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.

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 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.

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.

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

.

The heat hasn’t relented, not even at night. The bus is packed to the brim and I’m standing shoulder to shoulder as the 60 of us inch through rush hour traffic on the Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, a road that is as large and busy as it sounds.

The sweat is making my shirt stick to my chest. I crane my neck to get just a little bit more of the air coming from the vent. I marvel at how a young person can stay seated on a bus on such a day when mayores are standing next to them.

Six more stops to go.

Why am I even doing this, I ask myself.

I picked this day, at this time, to take myself from my new apartment in Poble Sec to the Ikea in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat simply to buy a chair—the exact right, super comfortable, high-backed armchair that I want—because, well… I’m nesting.

And a packed bus at rush hour during a heat wave ain’t gonna stop me.

I. I’ve finally stopped chasing

There’s a gold nugget of wisdom from Lauren Razavi that has been sticking in my mind since April:

…home isn’t something you find or inherit. It’s something you build, piece by piece, when you stop chasing the next better version of your life.

One cannot teach this kind of thing. I can’t just tell you to stop chasing the next better version of your life, or pursuing the next girl, the better job, the bigger house—or perhaps digital nomading your way to the next better country.

If someone had come to me earlier with this kind of advice, I would have filed it away for safekeeping, to be used in case of fire, perhaps, but not something to act on now. I’ve often been like St. Augustine: “Lord make me chaste, but not yet.”

I will settle down and commit, just not now.

But times have changed. I’m 43, and I’ve stopped chasing.

Mostly.

II. Me Enamoré

When I read Lauren’s piece, I was newly under contract on an apartment in Barcelona. Arras signed, mortgage application begun, building inspections in process.

I’d started the search for an apartment in earnest in January, just two months after getting back from climbing in the U.S.. The truth is, I’d been missing Barcelona almost since moving away last Summer.

It was supposed to be an interlude, a beautiful year with my son to give him an international experience, a brief moment in time before which I would go back to the countryside to climb and build. But it turned into something else entirely.

As I’ve been telling people about the year I spent in Barcelona, me enamoré—I fell in love.

I really didn’t mean for this to happen. I don’t even think of myself as a city person. I’m a climber, a writer, a lover of fresh mountain air or warm ocean breezes.

So it has come as a surprise even to me just how firmly I feel that Barcelona is where I want to make my home, not just for the next phase of life, but indefinitely. The place to stop chasing and start building.

Which is not to say I’m not still building in the very real sense, at the renovation project. In fact, the same week Caixa Bank approved my mortgage in Barcelona, the town hall in Cornudella de Montsant approved my building permit. So I’m ready to keep moving forward there—the only difference now is that it’s a project, a place to go and climb, sink nails, run wire, pour concrete, a place to keep learning. But it’s not my home. It never did feel that way.

Meanwhile, Barcelona… Well, I will have time enough to wax poetic.

III. The irony

Ok, a little waxing: the irony of choosing Barcelona as the place to stop chasing is that this is the perfect city for chasing.

What I mean is, this city has it all. Infinite bars and restaurants, infinite little cafes and bookstores, and ridiculously cute shops. Infinite narrow streets to wander down and get lost in, or wide ramblas to stroll. Infinite options for nightlife. Last year, I wrote that Barcelona is like a fantasy playground for grown-ups, and it doesn’t matter what kind of playground you’re into. It’s all here.

Go to the beach and you will find infinite activity. Packed with tourists on one end, locals on the other, with beach volleyball and sand soccer and yachts and sailboats and anything else you can think of in between. Go to the mountains and you will pass infinite cyclists on your way to infinite trails, and arrive at enough crags and climbing routes for several lifetimes.

If you are single, there are infinite beautiful people, and infinite ways to meet them. Infinite dance classes, workshops, readings, comedy nights, language exchanges, and more. Infinite little plazas in which to sit and sip a beer, read a book, and watch the people on their way.

And if you ever want to get away, the international airport is right there.

So yes—Barcelona is a city in which it is so easy to settle down, precisely because it can always remind you: Don’t worry, I’ve got you—there is infinite possibility in the world and in your life.

IV. Miles to go

I shove the odd, L-shaped box with the Ikea chair in it onto the floor of the crowded bus. It’s the D-20, which is always packed. It’s one of those with two big cars connected and an accordion in the middle, enough space for about 100 people to be carted down Avenida de Parallel. My old neighborhood is to the left, my new one to the right.

At my stop, I get out and start walking up the narrow, slightly inclined calle toward Montjuïc, and my place.

Inside, I drop the box, peel off my shirt, and drop my shorts. Even those are too heavy for this heat. I look at the walls, still many to be painted. I look at the empty space in the sala, still a table and chairs, and a desk to buy. I walk down the hall past one of the bedrooms, still empty, past the nook, with boxes still sitting on the floor.

Into my bedroom, newly painted, newly hung curtains, switch on the fan, and flop onto the bed from my old place in Cornudella. Miles to go before I sleep, I think.

But finally, at long last, I have my home. I think I’ll be here for a while.

The truth about my passport privilege is often that I’m scared to talk about it.

How can you be in Europe for so long without a visa?

Because I have a German passport.

Oh! And how did you get that?

I’m never sure what to say next. Because my grandfather left Germany in 1934, deprived of citizenship. Because Jewishness. Because the guilt of a nation. Because terrible atrocity.

Because The Holocaust.

The conversation is more fraught today than ever. How am I supposed to tell this story amid rising antisemitism around the world? Amid a terrible war that only seems to unleash new horrors and open new wounds, rather than correcting for old ones? How do I navigate a conversation in which I suspect the person on the other side wants to talk about genocide, just not the genocide I’m talking about?

Best to avoid the whole thing.

But then it comes up. I’m sitting across from my real estate agent, a blond-haired, blue-eyed German living in Spain ever since her Erasmus university program more than a decade ago. To my right is the agent for the seller, who asks for my passport—the one attached to your NIE, he says.

I take out the dark auburn-colored booklet with the German seal and hand it to him.

My agent gives me a surprised look. Oh! I didn’t know you were German! she says.

I didn’t know you had a 1-year-old, I reply.

Even I can’t tell if that sounded defensive or if it sounded like flirting, but she doesn’t press me further. We’re in the middle of conducting business.

So, the seller’s agent says as he hands back the passport, What do you think of everything going on in the U.S. right now?

I can’t believe he’s asking me this. Where I come from, we generally don’t ask politically loaded questions just as we’re negotiating a real estate transaction.

Is that really the kind of question to ask right now? I reply.

Definitely defensive.

I’m a liberal and I believe in things—free speech, due process, the promise of the American dream—so I’m appalled at what’s going on now in the country of my birth. It makes me very sad and not a little angry, and it makes me want to not go back home, at least not until something changes.

But then I think about my other passport, the one from the country that systematically deprived my ancestors of all rights as a citizen and dignity as a human, just before murdering as many millions as they could. My grandmother, for as long as I knew her, never forgave the German state, which, in many cases, prioritized the murder of Jews even over its own war aims. So great was their belief in the seriousness of the “the Jewish problem.”

Yet this is what I remember every time I have a feeling of estrangement from the U.S.: I’m not a refugee. I’m not escaping death camps or war. I left the U.S. before Trump was re-elected to term two, left for reasons of personal fulfillment, not economic necessity or physical safety. I left with money in the bank and with every option to return when I choose.

It’s a confusing mix of feelings. I’m in mourning for the death of the U.S. as I’ve known it since I was a kid, while at the same time living on borrowed privilege born out of an even more terrible past.

My own country is disappearing people to foreign prisons in a style indistinguishable from that of a banana republic dictatorship. The country that gave me my EU passport only did so in an attempt to atone for the worst atrocity history has recorded. My identity as an American fades with each new wound inflicted on the ideas that once made it a light to the world. My identity as a Jew, practically non-existent as a child, only grows with each new expression of moral confusion about the events that got us here.

I wasn’t raised Jewish; my mother is not a Jew—thus, according to Jewish law, culture, and tradition, I am not Jewish. Nonetheless, I would certainly have been shipped to the camps. Jewish in the eyes of those with the guns and the gas chambers.

Meanwhile, my identity as a global citizen is what I grasp on to, forged as it was by my study of philosophy and the obvious practical fact that where one happens to have been born in the world is a matter of pure chance. Certainly, I ought not be congratulated for having had the good luck to be born in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Nor do I bear any responsibility for the circumstances of my grandfather and his family’s flight from Germany.

All that said, my history—history in general—is a reminder that we don’t know which part of the story we’re in. The happy ending? The calm before the storm? The darkness before the dawn? Germany was in many ways the most advanced, educated, artistic, and philosophical country in the world just before it launched its genocidal project. What has felt like luck and extreme privilege of my U.S. passport today could turn into a Scarlet Letter of shame and misfortune tomorrow. Indeed, it seems that is the direction we may be headed.

The borders and opportunities that have been open to me until now won’t necessarily be open in the future. There could easily come a time when people around the world look upon my U.S. citizenship and, rather than covet in envy, they hang their heads in sympathy—so far has the country fallen, into whatever calamitous dark future you can imagine.

And so the truth about my passport privilege is that it’s more brittle than you or I might think. Civilization is a fragile thing. Borders are not inviolable. Not yours, not mine. That much should be obvious by now.

Maybe this is the genes of my refugee ancestors talking, but nothing is permanent, and nothing is owed. Not wealth, not privilege, not citizenship, not passports. These are all things we’ve made up. They exist by the good grace of humanity and culture and tradition, and they can all disappear.

These documents we hold in our backpacks, these little booklets of blue or auburn, with their holographic stamps, and their heavy covers—they only represent promises made by governments. Which is to say they’re invaluable, right up until they’re not. Just something to remember when we talk about passports.

Of course, I’m not trading in my U.S. and German booklets for any others. I don’t want the enlightened dictatorial bureaucracy of Singapore. No pining for the detached, edenic ruggedness of New Zealand. And certainly not the petro-Islamic cosmopolitanism of the United Arab Emirates, which is somehow #1 on the list of global passport power rankings.

I still own my history, even if I’m not responsible for it, because, like it or not, it is all part of my identity. Born in the U.S., repatriated by Germany, choosing to live in Spain, which God knows has its own violent, tumultuous, unpredictable history. And accepting of all the burdens and privileges that come as a result, aware they could change at any time—aware they are changing right now.

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I’m on my way back to Spain after spending three weeks at my home in New Hampshire. I’ve visited with my son, seen friends, and inevitably fixed a bunch of things around the house.

