We were naked in bed, my girlfriend and I, and talking, as we often have, about mental health. Her struggles, my struggles, the world’s struggles. It was a warm afternoon in June. My double windows swung open to the back terrace to let in the Mediterranean city air.

She had just been to therapy, and me, I had just been outside climbing.

Why? she asked in return.

I took a long pause. There was something I’ve been trying to say for a long time about climbing, something that has been germinating in my writing for years, but was only recently clarified. It’s not like I haven’t already said a hundred times that climbing is my therapy—but there was more.

What I needed to do was write an entire post just about the mental health part. Because, dear reader, this applies to all of you.

I fear that as a species, as a global community, as a civilization, you might say, we have collectively lost touch with reality. And I believe climbing—specifically, projecting climbs outdoors (I’ll explain “projecting” in a moment)—may offer a lesson to help us find the way back to something resembling a functioning polity. A way back to a shared understanding of reality.

Not that society is going to collectively take up rock climbing and thereby resolve all its ills. But walk with me just a bit.

I.

Starting sometime at the end of April, beginning of May, it simply becomes too hot to climb in the sun here in Catalunya. You have to chase shade.

So it was that a small crew and I drove 45 minutes north from Barcelona toward Sant Llorenç del Munt. I had been twice before, but years ago, when I first moved to Barcelona. The rock is conglomerate, like the famous otherworldly nearby spires of Montserrat. Little pebbles, baseball-sized rocks, and the myriad detritus of geology baked into millions of years of sandstone. It looks cumbly, but it is surprisingly solid. You can rest your whole weight on a grape-sized pebble protruding from sandstone, and it will hold.

Of course, the rocks do sometimes fall out, leaving pockets that create new holds, the kind you have to feel around in to see how good they are. The routes that go up conglomerate cliffsides are notoriously difficult to “on-sight” (i.e., climb cleanly on your very first try, with no falls or resting on the rope), precisely because you can’t know how good a pocket is until you touch it.

After a 40-minute hike uphill, we came to the top of the mountain, and a trail that led around to what we were looking for: El Gruyére, a cliff that faces directly north, never getting an opportunity to soak up heat from the June sun. We dropped our packs, laden with 80-meter ropes, dozens of quickdraws, and copious liters of water, and basked in the cooler temps sheltered by the gently overhanging shaded cliffs.

We warmed up on a relatively easy route, then I led a flowy slab with an imposing crux move just before the chains at the top. After that, we turned our attention to the most interesting part of the cliff: a more overhanging, heavily pocketed 30-meter-tall section with a smattering of harder routes, ranging from 7a to 7b+.

Here is where we made measurable contact with reality.

II.

In fact, my girlfriend had just read one of my posts from last year, A breakup focused me like never before, about how I turned to climbing in the aftermath of my last relationship.

I’ve done that a few times in life. I’ve also been to therapy a few times. Once, a therapist urged me to get on antidepressants. I promised her I would go to the gym instead, and I did every day until I saw her next. I felt better, and the crisis passed. Over the years, I’ve learned that a few weeks devoted to a hard climb is better than any therapy I could seek.

That’s because climbing does something that therapy doesn’t. It puts me and my full body into contact with reality—real, physical, hard reality—in a way that no amount of cognitive interpretation or rumination or analysis can.

But it’s not just going climbing that does this. It’s devoting myself single-mindedly to just one hard climb for weeks. We call this projecting: going back over and over to the same very hard route in an attempt to work out the moves, master the sequences, and eventually “send,” i.e., climb the route in one go with no falls or resting on the rope.

Not all climbers enjoy projecting. But those who don’t, I think, are missing out on something important. Yes, projecting helps you improve as a climber, and by improving, it expands the range of climbs that are available to you. Getting better “expands the size of the playground,” I am fond of saying, and for that alone it’s worth it to try.

But the beautiful part of projecting is that finishing it—sending—is an incontrovertible measure of shared, objective reality. I wrote about this last year as I was projecting the hardest climb of my life:

…the beauty of projecting is that it defies your own narrative: you don’t have it until you have it. It’s not a subjective thing. It’s not in the mind of the beholder. You either send or you don’t send.

When it happens, we all know that it’s happened. And if not, not.

This is what I mean by measurable contact with reality (the operative word being "measurable").

So many things in life are indeed subjective. Things I care about deeply. Art, writing, film, politics, relationships. In so many areas of life, different people can look at the same facts and come to different conclusions, see different patterns.

Making sense of reality is harder than ever. It’s so hard, in fact, that our default response has been to create, or immerse ourselves, in bubbles of our own making. We accept individually tailored digital realities. We celebrate “felt experience” and “individual truth,” while we separate ourselves from those with different interpretations of reality than our own.

In such a world, I find it hard to understand how we could possibly hope for a shared understanding of anything, much less an accurate understanding of ourselves. Therapy itself is an exercise in creative interpretation of a certain fact pattern, for the purpose of self-knowledge. I’m not trying to take away from the good therapy can do—only to say that it can’t do what climbing does. It can’t do what I’m about to describe.

III.

The rock just is, I found myself saying, as my girlfriend lay beside me, harkening my mind back to the absurd I Heart Huckabees poem, delivered by an entirely earnest environmental activist played by Jason Schwartzman. (“You rock, rock. The rock just sits, and is.”).

I admitted I’m in my own head a lot. Even as I’ve come to understand my feelings quite well, I usually just take those feelings as information to give to the analytical, intellectual side of my brain. (“Now that I’ve identified and understood my feelings, how much importance should I now assign to them for the purposes of moving forward in life?”).

It can be exhausting, all this intellectual rumination.

Up in the shade at Sant Llorenç, I clipped the first two bolts and proceeded to the overhanging portion of a 7a, normally a grade I feel pretty comfortable on. The first move required deadpointing to a small three-finger crimp, and then doing an overhanging pull-up using only the three pads of my fingertips to reach a pocket. My core struggled to keep my hips into the rock instead of swinging out into the air.

After that, there were more hard moves. With the rock so steep, it was hard to see the holds, much less inside the pockets. After each hard section, I asked my belayer to “take” so I could rest on the rope, catch my breath, and work out the next moves. This is called “bolt to bolting,” and there’s no shame in it. It just means you’ve found yourself on something quite hard.

After two months of drinking cervezas in the plazas, my body wasn’t quite in the same shape it was this past winter. I didn’t have the power anymore to do these overhanging pull-ups. I didn’t have the endurance to link together several moves without asking for rests.

I was very far away from “sending.” It was nothing personal. The rock just is, asa it has always been, shifting and crumbling and reforming itself ever so slightly over the course of millions of years.

In one world, I could have just stopped there. In fact, I hear this approach from many of my climbing friends who don’t like to go back to the same routes they’ve already tried. “I’m just here to have fun,” they say. “It’s all about the experience.”

Which is fine, if you want to treat climbing as if you’re visiting a new country or trying out a new restaurant (both of which are experiences completely subject to interpretation, I might add). But they miss something profound. I might even argue that to not try to send is to avoid contact with reality.

Why would we do this? Many reasons.

The podcaster and climbing coach Kris Hampton has a rant about this:

…after carefully curating my Instagram feed to get rid of most of the moonboarding videos I've been left with hundreds of posts every day that are trying to sell me the same message: “it's the process that's important. It's not about success and failure it's only about days out with friends. Sending doesn't matter because I do it all for the journey.”

But it’s a mistake not to treat sending as an important part of the process:

We’re humans. Failure hurts. Pretending it doesn’t is a lie. We understand that we need those failures in order to continue learning. It’s the same with success. We need those wins not only to keep us afloat but also to learn what it is that we’re doing right.

It’s not that we only care about outcomes; it’s that if we don’t care about outcomes at all, we’re positioning ourselves for self-delusion.

On the other hand, if you pay attention (and climbing hard cliffs all but forces you to pay attention), you will see that a climb can reveal something true about yourself in a way that can’t be argued. Not by your climbing partner, or your romantic partner, your friends, or your family. It can’t be argued by a politician, not by an influencer online, and not by a therapist.

But it will only do this if you try to send. You will only make contact with reality if you can objectively measure it.

You either did the thing, or you didn’t do the thing.

IV.

I tried the overhanging 7a twice, struggling up both times. My climbing partner that day tried it three times. At the top, she fell again and again. Big, 15-foot whipping falls into thin air. Each time I caught her, and each time, she jug-hauled back up the rope to the same hard section as before, trying to find a way through.

This wasn’t about trying a climb once, taking lots of rests, hanging on the rope, finally getting to the top, being lowered, and congratulating oneself on a day well spent with friends in nature.

This was about facing one’s own weakness head-on, one’s own failures, about understanding the interaction between yourself and nature, your body and the world.

The next morning, I found this video on YouTube about why Japanese climbers are so dominant throughout the world. Spoiler: it has to do with their relationship with failure. In Western climbing gyms (as a European route-setter in the video testifies), they gradually soften the grades so that the climbers can feel better about themselves when they complete the routes, so that they feel good and keep their memberships to the gym. Thus, there is an inexorable trend toward easier and easier grading: about sheltering our egos from reality.

In contrast, the Japanese gyms and the Japanese route-setters keep the routes and the grades hard so that climbers become accustomed to failure, so that they develop an acceptance of reality. As the Japanese climbers in the video tell it, they come to appreciate and have gratitude for failures, and it drives them to do better. It’s all there in the ancient Eastern religions, and has been from the beginning.

The rock just is. Understand and accept reality, especially your own. But to do that, you have to make measurable contact with it in the first place. This is the path to enlightenment. Am I overselling climbing as a spiritual practice? A path toward better mental health? A civilizational tool with which we can recapture a shared understanding of ourselves and the world? I think not.

Last night I was at the Comedy Clubhouse with to watch the improv troupe, Typical Adult Behavior. For a group where three of the four performers are non-native English speakers, it’s pretty great comedy, and I spent most of the 90 minutes laughing.

At the door, they give you a slap bracelet to indicate you’ve paid.

Do you remember these? Asia asked.

Of course—we both grew up in the U.S. in the 90s, didn’t we?

The slap bracelets got us 2 euros off drinks, so after the show, we walk from the Canvis Nous location (around the corner from the Basílica de Santa Maria del Mar) down the block to the larger Laietana location, where you can sometimes catch Michelle Wolf workshopping material, and we order a drink.

There’s a massive karaoke competition going on, and the place is packed. An organizer is giving a pep talk to a motley crew of amateur singers. I order an IPA, Asia a white wine. The bartender has an American accent, and I ask him where he’s from—California. Asia asks if he’s enjoying living in Barcelona.

Been here seven years. Life is just easier here, he says.

Asia and I sit and talk about our writing, about how much we leave out of our newsletters, how much is personal, where to draw the line between vulnerability and privacy. I ask about the process for her last post, which is already her second-most popular ever, right behind Italian village life is not for me.

We’re both Americans, both moved to Barcelona with an ex in tow, and both with our only children. Only I did it three years ago, and she just moved two months ago. There’s a lot to talk about.

I’m thinking about adding a new section to my newsletter, I tell her.

And I am. I think it’s going to be much more personal (and possibly only for paying subscribers). In fact, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I can use this space to relate to this city, or illuminate it somehow, or at least chronicle the time. I think I can be doing a lot more. Maybe some of the things I’ve been leaving out, I should, in fact, be putting in.

Be a true artist. Don’t censor yourself, my sister said recently. She’s also a writer, also with a Substack.

I’ve also been talking about it with , my other Barcelona writer friend. Brian and I first met almost exactly three years ago on a ‘bro date’ on Calle Blai, an eight-block-long pedestrianized street in the middle of Poble Sec. Blai is well-known for its “pinchos,” i.e., one-bite offerings even smaller than tapas. It’s like in fancy restaurants, where you’re charged more for less, and it’s only sometimes better.

I wouldn’t recommend eating at most of the places on Blai—anywhere there’s a guy with a menu standing outside begging you to sit down is to be avoided—but it is a lovely place to sit outside and have a beer, especially on the kinds of endless sunny late Spring days we are getting right now.

Anyway, the first time Brian and I met, we talked newsletters and writing, but also relationships, meaning, goals, and life purpose in general. It was a successful first bro date.

Three years later (and now firmly in the AI era), we’ve been coming back to some of the same themes from that conversation. We met for so-so burgers at De Paula Hamburguesa, a block from my apartment (I’ve yet to find a burger here that rivals your average pub classic in New Hampshire), and then a few weeks later for vermut at Bardaixa, a winery on Calle Parlament.

The more I stray from my personal experience, the more I feel myself getting bogged down, I tell him. All I can do is share the experience of being me. It’s the one thing the robots definitely can’t do.

That’s what I can offer: how it feels to live here, the emotional journey of it. The smells, tastes, the crying on the streets. I don’t know much, but I know there is a Barcelona as it's performed for outsiders, and then there’s the city as it actually runs.

There are the tourist restaurants off La Rambla that charge 3€ a person just for bread and olives and add default service charges to the bill like in the U.S.—and then there’s a normal place to eat, where the food is better, there’s no paella on the menu (because paella isn’t a typical Catalonian dish), and they aren’t trying to price gouge you.

There are the trinket shops lining the medieval streets of the Gothic Quarter, and then there are the actual treasures to be found among the various flea markets and sometimes in the second-hand shops of Raval.

There is La Boqueria, the food market off La Rambla, and then there is every other food market in the city. There are the transient groups of digital nomads who dip their toes and leave, and then there are those who really live here.

In August, it will be three years since I moved here. That time has been a process of finding my own Barcelona. Building my community of climbers and writers and pretty much ignoring the one known as “expats.” Learning to avoid most of Gothic and El Born most of the time. Finding the bike routes that get me to the climbing gym the fastest. Going back to the local bars and small music venues scattered around various neighborhoods far from the center, discovering just how packed full of talent this city truly is.

After the beer and the wine at the Leitana clubhouse, Asia and I walk toward the waterfront. I hug her goodbye at the Barceloneta metro stop, and then head for the battery of city bikes across the street—the ones you need a local tax ID number to sign up for. I can’t find an electric one, so instead I pedal one of the heavy manual bikes along the waterfront and uphill on Parallel toward Poble Sec. It feels good to work off part of the beers in any case.

My dog has been waiting for hours, and I take him for one last walk around the neighborhood just before midnight. My brain is churning on the new section of the newsletter I want to start.

I’ve been thinking about the content and the positioning, but also the name. There’s one in particular I’ve been batting around that I like: Bitter Sex and Sweet Vermut.

They want to do everything because they can. But what they gain in abundance of choice, they suffer from in anxiety. One might say it’s the central problem of abundant, modern societies. All of us going around being told to self-actualize, to work on ourselves. And then what?

When we can go anywhere, do anything, and be anyone, we suddenly find ourselves confronting life’s most difficult questions about meaning and purpose. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” as Kierkegaard put it.

I wrote more than a year ago about the problems of too much freedom. It’s a recurring theme here, one that seems to have popped up yet again in the last few days.

Unbridled freedom doesn’t necessarily lead one to life satisfaction, I told my climber friend last week. I was visiting his place in the mountains, where conversation away from the rock often turned to politics.

People don’t want to be told what to do, he replied.

I think that’s exactly what a lot of people want, I countered.

We went back and forth over tea, with a view of the cliffs outside. He cited history, telling me that autocracies fail because they force people into lives they don’t choose for themselves. I cited Plato, suggesting that people might be happier with less choice if, in exchange, they could have more social connection.

He conceded that, unlike me, he didn’t study philosophy in grad school. I conceded that, unlike him, I hadn’t just published a book on political ideology.

