The bible of this industry is literally titled “Hooked.” No joke. Here is an excerpt from the book:

“Emotions, particularly negative ones, are powerful internal triggers and greatly influence our daily routines. Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion, and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation. For instance, Yin [a human being] often uses Instagram when she fears a special moment will be lost forever… By thoughtfully moving users from external to internal triggers, Instagram designed a persistent routine in people’s lives. A need is triggered in Yin’s mind every time a moment is worth holding on to, and for her, the immediate solution is Instagram.” (48 - 51)

This industry makes shiny, grabby user interfaces designed to alter human psychology. It foments addiction, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, comparison, and competition. In a sense, it is not an extractive industry, but a Devouring Industry.

Here’s how it goes: You get a new phone. You download an Industry app. You sign in, seamlessly, one click. You’re invited to join interest groups and follow sexy and interesting people. It shows you some sexy and interesting photos and videos. Your brain lights up! You click like. A heart appears, letting you know that it’s not a like after all — it is, in fact, true love!

Rinse, repeat, faster and faster, more and more. You add photos. People love YOU now. More photos, more love. What could be simpler! You have never had more love than you have on this app! What delights!

Yes, delights… and now it has its hooks in you. Day after day, you pick up your phone impulsively. You cannot control it. It will never let you go. It eats your attention. It eats your time. It eats your life. Bit by small bit. You cannot, of course, imagine deleting the Industry app from it (too useful! too loving!). From Hooked:

“The collection of memories and experiences, in aggregate, becomes more valuable over time and the service becomes harder to leave as users’ personal investment in the site grows.” (147)

Have you watched Stranger Things? There are scenes where the villain, Vecna, forces his slimy tendrils down into children’s throats, and pumps them full of dark energy, forcing them into a virtual dreamstate to take their agency for his uses. Hooked, again:

“Recently, a blog reader e-mailed me, ‘If it can’t be used for evil, it’s not a superpower.’ He’s right. And under this definition, building habit-forming products is indeed a superpower… [Industry products] can quickly degenerate into mindless, zombielike addictions for some users.” (11)

This is Zuck’s metaverse, pipelined straight into your eyeballs, welded into your tweenbrain, pumping you full of dopamine and feeding your desires. And monetizing them. Today, Meta’s market cap is $1.56 trillion. What a valuable company!

This is the nature of the Devouring Industry. It eats human capital. It eats cultural capital. It turns it into cash. Rinse, repeat. Every day it is engaged in a Great Devouring of human potential. Nom nom nom.

Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch wrote just yesterday, “…social media is an unusual consumer product because of its vast user base and the enormous amount of time it takes from most users. It’s as if a new candy bar, intentionally designed to be addictive, was introduced in 2012 and, within a few years, 90% of the world’s children were consuming ten of these candy bars each day, which reduced their consumption of all other foods.”

Candy bars Devouring us. Devouring the possibility of real-life human connection and imagination, like the Nothing and its wolf agent G’mork in the Neverending Story:

Now, not all social medias (or porn and video games) are dark forces. I do not think it includes Substack, but I may be wrong. Also, some people use Industry apps like Instagram as tools, and appear to have healthy (or at least managed) relationships to them. Good for these people. I am not one of them. I had Instagram’s hooks in me, back before 2017 (see Story #1 here). I hated this, and I eventually quit cold turkey.

A big part of quitting is answering, “what is the counterfactual? What do I otherwise do with the time I spend on social media?”

I had coffee with a new friend the other day and we discussed this very thing. He said, “imagine if all the time spent on these apps went into community service.” It’s a beautiful thought. Idealistic, yes, and beautiful.

It doesn’t have to be service. There are very many other ways to spend your time. Reading, running, dancing, writing. Music! Parties! Smooching! Picking your nose!

Whatever it is, share it one-to-one with a friend or family member, or with a small group in person. Real-life, person-to-person connections make life rich. Just please don’t pick your nose and share it.