When I arrived, the electricity in the basement was dead, and as it was the middle of a full-on melt from a heavy winter, there were two feet of water standing in the basement. I ran an extension cord, plugged in another pump, and drained the water. Then, happily, my first guess for fixing the electricity worked—replacing the breaker.

I was also able to finish getting a driveway put in on one of the pieces of land I own nearby. I had to marvel at the efficiency of the New Hampshire Department of Transportation: the Thursday after I arrived, I drove to the land, took some measurements, then drove home and applied for the building permit. By Monday the next week, it’d been approved for construction.

Meanwhile, I’ve been waiting FOUR MONTHS for the permit to replace the roof at the Spain property. We have the quote from the builders; everything is ready go; and still no clear answer on what’s taking so long. Last I heard from the architect, the town will be “asking for some clarifications” on the project, which is not encouraging.

In stark contrast, the day after getting the permit for the driveway, I met a contractor at the property; that weekend, his crew was at work clearing land. I’d snuck into his schedule at a slow time, which I expected, considering it’s still mud season in New Hampshire. Within a few days it was all done.

It’s always satisfying to see physical progress like this.

All of which brings me to a topic I’ve been pondering on and off for many years.

I. A kit to prepare for End Times

Of all the news that had made me morbidly roll my eyes the past few months, perhaps the most fun was this: Brussels asks EU citizens to put together a 72-hour emergency kit to face crises.

The kit was to include “photocopies of identification documents, cash, a radio with batteries, a charger and a phone battery, a flashlight, matches and a lighter in case of power failure, a first aid kit, water, food, and board games to pass the time.”

The whole thing reminded me of telling schoolchildren in the 1960s to hide under their desks and cover their heads in case of a nuclear attack. In other words, well-meaning but patronizing bureaucrats attempting to soothe the public with a bandaid against potential armegeddon.

Maybe Brussels was just trying to get folks to take seriously the various potential military, environmental, or perhaps pathonegenic threats of the future. Or perhaps the recommendation to pack a flashlight and board games was made in good faith—don’t worry, EU public, whatever happens, a 72-hour kit should get you through it.

I was rolling my eyes, but as my girlfriend pointed out, Europeans are accustomed to relying on the government to help them through tough times—even save them from tough times. Up to and including how they should prepare for End Times.

One weekend, when we were getting particularly adventursome in the mountains together, she pointed out that in Spain, most climbers and hikers expect that if they get into trouble, a wilderness rescue will be reasonably prompt and paid for, and that most expect this to come at taxpayer expense.

This expectation would be absurd in the U.S., where the swathes of wilderness are so huge, and rescue teams spread so thin (and often all-volunteer besides), that to expect a rescue out of the mountains paid for at public expense would be the height of hubristic folly. Hikers or alpinists might buy private rescue insurance, but no one actually expects a taxpayer-funded mountain rescue for personal, recreational risk-taking. Yet in Europe, that’s exactly what they expect. As a matter of fairness, even.

In any case, we agreed Europeans perhaps need a wake-up call. And the 72-hour survival kits might at least be a small part of that.

II. Imagining the future apocalypse

Preparing for the apocalypse has always fascinated me. Not that I’d qualify as a “prepper”—we stopped storing food in the basement after the first time water flooded it. I don’t own any firearms. Mostly, I just try to figure out more ways to reduce the propane bill (also this trip: we got a heat pump water heater installed).

Still, I’ve been running the apocalypse thought experiment in my head for years.

It’s both scary and—as the appeal of infinite post-apocalyptic movies and TV shows can attest—strangely entertaining. I think it was The Walking Dead that first got me hooked. I remember watching and asking some friends what they would do in case of a Walking Dead-style zombie apocalypse. I volunteered that I’d learn how to build my own house and improve my gardening—maybe brush up on my electrician skills so I could get some electricity going from a solar panel. They had the better answer: get guns and steal whatever they need from people like me.

Of course, the zombies are always just a metaphor. It could be any world-destabilizing event where survival is at stake. A plague. Nuclear armageddon. An astroid.

We’ve already run the plague hypothetical.

III. The capacity for self-delusion

COVID forced everyone into place, and we didn’t have much time to choose where that would be. I was in Mexico with my partner at the time. But, sensing the uncertainty, we changed our plans and flew back to the homestead in New Hampshire. Just in time, as it turned out. Flights were canceled or grounded for weeks afterward.

It was the perfect place to wait out a global pandemic (I wrote about it in 2022: A brief, shining pandemic moment). We had a garden, fruit trees, good neighbors, close friends, plenty of space, plenty of water, a swimming hole across the street, and a climbing area down the road.

Stories of people who found themselves holed up in cities during that time, especially European cities (or worse, Chinese cities), sound absolutely terrible to me. I’m not surprised there is so much trauma associated with that time. Yet, sometimes I wonder if any lessons have been learned.

We humans are naturally optimistic, with a great capacity to bury our traumas and just move on. We are good at collective forgetting. Or, you might call it burying our heads in the sand. Exhibit A: hiding under our desks as a defense against nuclear armegeddon.

Maybe that capacity for self-delusion is a good survival instinct. A way to move on when bad things happen. Yet over and over again, we move on from disaster without changing our behavior. A hurricane or a fire destroys your home, so you rebuild in the exact same spot. A global pandemic kills millions, and we go back to our lives just the same.

As a kid, I was taught the old boyscout saying, even though I was never a boyscout: hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Yet ask what one’s response to potential disaster should be, and you’re as likely to hear about systemic injustices and inequalities as say, making your home more resilient to natural disaster.

In Spain, housing activists pass around flyers calling for a range of actions that would more or less reinforce the status quo (indefinite rental contracts, not allowing investors—ahem, speculators—to purchase units, etc.) In contrast, no one here is marching to make the permitting process less onerous, so, for example, one could replace a roof on a building that’s been abandoned for decades. And almost no one calls for building more homes on empty land. God forbid.

You hear much (both in Europe and the U.S.) about systemic problems: the failures of government, the evils of big business or big tech, the erosion of free speech and civil liberties, and the rise of fascism. In the U.S., we are organizing “national days of action,” but that action doesn’t typically include planting a garden, fixing your home, or learning any new skills.

And waiting for the government to save you has never been a particularly good survival strategy.

V. Where there’s a will

My internal armageddon discourse sometimes reminds me of a particular incident from my past: the Northeast Blackout of 2003. If you were there, you know. Power was out from Ontario to New York City, affecting 55 million people. And, it just so happened that day my dad and I were in the New York suburbs, trying to get into the city to visit my sister.

With electricity out, the trains weren’t working—and the radio said bridges in and out of Manhattan had been closed in response to potential terrorist threats (this was a mere two years after 9/11, mind you).

I was 21 at the time. I had no clue what to do. My dad said we should try to drive into the city. I looked at him like he was crazy—dad, the radio just said all the bridges are closed!

He must have scoffed. Let’s just try.

So we got in the car and started driving, me at the wheel. It did kind of feel like an apocalypse scenario. On the radio, they had ruled out another terrorist attack. The cause of the outage, apparently, was some failure in a power company control room somewhere, causing a problem that had cascaded across the entire Northeast.1

As we got closer to NYC, we made some guesses and headed for one of the inobvious bridges connecting the Bronx to Manhattan. To our surprise (well, maybe not my dad’s), it was open. No one was driving across it. And quite suddenly, we were dumped into upper Manhattan with not a single other car on the road.

I drove a few blocks across town, then hooked south. From 150th, I started driving south along 5th Avenue with not a single stoplight working and not a single other vehicle on the road. Undoubtedly, I still hold the all-time speed record for fastest time driving from Harlem to Midtown.

Around 50th street, we hit a mess of abandoned vehicles blocking any further progress south. Again, something out of an apocalypse movie. But my sister was only about 10 blocks away by then. We walked the rest of the way, where we found her and some friends outside a restaurant that had opened its doors and its fridges—the chefs were were preparing and giving away all the food before it went bad. People were drinking beer, smoking joints, and playing football in the street.

I never forgot the lesson from my dad: Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

At worst, we’ve completely forgotten our will. At best, we’ve let it severely atrophy.

VI. How to prepare for a more dangerous world

Our will has either been hijacked by distractions or we’ve been convinced that it’s pointless and ineffectual to use. We’ve become nihilists.

But nihilism is something to be afraid of. Convincing as many people as possible that their actions don’t matter is a sure way to make that society complacent and compliant. The most dangerous meme of my lifetime is lol nothing matters.

Instead of lol nothing matters, do something hard with your time. Something like what Corey Booker did recently on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Holding the floor for 25 hours straight, disrupting the normal business, getting into “good trouble.” No eating, no sitting, no bathroom breaks. And along the way surpassing a record set in 1957 by a man opposing civil rights.

You might take the view that what Booker did ultimately doesn’t matter. But I prefer to take the view that it was an inspiring act of will (read one headline: Corey Booker, Endurance Athlete), one we might all learn from.

No one is powerless. We can direct our will in whatever way we think is right, but we should try to direct it toward doing impressive things. It could be organizing a march if it makes you feel better, but personally, I’d aim for something on par with breaking a record that’s been held since 1957. Even if you don’t get there, you’ll be in a better mental space afterward. And the world might even be better off for your effort.

This is, in essence, how I think we should be preparing for a more dangerous world. By re-asserting our will, our capacity to do hard things, even if it takes focus for hours on end. We should build, explore, nurture, grow, learn, teach.

If you must, it also probably wouldn’t hurt to learn how to safely handle and fire a gun. I learned a long time ago, at Summer camp. So, if it comes to the zombie apocalypse, I’ll be in better shape than most.

As for a more dangerous, unpredictable future, I can guarantee that going to your nearest convenience store to buy a 72-hour prepper kit isn’t a good response—just a late capitalist one. In fact, it strikes me as about as effective as ducking one’s head under a desk or burying it in the sand.

But hey:

A few days ago, a reader called left this comment on a post of mine:

They left it on the post I’ve got pinned to the home page: Why you should stay in place. This piece is foundational. I wrote it in 2022, just after the second winter of the pandemic, as I was coming off a period in which I barely left my homestead in the mountains of central New Hampshire.

This was one of the best years of my life. I didn’t feel “stuck”—rather, I felt fulfilled in a way I rarely had in my adult life. I was climbing more than ever. Building things with my hands. Planting the garden and harvesting, preserving, and sharing with neighbors. Spending long nights around campfires with friends. Taking long walks with people I love.

It was also the year I first heard someone divide the world into “Somewheres” and “Anywheres.”1

I knew immediately that I was an Anywhere who had found peace and fulfillment in being a Somewhere. But it had to be forced on me to recognize it.

My whole life I had been over-indexing on freedom as a core value—assigning it too much importance when weighed against other values. When forced to stay in place, it turned out, I was able to do much more of all the things that brought me joy in life.

