The popularity of adventure recreation and adventure education has arisen, in part, from an assumption that adventure experiences are radically different from those of everyday life in modern societies. A paradox previously pointed out is that those seeking adventurous experiences often make use of technical and technological prosthetics, thus safeguarding against risk associated with adventure. This has generally been understood in the context of the risk society. However, a further and, we argue, deeper paradox than this is manifest in the current popularity of adventure recreation and adventure education. This is the conflict between the use of adventure to provide experiences supposedly "missing" in contemporary societies and the extensive centrality of notions and ideologies of adventure in the history, literature and process of economic expansion of those same societies. We explore this paradox by characterising the current focus on adventure as either deeply contradictory at the social and economic levels, or conversely, as an unintended and reflexive process of (adventurous) subversion of the economic and social forces that initially harnessed the notion of adventure. Our purpose in doing this is to offer a novel framework for researching the notion of adventure in outdoor recreation and outdoor education.