Communion

A few years ago I was at a dinner party with my friend Niko and he said “Plato says…” and then went on to quote something Plato wrote. I interrupted in jest, something like, “Well, first off, Plato died two thousand years ago so he doesn’t say anything.” This has been on my mind recently because I’ve come to think Niko was right to use the present tense.

Fully engaging in reading good writing is being in conversation with an author. Authors spend a lot of time crafting their art. And when the author is someone you love, or could have loved, it means something extra special. In those moments, reading is a channel to inner dialogues with lost friends, loved ones, lovers, philosophers, intellectuals, business people, activists, really whoever took the time to write something you deem worthy of picking up.

I’ve found reading is the best communion with people I’ve lost, and people I wish I’d known, and people I could get to know better. I’ve felt this deeply while reading this year. Reading letters and emails from lost friends. EO Wilson’s books, though I never had the chance to meet him. Blogs of people I might like to know.

There is so much wisdom stored in writing. To start listening to it, all it takes is a book, intention, attention, and a place to sit quietly -- a couch, bed, bar stool, plane seat, you get the picture.

Courage

There has been a lot of violence around free speech this year. A lot of concern about its place in society, too.

I grew up with parents often riven by political conflict. My father is a Republican formed by military experience who values family above all else. My mother is a hippie at heart, a true “bleeding heart” liberal scientist who values education above all else. In my own political leanings, I am of them both.

In my community (perhaps because of my upbringing, perhaps it’s genetic), I enjoy picking up and playing with hot topics in conversation. I try to do this respectfully.

Yet, this year friends on the left have called me “bomb-thrower,” “instigator,” and “elitist,” and friends on the right have called me “naive,” “idealistic,” and “academic.” Being labelled for voicing a different take or opinion — it’s generally good information to have about what people think, but sometimes it’s a real bummer. Opinions aren’t wrong, and of course folks are free to disagree how they’d like. But sometimes it comes across that it’s not OK to have a different opinion.

Free speech is crucial. Why? Because we need to play with ideas to understand if we believe them or not. We should be free to act them out, to try them on for a few weeks, to consider them from multiple sides, to debate them, to be told we are wrong.

We should also form ourselves to have the integrity to ask, “why am I wrong?” and listen carefully to the person giving the answer.

I highly recommend Greg Lukianoff’s Ted Talk on this, it is only 13 minutes:

Without free speech, we tend to hide opinions, or weird and dark thoughts. Occasionally with this bottling up, violent release towards self and others becomes more likely.

I was chatting to a close friend recently. They told me “I think about killing myself every other day.” I loved this. I loved this, because I love this person, they felt comfortable speaking their mind to me, and I could be there for them because I knew what was on their mind. In my past, I have had a form of this thought, but I have never voiced it. I was too afraid of what others would think. It’s a terrifying thought.

It takes courage (and sometimes, stupidity) to speak your mind, especially when you’re in a group and you believe it’s the “wrong” social context to hold your belief, or you will be judged by the people listening.

On to reading… Developing nuanced beliefs involves reading discourses you may disagree with, testing them, and convincing yourself what discourse, or mix of discourses, you believe in. Reading widely and openly among different discourses is among the best ways to understand complex problems.

Consilience

I was Wilson-pilled this year. E.O. Wilson was a naturalist specializing in the biology of social animals (sociobiology). I find his writing endlessly fascinating for what it contains about the origins of human psychology, behavior, and culture. He was also quite the philosopher.

In 1998, Wilson wrote Consilience. He introduces the term thus,

Consilience is the key to unification [of knowledge]. I prefer this word over “coherence” because its rarity has preserved its precision, whereas coherence has several possible meanings, only one of which is consilience. William Whewell, in his 1840 synthesis The Philosophy of the lnductive Sciences, was the first to speak of consilience, literally a “jumping together” of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation….