I’ve been writing about and advocating for those things ever since: finding meaning by investing in people, places, and communities.

Not that it still isn’t a struggle.

I struggle with it all the time. I still long to visit more places. Climb more crags. Kitesurf more seas. Connect with more people. I have a vagabonding, journeying heart that often feels restless. I can look at something directly in front of me and think to myself: I love this with all my heart, but also, wouldn’t it be interesting if I could go do something new?

A lot of people, given the money and freedom to do so, will follow that instinct.

They’ll move places. Sell homes. Quit jobs. Change partners.

This is usually celebrated. Follow your heart. Live your dreams. Pursue adventure. Be happy. You deserve it. The instinct to pursue novelty is strong.

But it’s a fallacy to think that more freedom will necessarily open your life to more meaning.

I’ve been mulling my choices over the last year (see: Too much freedom) and seeing myself drift to a place I don’t quite like—like a casual drinker slowly creeping toward just a bit more wine, just one more drink.

Just one more trip, I keep thinking.

No matter if it takes me away from things (or people) I thought I’d committed to. Everything will be fine. Just be happy. I can afford it. I deserve it.

I was thinking about all this when left their comment:

Anywhere is something that is only possible because a whole heap of us choose to be somewhere; it's not like the anywheres are spear fishing their own food every day, moving their flocks from pasture to pasture or building their own computers on the fly.

And, I was thinking about it when published her excellent piece last week, The Freedom Trap: Why Escaping the System Won’t Set You Free. Among the many very good essays Lauren has written on digital nomadism, this has been my favorite. She writes:

Freedom sells itself as an open road, an endless horizon. But sometimes, the more you chase it, the smaller your world becomes. The visa countdown. Another Airbnb host. The rising cost of never staying. It starts as endless possibilities, then tightens into a maze—one where the way out is never clear.

Escape is easy, Lauren writes. But what comes next? What’s the difference between having what Isaiah Berlin calls negative freedom—freedom from things—and positive freedom, i.e., the freedom to shape one’s life with intention, to do something meaningful?

Constant movement, Lauren writes, can be its own cage:

A nomad can technically go anywhere, but if they’re stuck in an endless loop of instability, their choices aren’t much freer than those of an office worker tied to a desk. The worker climbs a corporate ladder; the nomad runs on a treadmill.

Often, the motion itself becomes the escape. Moving keeps bigger questions at bay: What am I actually working toward? Where do I belong? Am I building something, or just passing through?

There’ a lot more, and I do recommend reading the whole thing. But the piece resonated deeply.

Who are the people who build something? Who are not just passing through? The Somewheres.

Whether it was the news of the day or Lauren’s pieces, for some reason I thought about all the local officials who were not the President or his team throwing grenades around to see what breaks. I thought of all the people who had run for or volunteered for local offices, taking thankless roles, agreeing to devote their time to trying to make their community just a little bit better.

I thought of the governors of various mountainous western states (because that’s where I’m from) shaking their heads at Washington D.C., wondering what any of it had to do with making the schools or trains work better, or the neighborhoods safer, or the jobs better.

I thought of the town clerk in New Hampshire where I have the homestead: I have no idea who she votes for every four years. All I know is her extreme competence and efficiency in getting our absentee ballots delivered, our car registrations renewed, our local elections running smoothly. All I know is her photographic memory for connecting the names and faces of everyone who lives here. All I know is her kindness in asking after family members. Everyone who lives here knows her name. She helps make this town work.

Obvously, she is a Somewhere.

She is the people WeepingWillow talked about who make it possible to even contemplate being an Anywhere.

Indeed, Anywheres are not building their laptops on the fly. Or planting seeds and growing the food, or harvesting and roasting the beans for the coffees, or building the planes and extracting the oil that becomes the jet fuel they use to travel the world.

Anywhere is something that is only possible because a whole heap of us choose to be somewhere.

Indeed. We all have to choose how we spend our time on this Earth. We can be trapped by too much freedom, as Lauren wrote. Or we can be set free by staying in place.

It’s not a binary thing, of course—always there is a balance to be found.

Yet time and again, I find myself struggling with where to set the balance. Too much in one direction, not enough in the other. All I can say for sure is that the world tends toward entropy: if you’re not careful, things can disintegrate. Just one more trip. You deserve it.

And then you wake up, and you wonder, why do I feel so disconnected? Where is the meaning in all of this?

“For a post-nomad,” someone recently told me, “you actually travel quite a bit.”

Which is true.

I travel more than most, though less than those who you think of as full-on digital nomads, skipping from city to city every few weeks or months. The problem with this type of travel, as I’ve written, is the disconnection, both from people and places.

My travel now faces the opposite problem. I am connected to communities that I love, but I continuously leave those communities.

Last year, I spent September and October at my homestead in Rumney, New Hampshire. I reconnected with friends and climbing partners and loved every day on the cliffs, watching the leaves change, dipping in the swimming hole, pressing crabapples from the tree, enjoying long pasta dinners. But when I left, I was filled with a deep sadness, even if I was excited to get back to Spain and devote attention to the renovation.

The past two weeks I’ve been kitesurfing with a close friend in La Ventana, in Baja Mexico. It’s my third season here, so it’s not just my friend I’m spending time with, but a whole community of kitesurfers, salsa dancers, and general vagabonds that I see each year, and each year the circle grows. Many of them live here, having come once for a kitesurfing lesson and been lured by La Ventana’s edge-of-the-world, cerveza and sand, disconnected from it all, chill-as-can-be vibe.

But I’m leaving soon, and again, I am filled with a deep sadness.

Last night my friend and I danced salsa on a makeshift dancefloor on the edge of the beach under a full moon. Salseros from around the world hugging and kissing on the cheeks, sharing a beer, dancing close to bachata, twirling around to salsa, each one of us basking in the gratitude of a beautiful February night of music and friendship and (for some) simmering romance.

I don’t want to leave this community that I love. And that’s the problem—you either have to stay, or leave them behind.

Indeed, I feel I’ve discovered many of the ideal places to be in the world, at least if you’re me. Rock climbing in the northeast in the Fall, kitesurfing in Baja in the winter, and Barcelona at any time of year.

I miss everyone in all the places. I want to be everywhere. Time is short. Life is short. Another season passes you by, and all you can do is savor the moments of love and joy and passion.

These are good problems to have of course.

Occasionally, I still come across digital nomads who want to settle their lives but don’t know how to choose where.

You go toward community.

There’s adventure and novelty in new places—over Christmas, I traveled to Gibraltar and Morrocco—but the skill is to recognize a community you jibe with when you find it, and give it its due.

I still don’t have this completely down. Indeed, I didn’t recognize just how much I would miss Barcelona until I left. I gave up my apartment there last year—which in retrospect I regret. I’m looking for another one now, hopefully, to buy this time. The renovation in the countryside goes on, and the climbing cliffs at Siurana always beckon, but Barcelona captured a piece of my heart. Me enamoré.

A place attracts a certain kind of person. Sometimes you sense it when you step off the boat. Other times, it takes months. And when everyone who values the same things finds themselves in a place together, doing things that bring them joy and peace and fulfillment, well, that is a precious thing for everyone.

La Ventana is certainly one of those places.

But you have to open your heart and make available the time and space. I’ve been guilty in the past of adhering too rigidly to prior plans, to life goals, to projects once started and committed to.

My head is always planning; then my heart gets ignored. And then, even when I do recognize the value of what I’ve found, I have trouble prioritizing. But I suppose this is the great puzzle of how to spend one’s limited time on earth.

My different values are now conflicting with each other—time outdoors, continuous learning, creative endeavor, time spent with friends and family, simplicity in living—where one place gets me one or two of those, I miss another. In one location time spent with friends, another family. In one, creative endeavor, in another continuous learning.

Right now the main thing is my friends and family: they are spread over the world, and all of them have less freedom than I do. So I feel I should go to them.

So I side-trip to San Diego to see my brother. Another excursion planned to New Mexico to see my sister, dad, step-mom, cousins. The timing of La Ventana itself was motivated by my friend’s limited work flexibility, and his wife and two kids at home.

But I can’t be everywhere. And every time I leave a place or a person—a community I love, I get sad. What could come of these relationships if I stayed? But then what would I miss of the others if I never go? Yes, I travel more than most, though less than some. I’m still struggling to find the balance.

I maintain there is no better place in the world for a climber to be in October than here.

Crisp air, cool temps, and oh, the leaves—it is a magical thing to be surrounded by every shade of orange and red as you climb a cliff, and to top out a route and look down on the Baker River Valley spread below, the river winding its way between hills cascading in color, and to simply know that there is no more beautiful place in the world to be doing the thing you love than right here, right now.

To feel strong in your body in such conditions is a glorious thing. I’ve been climbing outdoors three, sometimes four times a week since August. Latched into cracks, the tendons in the fingers strengthen. Dangling horizontally beneath steep roofs, the muscles in the core all tighten. Pulling on so much rock so often, the shoulders, arms, and back become lean.

At 42, I am climbing close to as strong as I ever have. And it is a great pleasure to know that soon I will return to Spain where I will be able to continue this climbing life. I’ll skip the long New Hampshire winter, and will resume work on the renovation in Cornudella de Montsant full time.

Still, there is a sadness to leaving. I will miss my friends here.

Europe could fix you, actually

A few months ago I saved ’s wonderful piece from (“Europe Won’t Fix You”) about an American friend who bought a crumbling stone farmhouse in Italy, hoping to devote his life to the renovation—at the same time when his Italian girlfriend wanted nothing more than to go back to Washington D.C. to pursue a long-worked-for career in counter-terrorism.

Sitting inside a “vine-draped pergola in the backyard of my friend’s parent’s villa,” Elizabeth writes, she could tell the girlfriend’s father wanted her to go for the job and the career back in the U.S.:

That’s because father and daughter had seen what befalls men like my friend—afternoons spent at the local bar, weeks and years wasted on a project that needs a job to fund it, a life full of big talk strangled by inaction. His American fantasy was their Italian nightmare.

A cottage industry sells the dream of moving to Europe as a cure for all the ills of modern American life. The truth is significantly more complicated.

Like so many Eat, Pray lovers who’ve come after him, my American friend was using foreign cultures and people to fix him. Just one more of the untold alcoholics, lost souls, and troubled ex-pats I’ve met during my decades abroad—most of them running from something, rarely to anything.

Americans who came to Europe as an experiment, for a long-out-of-the-picture boyfriend or girlfriend, for a job teaching English, or to fix up a crumbling farmhouse—they all came for a dream. When that dream faded—because real life was hard and even more complex in a foreign country—if they had something to go home to, they did.