After breakfast, we drove to a crag he had bolted, one of the many visible from the gigantic glass sliding doors leading out from his living room. We walked from his truck up the gravel path to the cliffs. He pointed up at a beautiful overhanging 7b.

There are crazy acrobatic moves at the top, he says.

Sounds cool, let’s do it.

We both sent on our second attempt. Six months ago, a climb that hard would have taken me a week at least. I’m hitting my stride, finally. But I’m not sure how much more time I want to devote to climbing now that the season here is effectively over. Basically, I have too much time on my hands and can’t decide what to focus on. I need more constraints.

I am faced with existential problems of purpose and meaning that are the clichés of retired people and empty nesters. Except I’m 44.

Back in Barcelona, I turn on a podcast: Derek Thompson interviewing David Epstein about his new book Inside the Box. They quote a psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who notes that married people with kids report the greatest levels of happiness, despite, in many ways, having the most constraints on their lives:

By making up one’s mind to invest psychic energy in a marriage, regardless of any problems, obstacles, or more attractive options that may come along later, one is freed of the constant pressure of trying to maximize emotional returns. Having made the commitment and having made it willingly, instead of being compelled by tradition, a person no longer needs to worry whether she has made the right choice or whether the grass might be greener somewhere else. As a result, a great deal of energy gets freed up for living instead of being spent on wondering about how to live.

The actor Bob Odenkirk expressed a similar sentiment in a recent interview with the comedian Mike Birbiglia:

There’s no question I knew what I was doing when I had kids growing up. I was being a dad. That was my job. And I didn’t have to ask myself ‘what am i doing here?’ How can I be a part of this world? How can I be meaningful today?’ I didn’t have to ask that question, because the answer is ‘pick up everything between here and the door, and make sure they get to school, and have a laugh with them.’ Life was, you know—I understood my purpose.

I must admit, I wasn’t quite as clear on purpose when my son was younger. But I see the point, clear as day.

The more constraints we have, the more we can focus on just doing the thing. And the social science is clear: more options equals more likelihood of being unsatisfied with the choices we make, and more anxiety about where we made the wrong choice. This goes for our careers and our romantic partners, as well as the smaller questions, like what food we buy at the grocery store.

Conversely, as Epstein writes, constraint often generates invention, creativity, and breakthrough.

Of course, I’ve understood this for quite a long time. When I was making indie films in Washington D.C., I took the low budgets as a challenge to find creative production solutions, as directors have done from time immemorial (It’s not cool to sit around complaining no one will give you your budget; cool is making the best film you can on the budget you have).

And, I’ve been writing about this here since at least 2022.

Last year, I set a goal of dramatically simplifying my life. A smashing success, but that has led to new challenges. Even fewer constraints. Fewer demands on my time. I must resist simply filling it back up with random obligations, which is what many of my fellow city dwellers seem to do. Busy schedules are still somehow like status symbols here, as they are in the States. Tuesday group meditation; Wednesday swing class; Thursday pottery. Next four weekends, planned in advance.

Nearly all their time is spoken for (if they haven’t achieved this by adding hobbies, their work has likely done it for them), and so most are not obsessing as I do about meaning and purpose. Their energy is devoted to living, as opposed to wondering how to live.

Limitations are liberating, I know that. But what more limitations should I impose on myself? I already brought my dog from the U.S. This is the most structure I have right now: a morning pee, a longer afternoon walk, and one more outing around the neighborhood to sniff the lamposts before bed.

A week ago, I posted an image from Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates to Notes. It was about what she calls The Tolstoy Problem:

My question… was the very simple question that lies in the soul of every human being, from a silly child to the wisest sage—the question without which life is impossible, as I experienced in actual fact. The question is this: what will come from what I do and from I will do tomorrow—what will come from my whole life?

The question did knock me for a loop there for about 24 hours. But I soon got over it. In times like these, the Zen proverb has given me a lot of solace: Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

I take this to mean that we continue on with our lives no matter how much ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’ we do or don’t find—whether that is going to our jobs, toiling away at a book, or climbing a rock face. No amount of enlightenment will free us from the basic realities of existence.

Later, Tolstoy explains what he did in response to his problem:

And I searched for explanations of my questions in all the branches of knowledge the human beings have acquired… I didn’t search limply but I search agonizingly, persistently, day and night; I searched as a dying man searches for salvation, and I found nothing.

I don’t have the patience to search that hard, and definitely not if I’ll still just be left chopping wood and carrying water. So, after I hit ‘publish’ on this piece, I’ll try not to spend too much more time lamenting or worrying about it. Too much freedom is a fine first-world problem to have, I know.

You need to check your privilege, bro!, another climber friend would often joke to me. Yea, he and me both: each of us self-employed, with near-full control over our schedules, climbing through the winter, enjoying the freedom of the mountains, the joy of movement on the rock, the lively conversation over wine in the evenings, shooting pool on his billiard table.

Not to say I don’t appreciate it when someone validates my existential struggles as legitimate. And I get a certain satisfaction over the popularity of a movie like, say, Sentimental Value, in which wealthy, socialist Norwegians with all their material wants long ago fulfilled nevertheless continue to agonize over existential problems of purpose and creative fulfillment.

But in the meantime, we must try not to obsess too much over those little eternal problems of existence.

I once saw a post, I think it was on a “Renovating Spain” Facebook group, from a woman who wanted to give some advice after long years of struggling through a project somewhere in the countryside.

If I could find it now, I would share, but as it’s been lost to memory, I will attempt to paraphrase:

The regulations are too byzantine; the contractors too unreliable; the general environment and materials difficult; the language a barrier, the culture a barrier; costs spiral upwards, no end in sight. If you can save yourself years of headache, heartache, stress, and trouble, do yourself a favor and skip it all.

And so my advice on a renovation is this: do not do a renovation!

Many months have gone by in which I thought I might write my own version of this post. This is how my mind works, always writing in the background. My mom says her brain often defaults to choreographing dance moves in her head; mine defaults to writing scenes, choosing phrases, crafting headlines.

This imaginary post would be titled, “The disaster renovation project has finally defeated me,” or perhaps “The beautiful failure of my renovation project in the Spanish countryside.”

You see these kinds of mea culpa posts. They are formulaic (as is so much on Substack these days). The article would write itself. A litany of delays and a catalogue of missteps, followed by all the lessons I’ve learned along the way. Cue a defeated author walking into the sunset, defeated perhaps, but nonetheless grateful for the journey.

There may yet come a day when I write that post. But it is not this day!

II.

Instead: the past year has been a frustrating lesson in waiting.

After months of demolition, then a work stoppage resulting from a complaint by my neighbor, I waited eight months for the town to give me a permit just to be able to replace the roof and construct a rooftop terrace.

The process was particularly frustrating because, as I waited for a permit, it seemed all of Spain was complaining of a severe cost of housing crisis. Yet rather than speed up the process for building permits or making it easier to get one, the only solution of interest seemed to be imposing rent controls on existing owners.

In any case, I was kicking myself. Before the neighbor complained and the town architect forbade me from continuing, I had received some local advice that I should just start the work sans permit and try to keep it quiet, as many in Spain do. Especially if it’s a rural property, paying a fine for work completed without a permit is often cheaper and faster than going through the official process.

In retrospect, I should have disregarded the advice and applied for the permit upfront. First major lesson learned. I should have known there was no “quiet” way to do a roof replacement in the middle of the town surrounded by neighbors.

On top of this, when the permit finally did come through (in June last year), I promptly had a falling out with the Reus construction company that had bid to do the work. The issue was that I had crossed out a few of the line items from their budget, which I regarded as unnecessarily frivolous.

I was already bought into paying someone for the roof replacement, rather than doing the work myself—especially considering the permit’s requirement for a builder with insurance and a safety plan. But from a total cost of 35,000 euros, I had crossed out about 7,500. One example: I was happy to re-afix the old Catalan roof tiles myself.

When I sent the red-lined budget along with my approval to start work at their earliest convenience, I received a message back from the project manager: they would either do the whole thing or none of it.

I promptly started searching for another option.

III.

The builder I ultimately hired came through a recommendation from my other neighbor, who owned the building supply company in town. It was his company that had come with the little forklifts to haul away ten gigantic waste disposal bags I’d filled with broken concrete and brick from demolition.

Over the course of the few months I’d been working, he’d been nothing but friendly and understanding of all the noisy work. Even when his young kids were napping. Over the holidays, he had gifted me the standard: wine and olive oil pressed from the family land.

He recommended a builder who lived down the street (Another lesson learned: I should have asked him first for someone local, rather than rely on builders from forty minutes away).

In July, the new builder came to walk through the property with me. He was excited to work on a project so close to home. But there was a long road ahead. I wrote last month about what came next:

…a death in the family; supply delays; the rainiest January in a quarter century. But many weeks had now passed with beautiful weather and no obvious holdups, and still, for some reason obscure to me, no work done.

By March, it’d been five months since I’d sent him a deposit, and I still had virtually nothing to show for it aside from a stack of roof panels arrived from the supplier.

I’d been getting a lot of advice on how to manage the situation, especially from two Catalan friends. They were literally reviewing text messages and scripts for voice notes before I sent them. At times, they told me I needed to be more angry, that I needed to “show my character,” or nothing would get done. Other times, they reined in my frustration—that’s too fuerte, one told me.

I went through phases of feeling completely disconnected from the project. I contemplated trying to sell it and buy a van. I would just swallow all the losses and chalk it up to a learning experience. I started writing the scenes in my head.

This was all foreign to me. Not just the culture and the language, but the very idea of needing to continually monitor someone lest work not get done.

I’ve always been a terrible project manager. The whole idea of project management has always felt odd to me. Why should I look over someone’s shoulder and babysit their time for them? I’m a solopreneur for a reason—I don’t like managing people, and I don’t need to be managed myself.

IV.

When I met with the builder in March, he was even more nervous about the meeting than me. We talked about everything that happened. Reasons for the delays. Progress that could have been made, but wasn’t. I suggested—more than once—that I would have to find another path forward if he didn’t start soon.

He couldn’t tell me a precise start date, but he did promise an end date: el Dia de Sant Jordi, the 23rd of April, the holiday for the patron saint of Catalunya. The tradition is for couples to exchange books and roses.

It was a self-imposed deadline. I accepted, and we shook hands. Entonces, tenemos un acuerdo, I said, looking him in the eye—so we have an agreement. Sí, he replied. Tenemos un acuerdo.

And then, miraculously, work began. He started sending me photos. A pile of rubble. A hole in the brick wall to move in supplies. Rebar down on the terrace. A new hole in the roof. Sunlight, air, space, progress.

I met with him again two weeks later. Estoy super contento, I said. I’m very happy.

Work was now speeding forward. The asbestos panels were gone and properly disposed of. Half the roof was down. The new insulated “sandwich” panels were going up. We climbed the scaffolding to inspect the roof from above, and discussed what kind of railing would go on the balcony.

I was trying to work on my project management: I asked about next steps, materials, logistics, milestones.

A few days later, he sent more photos. Sandwich panels up, cement poured, Tyvek wrapping placed. It was a lot of progress.

V.

For months, it seems there has been nothing to report, so why write?

And the work is still not done, the deadline not yet met.

But I do what I can to avoid being formulaic (It was hard, but I persevered, and now it’s finished!). Part of doing that is writing while still in progress, while questions still don’t have answers, and where my feelings are still unresolved.

I’m not sure what will become of all this. In many ways, my life has moved on from my beautiful, difficult, romantic renovation project in the small town in the countryside. Should I re-engage? What new roadblocks, delays, and stresses would I be courting? What do I really want out of this project now, years after I first launched it, and after so much delay? And always: why?

These are the questions I’m pondering these days, a week out from Dia de Sant Jordi.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
- Albert Camus

Spring is here in Barcelona. We’ve all been drinking our beers in the plazas all winter, but it’s nice that the sun is out. Soon the beaches will fill, and the tourists will come.

I’ve been working to transform the draft of a memoir I never liked into a novel that I do like. It’s going well, in that the writing flows, feeling more like play than work. It’s about the books that influenced a young man at key moments in his work and life, but mostly in his relationships. 79,000+ words so far. Months more work to do.

The renovation in the countryside is finally progressing. The builder is working every day with his crew, even Sundays. He promised to be done by the Festival of St. Jordi (23rd of April), and it looks like he may actually hit it. The rooftop terrace is nearly done, and the new roof. New cement about to be poured on the lower level. Honestly can’t believe it’s finally happening. You can see the view of the mountains I’ve been dreaming about for two years.

When I’m in the country, I’ve been climbing very hard. Feels amazing to be strong like this at age 44. I’m not even sure I’ve hit my peak yet. Sent a 7b+ (12c) the other day on only my second attempt, a difficulty near the top of what I’ve ever climbed. With the warm weather though we have to chase shade, and there are fewer cliffs facing away from the sun. How much longer can I keep this up before another season passes?

When I’m in the city, I seem to meet new, beautiful and interesting people every week. The climbing circle from the gym is strong. The social life is full. I’ve been hosting various friends for most of the last two weeks. Last night, I danced: salsa, bachata, merengue.

Dancing as an act of rebellion.

I.

Everyone is scared.

The world is scary but I’m not talking about that. I’m scared is what someone tells me when they don’t want to try climbing. Fear of heights. I tell them I do it because I’m scared of heights.

A few weeks ago, I was twenty meters up on a vertical swath of limestone in Siurana, feeling so scared it was almost paralyzing.

I was so scared to lead another five meters of rock that I abandoned the climb and traversed to an easier route, a comforting, enveloping crack I could stick my entire arm into. I abandoned the existential battle for my soul in favor of easier ground.

But I’ve had a thousand moments like this. They’re dispiriting when they happen. This moment even more so because it was a climb I’d been on the previous year, and a grade I should have been comfortable on, 7a+ (12a). But the moves were delicate, the bolts were far away, and the falls, if I messed up, were quite long.

But knowing a fall is safe is not the same as feeling it in my body. Knowing you are safe in the world is not the same as the feeling many of us feel. Yet climbing level sets by putting physical reality directly into your face. There is no hiding from it. It teaches you both deep confidence and profound humility, often in the same week.

It was a few days later that I finished the 7b+ on my second try. All flow, all execution. Not just a feeling, but a black and white, incontrovertible success: climbing from the ground to the top with no falls and no rests on the rope.

There are highs and lows in life. It’s always a practice, always an infinite game.

II.

“Beware of looking for goals,” wrote Hunter S. Thompson. “Look for a way of life.” It’s a subject I’ve written about multiple times before. Treat life as an infinite game, only find the one you enjoy playing.

Yet there must be signposts along the way.

A climbing project can be completed or not. The renovation could drag another year, or be done earlier. A book must be finished or abandoned. Even a newsletter can find its natural end. You need not continue to write your Substack if it doesn’t fit the way of life you desire.

But the older I get (I’ve allotted myself one use of this phrase per month), the more I find myself abandoning projects that are not driven by intrinsic motivation. If I can find a way to do it where it feels like play, that means I keep going. If it feels like an obligation, I try to change it or stop (or vibe-code it away).

I try to do this because I’m following Hunter S. Thompson, and I’m following Camus. When Camus says that we must make our existence an act of rebellion, I respond that I am against workism, and live accordingly: with fewer hours, with clear boundaries. I say that spending one’s days in quiet desperation is to be rejected. I say you must reassert control over your own focus and attention.

That is the most subversive act of rebellion most of us can do right now.

III.

In a piece about the fall of the Assad regime, journalist Robert F. Worth reported that the Syrian dictator “was spending much of his time playing Candy Crush and other video games on his phone,” and thus couldn’t be bothered to mount an effective response to the militias that were about to take over his country.