The belief in the possibility of consilience beyond science and across the great branches of learning is not yet science. It is a metaphysical world view, and a minority one at that, shared by only a few scientists and philosophers. It cannot be proved with logic from first principles or grounded in any definitive set of empirical tests, at least not by any yet conceived. Its best support is no more than an extrapolation of the consistent past success of the natural sciences. Its surest test will be its effectiveness in the social sciences and humanities. The strongest appeal of consilience is in the prospect of intellectual adventure and, given even modest success, the value of understanding the human condition with a higher degree of certainty.”

One of the great joys of reading a variety of works, politics, and discourses is that at times, consilience punches you in the face. This year I read, among others, belle hooks, BAP, and Peter Thiel. This might as well be a bit starting, “a feminist scholar, a champion of the manosphere, and a gay libertarian business titan walk into a bar…”

Among some stark differences of opinion, I notice a lot in common amongst their ideas: An overarching desire to free humans from oppression. A thought that dominance-based hierarchies suffocate human flourishing. A need to listen to human wildness and instinct, and attendant emotions, in a world that’s trying to neuter you.

No one has all the answers. Frustratingly, sometimes ‘good people say bad things’ and ‘bad people say good things.’ To me, consilience means drawing truth out by engaging with different sources, discourses, and politics, which I ‘ought not’ agree with, or maybe even I think are a little bit crazy, and pulling on the common threads.

Books

Anyhow… my 2025 booklist:

Nonfiction:

• Fire Weather (John Vaillant) — A narrative account of the Canadian company town of Fort McMurray being vaporized in a wildfire.

• Zero to One (Peter Thiel)

• Half Earth (EO Wilson) — Phenomenal

• Consilience (EO Wilson)

• On Human Nature (EO Wilson)

• The Meaning of Human Existence (EO Wilson)

• An Immense World (Ed Yong) — On animal umwelt, and how other creatures sense the world. A great book to listen to during drives with special people.

• The Apology (Plato)

• New Atlantis and the Great Insaturation (Francis Bacon)

• The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith)

• The Prince (Niccolo Macchiavelli)

• BOOM: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation (Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber) — A fresh take on how innovation occurs. Differentiates financial bubbles (net bad) vs. innovation bubbles (net good). Wonder why life has gotten so expensive, but we still live in an apparently old world? Read the chapter on financialization.

• The Technological Republic (Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska)

• Impro (Keith Johnstone) — A wonderful book on mental flexibility, pathways to instinct, and repairing miseducation.

• The Courage to be Disliked (Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi)

• The Will to Change (belle hooks)

• Bronze Age Mindset (BAP)

• Breakneck (Dan Wang)

• Over Ruled (Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze)

• Superbloom (Nicholas Carr) — Fill in the blanks: F__k Meta

• The War Below (Ernest Scheyder) — A decent intro to the tradeoffs and complexities of mining for resources (metals, industrial minerals) necessary to enable a future of clean energy abundance. Multiple environmental discourses explored.

• The Lean Startup (Eric Ries)

• The Philosopher in the Valley (Michael Steinberger)

• Terrible Beauty (Auden Schendler) — Boo.

Fiction: I read more fiction this year. Reading a passage of good fiction is a bit like stargazing. I sit and read and reread and then put my book down and stare at the ceiling and wonder what it all means.

• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

“Now–such is progress–the old men work, the old men copulate, the old men have no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think–or if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon; returning whence they find themselves on the other side of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labour and distraction, scampering from feely to feely, from girl to pneumatic girl, from Electromagnetic Golf course to…”

• A Selection of Poems, e.e. cummings

• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question these honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior’s right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?

You aint nothin.

You speak truer than you know. But I will tell you. Only that man who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.

Even a dumb animal can dance.

The judge set the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps. Bears that dance, bears that don’t.

