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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

The permit is a necessary step for me to move forward on a renovation project that has been stalled for months, and which would create, in theory, two new housing units out of a previously abandoned 4-story rowhouse.

These apartments would be in the center of a town that has few available rental units, where locals are having trouble finding affordable housing, and where frustrated potential homebuyers are lamenting the lack of options on the market.

I know all of this because I am smack in the middle of it.

I have received offers to buy my property, even if it is still a construction zone. I have communicated with buyers, both directly and through my friend, whose father is the real estate agent who helped me buy it in the first place. I am in constant contact with my architect, who assures me the town is working on the permit, though the last I heard, the town will ask for “clarifications.”

By the way, just in case you’re in need of clarification, this is the structure as it currently stands:

And this is what we have proposed:

A newly insulated roof and a rooftop terrace.

That’s it!

Believe it or not, there is a 56-page document from the architect that outlines the plan. Most of it is boilerplate filler. Some of it is screen captures of products we plan to use in the construction.

I have a budget from a contractor that is ready to go. They have insurance that protects the city from any potential damage to city property, a plan for waste disposal, and a plan for safety during construction. The architect’s “colegio” (which I take to be a professional standards organization) has added its stamp of approval to the project plan. I’ve already paid thousands of euros to the architect so he could prepare all of this for submittal.

And so far, in return, I have received… A vague threat to fine me unless I patch the hole in the stone wall I created four months ago in order to replace a beam, in a wall that won’t even be there after the rooftop terrace is finished.

I am assured that all of this is not a big deal.

But I am also assured every week from domestic and international media that the housing crisis in Spain is a hair-on-fire Very Big Deal, and that it is mainly the fault of short-term rentals, Airbnb, and rich expats driving up prices.

Here is the NY Times less than a month ago (“Barcelona Becomes Ground Zero for Europe’s Housing Dilemma”).

The story gives some indication of how sticky the problem is. As it points out (and as I have as well), there are 4 million empty homes in Spain—but they’re empty for a variety of reasons that are sometimes hard to untangle. The right to housing is in the country’s constitution, but rental prices have surged 57 percent since 2015, and prices have risen 47 percent, while incomes have grown just 33 percent.

Read more

Just days after the election.

My friend is in the foreground dancing. A packed dance floor behind him. Flags from around the world hanging on the wall. Nothing but passion, joy, commitment to the moment. I posted it to IG at the time with a caption: what do we do in dark times? Dance harder, dance more.

Almost a decade later, I found myself in a similar moment, with the same friend, dancing salsa in the immediate aftermath of a terrible election.

I wrote about it last month in The Sadness of Always Leaving:

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.

The piece was about this and how sad it made me to continually be leaving communities that I had grown to love.

I got a lot of nice responses to that piece. Everything from “I can totally relate,” and “This hit home,” to my favorite, “You are my spirit animal.”

But one woman, apparently hoping for a respite from doom-scrolling bad news, said she had hoped the piece would be a “distraction from the chaos in the US”—unfortunately, she thought the whole thing was an “out of touch” indulgence.

It got me thinking.1

What should be our response to a world that is seemingly falling apart at the seams? We each must have our own answer. I for one take the question quite seriously.

Read more

I am typing from the Renaixença cafe in the center of town, a hot tea and a carrot cake on the table.

A dozen old men play cards at the tables next to me. A climber sits at the bar. Cheesy Spanish music videos play on the flat-screen TV on the wall. Outside, a light drizzle casts the town in a gray light. The reservoir that feeds the town water is filling. The cliffs where I climb are wet.

This is now my home in Spain. There is a bed tucked into a tiny room where I can sleep well at the end of long work days. There is hot water in the shower, a toilet, and a two-burner camp stove on a countertop in the next room. A hammock hangs next to the stove and a butane space heater fires up if I need to take the edge off the cold.

Aside from those few spare comforts, my property here is down to the bones. Crumbling concrete and plaster on four levels and a pile of rubble in the back terrace. Open floor plans waiting to be filled by my labor and dreams.