Good riddance to him—no one is shedding a tear for the Assad regime. But the cautionary tale remains.

The opposite of rebellion in the Camus sense is meme culture. It’s living our lives in imitation of someone else’s. We are all directed to self-actualize, to “work on ourselves,” and yet we continue in our imitation games, because we can’t find other ones to play.

Two years ago, I managed to invent a game entirely of my own, which is rare. I called it the Rumney Tenagi. It’s a challenge I made up to climb every 10a in Rumney in one day. As far as I can tell, no one has repeated it before or since. It was me attempting to break out of the imitation game, a small attempt at rebellion in a way that felt authentic and specific to me.

Completing the challenge had the exact kind of effect I’d hoped for when I conceived of it:

I found a new level in my climbing, a level I’d never experienced before. I was twenty-three pitches in, all mind, body, soul, and spirit were in sync… I was in pure flow state. Occasionally I paused and looked down at myself from above, and realized what was happening: I was floating upward. Every small shift in weight, every dance of the feet felt like grace. Every small step from nub to fin pure technique. I was on a cloud. This was it, the last one. I had found something new deep down, and I knew it… for those ten minutes it took me to climb, it felt practically like another plane of existence.

It may be scary, but go find your own Tenagi. (But of course I would be honored if you choose to repeat mine.)

I was especially thinking about it as I sat at my desk a few days ago, trying to see if I could avoid the more mundane aspects of my consulting practice so as to free up more time to go climbing.

In one window, I opened a chat and asked my AI to teach me how to use Claude Code. In another window, as instructed, I opened my computer’s Terminal application. It looked like a DOS prompt window from when I was 12 and my parents were both computer consultants, which was also the last time I’d stared at a blinking cursor on a black background.

My step-dad had tried to teach me to code back then, but it never stuck. My thing was writing actual words, in English. Learning a foreign language was already hard, and coding seemed like a foreign language beyond my grasp. Not only did humans not speak it, but it demanded 100% accuracy to work. I’ve still never coded anything in my life. I’ve never even tried.

For three hours, I went back and forth. In one window, I asked Claude about the mysterious lines of code being written by some alien intelligence in the other window. The intelligence seemed to want to correct itself, and at times even add on. It occasionally did things I’d not asked for, announcing them after the fact as if it were giving me an FYI. Eventually, I stopped asking the chat window what it all meant and started typing commands straight to the alien.

Around lunch time, the program still wasn’t doing exactly the thing I wanted, and my stomach was growling. I was nearing the end of my attention for such things. I tweaked one last thing and hit Enter on yet another execute command, not expecting much.

And suddenly: magic.

I hit refresh on the backend of my client’s website and stared in disbelief at what the alien had just done for me. I won’t belabor it by explaining the functionality, but it was something so mundane and small that, of course, no software anywhere existed to do it, because it was just too custom, too specific to my client, to their site, and to my workflow.

My eyes went wide, my jaw dropped, and I started cursing: HOLY FUCK!! I had involuntarily jumped up from my chair in my office and started pacing my home office. My dog turned its head from the sofa in the other room to see the commotion. My hands went to my hair and literally started tugging. I said it again: Holy Fuck. I just couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.

I really did feel like a goddamn magician.

After a few moments, I sat back down in my chair, grabbed 16 files instead of one, dropped them into the Claude Code folder, and ran the same command again. Woosh, poof, kazaam. I had vibe-coded my first ever piece of software—and it was glorious indeed.

I.

The past few weeks, several of my Substack-writing friends have published their own kind of Come to Jesus posts about AI. wrote that Claude Code has changed him. wrote that he could feel the ground shaking:

It is dawning on me that the world that I knew as a kid is well and truly gone. And it’s a world that felt sacred, somehow… We’re entering a new age, an age of computer sorcery, where the time it used to take to make things is mindbendingly compressed.

Nathaniel is grieving for an old world that no longer exists, and so am I. But not only because 1s and 0s have now arranged themselves into a magical superintelligence. Also, because the country of my birth has fundamentally changed, and the ideas it once claimed to have stood for have been summarily executed. Taken out back, shot dead in the head, and buried without a funeral.

I’ve been grieving for those ideas. Few here in Barcelona can appreciate that. Even when our actions didn’t live up to the ideals, at least there was a dream. Now there is no more dream, and more bombs are falling, and not even the ones dropping them can say why. The possibility of a runaway AI intelligence launching a Skynet-like robot apocalypse appears to have receded for the time being. But the possibility of an entirely human-made war in the Middle East leading to a Biblical-style four horsemen of the apocalypse situation seems to have simultaneously risen.

Here in Barcelona, protests continue against and for everything—Israel and Palestine, women’s rights and the hard right, immigrants and tourists, renters and capitalists—and all the while we sip our afternoon Vermuts and escape to the mountains for the weekend.

Last week, I managed to escape to the mountains for four straight days. I was there to climb but also to visit my renovation property, which remains a dusty, neglected construction zone.

I needed to have a difficult conversation with the builder I’ve hired to help move the project forward. Months have passed, and little has been done. There is no magic AI wand to wave that will get this all done—only real-world barriers to overcome. The builder did have some valid reasons for the delay: a death in the family; supply delays; the rainiest January in a quarter century. But many weeks had now passed with beautiful weather and no obvious holdups, and still, for some reason obscure to me, no work done.

I wanted to finally see him face-to-face and come to some kind of new agreement about the timeline. We meet on a Saturday morning. Talk on the second level of my property, where he was supposed to have poured a new layer of reinforcing lightweight concrete over rebar four months earlier. Go to the top level and dance around why exactly the roof replacement has not been started. He gifts me a gigantic jug of unfiltered olive oil from his family’s land nearby.

I know he’s a good man and well-intentioned. That much is unquestionable if you’ve spoken to him as much as I have. He looks me in the eyes and tells me that he too wants to see me enjoying the new rooftop terrace he was hired to build, a view of the cliffs at Montsant in the distance. I wonder if I’ve been too hard on him during the conversation. Or if I should have been harder.

Yo creo cuando lo vea, I say—I’ll believe it when I see it.

II.

Last month, news about Claude Code caused stock in software companies to plummet: they collectively lost approximately $15 billion in market capitalization in a single day of trading. We’ve invented superintelligent AI agents that can do all my tedious marketing work for me—but we still can’t build enough homes to save our lives.

Spain’s housing crisis has only gotten worse since the last time I wrote about it. A “Law on the Right to Housing” that introduced rent controls in the most distressed areas is backfiring in some significant ways. This has led to some awkward debates between me and the local anti-capitalists. It has also led property owners in the most in-demand areas to pull their homes out of the long-term rental market.

According to the governments in both Catalunya and Madrid, the law they passed is working: after all, rents have fallen. But anyone who has tried to find an apartment in Barcelona over the past year has found that there pretty much are none. Access to housing has gone down, which is the most predictable outcome of rent control ever.

Idealista says the rental housing supply is now at historic lows. And as La Vanguardia recently reported:

…the feeling among the population is that accessing housing, especially rental housing, is becoming increasingly difficult. Housing has become the primary concern for the population…

But this is just one of the many Major Problems In the World right now.

I learned recently that when Christopher Columbus first discovered the New World, European intellectuals could hardly be bothered—there were simply too many other important things going on at the time. The Ottoman Turkish Empire was invading the east. A schism in the Church was brewing, which would lead to a 30-year war. Contests for control of various crowns were ongoing. The most consequential discovery on the planet at the time was relatively minor news.

We can never be sure which developments in our time are the most consequential, or which ideas are the most threatening. From the same podcast interview: of all the people put on trial by the Spanish Inquisition, thousands upon thousands were for practicing paganism in Catholic territory. Only one trial—Galileo’s—was for threatening church doctrine with actual science.

III.

I’ve let my AI robot rest for the day; it’s done enough to give me a few more hours to self-actualize than I was expecting this afternoon, and I start to contemplate a trip to the climbing gym.

But before that, I have a Zoom call with someone who has been reading through my recent Substack posts. “Do you know the famous Keynes essay from 1930?” they ask.

I did. In fact, I’ve got a Substack post about it that’s been sitting in my drafts folder for some time. The essay is called Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. It predicts that future denizens of capitalism will have to work just 15 hours a week due to rises in productivity.

What Keynes failed to predict was that the more money most of us make, the more we want to make. Even despite abundant wealth, we remain financially-incentivized beings in our souls. From an NPR interview on the subject:

KESTENBAUM: In fact, he says, earning more money can make it harder to take time off. If someone is paid $200 an hour, do you really want to leave early and go to the beach? You’ll be sitting there on your towel, reading a novel, thinking, is this really worth $200 an hour ‘cause you could be back at the office. The better you are at your job, the harder it can be to not do it. It’s worth pointing out that Keynes himself seemed to have trouble following his own advice.

HUMPHREY: Maynard, of course, died from working too hard.

I have somehow escaped this trap, though it’s been a recurring conversation with my son since he was nine. He would always ask why I don’t work more, and I would always respond that I already have everything I need.

Not that Claude Code hasn’t given me pause: with so much power at my fingertips, my mind has started running a little wild with the possibilities. I could automate anything! Everything! The possibilities are endless. The ground is shaking. Claude Code has changed me.

After the Zoom call, I put my bag together for the gym and set out for one of the city bikes. The weather in Barcelona is increasingly beautiful as it shakes off the rainy winter, and I ride from my place in Poble Sec twenty minutes to the climbing gym at Tetuan.

It’s the middle of the day. Most people are at work. Only a handful of climbers have the time, freedom, and money to spend anything more than a bunch of weekends or perhaps a few short vacations throughout the year climbing outdoors. I have almost all the time I could want. The more I use the AI, the more time, freedom, and money I give myself.

I’ve never been more productive, I, as the character in Stephan Dybus’ graphic, say. And all the while in the background, the destruction continues—accelerates even. Old regimes are falling, incumbent economies are crumbling, and the ideas and ideologies that I grew up with are dead and buried, no longer defended.

We can build anything we want so long as it’s built with pixels—but what we really need is something different. New homes, obviously, but also new… everything.

I know I just wrote that I’ve made my peace with modern life, with “a certain bureaucratized decadence”—and I have. But a new world order appears to be coming, whether we like it or not.

Some years ago, during the Obama era, I wrote a screenplay about a zombie apocalypse that the U.S. had managed to escape. We start in a fortress America that lives in a kind of peaceful, near-future stasis, albeit with heavily policed walls across both borders. Universal basic income has been instituted; the country is self-reliant, and our characters go about their lives with little concern for what has befallen everyone unlucky enough to be outside its walls, where the world has descended into the kind of anarchist, violent, zombie fare we know well from other films.

The catch—my whole take on the zombie apocalypse genre—was that the people in the U.S. are actually trying to escape into the infected zone. The guards on the walls mainly try to catch smugglers looking to ferry people out of the country, rather than sneak them in.

Embedded in the screenplay was a theory of modern life that it had become so purposeless, devoid of meaning, boring, and bureaucratized, that a certain minority segment of humanity would rather strike out for adventure and uncertainty, even if it meant high risk of death.

The world seemed more boring then. Perhaps I was prone to romanticizing escape from mundanity. Today, as I travel through Rome with my son, the mundane seems good. We like to sit at cafes and play rummy for hours, while I drink a beer and he a lemonade. And in the in-between moments, we hold our breath, wondering what world order-shattering event we’re likely to witness next (I confess I didn’t have “possible war with Denmark” on my bingo card).

But of course, many of us really do live in the sanitized, boring, bureaucratized world of my screenplay. And the crisis of meaning I wrote about—the search for some higher purpose, be it adventure, activism, or (increasingly among young leftists I know) even revolution—is still very much with us.

Since childhood, I’ve always been fascinated with explorers, escapists, the ones setting out from comfortable homes into risky unknowns: the Amundsons, the Mallorys, the Magellans. I think of the famous advertisement published in a newspaper to recruit sailors to Shackleton’s mission to the Antarctic (even if its authenticity is debated):

Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.

I’ve never quite seen myself in these explorers; I would have been the journalist covering their exploits, the writer trying to make sense of it all—but still my heart flutters when I read something like that.

Some of these men were ruthless egomaniacs. Many left their families for years, wives to care for the children alone, with indefinite hope of return. Some go down in history as murdererous colonizers; others, as exemplars of leadership in difficult times.

Regardless of history’s judgment, though, what gets me about these stories is the emotional uncertainty of it all. Polar explorers used to set off from home, anticipating they would be gone for years, with no certainty of return, and no means of communicating progress to loved ones back home. Today, we want text replies within 24 hours. Back then, I imagine the wives, figuring out what to tell the kids: Don’t worry, your father will be home one day, maybe. Date: unknown. Condition: unknown.

It’s the same emotional gut punch that hits me in Interstellar, when Coop drives off in the truck on an uncertain mission to save the world, leaving behind his two kids on the farm, to be raised by their grandfather, date of return: again unknown. That shot of Matthew McConaughey holding back tears on the dirt road, his daughter Murph running after him in the background…. Gets me every time.

This crossing over from safety and status quo to risk and uncertainty is what I’m interested in. This was the contrast I set up in my zombie apocalypse script: on one side of the wall, boring modernity; on the other, uncertain adventure and risk of death. Safe return doubtful.

I was on a trip through the Sierra Nevada once, driving with my son, dad, and step-brother. The four of us went from charging station to charging station in my step-brother’s nicely air-conditioned Tesla, fishing gear packed into every nook and cranny, and my son, 10 years old at the time, taking every opportunity to play with the Tesla’s onboard music system. Every night, my father and step-brother called their wives to recount the journey thus far, filling them in on the details of where we had lunch, what we saw, and where we’d be going the next day.

This week, I’ve been travelling around Italy for a brief holiday just with my son, who is now 15. I wouldn’t call it an adventure of any kind—just new.

Yesterday, we walked by an Internet cafe in Naples, and I was reminded of when my friend Francis and I bummed around northern India after grad school, no phones, stopping into an occasional Internet cafe only long enough to plan the next segment of the trip and notify loved ones that we were still alive. At one point, I stayed an extra night in Udaipur while he forged ahead to the next city—there was no way to reconnect other than to trust our plan for a rendezvous hundreds of miles away the next evening.

After Francis returned to the UK, I went on to Nepal, where I rented a motorcycle (I’d never ridden a motorcycle in my life) and drove up and around the chaotic dirt roads surrounding Pokhara. At one point, I stalled the motorcycle in the middle of an intersection in the mountains, sheepishly dismounting and wheeling the bike to the side while dozens of vehicles whirled around me. By the time I’d found my way back to town, I’d popped a flat tire, with absolutely no means or knowledge to fix it. I returned the bike to the rental shop, paid a few hundred extra Nepalese rupees for the damage, and embarrassingly walked away. I suppose this is the silliest, riskiest thing I can think of from my youthful adventures.

Last night, as my son and I walked the streets of Rome, he told me he was still thinking about the movie Don’t Look Up, which he’d watched on the airplane.

How could everyone be so clueless? he wondered. There’s literally an asteroid headed for Earth about to kill everyone on the planet, and all they can think about is how to make money from it!

Or boost ratings, get a bounce in the polls, or get laid. Don’t Look Up was originally written as a metaphor for climate change, but ended up being released right around the pandemic. It was the closest we’ve gotten to zombie apocalypse territory in my lifetime.

