A Sunday Hello From Nature

Through all this learning, don't forget to be a person, too.

If you’re one of our new subscribers, welcome! As always, a huge thank you to Melissa, Anna, Aarica, Krauss, Kateri, John, Mopar, Eleanor, Joanna, Jack, Ben, Jack, and Benjamin. Who’ve been here since the very earliest days. Thanks as well to everyone who has taken the time to comment. Agree or disagree, know you’re teaching me too, and are always encouraged to chime in with your own life experiences, your questions, or just to chat amongst yourselves.

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Hey there, how are ya?

I just got back from a long nature walk with my partner, and wanted to share what's helped me enormously through a very anxiety-making week in world news:

If you can, try to get some time out in nature today or tomorrow. Even if it’s just your neighborhood park, even just a walk around the block.

For a decade or two now, the global economy in general and the internet in particular has come to depend on a direct line to your deepest feelings.

The commercial internet can offer you solutions to escape boredom or to cope with fear and loneliness. The tools of human commercialization have become so sophisticated they can almost directly touch the parts of you that feel pleasure, and equally importantly, inflame the part that makes you want to escape pain.

This economic and political system is what you might call totalizing.

It’s integrated into nearly everything we see, think, and do.

This system doesn’t exist to do this stuff, of course. It exists because it was a more efficient way of making rich people money in the 1600s, and humanity hasn’t figured out how to move beyond it yet. But until that happens, your attention, your anxiety, your relief and your desire to know are all fungible, they’re for sale, as profitable precursors to what you’ll do next, and what can be sold to you along the way. I don’t charge for this newsletter, but the information economy which it directs you toward does.

I don’t mean to be a We Live in a Society guy, but we do, so if you’re going to write and read about a system this totalizing, and the military, political, and economic empire which keeps it running, it’s so important to step outside of it, however temporarily. Making the choice to unplug from this stuff is essential because it’s what makes you come to see yourself as a person more than a consumer, a human being more than simply some nation’s citizen.

This week, I spent morning, noon, and night thinking about nuclear weaponry, terrorist attacks, state criminality and political intrigue — most of it surrounding Ukraine. For that total investment, I went to bed feeling like shit. Jittery and ruminative, waking up with little scars on the inside of my cheek where I’d been clenching my jaw in the night.

So I’ve had to rebuild some little barriers in my life to keep this stuff from becoming totalizing too. It’s not helping anyone there for us to absorb these things ad-nauseum. It shouldn’t consume my entire life, and I don’t want it to consume all of yours either.

Because what we’re doing here — learning about the political world as it actually is — is really important.

We’re not just filling up on history and foreign policy news to get off on the controlled anxiety, or because seeking information helps us feel safe and informed, all reasonable things.

I don’t know about you, but I’m doing it because deep down I see the same indomitably human thing in everyone, and think the systems which govern us today don’t respect that humanity in its fullest sense. Those systems must be changed, and that change will only come from persistent effort, across as many of us as possible, sustained over your whole lifetime.

What I’m learning is: If you want to do this learning for a whole lifetime, someone better be able to look at you and say, “Hey, they seem like their life is better for knowing about this. I wish I had what they have.”

You have got-to got-to got-to be a whole person.

So, my note to you this evening is a reminder. It’s okay to deny the systems we live within your full-time attendance, including this one. You can step out the back door and go be yourself in ways ungoverned by these political, economic structures. It’s okay to shut the laptop lid, go plug in the phone, and spend just five minutes re-remembering the distinct and inimitable pleasure of being a person.

Nothing better on earth for that than nature.

It’s hard work, and I’m naturally anxious, so I usually wind up with a racing mind, but that’s okay too. Learning to be a whole person is political work as well, and it’s the work of a lifetime.

Wishing you a happy, productive, settled week to come,

-Will