Replace Italy with Spain, and farmhouse with townhouse, and she could be talking about me.

When I bought the crumbling stone house in Cornudella de Montsant last year, I knew, in some sense, that I was chasing a dream (and wrote as much at the time).

I purchased the property in the aftermath of a 10-year relationship, so I was aware the danger that perhaps I was living out my own Eat Pray Love story.

It’s interesting to go back to what I wrote in December 2022, when I was newly under contract on the property:

There’s a movie version of what happens next, a story I could construct in my imagination: in the aftermath of the breakup, I buy the property anyway and do the work myself, sweat and tears dripping onto the old stones, cleansing both myself and the centuries-old grime along with it. I meet the locals and learn the history of the town. I face setbacks, but my new Spanish friends help me overcome them. The renovation is a metaphor for rebuilding my life, and ultimately I realize that happiness and satisfaction come not from having a partner to share in the experience, but from within, or at least from a hammer and a saw and chisel. After a year of toil and a good long montage of me doing carpentry, I finish the renovation. In the final scene, having polished the last of the grime, I walk to the nearby cafe down the hill. I order a coffee and sit at a small, round table in the corner, pausing for a satisfying moment of silence to think about life hurdles overcome, and the next dream to pursue. Cue music, roll credits.

I believe Elizabeth is right that we can’t escape our demons simply by moving to Europe. I’m sure it’s also true that many Americans come with a dream, the same one I had, and eventually crawl back to where they came from when they find that living in another country, culture, and language is super hard.

Elizabeth’s warning—“a life full of big talk strangled by inaction”—is never far from my mind.

Yet I move forward, poco and poco. Life in Spain is hard. I failed my Spanish driver’s license test. I wrestled with the often maddening Spanish bureaucracy. I went through a language-learning valley of despair.

Perhaps I am that rare sanguine personality type who smiles through this kind of adversity (after the requisite moments of frustration and cursing and pulling my hair out… my beard is certainly a bit more gray than it was a year ago).

Yet the potential for a very high quality of life in Spain at lower income thresholds is unquestionably superior to the United States and likely superior to most countries in the world. For all I wrote last year about my frustrations, I wrote much more about that quality: finding my community of climbers, the many sensual charms of Barcelona, day drinking and endless croissants, the sheer beauty of the city at Christmastime, and many more deep pleasures that I could never have found in such high concentration anywhere else.

One simply doesn’t need much money to live an extraordinarily beautiful life in Spain, one that feels rich in all the ways that truly matter.

And THIS is where I diverge from Elizabeth: moving to Europe actually could fix you because where you live has an enormous impact on your physical, emotional, and social health. Europe just has a high concentration of places with the right conditions. Spain famously has one of the longest lifespans in the world1, which most attribute to strong social connections as people age.

My elders in the U.S. spend much of their time alone or otherwise connected through screens. Elders in Spain are to be found at all hours of day and night sharing a beer or a coffee with friends outside, on a patio, and parents as well, sometimes with the children playing in the plazas nearby. This is true in the city and in the country alike.

As Johann Hari wrote in Lost Connections, many of the root causes of depression are not a matter of brain chemistry per se but are rather fundamentally environmental. We feel lonely, lost, and disconnected because of a lack of connection: to our friends, family, loved ones, our work, and yes to the places we live.

Moving to another place, be it Europe or wherever, can change the conditions of your life such that there is more possibility for more of the things that matter. It just so happens that many countries in Europe have organized their societies less around wealth creation or entrepreneurship, and more around social connection and peace of mind.

And maybe you prefer to optimize for wealth creation, or building a business! As Elizabeth notes, there are always trade-offs, and one shouldn’t be surprised if someone from Europe might prefer to live in the U.S.:

As you contemplate your move, it might be worth noting that most people in that tiny Tuscan village of your dreams would kill to have a US passport and access to all the opportunities you can’t wait to get away from. Just look at the unemployment rate in Europe, and you’ll see what I mean.

I am extremely privileged to have U.S. income but with the freedom to live in Europe. Sometimes I feel that I have unlocked a massive life hack. As Scott Galloway (Prof G) often says, the U.S. is the best place to make money and Europe is the best place to spend it.

It’s not that a life rich in all the things that give us meaning is impossible in the U.S.—it’s just that that’s not what America is optimized for. Spain, on the other hand, well… Come buy an old stone ruin and see for yourself.

You might indeed end up spending your afternoons at a local bar, a life of big talk strangled by inaction passing you by—but I promise you will have company at the bar for as long as you want to talk about it.

This note by kicked off a mini existential crisis in my writing:

Every time I scroll Substack for the last week or two, it seems like everyone is writing about living, but not in the good way?

…Everybody wants to write about story craft but nobody wants to write great stories. Everybody is writing about how to live a great life or how great their life is but nobody is writing about how they’re living their life right now.

This is always a danger: to slip into the how rather than the what. To let your audience growth numbers get to you, the gross annualized revenue, the likes, the shares. Before long, you’re no longer sharing your own life, but telling others how to live theirs.

“I’m providing value,” we say, or we use any number of euphemisms to describe the process of becoming a guru, an influencer, a dispenser of life advice.

But every time I do this, it feels just a bit off. Unnatural.

When I’m on my game, I’m writing about life right now. Like how it was to take down the walls of the old stone townhome I bought in Spain. What it was like to watch the best climbers in the world tackle their projects in Siurana. Or recently, how it felt to fail the driving test in Barcelona.

In contrast, when I’m off my game, it’s usually because I’m caught imitating.

And I’m not alone. On Substack, we are in the midst of what one meme called “Substack Summer,” characterized by writers writing about Substack, how to grow on Substack, or how to succeed at Substack. It’s writers writing about the meta points of life, rather than life itself, writers navel-gazing at themselves.

A new generation trying to be Carrie Bradshaw, just on a new platform.

Others have complained about the formulaic, LinkedIn-ification of certain writing on Substack: a personal anecdote, followed by a generalization, packaged with a clear “takeaway.”

I’ve been guilty of all of this. This writing you are reading now is itself guilty.

I sometimes write about writing because, well, I think a lot about the craft of writing and its place in my life. And I think the medium in which we tell our stories matters for the stories themselves.

If you are on Instagram or YouTube, then the particular constraints of those platforms shape how you tell your story. The particular rhythm, style, and cadence of the platforms has a profound impact not just on the stories we tell, but on how we live our lives while telling them

I like writing a newsletter because I don’t like to contemporaneously tell the story of my life while I’m busy living it. The last thing I want is to be present in the moment of some beautiful experience and then to have a thought suddenly intrude: should I Instagram this? Do I whip out a camera and film?

Some of my favorite storytellers online are YouTubers, but with respect to my friends who have suggested I start a YouTube channel about the renovation project in Spain, I just don’t want to have a camera pointed at me at all times. I simply do not want to film my life while I’m busy living it.

The newsletter allows me to live, digest, and then block time out of my life to specifically write, create, and share. This for me is preferable to a visual medium, where I’m much more tempted to share as I’m living.

Still, Becker’s complaint about writers who write about how to live a good life rather than how they are living right now struck a chord. There is a constant pull in this medium, in this Substack community, with the tools that Substack is developing, to imitate what others are doing. And what others are doing appears to be not dissimilar to what creators do on other platforms. Which is to say, make themselves into some sort of guru dispensing advice.

As songwriter wrote, in response to the note above from Becker:

i think the issue with a lot of the internet we’ve made nowadays is that people want to know how to do things, and how to improve themselves and bla bla bla… in short: many people don’t want the art as much as they want the tools to help them feel like they have the capacity to make the art.

This kind of how-to, clear take-away writing is nakedly transparent when I see it on LinkedIn. I’ve really come to despise the kind of formula you see there from LinkedIn “influencers”—a work anecdote followed by a meta point about work (even if I’ve occasionally wondered how I might imitate said influencers, to support my consulting business and make more money).

But the rabbit hole I’ve been down recently—including the excellent essay The Machine in the Garden—made me realize that Substack also has a lot of this formula.

Sundberg writes:

Creating content with the goal of making money off of it is different than creating content with the goal of getting likes, is different than creating content with the goal of being creative and connecting with other people. Seems to me, the obvious attraction of being able to monetize your taste—over putting out a probably-more-interesting letter about your actual life—is leading to a lot of very, very similar Substacks.

Yes, the profit motive leads writers to write certain kinds of writing above others, and there’s really no escaping this other than to remove the profit motive altogether.

Obviously.

Nevertheless, I will resist this pull (I nearly wrote, “You must resist this pull,” but that would be succumbing to what Becker called The Sin of the Second Person Sermon, wherein you start using the second person as a step toward universalizing one’s own perspective into a clear lesson for others—like I said, mini existential crisis).

I resolve to write about life as I’m living it. To resist obsessive self-analysis, to avoid excessive comment on meaning. Rather, to let the meaning speak for itself.

Becker again:

It’s an unfortunate side effect of internet writing that everyone thinks every piece of writing must have some crystal clear lesson for every reader with an 8th grade reading level.

One thing I admire about Martijn Doolaard, the YouTuber renovating two old stone cabins in the Italian Alps, is just how little comment there is. Doolaard films his life, but the end product has a kind of purity—Djoolard never gives advice or analysis, and rarely waxes philosophical. Nearly everything is just: this is what I’m doing.

It is left for us viewers to mull and wax poetic about the meaning.

I want more of that in my own creative work and life. Here I am, this is what I’m doing, this is how I’m living, these are my choices.

And that’s it.

Antoni Gaudi, the Catalan architect responsible for the Sagrada Familia, who transformed architecture, whose legacy on Barcelona is incontrovertible, said and wrote almost nothing about his own life. He rarely gave interviews, did not keep a journal, did not publish a memoir, and certainly did not have a YouTube channel.

The story of Gaudi’s life can only be told through his works—so said a biography I read of him while living in Barcelona. And though the adoring public may have wished for greater explanation (can you imagine Gaudi “giving value” to other aspiring architects?), we are left only with the works.

Rafferty writes:

sometimes it feels like you’re on this providing-value train and the people you’re serving want the value, you get successful providing the value, the how-to’s, the heres-what-to-dos and the handy listicles… but the value is always on the outside of the art, and isn’t the art itself.

Here is to letting the art be the thing itself.

Here is to letting the works speak on their own.

Ok—enough navel-gazing.

Back to life.

Perhaps I will be at my house in the mountains, working on the renovation, running plumbing pipes along stone walls. Or maybe refurbishing some old wood table or dresser coated in dust from decades of abandonment. Possibly I will be looking after the soil in the garden, or working on this newsletter.