The truth is that most of us who read Substacks are ridiculously wealthy and safe by historical standards—and also that modern society could use a little more adventure, a little more tolerance for risk. I’m the kind of person who thinks we should still fund space exploration, and if someone objects, But what about the people on Earth! I respond that they, too, need something to believe in, and that includes an astronaut reaching for the stars.1

As I get older, I don’t want to escape over the wall; just nudge us ever so slightly in the direction of boldness. My hope is that the revolutionaries don’t actually do a revolution—I hope that their imaginations are sufficiently satiated with the idea of it to not reach for guns or bombs.

In Naples, my son asked if I supported Catalan independence. I told him I was like the patriot in the Mel Gibson American revolution movie. Do I think the colonies can and should govern themselves? Yes. But am I willing to go to war for that? Most certainly not:

It’s not a great movie (though anything with Heath Ledger…), but this scene has stuck with me. Strong as we might believe our principles to be, we are generally not faced with a decision about whether to take up arms against tyranny, but at the risk of endangering our homes and the lives of our children. Even those who are choosing not to have children seem to have a general risk-aversion at least partly in mind.

In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens writes that the revolution stemmed from unbearable tyranny, from abject poverty, from oppression, and dehumanization by the elite. I came away from that book in my high school freshman English class thinking revolutions happen because people have nothing left to lose.

But that’s not quite right. Revolutions can also happen when a small minority hijack enough of the mechanisms of power to kickstart the violence—and then everyone else must pick a side. I don’t think most Catalans would choose to go to war over their cause—but there is also a small, vocal minority who might be willing to.

As I wrote last month, late-stage capitalism has a nice, easy decadence to it that I think most are loath to give up. The only problem is when the wrong group of individuals takes Margaret Mead’s words to heart:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

This was a nice rallying cry in the Obama days, because we assumed the small group of citizens was pressing for change on behalf of causes we agreed with: justice, human rights. But of course, these aren’t the only small groups of thoughtful, committed people in the world. I know a few in the White House right now, just as committed to change, just not the kind I want.

It’s almost enough to stick up and defend the status quo—and perhaps not launch ourselves full bore into a zombie apocalypse. Or at least make peace with a certain bureaucratized decadence.

I used to think the world was boring enough to want to escape. Now, I’m quite content to live with the status quo, things being as they are. Playing cards at the cafes, drinking my beer, chatting with my son about movies.

I get the sense that everything is unravelling beneath us—the fabric that holds civilization and our own mental sanity together. And yet, congizant that previous generations have always thought that, I wonder if I’m not just growing crotchety and old.

Or maybe my own creative work is at a crossroads. “Where’s the room for the creative expression, where’s the room to experiment?” said Kyla Scanlon recently in an interview with Derek Thompson:

I’ve been doing social media for almost four years now, and I’ve definitely noticed the algorithms are closing in on us, there’s less and less room, there’s less and less air to experiment, to be creative, because everything is so mathematically driven. It’s all about views and retention.

Yesterday, I deactivated my Instagram account and deleted Substack’s Notes app from my phone. Not that I ever used it, but the LinkedIn app also got deleted. Anything that swipes or scrolls or has feedback loops designed to give me dopamine hits of creative validation. I wrote the other day that reclaiming our attention is the most revolutionary thing we can do right now—but also maybe I’m just entering my Luddite phase.

My instincts are usually to stop playing games that I don’t like, and I’ve never liked the attention game. I do marketing for a living, but I’ve drawn the line at refusing to manage social media accounts. Plus, I’ve nearly worked myself out of having to work. Meanwhile, I’ve just sold a property in the U.S. for more than double what I paid six years ago, with no particular use for the cash other than to invest it in something very boring and income-generating.

I’m mindful that the premise of those investments is that society will keep on going more or less the same as it always has. Cities will not collapse, unable to pay their debts. Corporations will not suddenly find themselves illiquid. Governments will not borrow themselves into a full-blown crisis.

At the same time, it now appears that nearly the entirety of the U.S. economy is being propped up by the magical thinking of AI companies—who really are promising something like magic: a future of unlimited intelligence in which all of humanity’s problems can be solved if we only throw enough compute at them. The valuations are premised on that magical thinking coming true.

So again, I have to wonder: am I just getting old and crotchety, or is it the entire rest of the world that’s jumped the shark (thus have wondered crotchety old men and women everywhere throughout all time)?

To quote Wikipedia:

The idiom "jumping the shark" means that a creative work or entity has evolved and reached a point in which it has exhausted its core intent and is introducing new ideas that are discordant with or an extreme exaggeration (caricature) of its original theme or purpose.

The entity I’m wondering about right now is the world itself. I’m not sure what the purpose of it is, or my own. My old suppositions about discovering and lifting up that which is most human in all of us seem quaint in a world where the most successful creator on the planet is arguably this man:

In the Scanlon interview, she quotes from Mr. Beast’s recent memo about how to succeed within his production company:

Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. Everything we want will come if we strive for that.

There it is: no more room for art of any kind. No more tension between creative work and commercial necessity. Just serving the algorithm. Is that not this generation’s siren call? Everything we want will come if we strive for that.

Perhaps by deactivating and deleting the socials, I’ll actually be able to opt out. Perhaps the whole world will gradually appear less driven by memes, and the quality of my own thinking will begin to recover. Maybe it won’t feel as if the algorithms are closing in on me.

Still, the creative work I’ve been doing is on hold. The screenplay and the deck for the television series I was hired to work on are paused—the producer still hasn’t found a buyer, and with limited budget, we’re all taking a breath to decide what the next move should be. I know she wants to sell this idea and see it come to life on a streaming platform somewhere near you. But I suspect the right move is probably to move on.

I heard recently that Netflix executives have advised their screenwriters to make their characters say the thing instead of showing the thing. This is the precise opposite of a generation’s worth of advice for young writers to show, not tell. The reason given is that Netflix knows its viewers are likely to have multiple screens open while they watch, so if their eyes are elsewhere, it’s important to deliver plot points in the form of actual dialogue.

So anyway, it seems we are all truly fucked.

Many might simply say this is what “late stage capitalism” looks like. I’m not sure, but to me it seems more like Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence—a 900-page tour of Western cultural history in which civilizations follow a predictable, cyclical pattern: they produce great wonders, then they grow rich, then they become lazy and decadent, only to have periods of disruption and renewal. Today it seems that many wealthy societies all at once have become lazy and decadent. Lazy in their thinking, decadent in their habits.

Here in Barcelona (and in many cities across the Western world), it is universally agreed that there is a cost-of-living crisis, primarily driven by the affordability of housing. At the same time, the streets and cafes are always full, the people sitting for hours drinking their coffees and beers and vermuts. You pass table after table where sit dozens of empty Estrella bottles, and groups of friends crowded around laughing and conversing. The restaurants are always full, the parades well attended, the beaches packed, the mountains awash in hikers and climbers and bikers and runners with their dogs. If this is late state capitalism, it seems a lovely, natural end state to the world.

Unfortunately, as we all well know, it’s not the end—not yet. A period of disruption and renewal is on its way. Perhaps that’s what I’m feeling, when I feel the unravelling.

This is central to my worldview and informs my mental model of how other minds work, and thus why things happen in the world. But it’s surprising how many people I speak with who are absolutely certain that there are people out there who know they are doing evil and think of it that way. They insist that there are people out there who think to themselves, “I am an evil person doing bad things in the world, and I will continue to do so because that’s the kind of person I am.” Oh, and also usually because capitalism.

I just don’t think anyone thinks that way. Maybe there are amoral people in the world, those to whom the concept of right and wrong, good and evil, just don’t really occur. Or, they think the concepts are not worth considering. But these are few and far between. By and large, I think people think they are doing the right thing most of the time. The thing may actually be bad—but they don’t think of it that way.

A terrorist thinks that by murdering civilians, they are fulfilling their holy mission as God intended. A colonialist thinks they are bringing civilization to people who could materially (and maybe morally) benefit, and also that they are helping to spread their own culture, which they truly believe to be superior. A missionary, quite literally, believes they are saving immortal souls from eternal damnation. The CEO of a large, multi-billion-dollar company probably believes their company is solving a key problem in the world. If it’s a gigantic oil company, for example, maybe they think, “I make a product that helps millions of people around the world get back and forth from work so they can make a living and take care of their families.”

Yet as much as I point out that everyone has a good justification (at least a story they tell themselves) for why they do what they do in the world, others are certain these people are deliberately obfuscating. They insist the CEO of a large oil company knows they are doing evil and simply continues to do it. They insist a missionary is there for other purposes, perhaps to support the work of an evil capitalist or colonialist, and that the religious mission is only the ostensible purpose (in other words, they argue strong religious beliefs are not sincerely held). They insist the colonialist knows and conceives of what they are doing as extractive, rapacious behavior at the expense of the weak and is simply using the guise of “bringing civilization” as an excuse. And they insist that the terrorist who murders innocent people was most likely tricked into being a terrorist because they are uneducated, or was recruited to do so because they were poor and had no other choice (even if interviews and data about the communities where terrorists come from don’t bear this out).

Anyway, I think all of that is quite patriarchal. It is patriarchal to say, “I don’t think you think what you say you think; in fact, I have determined that you think something else.” It is also patriarchal to say, “You only think what you think because you’ve been misled or tricked; if only you had the same information and capacity for thought that I do, you wouldn’t think that.”

But I think it’s important and useful (not to mention respectful) to take people at their word, and I think it’s a mistake to assume that the reasons people tell us for doing things are not actually the reasons. You’re not some all-seeing master who can decide whose motives and ideas are arrived at honestly and whose aren’t. Besides, I wouldn’t want someone else to do that to me! I would want them to take me at my word. I would want them to accept that I’m doing the things I do for the reasons I say I’m doing them. Not because I’ve been tricked or I’m trying to trick you.

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I had, over the course of several weeks, through initial passes with coffee and tea, then progressing to more difficult ones with wine and whiskey, finally whittled my book collection to only that which was essential.

All that I had acquired and retained in life, from New Mexico to D.C. to here in New Hampshire, was down to this. The fifty or so books that would accompany me to Barcelona.

The house, you see, was under contract.

In a few days’ time I would sign papers, load a backpack, two 49.5-pound suitcases, and my dog into the Mazda, and drive with my mom to the Boston airport, where she would drop me off before herself heading back to New Mexico.

In the previous weeks, I had driven a lifetime of possessions to the town transfer station to be dumped or to the thrift store for donation. The detritus of life, transported away. Each trash bag or cardboard box, each plastic bin asking its own questions about what was valuable in life. What was worth saving—and what not.

The rest we would abandon to the new owner or burn in the wood stove.

It was the books, though, which laid it out for me in the starkest terms: so many possessions are ultimately about identity; to shed any of them meant letting go of a certain notion about myself. To wit: am I the kind of person who actually reads Proust, or merely keeps it on his bookshelf?

To grow older is to continually question what is still left to do vs. what is time for me to give up on doing, and the same goes for books still unread. Each item was a life project that would either travel with me to Spain, or be definitively abandoned. Each a decision about what still to pursue, and what to leave behind.

I.

The decision to sell the beloved farmhouse had not come lightly, but it was a long time coming. It was at some point this Summer that the emotional Rubicon had been crossed, and the house had crossed the line from blessing to burden.

In fact, it had often been a burden. I think of my son’s birthday last year, which I spent figuring out why the well was no longer filling up the cistern in the basement. Or when three weeks of sub-zero January temps froze the sewage basin with the pump into a solid block of ice, refusing to let anything else drain.

Then there were the frequent leaks in the copper pipe, the failed water heater, mice in the pantry, strange noises, slanted floors, or the relentless, overgrown goutweed. And there was the dead sump pump one Spring melt, which led to a basement full of water—in New Hampshire, there’s always either too much water or not enough.

The breaking point came when a house-sitter reported, while we were on vacation in Cantabria, that no water was coming out of the taps. The alarm I had installed on the cistern to warn us before water levels fell too low had somehow failed. And the well line—the brand new well line—was somehow just not pulling water down the hill.

After that incident, and the attendant umpteenth round of trans-Atlantic troubleshooting, my mom and I had a heart-to-heart.

The house had been a haven to all during the pandemic. And I had used it as a workshop: learning carpentry and plumbing and electric. I’d renovated the empty garage, built a climbing wall, a sauna, learned picture framing, built furniture, raised garden beds. We’d planted fruit trees, harvested unlimited crabapples, made cider, learned food preservation.

The large property had been especially valuable when my ex-partner and her two kids and my own were all younger, and our family of five could fill its rooms. But that time was over.

At the farmhouse, I climbed to get through that breakup, and, three years later, climbed to get through another. In that house, I became a stronger climber than I ever thought I would be. It held emotional attachments far out of proportion to the number of years I’d owned it.

But the time had come to close that chapter. Another demanded my focus.

II.

“Clear the decks. Reduce. Delete. Sell,” I wrote back in January. My life had begun to feel cluttered in a way that felt almost paralyzing. The projects, tracks, processes, and goals were too much. My bandwidth was full to the point where I couldn’t concentrate.

Of all the values I was trying to live by, simplify was the one I was doing the worst at—and I resolved to do better.

In June, I closed on the Barcelona apartment. Finally, a home that was not a project. A new coat of paint, sure, and the rooms had to be furnished, appliances ordered. But aside from that, it was ready to move in. Not a space in constant demand of my attention, but rather a space to just be.

When I got to New Hampshire a few months later, I set about doing three things:

1. Climbing as much as possible.

2. Putting the farmhouse up for sale.

3. Organizing to bring my dog back to Spain.

All other life projects would be on back-burner mode.

And so the trips to the transfer station and the donation pile began.

The first pass through the books in the hall outside the bedroom was fairly easy. My grandmother, who had also lived in the house several years back, had gone on something of a book-buying binge, acquiring anything she could find New England-related from local used book stores. Old histories of the White Mountains, the field guides of local authors. These were the first to go.

Next were various books on homesteading, textbook-like tomes more aspirational than useful. One on preserving food, another on square-foot gardening. A popular coffee table book about self-sufficiency on a quarter acre. By the third and fourth passes, I started to touch flesh: Robert Frost’s poems; Mark Twain’s short stories; Henry Adams’ The Education of Henry Adams.

There was no reason to get rid of such books unless a serious reckoning were underway. Soon after that, I came to books related to my graduate studies, a classical liberal arts degree that spanned the Western canon. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, dialogues by Plato, plays by Thucydides and Euripides, Thomas Aquinas, Hegel and Kant, Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology.

I came to books that I had read and enjoyed, but which had not made an enormous impression on me. Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir, Bukowski’s Women. Joan Didion’s South and West. And there were books that I had truly enjoyed, but did not see myself going back to, or lending.

What was left, after a particularly emotional night and several glasses of whiskey, felt definitive. Here were books, each one of which had made an important contribution at key stages in my life. Each one I could discuss at length, or explain the significance of to a stranger. Each was a book I might want to pull from the shelf to reference in future writing, or merely re-read for the pleasure of it.

The house had been slowly emptying: furniture sold on Facebook marketplace, old building materials carted to the dump, sporting goods donated to the thrift store, clothing donated or thrown away. But it was the size of the remaining book collection that marked true progress.

III.

When it was nearly done, I snapped a photo:

Yet even this would be whittled just a little further once the last packing of the suitcases began, and the suitcases weighed.

But the photo is a good enough record:

George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Nabakov’s Lolita and Speak, Memory. Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian (I didn’t keep its opposite argument, C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity). Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. I kept several books each by Hemingway, Willa Cather, and Michel Houellebecq. A copy of Aristotle’s Politics and Poetics and Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic.

