 10 years ago? Young women in Britain have been reported to spend 5 hours a week taking selfies.
Edit: To answer the question of the thread title: Yes. I hiked for about thirty years without "resorting" to lists. In fact I only learned of the list phenom when I began hiking in the NE in my late 40's.