And I will invite friends for cheap wine and homemade pizza from the oven. We will talk about our latest climbing projects and the state of the world and what can be done, and whether our place in all of that is small, or significant, or somewhere in between.

When I have questions about the renovation, I will consult the AI. I will point the camera at the stonework and ask it to give me feedback on new masonry skills. It will tell me which bugs in the soil are good and which weeds are bad. Perhaps I will ask it for a training plan, specific to my age, weight, body type, and psychological predilections for discipline (or lack of it).

After a while, I won’t even have to train it much. The AI will just know

I. Knowledge workers in denial

Last week, shared a post by Avital Balwit, the chief of staff at Anthropic (the company behind Claude, one of the large language AI models), about her last five years of work, and what will happen when AI comes for the jobs:

I am 25. These next three years might be the last few years that I work. I am not ill, nor am I becoming a stay-at-home mom, nor have I been so financially fortunate to be on the brink of voluntary retirement. I stand at the edge of a technological development that seems likely, should it arrive, to end employment as I know it. 

Employment as Balwit knows it means knowledge work. That which can be done on a computer. Or, remotely.

I am in agreement with that much of her analysis. This kind of work that most office workers and especially digital nomads do is going away. Maybe not all of it, but much of it. There are about 100 million knowledge workers in the U.S.—if I had to wager a guess, I’d put money on between 50 and 70 percent of them having to find a new way to earn a living, and soon.

You are of course free to disagree. But like Balwit, I think a great many knowledge workers are simply still in denial:

They grasp at the ever diminishing number of places where such models still struggle, rather than noticing the ever-growing range of tasks where they have reached or passed human level. Many will point out that AI systems are not yet writing award-winning books, let alone patenting inventions. But most of us also don’t do these things.

The economically and politically relevant comparison on most tasks is not whether the language model is better than the best human, it is whether they are better than the human who would otherwise do that task… The shared goal of the field of artificial intelligence is to create a system that can do anything. I expect us to soon reach it. If I’m right, how should we think about the coming obsolescence of work?

As they say, change happens slowly at first, then all at once.

That all-at-once part? It’s right now.

But it’s not all of work that will become obsolete—here I diverge from Balwit, who at no point in her piece acknowledges that there are jobs, such as those done with one’s hands, that AI cannot and likely will never replace.

Still—the world has created Artificial General Intelligence. Few have grasped the implications. Not that I know what all the implications will be. No one does, not even the creators.

But I do know that a $20/month, off-the-shelf AI tool is at this current moment better at doing certain work than hundreds of millions of currently employed humans. These workers are as of now obsolete. We have only to wait for everyone else to realize it, and act (or be acted upon).

This is where civilization is right now.

II. What will become of us

Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as the “godfather of artificial intelligence,” recently told the BBC that the world will need Universal Basic Income, and that he was “very worried about AI taking lots of mundane jobs”.

I’m genuinely not sure how worried we should be at an escape from mundaneness. As the Buddhist might say: Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

Balwit, for her part, looks at the data on happiness and unemployment and envisions a lovely future where we all go about like landed gentry:

Perhaps they did some minor administration of their tenants, some dabbled in politics or were dragged into military projects, but compared to most formal workers they seem to have worked relatively few hours. They filled the remainder of their time with intricate social rituals like balls and parties, hobbies like hunting, studying literature, and philosophy, producing and consuming art, writing letters, and spending time with friends and family.

It sounds nice. Personally, I can’t deny some aspirations to be landed gentry myself. After AI comes for me, I expect I will rent properties to rock climbers, pursue my hobbies, and also work relatively few hours.

But here I think it is Balwit who is in some version of denial. We need not fear an escape from mundanity, but we should fear the economic, cultural, and political turmoil which has so clearly already arrived, and which I think is likely to get much worse.

First, there is no version of the world I know that establishes a Universal Basic Income such that millions of workers may transition to a life of leisure, no matter how often the techno-utopians ensconced in their ivory programming towers may argue for one.

My feeling is that AI should be treated much like a public utility, which I think is a best-case scenario.

But I’m not naive as to the politics of our moment.

Far from a future of sensible governance and techno-utopian dreams, I think it’s more likely we are all in for decades of painful, violent disruption. Think Years and Years, the HBO show that tracked a crumbling world over decades, even as wonderous technological progress marched on.

Actually, the best reference for how to understand the current moment I think comes from Niall Ferguson, who likened our time in history to the technology-driven tumult of the 1600s, a “time of troubles”:

In Europe it culminated in the Thirty Years War… reducing Germany to one vast charnel house. In the British Isles, it was a time of internecine conflict — known variously as the Great Rebellion, the Puritan Revolution, the English Civil War, the English Revolution, or the Wars of the Three Kingdoms… In France, Cardinal Richelieu battled the Protestant Huguenots at home and the Catholic Emperor Ferdinand abroad. In China, the same period saw the fall of the Ming dynasty, its control of northern China lost to the Jurched leader Nurhaci, its fate sealed in 1644, when the rebel Li Zicheng captured Beijing and the last Ming emperor hanged himself.

By the way: the Thirty Years War killed eight million people, or roughly 10 percent of Europe’s population at the time. By contrast, WWI killed 3-4 percent of Europe’s population.

I realize I risk sounding quite alarmist.

And obviously, I hope I’m wrong, and I hope Ferguson is too. But I think his comparison is apt:

In our time, as has often been remarked, the internet has played the role of the printing press. The drastically reduced cost of reproducing text and images broke the church’s monopoly on both, just as the internet has enabled everybody who wishes to express and disseminate an opinion to do so — no matter how idiotic or illiterate.

In the 17th century, a certain amount of what was printed contributed to what ultimately became a Scientific Revolution. But a great deal more was devoted to alchemy, astrology, witch-finding and obscure arguments about the difference between transubstantiation and consubstantiation — in short, to superstition… In our time, I have long marveled at how much more attention is paid on social media to conspiracy theories than to theories based on evidence.

What will happen when billions of people in every country on Earth realize they cannot trust a single story, photo, or video they see on the Internet?

Maybe the liberal governments of the world get their act together. Maybe humanity won’t descend into a downward spiral of distrust and disillusionment.

But of all the naive opinions I’ve seen lately, that one seems right up there.

III. On antifragility

Some years ago I attended an Interintellect salon on Nassim Taleb’s book, Antifragile (a book I amazingly happened to read and write about just weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic began).

As with all Interintellect salons, the hosts started with a question: what was the most antifragile thing about each of us?

There I was with a bunch of software engineers—Taleb tends to attract those types—and to a person, all of them said it was their coding skills, their “engineering” brain, or their ability to solve problems (of the kind one sees online of course).

These software engineers saw themselves as antifragile probably because the economy had been handsomely rewarding coding skills for at least a decade, with no end in sight.

Then it got to me: “My house,” I said, to some bemusement.

Something that is antifragile is distinct from something robust, as Taleb explains. A robust thing withstands disorder. An antifragile thing gains from disorder.

My house fit the definition perfectly. When the pandemic hit, my place in the mountains of central New Hampshire dramatically increased in value. The acre of land, the ability to grow food, the well, the proximity to nature, the presence of a tight-knit community—all things that became more valuable, the more disorder there was in the world (my house is worth nearly triple what I paid for it in 2019).

Meanwhile, the latest AI is pretty good at doing the work of a software engineer.

Figuring out how to be antifragile isn’t easy. But there are gains to be had among all this disorder. I hate to sound like a prepper, but I do recommend buying land in climate-resilient parts of the world. I recommend learning skills with your hands and knowing how to grow food. I recommend making your life flexible, nimble, and simple because all these qualities lead to resiliency.

Beyond antifragility, I recommend reading (or re-reading) your Seneca:

Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?”

I wish the hundred million knowledge workers would actually follow this advice. But I know they won’t.

Anyway, when the AI comes for me… I’ll be chopping wood, climbing with friends, and building stuff.

It’ll be fine.

As I was waiting for my number to be called, I had to marvel at the view:

The Germans had it pretty good up there in the tower by the beach. The nice lady who processed my application agreed.

Meanwhile, I was thinking about the piece I wrote last year about how I got my German citizenship (the naturalization path exists because of German guilt over the Holocaust, which my grandfather narrowly escaped).

There was one part in particular that I’ve been wanting to say more about:

I understand that some Germans might resent the fact that I now have access to all the same privileges of citizenship as they do, despite not having been born or ever having lived there... The response, I think, should be to treat this extreme privilege with respect. To understand that it is a gift, born out of something terrible and that now I too have a responsibility.

What is that responsibility? I think it is something like this: to reject tribalism and jingoism. To reject those beliefs intended to divide us or set up the “other” as a scapegoat. And instead, to go toward our common humanity. To emphasize that—as a certain U.S. president once said… we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s future, and we are all mortal.

I’ve been thinking that this message has gone out of fashion. Instead, I see humanity being divided into groups, races, or genders. I see arguments that histories of trauma or oppression create unbridgeable divides. That we cannot possibly understand each other’s experiences.

This cannot be right. If it were, humanity would truly be doomed, and our descent into tribalism and jingoism assured.

History shows—history has proven—that this need not be the case.

But we tend to forget a lot of history these days. There appears to be a Great Forgetting that has been underway for some time. For example, we forget that many things used to be far, far worse.

We forget that, if freedom and self-determination are not defended, at times through force, that there are leaders of nations and armies who will gladly take away that freedom, even if only for the sake of their own egos. We forget that human rights are a mere human invention and that they too may go away if not defended. We forget that entire peoples and nations can be infected by poisonous ideologies that are opposed to human flourishing, and that this can be true even of well-educated peoples and nations, including those that have their own long history of culture and humanity.

We do have tools to guard against all of this—they are ideas. Classical Liberalism. Humanism. These are the ideas that are used to underpin functioning Republics and Democracies because those are the ideas about how to live with people who are different from you, whether in their belief systems or in their race, gender, or experience of life.

I learned about all of this as a kid. Many of you all did too. It just seems that now, as an adult, these ideas are no longer being defended by huge swaths of societies in the midst of a transition from liberal to illiberal.

In place of these ideas, we now have determinism, identity, oppressor, and oppressed, persecuted and persecuting. This has created a global trend toward tribalism. I see it in the crazed crowds at Trump rallies unaware they’ve entered a personality cult to a selfish, clownish demagogue. But I also see it in the activists whose organizing principle of the world is about identity. Elements on both sides insist there is no possible way for us to understand the experience of the other (for the record, I recommend reading memoirs of people different than you if you want to begin to understand the experiences of others—as many of us were assigned to do in grade school, and I still do to this day).

To all of these sad developments, I can only say: that way lies the dark side.