I kept Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and Stephen King’s book On Writing. I kept Jim Harrison’s Legends of the Fall, Michener’s Journey, and Yates’ Revolutionary Road. I kept Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, and Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet. I kept my beautiful hardcover of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, my tattered old hardcover of Sartre’s The Words, and some smaller softcovers of de Tocqueville, Camus, Arthur C. Clarke, Thoreau, Arthur Koestler, and Viktor Frankl. And I kept a copy of So the Woman Went Her Way, by Lynne Bundesen, my grandmother.

As many of these as I could, I packed into my carry-on. A good portion of the rest went into a small, brown rolling suitcase that turned out to feel far heavier than it looked. Some more went into the larger suitcase, along with the precious few other items I deemed worthy of travel across the ocean.

In the evenings, my mom and I poured wine, started fires in the wood stove, and burned through stacks of old papers. I couldn’t even tell you what was in all of them. Then the next day, it would be back to loading the car and driving yet another carful of accumulated possessions off the property. A lifetime carted away in weeks. Life is a constant trimming, but every once in a while, it’s burning down the forest.

That which I wanted to keep, but couldn’t take to Barcelona, went into a small trunk, which I packed into a moving pod, along with my grandfather’s reclining chair, and everything my mom wanted to take back to New Mexico, either for storage or unloading. I won’t speak for my mom—but she had her own even larger collection of books.

IV.

The last piece was Cooper.

He was a pandemic puppy, and he’d lived there at the farmhouse since my mom and I brought him home from the breeder five years ago. Technically, he had been her dog, but—and she will not dispute this—he most certainly loved me more.

We had discussed my taking him to Barcelona, and I’d been trying to organize the logistics since arriving in New Hampshire. But everything remained uncertain until the last moment.

The crucial remaining piece was the health form, which had to be stamped by the USDA itself. If only the U.S. government had not been shut down.

I scheduled Cooper’s health check-up for 30 days before travel, giving us the maximum allowed time to receive the health form back. Two weeks later, the government reopened. The Monday before my flight, we got word that the form had been approved and was in the mail. The vet could download the signed version from an online portal, but it came with an apostille stamp—and the vet and I guessed that Spain’s famous bureaucracy (or perhaps Lufthansa officials) might want the original document in hand.

But to wait any longer meant the health exam itself would be out of date past the allowed 30-day window. It was now or never.

On a Friday morning, we woke and started packing the car. The climber who was buying my house came to do a final walkthrough with my realtor. A lawyer from the title company showed up and started handing documents to me for signature. The house was empty. Cooper sat on the wood floor in the living room looking very confused.

The first winter storm of the season had dropped about six inches of snow outside just two days before, and the temperatures had dropped to sub-zero. We started one last fire in the wood stove.

By about 9:30am, it was done. I loaded Cooper into the car, into the crate I’d been training him in for months, and my mom and I said one last goodbye, stopping at the country store on the way out for a breakfast sandwich.

At the counter at Boston Logan, the Lufthansa agent checked me in, and I filled out another form to attach to Cooper’s crate that stated when he’d last been fed and had water. Per the online recommendations, I put a t-shirt I’d been wearing into the crate for something that smelled like me, and I took him for one last walk on the airport curb.

When it was time, a customs officer took us into a restricted-access hallway near check-in. He inspected and swabbed the inside of the crate and told me to take off Cooper’s collar. I put him inside, and the customs officer zip-tied the door closed. Then, he put the crate on a trolley and wheeled him away.

“That’s it?” my mom called. “He’s on his way to the airplane?”

He was. And twelve hours and one airport transfer later, he was delivered to me in Barcelona baggage claim—a little scared, certainly weary, he had a look on his face like, Why on earth did you decide to put me through that?—but five minutes later, he was out of the crate, tale wagging, and busily soaking up attention from the two customer service women at Lufthansa baggage claim.

I recovered the two other suitcases with the books, stacked everything onto a baggage cart, and, after waiting in customs for about twenty minutes, said thank you to the officer who had taken a brief look at the printed-out health form, stamped it, and waved us through.

Later that evening, I took Cooper on a long walk around my old neighborhood in Sant Antoni. He was a bit over-stimulated, but was his usual self, wagging the tail, sniffing other dogs, trotting along happily, seeking attention and pets from whoever might appear willing, and well into processing the odd turn his life had taken.

And later, after unpacking, I took a book from the shelf, lounged back on the sofa, and started reading.

Even in a country as similar as the UK, even with a shared language, even after 15 years abroad, my friend was trying to tell me that an essential cultural gulf remained. He had never fully gotten there, and would never get there. Never to the same level of comfort that he had in the U.S.

As we walked down the dirt road toward his house in New Hampshire, he said he was very happy to be back living in this small corner of rural America. Happy, as he approached 70, not to be living in a permanent state of background-level alienation.

Stow and I had known each other for only a few years, but I considered him somewhat of a mentor. He’d taught me to project hard climbing routes at the cliffs, and he was also annoyingly successful in life: long marriage, recently retired from his own law practice, charming, frustratingly good-looking, in great shape, and still climbing just as hard (ok even harder) as me.

A goddamn inspiration, that one.

I’ve been in Spain for two years, long enough to get through the hard parts of moving abroad, long enough to feel some level of comfort about my environment. But when Stow told me the thing about the inability to share a joke with a gas station attendant in the UK, I started to wonder.

What would Spain feel like after 15 years? Am I dooming myself to a permanent state of cultural alienation? Will I one day long to be back somewhere entirely my own, where even the smallest cultural cues are understood without a moment’s thought? What value should I place on that comfort vs. the growth that comes from discomfort?

We walked on down the dirt road. Stow was taking a trip to Spain himself soon, but there was still time to get out climbing together before that.

I.

Some days I worry what I’ve done with my life.

I walk through the wide open streets of Sant Antoni, watching the throngs sipping beers on the tables in the street, the Mediterranean sun shining, the life of this beautiful city buzzing, and I can’t help but wonder: will this subtle, low-level background unease ever quite go away?

Since talking with Stow, I’ve become more attuned to it. It’s a feeling I want to recognize, not ignore. And I’m seeing it everywhere. In film, played for drama, on TV, played for laughs. In other writers I follow.

On The Next Chapter, wrote recently about the feeling of being an outsider in the Italian countryside:

In a village filled with plenty of other immigrants, it feels silly to declare myself as such. I’m not the only person who wasn’t born and raised here, but for a big part of the village, that is exactly what it feels like.

People were born in this village.
Raised in this village.
Have extended families in this village.
Bury loved ones in the cemetery in this village.
Grow old in this village.
Pass away in this village.

The circle of life happens here every single day, and I am on the outside, looking in, even though I am right here in it.

And writing about his time in Argentina, delivers a kind of specificity that feels very familiar:

Yesterday the cashier told me my coffee and pastries would be $7.580 and I drew a total blank (numbers are hard). There’s a bulk health food store with jars of powders and legumes lining the walls two blocks from my apartment that I still haven’t entered because it gives me anxiety. I’ve had to turn back home several times, tail between my legs, after forgetting yet again that many places are closed on Mondays for some reason.

Similarly, when I go out to boliches, the parties that kick off at around 1:30 a.m. and don’t end until the sun has fully risen, I often find myself smiling self-consciously and fake-singing along to songs to which my friends know all the words. So many years of pop culture to catch up on!

But I will never catch up to what a Catalan has grown up with their entire life.

Or take Castellano—even if I were to binge every Spanish show I can find for the next two years, it would be small measure compared to the wealth of cultural baggage that lives rent free (finally the appropriate time to use that silly phrase) inside each and every one of us who grew up on American shores.

I walk the streets of Barcelona, near an apartment I own, visiting with friends I’ve had for years now. But in some sense I am still just an observer. Which is part of what life has asked of me here: to observe. As closely as I can manage. I feel perhaps I am a journalist again, writing from the outside.

Observing now a fundamental divide that will never be fully bridged.

II.

And yet I think there is a way. Not through it, not to overcome it. But around it.

August 2017 — Medellín, Colombia.

My second night after touching down. A taxi takes me and a new friend from tourist-friendly, gentrified El Poblado halfway across the city, dropping us off on a rundown street corner devoid of much life. The building we’re headed for looks like a closed pawn shop, bars in the windows, dim Christmas lights, half-cracked, flickering outside.

The sign says Son Havana Bar, and I wonder if there is something I must be missing about the translation (They Are Havana Bar).

The new friend says Son is actually a style of Cuban salsa music—a cultural detail beyond the capacity of Google Translate.

We enter: low ceilings, rusty metal chairs, smell of spilled beer, dim lights. But also salsa dancing. And friends of friends. Songs I’ve heard before. I don’t know the words, but I know the beat. Always eight counts in 4/4, and the familiar syncopated accents of the clave.

I watch, I order and down a shot of tequila, and then I reach my hand out to someone I want to dance with. She comes into my arms, and I start on the one. Without words, we are communicating instantly.

For years, I’d been doing this. Knowing how to salsa dance felt like something close to a superpower. Colombia and Portugal, Ireland, Ecuador—wherever I touched down, I could walk into a salsa club, not knowing a soul, surrounded by an unfamiliar language, and immediately feel something close to comfortable.

I don’t dance as much as I used to, but the memory of Medellín did strike me: the way around a cultural divide is by joining a subculture that circumvents it.

III.

In fact, I don’t even know if I want to escape this sense of alienation or embrace it.

Climbing has replaced dancing as my way into new places. The crags or the climbing gyms are home no matter where in the world. But climbing is not all of life. In other facets, the low-level unease remains.

A song lyric that’s never felt far from my soul:

Mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys. They’ll never stay home and they’re always alone, even with someone they love.

I’ll feel alone anywhere, leave it to me. In the U.S. or in Barcelona. Surrounded by people or not. With friends and loved ones, as well as strangers.

Anyway, I don’t know if I’ve ever joked with a gas station attendant anywhere. For me, there’s no Indefinite Alienation of Expat Life. Just alienation in general. Might as well make it somewhere beautiful.

Time to revisit one of my all-time favorites:

Everything works out in the end; and if it hasn’t worked out, it’s not the end.

We can always rationalize our way into believing we are in the part of the story that we want to be. We can rationalize that we’re in a story to begin with, and not, say, wandering through the wilderness, no paths, beginnings, middle, or end.

But yesterday did seem like a definitive end, in the way stories go. Such as we have in climbing: its routes, projects, and seasons. You either “send”1 or you don’t. And if the season ends before you get it, it’s over—at least until next year.

Yesterday I failed again on my 13a (7c+) project, the tricky, steep ramp up at Orange Crush known as Tin Man. Sometimes you just don’t have it.

And today, this morning, as the forecast stated, the weather has turned: snow, frozen sleet, sub-temps, overcast, and nothing but wet, rain, snow, and cold for the foreseeable future.

The season endeth.

I.

And yet.

I found myself climbing with two of the most joyful, supportive, stoked climbers I could have hoped for. It began as all climbing belay-tionships do, with chance run-ins at the cliff and small talk, with trading “beta” on how to get through the various sections of the route.

We traded numbers, Lauren and me, because after all, not everyone wants to keep coming back to the same route over and over, especially as the season fades. But that’s exactly what both of us wanted to do. Then later, the same with Ally. She says she got “suckered” into the climb, but what she means is it seduced her into its web, the same way it had seduced Lauren and me.

Eventually, it was the three of us all meeting together. All of us after the same goal, all of us questing after our first 13a. All a little obsessed.

Was it obsession in a good way? Immaterial.

When you follow your stoke and your passion, you find others with the same stoke and passion, I said one night as the three of us made fajitas in my kitchen after a hard day of climbing, and more failure.

We became friends. Giving each other belays, discussing in minute detail how to get through the crux sequence from the ground. All of us on a shared quest, but with slightly different styles and body types, and thus slightly different strategies—and different barriers to sending.

For Ally, an injury, difficulty with the cold, fingers and toes numbing out on the rock. Lauren, something of a mental block that kept spitting her off the bottom, even though she was by far in the best position to finish the climb. And me, a little bit of everything: fitness, technique, and my longer limbs making it difficult to tuck into the squeezed spaces.

Between attempts and in the evenings, we got to other topics: movies, travel, politics, love, relationships. And then, the next available weather window, it was back to the climb.

In such ways are friendships formed: time spent, pursuing passion, braving the cold and disappointment of failed attempt after failed attempt: shared suffering, one might say.

II.

And it wasn’t just us.

Up on the ledge at Orange Crush were a handful of other climbers questing after nearby routes. Matti on Tin Monkeys, James and Jason on Dynosoar. Orangahang, Flying Monkeys, and just down the hill, the grandaddy king line of them all, Predator.

If the weather was good, we could nearly always count on seeing each other on the ledge. And we almost always knew where the others were in our respective quests. Matti, with his new method of moving through the crux, powerful but suited to his huge wingspan. James inching higher and higher on each attempt.

On such climbs, progress can be measured not on whether you fell from a new, higher hold, but often whether you fell while moving up from the same hold as before. It can be measured in the certainty with which you were able to grip, whether all three pads of your finger were on or just two. Measured in a slight adjustment to your foot placement to make clipping the rope through the next carabiner just a hint easier.

Thus it was that climbing this one route took over much of our lives, even off the rock.

Back at the house, I hesitated to continue with a landscaping project because the risk of tweaking my back shoveling was just too great. Saunas were strategically timed for maximum muscle recovery. Our diets and drinking, our rest routines, our yoga stretches, our sleep: all were oriented toward recovery and preparation for the rock.

Our bodies were literally molding around the exact movements needed for this one, specific climb. Everything else was extraneous.

III.

So it was that on a cold, dreary day last week, after falling and failing for weeks, that Lauren finally pulled it out, seemingly out of nowhere.

Her stoke was high that day, even despite the gray weather. She had been saving a brownie for when she sent—a small pleasure, a victory snack for when it happened. But so certain it wasn’t going to happen, she ate the brownie just before the last attempt of the day.

And then: a release. A mental breakthrough. It’s hard not to see the connection: once she truly let go of the outcome, she did it. All of a sudden, she got through the bottom crux that had been defeating her for weeks. She moved onto the ramp, to the kneebar rest where the rest of the business starts, and called down to Ally, who was belaying: Oh shit, now I have to try hard.

And then she caught her breath, moved from the pancake-shaped hold, and slowly but deliberately moved her way through the ramp, to the final, steep jugs, and the anchor chains at the top.

Ally and I never got it. We came out one more day, just the two of us, the forecast bequeathing us one last window of warmth and sun before a snowstorm rolled in. Both of us were so close. We could taste it.

We had the send brownies in our bag, and toward the end of the day, we ate them, hoping to capture a bit of Lauren’s mystical send energy. Hoping for the same release that would unlock the final send for us as well.

But it was not to be.

IV.

They say everything is in the journey, not the destination. And I have to remember my beloved passage from Hunter S. Thompson: But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life.

But it stings to not finish when I’m so close. I could blame the weather, the shortness of the season here in New England. It was too hot, then there were about three weeks of decent weather, and then it was too cold and wet. In truth, I only chose Tin Man because I had no other choice—the holds on other climbs were all soaked, whereas Tin Man’s sheltered ramp stayed dry even after days of rain.

I could blame the style, not at all suited to me, or the odd, low-probability nature of the crux sequence. I could blame myself, my headspace, the mistakes I made falling from certain sections even when I’d gotten through harder parts below.

I could tell myself anything I want, really, I’m the author of my own story.

But the beauty of projecting in climbing is that it defies your own narrative: you don’t have it until you have it. It’s not a subjective thing. It’s not in the mind of the beholder. You either send or you don’t send.