I intend to post a lot of renovation updates as work proceeds—many of these will be just for my paid subscribers. You might say I’m doubling down on Substack that way. I view it as a way to signal my own commitment, not only to the kind of work I want to be doing, but away from other distractions.

I’m not ignoring what just happened in the U.S., land of my birth. I’m processing.

The main thing I want to say about it was already said better by Toni Morrison, so with all respect, I offer this before getting into my own thoughts. From an essay a few years before her death:

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

The whole thing is worth a read.

And now, after the jump, a few thoughts.

Read more

I’m in my last few weeks in Spain before heading back to the U.S. I’ll be at my homestead in New Hampshire for climbing season, to work on a few building projects, and to witness the last few months of what appears to be an ultra-scary election.

I don’t love writing about politics, and I know it’s not what you signed up for—but at the end of the day, politics affects us whether we care about it or not, whether we show up or not. In any case, I promise to get back to the climbing, the homestead, and the Spain renovation project next week.

But now, happy 248th birthday to the United States, and a few thoughts on democracy.

A majority of people in multiple major power countries would approve of their government’s preemptive use of nuclear weapons if it provided a strategic advantage either to their nation or a close ally.1

Just let that sink in.

Then think about it the next time you argue that what is needed is “more democracy.”

In the U.S., the founders feared a populist mob just as they feared a tyrannical king. This is why we have bizarre institutions like the Electoral College, which has twice in my lifetime given the presidency to the loser of the national popular vote (George W. Bush in 2000, Donald Trump in 2016).

I don’t approve of either of those presidents, nor do I approve of the Electoral College, but I get what the founders were thinking directionally.

Sometimes less direct voting is better.

Read more

I now joke on Zoom calls for work that small talk about the weather has gotten much more interesting.

The heat has been unrelenting and it’s hampered my writing. The past two weeks are littered with discarded prose. I saw a study recently that productivity plummets in hot weather. The surprising finding though was that “white collar” productivity also plummets. Something about heat outside just makes us all want to slow way down.

I’ve been taking city bikes back and forth to the climbing gym after Spanish classes, taking the rides as an opportunity for a warm-up and warm-down to book-end the climbing. It’s about 15-18 minutes each way, depending on how motivated I am to blow through red lights. I love the bike lanes in Barcelona, and the city is generally pretty flat, so it all feels very friendly even on busy main streets.

The past two trips though I’ve relented: there are e-bikes available for a markup of a mere €0.34 per half hour, and rather than risk heat stroke I’ve opted for that sweet, sweet motor to get me home. But I do wonder about the escape to convenience (as you’ll see below I’m sensitive to). At least I haven’t bought a moped yet.

Tomorrow, my son arrives from the States, and next week he’ll start school. The routine will change, Summer will end, and so too, I hope, will the heat.

I. Moral equivalents of war

After my interview with Chris Blahoot, he recommended I read Pete Davis’ Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing.

It’s a book after my own heart about committing to places, investing in people, and in general laying out a value structure that is an alternative to what he calls the “Age of Infinite Browsing.”

Davis references a lot of writers and ideas I’ve encountered before, but it was some of his observations on struggle, hardship, and challenge that were really helpful for me to re-encounter.

One of those ideas is what William James called “Moral Equivalents of War,” or “collective projects that share the positive qualities of martial valor—projects that necessitate struggle, vigor, fidelity, and courage—while avoiding the negative ones, like division, dehumanization, and bloodshed.”

I’ve often thought of climbing mountains as fitting that bill. Any proper alpine climb in a remote area certainly requires struggle, vigor, fidelity, and courage. In the lead-up to World War II, many European countries were even sponsoring mountaineering expeditions almost as a proxy for war.

The kind of climbing I do doesn’t come close to the kind of struggle and courage required to push new boundaries in mountaineering—but it does contain some of the same challenges in miniature. Struggle, vigor, courage, and fidelity are all part of the deal when climbing outdoors.