You will forgive me for this naiveté, but I remain a Classical Liberal. Maybe it’s just how I was raised.

I. Apathy loses

Perhaps this is the most obvious political point to make in the world, yet still, every time an election rolls around, I somehow feel the need to remind people: if you don’t show up to vote, you cede all decision-making and right to complain about future events to those who do show up.

Conor Friedersdorf wrote about this in The Atlantic in February. Here’s one part:

“We grow justly weary of our politics,” the late Charles Krauthammer once wrote. But politics, “in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations,” is not something prudently ignored. “For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics and other manifestations of human genius,” he argued, “everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics. Because if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction.”

Did you hear that? Everything depends on politics, including things you profess to care about. For me, it’s art, writing, and creative and free expression generally. But for you, maybe it’s something different.

Politics may be distasteful, or maddeningly frustrating, and I agree! But that’s why Max Weber defined it as a slow boring of hard boards.

If you are frustrated by the lack of progress, again I invite you to read history—this is how progress happens in liberal societies with a lot of different people who are empowered to participate (Yes I know many things are wrong with the process, but these are the basics).

If you want things to move much faster, we also have historical examples for how to bring various utopian visions into being, it’s just that they usually involve violent revolutions, millions dead, and more freedoms abridged than anyone had in mind at the outset.

Personally, I prefer what we’ve got now: go vote.

Beyond that: show up for when the decisions get made.

II. A Liberal Arts grad goes to war

To stick on the subject of history a while longer (one can’t stick long enough), I refer you to a piece by David M. Shribman, also in The Atlantic. It’s about a Liberal Arts grad from Dartmouth, all of 22 years old (Shribman’s uncle once removed), sent to go fight the Japanese Empire. The year is 1942.

While deployed on a Naval warship in the Pacific, he writes back to one of his professors at Dartmouth:

I’ve had lots of time to think out here… A decent liberal arts education based on the Social Sciences is all a lot of us have left—and more and more becomes the only possible background on which to view all this.

“All this,” of course, meaning World War II.

He also wrote letters of advice to his younger brother, Dick:

“What you’ll learn in college won’t be worth a God-damned,” Phil told Dick. “But you’ll learn a way of life perhaps—a way to get on with people—an appreciation perhaps for just one thing: music, art, a book—all of this is bound to be unconscious learning—it’s part of a liberal education in the broad sense of the term.”

But that wasn’t the end of it, far from it. “If you went to a trade school you’d have one thing you could do & know—& you’d miss the whole world of beauty,” he went on. “In a liberal school you know ‘nothing’—& are ‘fitted for nothing’ when you get out. Yet you’ll have a fortune of broad outlook—of appreciation for people & beauty that money won’t buy—You can always learn to be a mechanic or a pill mixer etc.,” but it’s only when you’re of college age “that you can learn that life has beauty & fineness.”

As Shribman writes, his uncle knew what he had been sent to fight for.

And I, for one, am glad there were enough others around at the time to know that it was worth the fighting.

III. You cannot escape politics

In 2020, turnout in the U.S. presidential election “soared”—meaning 62% of eligible voters came out (“Trump is good for Democracy,” someone recently told me… which is one way to read that I suppose).

Here’s how I read it: in a contest that could well have decided whether the U.S. remained a functioning Republic, nearly 100 million voting-age Americans decided to stay home and not vote, concluding, meh… I’ll let others make that decision.

You see I have always held a special disdain for political apathy.

It’s one thing for you to look around and come to conclusions that I disagree with. The world is a complicated place after all. It’s another thing to not care to look around at all. Or, to look around and conclude that the proper response is to not exercise the one birthright that separates us from tyranny.

For as long as you are breathing air, you are affected by how your neighbors, town, state, province, and country decide to organize and govern themselves (if you are lucky enough to live in a self-governing polity in the first place).

No one can escape politics. It is like air. Not caring does not magically remove you from the system, no matter how much disdain, apathy, or frustration you might feel. Politics happens to you whether you want it to or not, whether you notice or not—nor can you escape it by moving countries, or with location-independence.

So I beseech you, readers: do not pretend that politics doesn’t exist.

There can be no dedication to your neighbors without acknowledgment that you and your neighbors live in space together, breathing the same air, side by side. You are part of a polity. And, at least for many of us, that polity is under some form of self-government.

That means you.

Maybe you know the story about the fish, as recounted in a famous commencement speech by David Foster Wallace: two young fish are swimming along when they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish says, “Morning boys, how’s the water?” The two fish continue on for a bit, puzzled, until one of them turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?”

It’s a banal didactic parable, Wallace says. But that doesn’t make its lesson any less significant:

The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the culture of our native land (whichever land that may be) as the water we swim in. Even as self-aware as we may try to be, the ability to recognize the water we swim in is exceedingly difficult. And even if we do, we’re unlikely to recognize just how deep, or warm, or perhaps polluted it may be.

Sacrificing for our kids

In 2022, I wrote one of my very few posts about parenting. My main point was that one of the best possible things you can do for your kids is to be an example of how to live.

Yet this is not as straightforward as it may sound because being an example of how to live is in stark contrast to another core value of parenting, which is that, as parents, we should accept personal sacrifices for their wellbeing.

For example, if you want your kids to be ambitious dreamers who work hard and pursue their passions, then perhaps you should dream big, work hard, and let it be seen that you too are pursuing your passions.

This sounds all well and good, except that what I usually see instead is parents who engage in a kind of slow-drip sacrificing of one’s dreams. Why do parents do this? For the sake of their kids, of course.

We parents rarely think of our actions as sacrificing our dreams. Yet, when it comes to decisions both small and big, we repeatedly prioritize our kids over ourselves. We make choices we feel will give them a better future. And this feels like the most banal, virtuous thing we could possibly do as parents:

Sacrificing for your kids is… condoned by everyone, acceptable to all. It’s evolutionary. What could be more natural, than to sacrifice for your kids?

And yet to do often requires that we minimize or abandon altogether the first principle, which is to be an example:

Do we arrange our lives around our kids? Let me suggest that, not only is doing so only something that wealthy 21st-century parents who live in wealthy countries can do, but doing so is counterproductive to our goals as parents.

Do you really want that to be the example you set, that you arranged your entire life around their wants and needs?

I think sacrificing for one’s kids is not water that we swim in—it is a sentiment that crosses nearly all cultural and political boundaries.

Yet living in Spain has helped me understand on a gut level (even if I already knew on an intellectual one) that several of the things we take for granted as parents in the U.S. are in fact like swimming through polluted water. We don’t realize just how crazy it is to be swimming there.

One of these is our attitude toward paying for College.

‘I have kids’ college to pay for’

Not too long ago, I was talking on the phone with a nurse I know who lives in the U.S. She told me that she and her partner would love “nothing more” than to spend a large chunk of time in Barcelona. Not move here necessarily, but perhaps take three months, as much as their tourist visas would allow.

As a nurse, she couldn’t work remotely—but, I suggested she could take a leave of absence, or failing that she could always get another nursing job upon return to the U.S. Almost by definition, she works in one of the most secure, in-demand, well-paid jobs in the country. Surely nursing will always be there.

But no. It wasn’t possible, she told me. I have kids’ college to pay for.

At that moment, I was standing on a Barcelona city street, my favorite cafe in front of me, where a coffee and a croissant cost €2.30. At least three free, high-quality public hospitals were within walking distance. Nearby was the University of Barcelona, where average tuition for an international student is about €5,000 per year (for locals, it’s €1,000). Over the past eight months, I had met dozens of students from around the world who had come to study here, most of them doing programs entirely in English.

So it was that her comment struck me as patently ridiculous. College was so cheap!

But that is not the reality if we limit our thinking to the United States. There was a mom, a parent, who said she would love “nothing more” than to come spend three months in Barcelona, but couldn’t—obviously couldn’t—because, you know, the cost of college.

The water American parents are swimming in

The thing is: a decade ago, faced with the same calculus, I might have said the same thing.

The average high-income family in the U.S. considers saving for their kids’ college as something of a religious commitment. There are tax-advantaged savings accounts in every state to help them do so. In Bethesda, Maryland, where I lived for several years, it wouldn’t be unusual for households to have hundreds of thousands of dollars in an account specifically intended to pay for kids’ college.

In the U.S., the average cost of a 4-year private university is $34,041/year, and that’s not including money for housing, food, books, or the innumerable, multiplying fees for various administrative functions. All in, it is completely normal to expect to pay around $55,000 per year, per kid to send them to a private university (and don’t look now, but some colleges are approaching $100k). Choosing an in-state public university could halve that cost, but for upper-middle-class parents in the U.S., limiting their kids’ college search to one or two choices near home, when there are hundreds of interesting options around the country, feels like serious parental malpractice.

Then there is healthcare. Most Americans are somewhat aware that the rest of the developed world looks upon the U.S. as being deeply troubled on this subject. But I wonder if Americans understand just how deep. I’ve been working in healthcare (and ghostwriting for physicians and senior executives there) for twelve years now—so I am well-versed in a kind of fatalism within the industry. We’ve all inherited a system that is difficult to imagine any other way. Fundamental change feels impossible.

Even to recount the costs feels like a masochistic exercise, familiar to all: The average out-of-pocket healthcare expense for health insurance (not even health costs) in the U.S. is nearly $8,000 per year. For a family, it’s more than $22,000 per year. And many of those plans require you to spend thousands more each year out-of-pocket before the insurance even kicks in.

For almost any citizen of any other developed country, the situation is patently ridiculous.

Yet, Americans swallow these expenses basically out of fear. We stay in jobs we hate. We don’t start businesses. We don’t take risks. We don’t follow our dreams. All because the cost of health insurance would be prohibitive.

Understanding the crazy

I’ve always known on some intellectual level that this is all crazy. That costs for healthcare and college in the U.S. have diverged from reality, and that most Americans have just accepted it.

But it’s taken me living abroad for eight months to realize just how deeply blind we are to what an alternative society might feel like.

Yes, Spain has free, high-quality healthcare, and the University of Barcelona is €1,000 per year. But the cost of College and healthcare are more than just budgeting issues. Making these costs free or nearly free results in a completely different state of mind, one without the low-level background anxiety that nearly every parent has simply learned to live with.

And it’s not just one’s mental health that’s at stake.

I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that Europeans actually have more freedom to pursue happiness than Americans do, simply because Europeans don’t have to fundamentally alter the entire course of their lives, careers, and financial decision-making in order to accumulate hundreds of thousands of dollars for their kids’ college or to protect against the catastrophic cost of a medical emergency.

To do these things in Spain, or in almost any other developed country, would feel just insane. Madness. Who would do such a thing? Who would make such choices?