When it happens, we all know that it’s happened. And if not, not. If you think about it, the very black and white nature of sending is the reason it’s a shared experience. The shared reality is the reason we can celebrate each other’s wins so unequivocally.

But of course, the process itself is also the thing. I now know I can climb that hard. Given the time, the conditions, the focus, I can climb harder than I ever imagined just a few years ago. I am strong in my body, confident, psyched, and I will soon head back to Spain where it is warm and dry another winter season awaits.

But the real thing is always the relationships formed, the time shared. Happiness only real when shared, as Chris McCandless famously scribbled just before dying alone in the Alaskan wilderness.

Lauren and Ally, my ledge partners, my friends: it was a beautiful journey with both of you. Lauren, you absolutely deserved the send; and Ally and I will just need to come back one day.

Everything works out in the end, and if it hasn’t worked out, it’s not the end.

Brett Lowell, the cameraman who had been filming Caldwell’s journey for years, said he could never tell if he was wasting his time. Maybe Tommy would never send, and all those weeks and months hanging on a rope, pointing the camera, capturing footage, would all be for nought. Maybe Tommy was struggling against a void he would never overcome.

Many who aren’t climbers have seen the movie Free Solo, where Alex Honnold climbs a nearby route on El Cap without a rope. But what Honnold does is exceedingly rare in climbing. Less than 1% of climbers ever scale huge cliffs without a rope. And meanwhile, the Free Solo filmmakers make it clear that Honnold’s brain works differently from ours. That story is about the anxiety of the people around Honnold more than Honnold himself.

But Caldwell’s journey is supremely relatable. Especially because it’s not some unique area of the brain that made him beat his body against a 3,000-foot cliff for seven years, with little to no hope of success—it was something almost all of us can relate to. It was a breakup.

I.

The past five weeks, I’ve been visiting my old farmhouse in New Hampshire, which is just down the road from a major climbing area, Rumney Rocks.

I like to visit each fall and help my mom with the house (she’s been living here since I bought the property in 2019), and because Fall is prime climbing season. The leaves change color, the temperatures drop, and I think there is no better place to be.

But this year has been bittersweet. My mom wants to move (she’s in New Mexico at the moment), and so I’m thinking of selling the house. My life is in Spain now, and it doesn’t make sense to maintain this big property if no family is here, and I only visit a month or two out of the year.

More than that, however, is that I’m nursing my own breakup. I was supposed to be here with her, and now I’m here alone.

Which has thrown me into something of a Caldwell-like quest, with an amount of concentrated focus I’m not sure I’ve ever had before.

At 43 years old, I’ve never climbed this hard or this well in my life. Nor have I ever focused so intently on “projects,” i.e., hard climbs that can take weeks, months (or in Tommy’s case, years) to work out the moves before a send.

I say that Tommy beat his body against the wall, but projecting is much more than physical. It’s also a problem to be worked out, and the solution is both mental and technical. In Rumney, the climbs are often unusually “beta-intensive,” which means they require a lot of specific information about how to move through the route: which holds to grab and how, the specific body position at certain moments, the precise sequence of footwork.

For the past month, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time discussing beta with a rotating crew of climbers up on the Orange Crush ledge in Rumney. It’s a spot perched mid-way up on the side of Rattlesnake Mountain, with the entirety of the Baker River Valley spread below.

There are a handful of intimidating overhanging climbs that all start from the same spot on the ledge. There, we drink our tea, eat our sandwiches, and queue up one after the other for various routes—Flying Monkeys, Tin Man, Tin Monkeys, Dynosoar—watching each other’s approach to getting through the most difficult spots, or cruxes, discussing just how to rotate the torso so the back heel can lodge itself into the crack, or the exact finger and thumb position to be used on the affectionately called “baby ballsack” hold.

To a non-climber, these discussions would be practically unintelligible—it’s no wonder after two years of living in Spain I still can’t quite follow a discussion of the minutiae of beta on a particular climb: from the kneebar, lower onto the a-cup sloper, keeping the body tension, coming into the gaston with your right, to the finger slot with the heel-hook, and on and on, ad infinitum.

After three weeks of this, I sent a major project: Flying Monkeys, 12c (7b+ in the European grading system).

It’s an intimidating, acrobatic, steep endurance and power route. Basically, my anti-style. The crux is keeping it together while your forearms are so pumped out of your mind you can’t think straight. One friend even recommended skipping the last clip (i.e., not putting the rope through a carabiner for protection) because it would sap too much energy off the final moves.

The route took me 16 times tying into the rope over the course of three weeks. Counting “tie-ins” is a common measure of how long a project took, and thus how hard it was for each person individually.

Pro climbers will tie in to the rope dozens or even hundreds of times as they work their hardest projects. For me, 16 was the most I’ve ever done—the longest I’d ever focused on a single climb my entire life.

This signifies two things. One, I’m not choosing hard enough projects. And two, I’ve never given even a fraction of the focus to my climbing projects that stronger climbers do to theirs.

Which is why I’m writing here that I’m having something of a Caldwell moment.

II.

I’m not usually like this.

My time in Rumney is usually spent reconnecting with friends, climbing a lot but more casually. I’m generally a flexible partner, all-too-willing to alter my plans for another’s goals, but more often I simply don’t have plans to which I’m particularly attached.

This is different.

The other day, a semi-frequent climbing partner texted me to ask if I could do a day of high-volume, “moderate” climbing at some of the other crags. I texted back a friendly no—I was unusually focused on my project.

Two days ago, a partner from Boston regretfully texted that she couldn’t make it for a planned day up on the ledge. I trekked up there anyway, alone, against all my instincts as an introvert, in the hopes of asking someone for a belay (Of course, it was no problem; several climbers I knew were there working the same routes).

After sending Flying Monkeys, I briefly considered relaxing the rest of my time here. Perhaps I would do some out-of-the-way climbs, go to some other crags, or even visit another climbing area.

But no. Literally the next day out at the cliffs, I asked for a belay on an even harder climb up on the ledge, a 13a that shared some of the same moves. The crux is a boulder problem involving the aforementioned baby ballsack hold. On my fourth tie-in, I managed to do it. On my fifth and sixth tie-ins, I repeated the move, and started work on the other parts of the climb.

There is still a long way to go: putting it all together in one go, without a rest, is always harder than it feels like it should be, when you’re doing each of the moves individually.

But if I’m able to send, this would be the hardest climb of my life. Climbing 13a (7c+ in Europe) is a life goal for me, but it’s always felt pretty out of reach. Not because I don’t think I’m physically capable, but because I’ve always questioned whether I would ever have the time and focus for it.

My life has often felt so scattered. Parenting, moving countries, learning another language, the renovation, travel, writing, work, clients.

Leave it to heartbreak I suppose. Nothing to do but go.

III.

I do think about Caldwell up there on the Dawn Wall.

For months after the movie came out about his journey to finish the route, climbing gyms where I was living in Washington D.C. had gigantic, wall-covering posters up asking, What’s your Dawn Wall?

The push to complete the climb famously generated enormous media attention, with TV trucks parked in Yosemite Valley for weeks. Between tries, Tommy and his climbing partner were giving interviews to national media outlets from their portaledge thousands of feet off the ground.

Yet those in-the-moment TV appearances were curiously devoid of the heartbreak at the center of the story—his divorce from Beth Rodden after 10 years. Caldwell was there essentially because he’d just lost his marriage, his first love, his best friend, and his climbing partner.

Yet Caldwell has spoken openly about his motivations, both in the film and in other forums:

When my mind was going a million miles an hour and I was in this really crazy state, I needed a distraction from the pain of that. That’s when I really took this project on full force, because being up there in this place that I love and working hard was kind of the only time I could feel normal for a while.

Reading that makes my heart clench, and I have to take a moment. The feelings are so familiar.

My Dawn Wall, at least for now, is the Orange Crush Ledge. Up there with the rest of the crew.

It’s nowhere near the difficulty of Caldwell’s route (to my fellow climbers: please forgive even the hint of a comparison). And I don’t anticipate I’ll be there for seven years. Caldwell climbed a 3,000-foot stretch of wall no one thought could be climbed. I’m trying to do a few short routes on which thousands have come before.

What is the same is my grasp for control after a failure I didn’t see coming—and my need for focus when the mind wants to go a million miles an hour somewhere else.

To all the climbers who have joined me up on that ledge over the past several weeks: I am so grateful for your company, the belays, the beta, and the friendship. Sending season is here— let’s keep it rolling a while longer 🙏 💪 🤗.

It just struck me, the bizarre, tech-obsessed soullessness Sasha describes in such stark contrast to the warm, romantic decadence of Barcelona, that it had me wondering why anyone in their right mind would ever want to move there.

The Bay Area has a curse, Sasha writes: “Aboutness.” Everything has to be About something. People don’t gather for the pleasure of each other’s company; they gather for an exchange of information—a podcast discussion in real life. “In the Bay, most gatherings have the sweaty air of Purpose.”

Barcelona has almost none of this, except among expats who are themselves in tech. None of the throngs of young people crowded around metal tables outside of neighborhood bars are there for an exchange of information; they’re there because this is what Spain is optimized for—all the incentives and a thousand years of tradition and warm weather point toward four-hour dinners late into the evening, beer bottles and empty tapas plates strewn about.

Sasha writes of the Bay’s “famous gender imbalance”:

Is there a less sexual city than this? … The good, sweet men are scared of women. They find it unacceptable that someone, somewhere, could find out that they want sex.

Lol. The men of Barcelona are the opposite. Men into their 40s and 50s, charming, handsome, alive, impeccable salt and pepper stubble. And of course, they dress well. Of course, they want sex. It is Southern Europe.

Here there are none of the Bay Area’s “awkward people” writing popular posts on charisma and attraction, because neither of those qualities is in short supply. And as for the gorgeous woman Sasha describes as being self-conscious about wearing a pretty dress at a party?—I can’t imagine her existing anywhere in Barcelona.

I generally see Barcelona’s overt sexuality worn on its sleeve (pockets of Catalan modesty aside). Rarely have I been somewhere so densely packed with this diversity of attractive people. The Istiklal in Istanbul, a gigantic crossroads of half a dozen cultures, could perhaps compete. The Mediterranean climate here makes it easy to show skin, and beautiful tattoos are a matter of course. It would be rebellious and counter-cultural not to have beautiful tattoos in Barcelona.

Sasha writes of the Bay Area that “people are dreaming up the future here, who have never fully experienced their own bodies or emotions.” In Barcelona, for better or worse, few are dreaming up the future; perhaps they are too busy experiencing their bodies and emotions. Every day, I see people crying on the streets.

Then there’s this: “I talk to strangers at the climbing gym and it’s like I’ve startled a bobcat.”

Speaking as a climber who has relied on it for social connection wherever I go, the image of Sasha trying and failing to make small talk in a climbing gym startled me. My first friends in Barcelona were made at the gym or at the crags. Last month, I decided to join a friend at the climbing gym in the middle of the day on a Thursday, and was promptly introduced to five more would-be friends and climbing partners.

Of course, I know why the Bay Area gym is different. People all with the same tech-utopia mind virus move themselves to the Bay Area, and then they take up climbing, so that Sasha’s climbing gym is now one of the few places in the world where my beloved passion is not an inherently social pursuit.

I said I don’t know why anyone would move there, but in fact I know perfectly well: they move to pursue a memetic desire to change the world through tech and maybe get rich in the process. They’ve been sold the new American dream, where you become a “builder” who never picks up a hammer, but nevertheless is solving the world’s problems with a laptop, a PowerPoint deck, and an internet connection.

I don’t mean to speak so dismissively. Silicon Valley has been the preeminent driver of American GDP growth in my lifetime—an unparalleled wealth-creation machine that half the world’s leaders would desperately love to imitate.

I can only speak for myself when I say I think it’s a bad trade: the Bay Area and all the tech it’s given us vs. a culture as empty and lifeless as the one Sasha describes:

What’s relevant is that a place so erotically damaged has little eros, generally. Culture springs from the willingness for romance. Without it, life is less directed by wonder and attraction writ large. Fewer connected conversations with people who laugh easily and palpably enjoy each other’s company. Fewer moments when it feels like the human burden has been lifted.

This is the paragraph that made me think, Opposite of Barcelona.

I once had a friend (we don’t keep in touch) who would have fit right in. He used to say that the world would be a better place if it were managed by algorithm, so long as it was the right algorithm. One with all the inputs it needs to effectively manage the global economy, so that we wouldn’t even need politics anymore.

What a sad and naive idea. But at the same time, it scared me: what if men like him ruled the world? “The common view is that humanity is a problem which can be solved if we finally just put our heads together,” Sasha writes.

Of course, there are pluses to the Bay Area: “It’s a good place to work, to meditate, to experience solitude. I’ve grown more intellectually rigorous, because everyone here is so fucking literal-minded. My cardio is better because I can run along the ocean.”

In contrast, it may be difficult to experience solitude in Barcelona. The apartments are small, the streets full. Many people run and bike by the sea, but it’s a crowded waterfront. My Barcelona producer friend has a weekly meditation circle—which is so classic Barcelona, I can’t even: meditation, but social.

My friend and fellow Barcelona expat uses the word serendipity to describe what goes on here. What Sasha might describe as a life “directed by wonder and attraction writ large.” Chance encounters that create happy after-effects.

By now, I’ve had enough of those serendipitous moments in two years to outweigh a decade of living in the Washington D.C. area, a city one might also say is cursed by Aboutism, its gatherings infected with a sweaty air of Purpose. Here, I run into friends on the street. The city’s communities are interwoven. Seemingly random connections turn into meaningful moments at an unusually high rate.

Sasha writes:

The Bay sucks up bright minds and invites them to descend into insular parody. It also sucks up try-hards who imitate the genuine eccentrics and, in the process, merely become mediocre dysregulated people.

Barcelona sucks up wandering souls. It sucks up artists and musicians who imitate the Gaudis and Picassos of old with their own show—a cabaret, or an open jam session, a nude figure drawing class, opera on the beach, open mic and cocktails, comedy, weekly jazz in the old bordello. And it sucks up the Latin and Chinese and Moroccan immigrants, coming to study, to advance, to escape. To take over a neighborhood Catalan restaurant and run it the exact same way, with the exact same menu.

Eventually, we too get infected with a mind virus, the one advocating the daily siesta and the slow lunches, the evenings in the public square, and the Sundays with family. We may merely become mediocre people, in the end—but we will almost certainly not become dysregulated. Quite the opposite.

I’ve always thought of myself as an incredibly successful Anti-Capitalist, Capitalist (ACC).

An ACC uses capitalism to escape capitalism. We’re good at making money, and often enjoy doing so (I love winning new marketing clients). We know that our own ambition often sets other beneficial societal wheels in motion, whether that’s creating jobs that pay for people to live and raise their families, or creating products and services that improve people’s lives.

At the same time, we recognize all the inherent corruptions of an unchecked profit motive, especially paired with bad regulation. We understand that it’s the combination of these two, often in an “unintended consequences” way, that enables things like rapacious monopolies, predatory rent-seeking, or absolutely insane, ahistorical wealth inequality.

But we know and accept that we exist within a capitalist system—i.e., we’re not revolutionaries, and we’re (rightly) weary and skeptical of revolutions. We just believe that the best way to escape capitalism is to use it well, to harness it toward our own needs.

So we don’t fall prey to lifestyle inflation or excessive consumerism. We resist the memetic desire to simply imitate the wealth-worshiping values of others. Our money is used to invest in assets and to generally increase our options and autonomy, even in the face of bad job markets, recessions, or other negative economic conditions.