• No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy

Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference in Corpus Christi and I got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that. I aint even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I told her that and she looked at me funny. She thought I was sayin somethin bad about em, but of course that’s a high compliment in my part of the world.

• The Road, Cormac McCarthy

One night the boy woke from a dream and would not tell him what it was.

You don’t have to tell me, the man said. It’s all right.

I’m scared.

It’s all right.

No it’s not.

It’s just a dream.

I’m really scared.

I know.

The boy turned away. The man held him. Listen to me, he said.

What.

When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you can’t give up. I won’t let you.

• Neuromancer, William Gibson

• Fourth Wing, Rebecca Yarros -- dragonrider smut (listened to this triology as a booktape on long drives)

• Iron Flame, Rebecca Yarros

• Onyx Storm, Rebecca Yarros

I have recently wondered if folks today are disconnecting from death. This got me thinking about war, and my relatives who fought in war. War is an obvious arena where death is far more prevalent than in day-to-day Americana.

My maternal grandfather (Rene) was a Marine who fought on Iwo Jima during World War II — the bloodiest battle of the Pacific theater. Of 80,000 soldiers who fought for the United States, more than 6,000 people died and 18,000 people were wounded. In other words, my grandfather had a nearly 10% chance of death just being in this battle.

Over the holidays, I sat down with my parents and asked them what Rene shared with them about his experience in war before he died. They shared a few stories.

Rene was in the second wave of Marines who landed on Iwo Jima. He was a machine gunner, a BAR operator. As a Marine, Rene’s job was to kill the enemy and protect his comrades. They landed on a beach and began moving inland.

By the time he landed, the enemy had retreated to a tunnel network established for guerrilla warfare. His platoon was camped on the beach. At night, it was tough to sleep, because once the dark settled, voices would emerge from the tunnels and float out to sea:

Hey Joe, Hey Joe, You’ll be dead in the morning!

Then the enemy would sing a song.

The song was seared into my grandfather’s memory. I know this because he taught it to his children. My mother and aunt sang it for my family at Christmas. None of us had ever heard this before:

The enemy would fight from the tunnels in two ways. One, they would rush out in a banzai charge, altogether, aiming for overwhelming force in numbers. Two, they would sneak out alone and attempt to take out strategic positions, like Rene’s machine gun.

At one point, a single enemy combatant was sneaking upon Rene’s position, in a foxhole behind enemy lines. His platoon was advancing in a line beyond the combatant’s position. Rene left his foxhole and saw the combatant, who was playing dead. The man was armed and capture was a mortal risk.

E.O. Wilson writes in his excellent book Consilience, “Nature is a battlefield, make no mistake.” Sometimes in war, as in nature, you can’t make a moral choice. You must simply make the choice to live or die.

Rene was awarded a Bronze Star with the citation: “For heroic achievement in connection with operations against the enemy on IWO JIMA, VOLCANIC ISLANDS, during the period 25 February to 16 March, 1945. Private First Class [Rene], while serving with a Marine infantry battalion as an automatic rifleman, crawled through heavy enemy mortar and small arms fire, without regard for his own safety and without having been so ordered, and evacuated a wounded comrade who had fallen in front of the lines. Later, he engaged an enemy dual-purpose gun in a fire fight and rendered such accurate fire that his platoon was able to withdraw from an untenable position under cover of his fire. His devotion to duty and actions throughout were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.”

On his deathbed, Rene said something like “I don’t know if I’ll go to heaven because of all the awful things I’ve done,” but he also said throughout his life, “I would do anything to keep my children and grandchildren from war.”

When Rene was fighting on Iwo Jima, he prayed,

Dear God, if I get out of this alive, I will never again have a bad day.

I remember my grandfather as a jolly, gentle man who was full of love, wit, and charm. As a kid, he would take me fishing on his boat, the Poliwog. When I think of him, I think of the smell of salt air, the smile on his face, and the pride in his very being. On the ocean, he was happy to be alive.