An American, I suppose.

P.S. Lest you think it’s “worth it” to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to send your kids to an elite university in the U.S., I direct you to a large and growing literature on the fallacy of such thinking. Not to mention there are other considerations beyond simple ROI. I recommend starting with this New Republic piece from some years ago:

Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation… Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.

About a month ago I was feeling pretty overwhelmed and resolved to take a brief break from writing—thus proceeded a pretty significant outburst of creative energy and output.

I was thinking I’d take a break from writing on Substack; instead, I had no trouble publishing new editions throughout the holiday. I thought work on my book of essays might be effectively ground to a permanent halt; instead, I rededicated myself, and am now very close to being done with the first draft.

Meanwhile, ideas for new posts here have been coming fast and furious. Below I take on one of those, namely whether 2024 will be as bad as everyone says.

But first, what explains this creative burst of energy?

I think two things, neither surprising: one, my son left to visit his mom for the winter holiday. He’s a great kid and at age 13 becoming more self-sufficient every day. Still, it’s remarkable how much of my mental bandwidth is taken up just doing the mundane, day-to-day work of single parenting. I honestly cannot imagine how full-time parents of multiple young kids hope to get anything done except hold down a house and job and put some food on the table.

The second thing is that I’ve given myself a break on the renovation. It’s the one, big project I have where progress is kind of out of my control. I’m really not able to visit the property except when my son is off with other family, which is just very rare this year. So, I’m focusing on the things I can do: namely, my consulting business, my creative work, and my Spanish.

It can be really satisfying to find clarity on these kinds of things. And now, onward:

Will 2024 be terrible?

I read a piece the other day, The world should fear 2024.

“Escalation lurks on every battlefield,” according to Aris Roussinos:

When asked in 2020 to envisage the world after Covid, Michel Houellebecq proclaimed, accurately enough, that “it will be the same, just a bit worse.” It does not take a soothsayer to foresee that the same will hold true for this coming year.

Maybe so, and it’s a prediction that has lots of company.

Just today I listened to Niall Ferguson give some pretty dire predictions on Bari Weiss’ Honestly podcast. He thinks China is going to blockade Taiwan like this month, and we are going to find ourselves in a Cuban Missile Crisis-style standoff, with the U.S. playing the role of the USSR trying to run the blockade.

Meanwhile, I know a lot of people are quite distraught about the Israeli war on Gaza, where more than 24,000 people have been killed. It’s almost enough to overshadow the war in Ukraine, where 500,000 have been killed or wounded, and where it now seems Russia might be winning.

Then there’s the impending electoral disaster in the United States, where it’s not hyperbole to say the future of the Republic is at stake, and also election after election country after country with right-wing, nihilistic populists on the rise.

And finally, last year broke all heat records—it’s obvious the world will smash through the 1.5 degrees target that the United Nations set in 2018 as a line we shall not cross in the fight against global warming.

I’m cognizant of all these things.

What the trends say

And yet—I remain an optimist.

And not just about this coming year, but about the future in general.

That might seem naive, or odd, but all you have to do is look at some history. For starters, look at this chart:

You might want to click on it to get the zoomed-in version.

What this chart shows is pretty astonishing—it shows that per capita global deaths from armed conflict have remained pretty stable over the last 600+ years. In fact, since 1600 they’ve waxed and waned with something like regularity.

There was a spike around World War I and World War II, but on a per capita basis even the two world wars were no worse than the 30 Years’ War in terms of overall death.

Then, since the end of World War II, we’ve been on a clear downward trend, until very recently when we see a slight uptick in civilian casualties from conflict, although as you can see the level is still far below the historic per capita death rates.

If you are right now wondering “but wait, how can this be?—the world seems worse than ever, and almost everyone I know agrees!” may I humbly suggest that you haven’t quite grasped (or properly distanced yourself from) the psychological effects of the Internet and the global, 24-hour news cycle.

We live in a world in which every worst thing that happens on any given day is captured, reported on, broadcast, and published to EVERYONE.

Actually: it’s the worst things in the world cross-referenced with the things most likely to make us outraged or upset.

The result is that everyone is frazzled. And often unable to recognize the good.

What is the good?

Progress in one generation

Just before Christmas, I was in Spanish class. We were learning the subjunctive—a special verb conjugation for our hopes, dreams, and wishes for the future. Most of the time if you are saying what you wish for, hope for, or expect to happen, you need to conjugate the verb in the subjunctive.

Thus, we were talking about how we hope the world will be in the future.

Oh man, was there a lot of pessimism in that room.

But I just couldn’t bring myself to join them in their professions of how bad everything was.

Today, I’m going to be the optimist in the room, I said in Spanish. That seemed to defuse some tension. Since I was a kid, there are more than a billion fewer people in poverty than there are today.

I repeated for emphasis: A BILLION. (except in Spanish you say a thousand million).

Here are the relevant numbers from Our World in Data:

When I was 11 years old, 37% percent of the world lived in extreme poverty. Now, it’s less than 10%. That is fucking amazing.

When have we been better off?

I often like to challenge people with data like this, and with other assertions: There has never been a better time in the world to be a woman. Never a better time to be gay. To be trans. To be black.

Or would you prefer to turn back the clock a generation? How about 50 years? A hundred? More? Didn’t think so.

Yet people are generally unwilling to take the wins.

We still have progress to make, they say, and I agree. But take the wins.

And don’t tell me that things are worse than ever. I think mostly they are better than ever. There is much to be grateful for and to look forward to.

Also on the Bari Weiss podcast, economist Tyler Cowen pointed out that we have achieved the mythical “soft landing.”

Remarkably, I think it was the first time I heard someone acknowledge that.

And we have! Everyone predicted a recession. Everyone said that we have never been able to tame inflation without triggering a large rise in unemployment (they were essentially going off a data point of one).

Yet here we are. Every once in a while, government actually gets itself together and does something right, Cowen observed.

Meanwhile, it is possible—even likely—that we are on the cusp of an explosion in scientific breakthroughs, mostly brought about by AI.

We are going to cure disease. We are going to discover new treatments and new medicines. We are going to solve hard problems in physics, which will allow us to continue making cheaper and more abundant clean energy. Electric vehicles are soon going to dominate the world. Information is more accessible than ever—maybe a double-edged sword, but no one can deny that cheap, free, good education is available to more people than ever.

All this explosion in innovation is going to generate economic returns, and those are going to lift even more people out of poverty in more parts of the world.

None of this is to diminish the pain of individual suffering. Suffering might come to any of us, and one day it might come for me. If it does, do what everyone has always done: find purpose, find meaning, find God if you have to.

There will still be horrible things happening every day—nevertheless, the positive trends will continue.

At least, that is my optimist’s take.

One way to undo all of this would be to throw progress under the bus. To decide to hell with it all and elect the egoist nihilists to run the world, and to become nihilists ourselves. To fail to recognize what is staring us right in the face.

How bad it could get

Of course, it is always possible we could go backward. Anyone with a little historical perspective is surely mindful of the capacity for humanity to backslide or worse, to destroy ourselves.

A few months ago, because I was in a somewhat masochistic mood, I decided to watch an old BBC movie called Threads.

I had never seen it, but I was reading about depictions of nuclear holocaust in movies, and Threads kept coming up. “I have never seen anything so horrible and bleak in my life,” said author Stephen Brotherstone.

I’d have to agree.

I watched it by myself, in chunks, unable to do it all in one sitting.

And unless you want horrible images scarred in your mind for life, I recommend you skip it, and instead suffice with this summary: a fictional but very plausible Cold War conflict involving Iran escalates into a limited “tactical” nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia, which shortly escalates into a full-blown global nuclear exchange.

The movie takes place in a mid-sized British city close to a NATO installation—it ends with humanity more or less kicked back to the Stone Age: subsistence farming and scraping for survival combined with stillbirths, disease, and deformities from radiation poisoning lasting for generations.

It is brutal and horrifying and holds nothing back and if you really want to see a world in which things have never been worse, I recommend watching the movie. (But again: images scarred in your mind for life.)

So, we should continue to fight for progress. But also keep our historical perspective, and be grateful, and take the wins, and let us not dwell in pessimism. It serves no one. The world is still dangerous in many places, but it has also never been safer and more prosperous.

Will 2024 be horrible? Maybe. But for most of us, probably not, and even if it seems like it is, don’t lose your perspective.

A lot of bad things have happened to us humans, and we’re still here. Doing pretty well actually. Might even start exploring the stars.

I’ve been feeling pretty overwhelmed over the past few weeks and as usual, the proximate cause is that I’m trying to do too many things at once. The renovation, my consulting work, parenting, climbing, two hours of Spanish class every morning, and adjusting to living abroad—it’s feeling like a lot.

Thus, the next few weeks I’m going to tee up some posts that have been sitting in my draft folder for a long time, which I haven’t published for one reason or another.

The first below is something I wrote nearly a year and a half ago, in the immediate aftermath of the breakup with my partner of 10 years. With some distance, I’m ready to share, in part because I almost never see good writing about this subject, and also because what I wrote then still feels accurate and true to what happened and how I feel about it.

Maybe it will be some small help to others trying to make sense of a similar experience.

Sense-making after a relationship ends

I wrote this a year and a half ago. As a reminder, putting it all in a block quote:

I’m single again.

I’m not gonna tell the story. There will be no details, and I’m not going to explain here what happened.

And yet understanding what happened is a lot of what I’ve been doing in the months since it ended. I am deeply sad and in mourning for the loss, besides a few other emotions. Yet the overriding thing when I step back from myself and observe is that my sense-making apparatus is in high gear.

When relationships end, we try to tell ourselves the story of what happened and why. We negotiate that shared narrative with our ex, or not, and then we revise and iterate until the story feels right, feels True. Or, we decide to care less about Truth and instead look for a story that serves our emotional needs or advances our purposes. Perhaps we search for a story that allows us to move on.

For my part: I like to think I’m searching for what is True.

But it is hard.

Quite often a couple cannot agree on what happened, and this becomes the source of much pain and hurt and resentment. Or, they agree on some parts and not others. Or they agree in broad strokes but not on specifics, or on specifics but not about what they mean on the whole.

The temptation is always to grasp on to your version for all it’s worth and make it the version, and fault the other for their deviation, their refusal to see things the way you see them.

A breakup will go much smoother if, when this happens, you agree to disagree. Even better, respect that the other person is legitimately doing the same for themselves: doing what they can to make sense of it all.

Sometimes, we are still processing what happened, even if the other person thinks they know already. Not everyone knows exactly why they feel the way they do at the moment when the other demands an explanation.