Our goal is to make money not matter so much in our lives and ultimately, to divorce money entirely from that which gives us purpose and meaning.1

When I was younger, I thought the most Anti-Capitalist, Capitalist thing you could do is grow your own food.

In the 90s, when I learned about what Monsanto was doing with seeds, I decided it was the most immoral, bad-for-society thing I’d ever heard of. The agriculture conglomerate had patented seeds that were genetically modified so they could only be used once; after that they would be sterile and unable to germinate. The idea was to actively prevent farmers from saving and reusing seeds to plant next season’s harvest, thus making them dependent on an annual contract with Monsanto.

Essentially, Big Ag was robbing society of its most basic capacity for self-reliance, enslaving farmers to its will, and trapping them in a cycle of paying for seeds and the chemicals needed to grow them.

Centuries of wisdom about how to grow food, wiped out by a chemical conglomerate.

What’s worse, as I watched Big Ag destroy small family farms, it appeared there was almost nothing we could do about it—forces of capitalism at work and all that. The Department of Agriculture had approved. Congress was subservient to donor interests and full of cowards. And perhaps most signficantly, the economics of it all left farmers little choice.

But there was one thing we could do: plant a garden and grow our own food.

At a young age, I decided this was the most revolutionary act possible. To grow your own food was to assert your basic right to live and exist outside the dictates of a socio-economic system that was doing everything in its power to make us subservient consumers, dependent on Big Business for our most basic needs.2

Growing your own food was an act of rebellion, but also an economic and environmental benefit. Saved from drives to the neon-lit grocery stores to buy expensive mini-bags of arugula packed into plastic. Savings on gas, savings on transport of food across continents, savings from not buying all that plastic. And a large chunks of your monthly grocery bill instead harvested directly from your little piece of land.

Planting a vegetable garden was the true mark of an Anti-Capitalist Capitalist. It allowed you to at least partially step outside of a completely corrupt system.

But that was then. Today, there’s arguably an equally important mark: reclaiming and reasserting control over our attention.

Of course, I’m not the first to say that our minds have been hacked. That there are Big Corporate Interests who spend billions to ensure we’re addicted and engaged to their mindless scrolling products. Nor am I the first to say that attention is the new currency, because it’s so clearly our attention that is being bought and sold: by social media companies, by streaming services, the news, the reels, the vids—by everyone.

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Every day in Barcelona, I see someone crying on the street.

Or at least, it’s clear they have been crying very recently. The other day, it was a pregnant woman leaning against the wall in Poble Sec outside what I assumed was her apartment building. Long skirt, looked about 34. Had she stepped out to get some space after a fight?

Or the woman in heels, miniskirt, mascara dripping, walking in Sant Antoni at 8 am in the morning, I can only assume in a direction away from her lover’s apartment. Did the fight begin the night before, at a club somewhere, or only just this morning?

I have yet to cry in the street, but there have been sad days. Life does follow you to other countries, along with all its sadnesses. A few weeks ago, I was walking near the Gothic Quarter, feeling down, when I passed another woman crying, this time with her boyfriend walking beside her, looking frustrated and embarrassed. Another relationship turned sour.

I thought, right now in Barcelona, there are tens of thousands of people on vacation so happy to have paid thousands of euros for a plane ticket and a few nights of accommodation, just so they can walk down this street I’m walking on now.

In fact, there are 15 million tourists who visit Barcelona each year—41,000 per day.

In general, I try to stay away from the big tourist areas. People ask me if I’ve been squirted with a water gun. Well, no, because I’m not dining on bad paella on La Rambla in knee-high white socks and tennis shoes. Nor am I gawking at my cell phone screen pointed up at Casa Milà on the Passeig de Gracia trying to take the same photo as the other three hundred people.

No one who lives in a tourist hub spends that much time doing touristy things. In ten years living in Washington D.C., I visited the Lincoln Memorial, my favorite of all the memorials, no more than three or four times. I visited the National Gallery about once a year, but only to beeline it directly to the Rothko collection. The White House? Congress? Never once got a tour.

My own hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is also a tourist spot. The city receives about 2 million tourists annually. When I was a reporter there, I lived quite close to the historic center, which meant I couldn’t avoid at least some of the 5,500 tourists a day wandering up and down the Spanish colonial streets in search of turquoise jewelry or Native American art.

I visit my family in Santa Fe around once a year—and yet (this is actually embarrassing to admit), I’ve never once been inside the city’s most-visited tourist attraction, the Meow Wolf immersive art space. Just can’t be bothered. Also, I don’t really like “immersive” art (but give me the Rothkos).

But back to the crying. A tourist city is still a city, and a city contains all the myriad shades of human drama and emotion.

I’ve been living in Catalunya for two years, so I’m well past the “I’ve moved to Europe!” honeymoon stage. The oh my God I can’t believe this is my life stage (for a good example, see my September 2023 post, Day drinking and endless croissants).

I’ve struggled. I’ve beat my fists against the Spanish bureaucracy. I’ve failed and failed again at things I should be good at. I’ve felt like a child, a beginner. I’ve felt alienated and alone as well as connected and accepted. Beautiful relationships have come into my life, and also ended.

So even though I don’t wish to participate in what .Ink calls the “European Dream Industrial Complex,” still, I think I can say this without rose-colored glasses: if you’re going to be sad, Barcelona is a beautiful place to be while you’re at it. Very unlike some other cities I know (here’s looking at you, New York).

Beauty is a strange thing in that way. When I see it in nature, I think: maybe there is a God after all, who’s to say? But when I see it in a built environment, when I see beauty made from human hands, like one sees walking around any number of Barcelona neighborhoods, I think: I am welcome here.

Welcome to stand and gaze up at those ornate art nouveau balconies, the vaguely Parisian architectural details, welcome to stroll as slowly as I dare down a pedestrian streetscape, shaded by large trees and surrounded by history, welcome to sit by myself for a beer or a coffee and just people watch. Anyway what were these Catalan and Spanish architects thinking, if not that they wished for us to be here and gaze upon their works?

When I see an ugly city, I don’t feel welcome. I feel I must do my business and get out as quickly as possible. An urban environment built for cars naturally feels this way, almost by definition. Most neighborhoods in most cities in the U.S. are like this, though there are exceptions. There is no leisurely strolling down a Detroit street taken at random.

When I cry in the street in Barcelona, if I cry in the street, I will do so knowing that a croissant and a coffee are only a few steps away, or a cheap house vermut, a copa or caña. I will do so knowing I can walk it off in the first place. Walk up the hill toward Montjuic if I have to, walk until I have a view of the whole city, and I can sit on the hillside and cry some more if I need to.

Besides, the southern European countries are all totally fine with emotions, and the open expression thereof. The streets of Barcelona are teeming with Latinas, with Italians, with Spanish people from every corner of Spain, the Andalucians, the Galicians, even Madrileños. Emotions are worn on the sleeve.

My stoic American spirit has had to learn to express emotion. Like many boys where I come from, I was told that boys don’t cry. Not them, and not me. And for many years, I never did.

But things change, often helped about by the places and environments we surround ourselves with. So yes, Barcelona is a fine and good place to cry. As good as any.

In a relationship, at least one of the two people has to be responsible for grounding it (ideally both). Without that, the relationship is quite susceptible to falling apart.

Just something I’ve learned recently.

Another thing I’ve learned: I’m in a serious relationship with climbing.

It’s not an exclusive relationship. Never has been. But at this point, my relationship with climbing is among the longest in my life, preceded only by a small handful of friendships. That and the relationships I have with my family.

So what’s the secret to this longevity?

Climbing is possibly the most grounding presence in my life. Whatever happens, whatever heartbreaks occur, whatever tragedies might befall, climbing has always been there for me, and I know it always will.

It doesn’t even expect reciprocal treatment. I don’t have to show up for climbing (though, barring chronic illness or catastrophic injury, I always plan to). But climbing needs no reassurance on that account. It’s fine whether I show up or not. I can leave for however long; climbing will always be there.

I mean this in a very literal sense. Climbing is always in place, right where I left it. The cliffs will remain, the routes, the boulders. Sure, the holds may get polished over time, but the route itself will stay right where it is.

Climbing is immovable, in its own way, and so I can always trust it to be there.

Plus, we have a history. In times past, it almost didn’t matter what had befallen: the end of a long relationship, the death of a close friend, some particularly depressive episode in my life.

Even in those times when I couldn’t bear to work, couldn’t drag myself from bed, times when I wanted to eat my feelings and drink my sorrows, moments when I couldn’t find motivation for anything—I could still find motivation to climb.

In those dark moments, climbing showed me who it truly is: an impartial vessel, into which I can pour the inner demons, expunge all the doubts. I can smash them against the rock, wring them from my body, perhaps exorcise them completely; climbing won’t care.

And besides, climbing is such a beautiful mistress. In the Fall in Rumney, with the leaves turning red and orange against the Baker River Valley. In the winter in Siurana, when the sun sets over the vineyards of the Catalunyan countryside, and you can sip a beer from the little village, more than a thousand years old. In Greece, with its seaside cliffs. In Mexico, with its towering bolted multipitches. And of course, in Yosemite, with its granite prow sufficient to inspire a spiritual awe in all who visit.

Climbing becomes even more beautiful the more I visit, the more I commit. My body responds to its touch, making itself lean and strong. And my mind responds to its infinite, patient challenges, making itself brave and focused. I become more present, more grateful.

The better I get as a lover, the bigger the playground for exploring.

What’s more: climbing doesn’t mind if I have other relationships—in fact, it encourages it. Climbing is a wingman, a social connector, the best possible excuse for a date.

Of course, if I am with someone who also loves climbing, we can have threesomes every weekend. It’s a beautiful thing to share our love. Conversely, if I’m with someone who doesn’t climb, no pasa nada—but they’ll need to understand I do have a mistress.

Climbing takes me as I am, but it also questions me, as life itself does. Climbing asks, do you really want this? are you spending this brief time on earth wisely? what is your relationship to nature, to others, and to yourself? are you kind with yourself? with others? do you want them to succeed? do you want them to find joy and passion in their life? Do they make you feel safe? Can they trust you to do the same?

Like many relationships, this one can seem like something of a black box to those on the outside. People who have never been in a relationship with climbing can’t quite understand what the big deal is.

But that’s fine; they don’t need to.

In the end, no one can truly understand what goes on in a relationship, sometimes even including those who are in it.

As for climbing, I can always say: thank you for being there, even despite all my many flaws, always.

My Hungarian climber friend brought me a book over the Summer, when he came to visit from Budapest—Journey by Moonlight, by Antal Szerb.

A young couple, traveling through Italy on their honeymoon, though with a growing sense of unrest between them. “Wandering from city to city, with his marriage rapidly falling apart, Mihály must confront the ghosts of his past and try to find a sense of purpose,” says the back cover.

The year? 1937.

I’ve often wondered what it’s like to live in the waning moments of a world order about to collapse into cataclysm. And the novel has an answer: it’s a lot like living through any other time.

The author, Szerb, appears to have no sense of what is about to come. Hungary at the time was led by a right-wing Christian nationalist government allied with Germany. Szerb’s characters travel through an Italy ruled by Mussolini, but their thoughts are preoccupied with the beauty of the countryside, their own personal relationships, and their place in the world.

Because of course they are.

They’re like the fish in the famous speech from David Foster Wallace:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

Except that I’m getting the distinct sense that someone is about to pull the drain plug and flush it all down the drain.

I. This moment in Barcelona

Barcelona right now feels full of bleeding-heart anti-capitalists. I’m in a Spanish conversation class with one of them now. Capitalism is so all-consuming that we can’t even imagine a different way to organize society, she said in class last week.

Young people today talk like revolutionaries. In 1937, socialists were fighting a losing war right here in the streets outside our classroom—a torrent of violence and mass executions so that Spain could sit out the coming global cataclysm and spend the following three decades living under Franco’s dictatorship.

This young socialist in my class was speaking much like I imagine the ones of old, ready to overthrow the existing order in search of something more “just,” if only they had the power to do so. They see the system around them as misery brought about by settler colonialists, inequality forced on us by billionaires, and above all, injustice brought about by racism, power, and corruption.1

I mean, here is an expat young person from the U.S. living in Barcelona who spends their days organizing their creative thoughts into a “second brain” along the lines of tech bro Tiago Forte, preaching to me about injustice and about how we should overthrow the existing world order.

I’m not scared that young people like this will actually take up arms to bring about this unspecified new world order—I’m worried they’ll stand by, scared stiff, as someone else takes power for themselves. After all, my classmate said, I’m a pacifist.

Interesting how the varying ideologies co-exist.

II. The right problems

After class last Friday, I drove to visit my friends in the mountains and climb some rocks.

The husband is working on a new book about how liberalism can start winning again by crafting policies that speak to core, evolutionary values that exist in all of us by nature. I don’t know if he’s right, but I think the questions he’s working on are the correct ones.

Meanwhile, the wife is working on a new round of funding for her early-stage startup and wrestling with difficult problems about the extent to which capitalism can be harnessed to address the harms of incumbent, profit-driven industries. Should she create a product that helps bad companies do less harm, at the risk of propping up an immoral industry? It’s a difficult moral problem.

Oh—and she is eight months pregnant.

My Spanish classmate, of course, isn’t sure whether they want to bring kids into this world.

The husband and I spent the weekend climbing at two new cliffs in the area, the rock still sharp, the skin on our fingers chaffed away until raw. By the end, my muscles were as worked as they had been in months. It felt amazing.

Climbing as therapy, as always.

III. Choosing your frustrations

After, I drove to my property in Cornudella de Montsant, to the renovation project that has sat stagnant for much of the last year.

I needed to check on a leak my neighbors had reported while I’ve been away, my attention focused elsewhere. My neighbor across the street had texted me that he’d heard a strong dripping sound through the front door, and could see the ground wet underneath. Fortunately, the water shutoff can be accessed from the outside, which is exactly what my neighbor did as soon as he saw.

Headaches like this have been creeping up in all my properties.

In New Mexico, at the townhouse I’ve owned since my 20s, torrential desert storms created a roof leak, which went unaddressed by both the tenant and the property manager. Mold was eventually reported; remediation had to be done; the roof needed to be replaced, interior insulation and drywall still to be repaired.

At my farmhouse in New Hampshire, the new, gravity-fed well line we put in last year suddenly stopped working just as my mom, who has been living there the last five years, was in Spain visiting my son and I. The alarm system I’d installed to warn if water levels were low in the cistern had failed. And now we were troubleshooting with the housesitter via WhatsApp from across the ocean.

Fortunately, the Cornudella leak turned out to be small. It was on the ground floor, a pinhole leak in the copper pipe just after the water meter. Nothing in the house had been damaged. It would be a relatively easy fix, and besides, I had wanted to redo the lines for a while.

But the property headaches were adding up. I really didn’t want any of this stress in my life, if I’m honest. The older I get, the more choosy I’ve become with what kind of frustrations I’m willing to put up with.

IV. Continuing on

I’m nearly done with Journey By Moonlight. Will the characters find purpose in their life? Will the unrequited love that Mihály pined for as a rebellious youth finally be satiated?

Will all of this resolve itself before Hitler marches on Poland?

“The U.S. right now is giving off definitive late-stage, fall of empire,” vibes, I texted my sister in Santa Fe, who had just sent me a meme about the impending fall of civilization. But her oldest son is doing very well in the new Waldorf charter school there, it’s reported.

Here in Barcelona, I find my emotions are in a particularly raw state, brought about entirely by personal issues, and having nothing to do with the state of the world. Crippling anxiety about world events serves no one, I keep telling people. But crippling self-doubt about my way of existing in the world, well… That’s my own struggle.