Society needs more things like that, where instead of comfort, convenience, and sloth, we are required to struggle and be brave. As a parent, I can certainly see my son searching out these kinds of experiences to try and test his own bravery. Even if I don’t provide them, he’ll contrive them on his own with whatever is available.

The more you look around, the more you see it—wealthy Western society writ large is in desperate need of struggle in service of shared purpose. And that lack has consequences that reverberate, especially over our politics.

Read more

I cooked pancakes for the kids, my mom drank coffee, and my grandmother read us Richardson’s brief post about one of America’s fundamental founding myths: equality.

In a family of writers, at least this much we can all agree: powerful writing is a thing of beauty, but we can appreciate beautiful words while also disagreeing with their sentiment.

So, with due respect to Richardson (who has about a gazillion more subscribers than me), I think she’s kind of wrong about America. The “words to live by” in 2023 aren’t the ones about equality—they’re the ones about the American dream.

And since it’s 4th of July, I hope you’ll take a moment to indulge me as to why.

All men are created equal

Heather’s post quotes from two of America’s greatest wordsmiths in Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.

It was Jefferson who gave us We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal… But it was Lincoln, who once noted that the aggregate of all his schooling on the Illinois frontier amounted to about a year of education, who wrote, in my mind, the even better stuff.

Here’s via Richardson:

The men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, pledged their “Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” to defend the idea of human equality. Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives, for that principle. Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

This last part is quoted from the Gettysburg Address. But I actually prefer Lincoln’s 2nd Innagural Address, which also took place in the midst of the U.S. Civil War. The entire text is only 701 words long, and for my money, it is a masterclass in great political speech.

Both the Inaugural and the Gettysburg Address are etched into the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., making it my runaway favorite of all the D.C. monuments (did I mention I come from a family of writers?).

And yet I was super disheartened when I took my Canadian friend to visit it just two months ago. It was my last month in D.C., and he’d never been. So I took him to see the greatest hits all in a big loop around the National Mall. But though he appreciated the big statue of Lincoln seated in the chair, the words etched on the walls just didn’t mean much to him.

I tried to make the case, arguing something about the historical context, the phrasing, the man meeting the moment—yet it seemed my arguments were falling on deaf ears.

But then I had to remember that to outsiders, America’s Civil War is basically just about how the racists nearly got their way, just before getting their way in other ways for another hundred years.

And in fact: it was just one of the dozens of moments I’ve had in interactions with people around the world in my life where I am reminded that America’s most powerful idea—what I call our founding myth—is actually not about all men being created equal, or pontifications about government of, by, and for the people.

To most non-Americans, all our rah-rah about equality is just so much hypocrisy.

Individual freedom and enterprise

What actually resonates, and what I think is the best, most powerful idea we have in this country, is one that was also at the core of our founding documents: The American Dream.

Read more

A lot of readers won’t remember An Inconvenient Truth. Or maybe they think Al Gore is an out-of-touch fuddy-duddy from an obsolete past. Well, let me tell you: it was a HUGE cultural moment. Everyone talked about it everywhere, and back then these moments lasted more like three months, rather than our current 36-hour outrage cycle.

If you can imagine, this was before climate change had devolved into an outright partisan issue, before “denialism” became half the country’s defining posture. Heck, the GOP still had its own climate change proposal—cap-and-trade. Anyway, those were the days.

I was working as a journalist when the movie came out, covering politics for the Albuquerque Journal. There was a clear lesson for journalists here, which was that fairness and balance aren’t about both sides. If ninety-nine scientists say one thing and one scientist says another, the story should read, “The overwhelming consensus of science is…” and not “Some scientists say this, while other scientists say that.” I brought this lesson directly into my reporting.

But An Inconvenient Truth influenced me in other, longer-lasting ways:

1. It showed me climate change is probably the most serious long-term problem humans are dealing with.

2. It showed me that the issue is not going away in my lifetime.

3. It convinced me that I should devote at least some portion of my life to somehow helping to fix this issue.

Yes, all in all, the movie was a wake-up call. It had its intended effect.

And then everything went downhill from there.

Read more