All we can really say is that there are immediate causes and proximate events, influences, insights, and minor epiphanies. Sometimes the passage of time clarifies those influences and events, or puts them in a new light. Then, we continue to reach for a True accounting as long as we have the energy to do so.

Looking back on my life, sometimes I can remember the cause of breakups, and other times not. Perhaps my memory has shielded me from too many painful details; all I remember are the emotions. But do the emotions help form the story, or does the story form the emotions—or is it a mutual influencing? Am I hurt because of what happened, or am I deciding what happened because I am hurt?

Again, I’m looking for the Truth. But it’s hard to find. If you are friends with a couple that is breaking up—that is, you are on the outside of a breakup looking in—perhaps all you can do is respect how hard it is to write the what happened story. Take sides, sure, give emotional support, yes. But understand that you do not and will never know everything, because even they don’t know everything. Maybe you’ve even engaged in a little sense-making yourself, anchored by your own biases toward making events fit a narrative.

But I digress. I’ve been writing this newsletter for three years, and I’ve always taken pains in these pages to protect my relationship. I don’t write about grievances or unpack past fights. If I’ve ever had a question as to whether this is something I can make public, I have checked first and given her veto power—as I’ve done with this piece.

I wasn’t perfect the past 10 years and neither was she, but together we agree at least on this: we were good partners to each other. We both protected our relationship. We have helped raise each other’s kids. We have been there for each other through sickness and pain and much more. We helped each other move through the world and deal with all of its difficulties, and we loved and supported each other as best as we knew how. We were not a perfect couple, but we were better and stronger and more at peace than most.

I am grateful to her for every one of the past 10 years.

And yet. Like any couple who are being honest with themselves, we also have fundamental disagreements, and these disagreements are long-standing.

Relationships are a delicate thing. A friend who I spoke to recently described relationships as a series of scales and balances which are all precariously aligned in fragile harmony so that the two people stay together, and keep choosing to stay together. But sometimes, if just one of those scales is upset, if just one of the many parts becomes out of balance, the whole architecture of the relationship no longer works.

I think this is what happened to us. It’s the truest thing I can say that happened. Even if my emotional needs would be better served by hating her (I don’t) or blaming her (how could I?), perhaps the only thing I can really say is that our disagreements became salient enough such that the balance and architecture of the relationship collapsed, and quite suddenly.

Beyond that, whatever story we tell ourselves about what happened is ours to keep, and edit or revise as time goes on, in ways that work for us, in ways that help us stay whole and move forward—hopefully with as little guilt, anger, hurt, or resentment as possible.

It’s Saturday morning, the day of El Classico. I.e., when FC Barcelona plays Real Madrid.

The kiddo and I will be watching from the stands in the Olympic Stadium at the top of Montjuic, which amazingly is only the temporary back-up stadium where FC Barcelona is playing until the much better, bigger, and more impressive Camp Nou stadium is done with renovations.

This is the one thing I promised him before moving here, that we would go to an FC Barcelona game. I gave him the option of going to a few games with lesser teams or this one game, with Barcelona’s main rival: he picked this game. (Tickets were an arm and a leg, in case you’re wondering).

Yesterday, we did our usual Friday night volleyball. Even in late October, the weather is quite glorious. Tomorrow, we will go climb in Montserrat.

Life is good.

And now, I offer some notes on courage.

I. Bukowski on lives frittered away on nonsense

Poetic Outlaws recently sent out a Charles Bukowski poem, one I hadn’t seen before. It starts (bolding is mine):

too often the people complain that they have
done nothing with their
lives.
and then they wait for somebody to tell them
that this isn’t so.
look, you’ve done this and that and you’ve
done that and that’s
something.
you really think so?
of course.

but they had it right.
they’ve done nothing.
shown no courage.
no inventiveness.
they did what they were taught to
do.
they did what they were told to
do.
they had no resistance, no thoughts
of their own.
they were pushed and shoved
and went obediently.
they had no heart.
they were cowardly.

If you’ve never read Bukowski, I offer this caution: his books are a bit repetitive (how many scenes of getting day drunk and trying to sleep with someone do we really need?).

If you must read a Bukowski novel, I suggest reading Factotum. Then, promptly move on to his poetry.

But you also musn’t take his poetry as some sage fount of wisdom. Bukowski isn’t here to offer Truth—he’s here to be provocative and offer a swift kick in the pants. You read him for pleasure and maybe to challenge your thinking, not because he’s always right about things.

For example, I think So you want to be a writer?, his famous screed about art and inspiration, is dead, flat wrong about the creative process. (No, it doesn’t need to come “bursting out of you.” See this takedown, one of my favorite discussions of the creative process on the Internet).

Still, Bukowski’s musings often get me thinking. As did the idea that courage is one of the prime missing ingredients if you’re unsatisfied with your life. Those who “complain that they have done nothing with their lives,” he writes, have “shown no courage… they were cowardly.”

My first thought here was to question whether there were enough opportunities for courage, such that you could fault someone for not displaying it. I mean how many times in your average week is courage really called for?

Modern life is mainly designed to remove danger and add convenience and comfort. But the danger of civilization, as Jim Harrison wrote, is that you will “piss away your life on nonsense.”

I put myself into this bucket, at least on occasion. How much time have I frittered away on nonsense? Quite a lot. When the reckoning comes for me, I’ll have plenty to answer for.

But I think what Bukowski clarified is that to craft the life you want requires a kind of courage. In other words, you are afraid to do the thing and you keep going anyway.

Or, to paraphrase Aristotle: courage is the midpoint between two vices. On one end, you have those who aren’t afraid of anything. These are the boastful, shameless, rash. On the other, you have those who are afraid even of things they shouldn’t be—they lack confidence or are overly pessimistic in the face of fear.

In the middle are the courageous.

For me, I find that middle ground all the time. I find it every time I go climbing.

Read more

The wandering man becomes a primitive man in so many ways, in the same way that the nomad is more primitive than the farmer.

That’s from a short and sweet Herman Hesse essay (found via ) that hits all kinds of notes about almost all the things I’ve been thinking about for the past few years: the search for home, wandering, investment in place, identity, the inability to leave one’s heart in just one place.

I can count 10+ years now that I have been location-independent but not nomadic (Just because you can work from anywhere it does not necessarily follow that you should).

To be a nomad is to be lonely, rootless, a wanderer. And as Hesse would say, the nomad is more primitive than the farmer. This is probably contrary to the way most nomads think about themselves. They can be quite smug about their rootless existence: I’m speaking of course of the endless pics of their laptop by the beach, at the pool, the commitment to Instagramming their life, and the endless recounting of new countries seen, new experiences ticked.

(Here I must admit, I once did Instagram a photo of my laptop with the Sea of Cortez in the background… the scene was just too pleasant to ignore).

But though the photos we may share, perhaps it’s worth considering whether a remote worker on their laptop bouncing from country to country isn’t more primitive than we’d like to admit.

Hesse is a nomad himself, but he is ambivalent about the repercussions. He knows that those who stay in place, the farmers, are the ones who invest and build. They are the ones who actually create civilization. Yet Hesse himself can’t quite bring himself to do it:

I am an adorer of the unfaithful, the changing, the fantastic. I don’t care to secure my love to one bare place on this earth.

So it was with me in Washington D.C. In the beginning, I quite liked the city. It was the time of my professional youth, my time of carer ambition and political advocacy, and so no surprise that I enjoyed being in the center of it all, with others who were there for the same reasons.

I do have good memories of those late nights in my 20s stumbling back from Adams Morgan to my studio apartment in Columbia Heights. There was making out against the wall outside, then gunshots in the night, the sound of sirens, and the next morning, the chalked outline of a body on the pavement outside my bay window.

Of course, I fell out of love. But it wasn’t the chalked outlines or gunshots—it was just age. And parenthood. And a shifting of career ambition toward a desire for more social connection and more time in the outdoors. More climbing and travel and fewer long hours and late night work crises.

Really, my heart needed to wander.

Hesse writes:

I don’t care to secure my love to one bare place on this earth. I believe that what we love is only a symbol. Whenever our love becomes too attached to one thing, one faith, one virtue, then I become suspicious. Good luck to the farmer! Good luck to the man who owns this place, the man who works it, the faithful, the virtuous! I can love him, I can revere him, I can envy him. But I have wasted half my life trying to live his life.

But I did find that life. The one of the man who owns his place and works it.

In New Hampshire, I found the first place that felt like home since New Mexico. It was the sky and the mountains, the climbing community and the swimming hole across the street, and the apple tree in my front yard that dropped enough apples every Fall for 100 apple pies. How could it not feel like home?

When not working, I climbed, and when not climbing I hiked, and when I was done with all that I built things. There is always something to build or work on or fix in that house, and I love it for that.

Still, I have always empathized with the digital nomads, especially with the wanderlust. Covid forced me to be settled in New Hampshire, at least for a while, and I found I loved it. But in an open world, would I ever be truly settled? Could I ever truly be satisfied with just the garden and the apple tree?

Here in Barcelona, there is wanderlust writ large across an entire city. There is so much to do. So many people to meet—even the options for outdoor adventures seem endless. One could go a decade here and still not feel settled.

But then, all big cities feel like that. There is an emptiness to them, no matter how full they are.

Here, I am feeling both more and less settled. No more traveling on the one hand, but on the other: I miss the country. Also, I am ambivalent about being a person of somewhere vs. a person of anywhere, and this too Hesse captures, though he appears somewhat further along the path than me (or further behind, one can never be sure):

I wanted to be something that I was not. I even wanted to be a poet and a middleclass person at the same time. I wanted to be an artist and a man of fantasy, but I also wanted to be a good man, a man at home. It all went on for a long time, till I knew that a man cannot be both and have both, that I am a nomad and not a farmer, a man who searches and not a man who keeps.

A good man and a man at home.

An artist and a man of fantasy.

A faithful partner and a passionate lover.

A climber and explorer, a father and a citizen, a nomad, and a builder.

Sometimes I feel homesick for the U.S. This week marks the longest I’ve ever been out of the country at once. I am starting to miss small things—the green chile from New Mexico, the view out my back porch in New Hampshire—but also bigger things: friends, and family. But all will be well: I will have family visiting next week, and they will come bearing chile.

Anyway, it is okay to feel homesickness and also continue on:

A damp mountain wind drifts across me, beyond me blue islands of heaven gaze down on other countries. Beneath those heavens I will be happy sometimes, and sometimes I will be homesick beneath them. The complete man that I am, the pure wanderer, mustn’t think about homesickness. But I know it, I am not complete, and I do not even strive to be complete. I want to taste my homesickness, as I taste my joy.

Can a pure wanderer also be a “complete man?” I do wonder.