I am reminded that entire lifetimes can be lived, children born and raised, loves won and lost, in the twilight before a cataclysm. We continue on as best we can. And hopefully, we choose our time on this earth wisely, however limited it may be.

There’s the writer I am, and there’s the writer that sometimes I wish I was.

Take John Reed, whose epic life Warren Beatty adapted into my favorite movie of all time, Reds.1 Reed and his wife, Louise Bryant, were among the only journalists in Russia during the revolution in 1917. When Reed returned to the U.S., he wrote an influential book called Ten Days That Shook the World.

It was urgent and vivid—a page-turner, as they say. To read it is to feel as if one is in the room with workers and revolutionaries: “Always the methodical muffled boom of cannon through the windows, and the delegates screaming at each other… So, with the crash of artillery, in the dark, with hatred, and fear, and reckless daring, new Russia was being born.”

In the movie, one of the characters says of Reed: “He knew he was on the threshold of history, and wrote it that way.”

Those words have always lingered.

To be on the threshold of history and to write it that way.

I. Interesting times

May you live in interesting times.

I’d always thought that was an ancient Chinese curse, though Perplexity reports that no equivalent Chinese phrase has ever been located. Nevertheless, it’s a useful reminder that “interesting times” doesn’t necessarily mean peaceful or tranquil times—usually, quite the opposite.

It seems as clear as any time in my life that we are at a threshold of history, but thresholds are rarely peaceful affairs. More often, they’re a time of troubles.

My prediction for the near future is that violence will proliferate, and chaos and disinformation will rule. The world will grow more dangerous, and there will be more war. Already, it is reasonable to say that you should not trust video or photo evidence that you see with your own eyes. And what was true a hundred years ago is even more true today: “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.”2

I liken this moment to the period after the invention of the printing press, which spread new ideas and gave us important and fun Summer books but also caused a religious schism that led to the 30 Years’ War. For the history buffs, I offer this unsettling statistic: the 30 Years’ War killed a larger percentage of Europeans than either of the two world wars.

I expect that, barring outright nuclear catastrophe, we will get through this. Humanity always seems to find a way. Maybe we are even headed toward the bright future of eradicated disease and unfettered personal fulfillment that the techno-utopians promise.

But I suggest keeping your loved ones close until it arrives.

II. What one person can do

So, we are standing on a threshold. Shouldn’t I then write about that? Shouldn’t everyone with a pen and a publishing platform be talking about this, the world-historical moment we’re in?

Why write a silly little memoiry newsletter about my Spanish home renovation and painting the new apartment when there are people dying, when the singularity may be near, the world is burning, dictators roam the earth, and a neo-fascist gangster police state is emerging in the land of my birth?

I’ve already answered this question a few times, most recently in Dance harder, dance more (read it if you’re despairing). I quote from Reds and reference several films on the same theme: Dr. Zhivago, The Shawshank Redemption, Jo Jo Rabbit—all movies in which protecting and nurturing the personal is the way to fight a fascist regime:

I can and should write about personal matters in these dark times because to protect the personal is to protect what is most human and individual in each of us. The personal is political—but it is important to insist with our writing and poetry, our music and movies, our painting, sculpture, plays, our stand-up comedy—it is important to insist with all of our heart and souls that it is we individuals who determine the course of politics, and not the other way around.

But how exactly do we resist? What are the concrete actions we should take? I was recently asked: What can one person do in the face of all that is going wrong in the world?

Viktor Frankl writes about this in Man’s Search for Meaning:

We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly… Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way. Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements. 'Life' does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life's tasks are also very real and concrete. They form man's destiny, which is different and unique for each individual. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny.

I.e., each of us must answer this question for ourselves, in our way.

For one it may be attending a protest; another, painting a mural; a third, starting a business. I can’t say which is the most efficacious, but I do know that, for me, the answer is to write.

When life questions me, I answer with this newsletter.

III. All my discarded writing projects

And yet my writing life is littered with discarded writing projects. It can be surprisingly hard to find motivation on the threshold of history.

Drafts for this newsletter, written, re-written, eventually deleted. Screenplays half-finished. And the books—oh, the books. I believe I’ve finally decided to scrap 70,000 words of my latest and rewrite the story as fiction.

An aside:

When I think about all my romantic notions about being a writer, and how wrong they all are, I think about the typewriter sitting broken on my bookshelf in New Hampshire.

I originally wanted a typewriter because of some notion that I would write my book-length memoir on it, undistracted by internet, email, Instagram, YouTube, porn, politics, drinking—anything else my endorphin-riddle brain might desire.

The romantic notion goes: I would sit alone in my study or in the studio I built for myself on the hillside behind my house and just WRITE.

Except that I haven’t yet built the studio. And in fact, the typewriter is broken. It needs repair. I need to order parts. But also mow the lawn. And fix the stairs. And cook dinner.

Deadlines help. I have recently been working on a new screenplay project, my first in more than six years. The producer gave me a deadline; I met it. A full rewrite of a 60+ page pilot for a new show in about a week.

It’s been nice to flex that creative muscle again. Plus, doing fiction has reminded me that sometimes it’s the better choice for difficult Truths. Maybe the only choice.

IV. Embracing your particular answer to life’s questions

In the opening scene of Reds, Reed is running furiously through what looks like the Sonoran Desert in Mexico, chasing a horse-drawn wagon and trying to outrun gunfire and shelling all around him. Another of the witnesses provides voiceover: “Jack Reed’s life, short as it was, happened at a time—and all of us after all are the victims of our time and place—when he had the opportunity as a reporter to be in some very exciting and dramatic places.”

Alongside Reed, I think of Hemingway or Lee Miller going to cover World War II. Or Michael Herr going to Vietnam. Chris Hedges going to every war zone he could manage in the 1990s. The reporters in the recent movie Civil War.

Of course, it doesn’t always have to be war, but life’s most difficult moral questions are so often revealed by war that it is a time-honored choice among writers.3

I so admire those who recognize they are on a threshold, put themselves into danger, and write it down so that the rest of us may encounter a Truth we might otherwise not. But does this mean I must go to Gaza, or Ukraine? Travel by train or bus, cross the border, see the front lines, and use whatever talents as a journalist and writer to say my version of what is happening there?

In a crucial scene early in Reds, Reed chastises Bryant for writing about an armory show from three years ago, just as Woodrow Wilson seems intent on bringing the U.S. into World War I—she’s feeling sorry for herself, and doesn’t think that his artist friends take her seriously; Reed responds that if she wants to be taken seriously, she should write about serious things.

It’s a scene I’ve pondered a lot over the years.

But Frankl’s dictate that we must all find our own answer to life’s problems applies to writers as well—we must all write about that which we are most called to write. In the manner, on the platform, in the genre that feels appropriate in response to life’s questions.

Just so long as we take that work seriously.

If we do, others will as well.

It was texting in response to a Substack I’d just posted. Since we connected last winter, he’d become an especially close reader of my work. And I’d become a particularly close watcher of his.

Nathaniel is renovating an old property in rural France (YouTube channel here), I’m renovating an old rural property in Catalunya, and we’re both Americans who have moved to Europe—so we had much to talk about.

Originally, Nathanial had wanted to know how I was dealing with some of the emotional, psychological challenges of the renovation. But after talking for two hours over video, we realized there was much more learn from each other.

We met in Barcelona a few months later, and today we continue to trade occasional long texts and voice notes. I’ve come to enormously respect Nathaniel’s capacity for deep thought, his curious mind, and his skill at cutting to the heart of important life questions.

So I wasn’t surprised that he’d written to question one of my core premises. “To me you are nomadic in nature and in spirit and I do not say that pejoratively,” he wrote. “You’re living multiple lives. You are learning to operate in a multitude of ways. You clearly care to think deeply about what you’re doing and the impact it has. I’m just curious why you think this pattern is now broken?”

It was provoking enough that it took me several days to respond.

I. Summer in the city

The guys who installed the minisplits for the aircon had been there all day.

Somewhat miraculously, I’d managed to get two separate bids in the midst of a heat wave—each had promised to get the work done within a week (The expat Facebook groups had recommended a big box store for the work—but Leroy Merlin couldn’t even get there to give me a quote for another three weeks).

The guys arrived just after 9 a.m. and promptly filled the apartment with boxes the size of small refrigerators. Four units: one for each bedroom and one for the large kitchen and living space, plus two outside condensors. I passed the morning to the sound of huge drill bits clawing through the concrete and brick walls. Men walking in and out from the street with more materials and equipment. Ladders reaching up to the high cielings to prepare the walls for conduit.

The guys were from Bolivia. The other bid had been from two Colombian brothers. Spain is in the midst of a massive immigration boom and is currently the best performing economy in Europe. The two facts are not un-related, I thought. Without people to do work like this, the economy would ground to a halt, not least because it’s not possible to think straight in this weather—the heat rots your brain.

My girlfriend had also been working from the apartment. The aircon in her office building by the sea was down for maintenance and they’d recommended everyone stay home. Office buildings aren’t typically designed for self-cooling during a heatwave.

On the other hand, my apartment was on the ground floor, with air flow from the street on one end, the back terrace on the other, and a small courtyard in the center. With strategic opening of windows, it was possible to send moving air almost anywhere, and two floor fans compensated for everything else.

Still, it’d been hard to sleep, harder to work. The minisplits would bring a special kind of relief. I wanted to get them installed before we left for Cantabria for a month—my step-father would be visiting directly after that trip, and I wanted him to be comfortable.

II. My son arrives

Two weeks later, I was nervously awaiting word from my son that he’d made his flight. He was doing his first airport connection by himself, an international: Karpathos to Athens, Athens to Barcelona.

His phone had gone dark—the lack of a second check mark robbing me of my parental ability to make sure everything was alright. He could have mistakenly parked himself at the wrong gate. The airline could have changed gates last-minute. He could be so focused on whatever FIFA game was on his iPad that he wouldn’t notice until it was too late.

Finally, I got a message: he’d put the phone on battery saver because it was about to die. He was on the plane. They were taxiing toward the runway.

Later, he would give me shit for sending three worried texts in a row and calling twice.

I don’t know, maybe I’m still in mourning for the end of his childhood. It happened definitively about a year ago, when he was living with me in Barcelona, attending an international school and going to as many FC Barcelona games as he could. I watched it happen before my eyes: in the span of about six weeks, he went from kid to teenager. I still haven’t quite reconciled with the change.

When I saw him come out from the baggage area at the airport, I could see he’d grown. We stood back to back. My girlfriend eyed the miniscule difference in height. I still had him, but my days were numbered.

Back at the apartment, we enlisted him in helping to retrieve more furniture from Wallapop, shuttling pieces of tables and chairs up and down the elevator from a top story apartment building in Eixample. He sat on the street corner in one of the lounge chairs guarding a few more pieces while my girlfriend rushed back and we unloaded a van’s worth of furniture into the apartment.

It was 8 p.m. before we were done. Showered, dressed, we went for a burger in Blai and then walked to the movie theater in our old neighborhood, Sant Antoni, to see the new Jurrasic Park movie.

III. Cantabria

It was a frenzied five weeks at the new apartment.

But with the aircon installed, the kitchen done, the two bedrooms, the office, even the large u-shaped Soderhamn sofa for the TV area arrived and built, it was time for a road trip.

The Cantabria vacation with my family had been planned months ago. Even before I’d begun searching for a Barcelona apartment. In fact, aside from the hard core nesting I’d been doing, the past few months had felt pretty nomadic.

I’d been to New Mexico for my father’s retirement party, and for the first time in many years all three siblings were together in the same space. My brother from San Diego, my sister now living in Santa Fe, blessedly returned from several years in New Zealand.

As I showed my girlfriend the place of my birth, land of enchantment, the high desert and mountains, the climbing crags and the restaurants, she asked me if I could ever see myself back living here.

I hesitated—in my mind, I’m committed to Spain and to Barcelona; I just bought an apartment!—but at the end I had to admit that Santa Fe would be a wonderful place to end up in life. There could be no complaints if my future somehow led me back there.

But now it was time to drive the seven hours from Barcelona, past Zaragoza, up through the Basque Country, past Bilbao and into Cantabria, toward Asturias and the Picos de Europa.

A few days later, we would take a drive through the Picos—some of the most stunning landscape I’ve seen anywhere, ever. Enough soaring cliffs on each side that it makes even Catalunya’s absurdly rich bounty of climbing crags pale in comparison.

If only there was a place to park, which most often there was not. Cantabria and Asturias are popular Summer vacation spots with the rest of Spain, plus not a few French and Germans. Even the smallest villages are full, as are many beaches. While others from across the oceans go to Barcelona for August, those living in Barcelona go north, here.

But there was one place we found, pristine, seemingly untouched, down a small dirt road next to a forested hillside—one of the most beautiful beaches I’d seen anywhere, with one of the most beatiful climbing crags, clinging to the coastline, waves dashing against slanted caves as the tide goes in and out. A beautiful, untouched inlet, from which a lazy river flows out to the sea, where small fishing boats trawl a line for the Atlantic fish that come in to feed.

IV. My nomadic spirit

So it was that among the coves and beaches, the coastline, and the climbing cliffs, that I took a moment to return Nathaniel’s long text about my nomadic spirit.

I told him that I always grapple with how to balance “knowing myself” against making intentional choices about where to take my life. That to surrender to my “nature” would only lead me down paths I was likely to regret looking back at the end of my life. That to forge meaningful relationships almost always means staying in place. To say nothing of my longer-term desires, such as renovating the house, that simply require a fixed location. “A lot of the things I really want to DO WELL require me to be in place,” I wrote.

This is true even in climbing—to progress in the sport is to come back to the same hard projects over and over. To root yourself at a crag, to come to know intimately every hold, every pocket, every small edge of the rock. There are certain climbs whose every movement is lodged in my brain forever, just as a song lyric might be. That only came from staying in place.

I concluded:

So all of this is to say… my spirit and nature might be nomadic, but… I just can’t get past the deliberate thinking through of what I want for my life, and all of that means I should probably restrain my nomadic spirit to some extent. The question is… to what extent?

Of course, we all need to account for changes in life. Growth, development, evolution in desires. We don’t have to stay in place forever. But by committing to a place (often through buying property), it introduces deliberate friction to what might otherwise be an easy decision to pick up and go, in search of more novelty.

I may have a nomadic spirit, it’s true. I think Nathaniel was right about that.

But it’s also true that I’ve become somewhat negative about “nomadism”—I do speak of it in the pejorative—because I’ve come to look down on what digital nomadism in particular represents. I don’t like the shallowness of the relationships. The lack of home or connection to place. The continual using of a community while the people who actually live there are what makes the fancy-free, rootless lifestyle possible.

Or maybe I’m just reacting to my own deep-down, unresolved issues. A rejection of self (an all too familiar story).

Some months ago someone who identified himself as a farmer commented on one of my posts. He is literally rooted in place, but he also understood that humanity has a long history of nomadism:

Historically, there were always people like the gypsies and travelling circuses that roamed across the world, but the key thing was they were a tribe that moved together, and in many ways they were (and still are) physically mobile but socially sedentary. They were also always selling things that weren't easily obtainable in sedentary places, so were welcomed and valued.

The problems with nomadism aren’t inherent; it’s just the modern iteration that I’m soured on. With great freedom comes great responsibility and all that, except that modern digital nomads do little to embrace responsibility. They privilege freedom above all else, as I once did.

Though I’ve settled somewhat, there’s a tension that hasn’t dissipated.

Our nature is there; to what extent should we follow it?

So have asked thoughtful people for all time

.