My mother recalled, “When my Mom was cranky, Dad would put on polka music. Then he would sweep her off her feet, and spin her around, and dance until she laughed. She couldn’t help but laugh. He loved her so much.”

This last story I love above all the others… My grandfather, the romantic.

A couple weeks ago I watched a documentary about the philosopher Rene Girard, who started his career as a literary critic. A line from the documentary stuck — Girard’s colleague describing ‘learning to read’ with him, “He certainly taught me many things, especially how to read. He taught me to read with an open mind, and not to read with reverence, not to read with obedience — to read freely even the greatest authors. [That] you can be interested in what the text says, and also what the text does not say, and also what the text wants to hide” (~52m).

I love this notion of free and unabashedly critical reading. Reading paper books slowly enough to develop critical thoughts about them is an antidote to over-information.

I have been guilty in my life of reading with blind acceptance, and therefore, absorbing some ideas and rejecting others without testing them first. In 2024, I opened myself more to chewing on ideas, and as a result it was my best year of reading yet. I was receptive to new genres — particularly, psychology and philosophy. And, it turns out, reading about how humans think and what life means is delightful.

My favorites in the genre of Psychology and Philosophy:

• Attached (Amir Levine & Rachel Heller) - Basic introduction to attachment theory. At first I was skeptical of attachment theory, because I read Attached as a diagnosis for relating to others — i.e. people should fit neatly into secure, anxious, avoidant, or disorganized bins. But over conversations with my therapist and a philosophy reading group, I started thinking of attachment as much broader. I now understand it to be the accumulated mosaic of experience, thought, and emotion we hold in relation to objects — ideas, other beings, favorite lamps, etc. — which inform how we interact with those objects and the world more broadly.

• Anger (Thich Naht Hahn) - Mindful practices for dealing with an emotion which can be destructive and therefore which I’ve often judged harshly when expressed in myself and others. But anger often means something should be known.

• Breath (James Nestor) - I used to laugh at mouth taping, but after I read this, I started taping. I think it’s improved my sleep.

• Dopamine Nation (Anna Lembke) - In part, assesses smartphone and media use through the lens of addiction studies. I found the chapter on shame (destructive shame, “…which deepens the emotional experience of shame and sets us up to perpatuate the behavior that led to feeling shame in the first place…” vs. prosocial shame, “…[which] mitigates the emotional experience of shame and helps us stop or reduce the shameful behavior.”) particularly interesting.

• It’s Not You (Ramani Durvasula) - This is a primer on narcissistic relationships. It provides a useful framework for identifying and healing from narcissistic abuse and the profoundly confusing shame and grief that comes along with it.

• Self Compassion (Kristin Neff) - This book & the associated exercises facilitated a personal revolution in addressing, rather than hiding from shame. The feeling is an onion, but Neff’s book is straightforward. Highly recommended for every person who grew up Catholic or in New England.

• Setting Boundaries that Stick (Juliane Taylor Shore) - ‘Setting boundaries’ is a most popular term. Often I hear people misapply ‘setting boundaries’ when they mean ‘making ultimatums.’ This book clarifies that boundaries are largely internal — we choose what we allow into and out of our heads and bodies.

• The Anxious Generation (Jonathan Haidt) - Perhaps the best summary of the 'alone together' pressures of smartphone use, social media, gaming, etc. I've ever read. Starts the conversation with somatic realities of modern life — how humans have evolved to be embodied, communicate synchronously, find rhythm together, and how we've developed technologies that disembody us, are totally asynchronous, and destroy natural rhythms — leading to elevating rates of anxiety and depression among young people today. Ends it with practical advice to improve human connection, encourage resilience beginning in childhood, and reclaim attention. A must read!

• The Body Keeps the Score (Bessel van der Kolk) - Hugely helpful, nudged me to pursue acupuncture, breathwork, and bodywork as the next phase in recovery after a six-year ordeal that started with a broken femur. Also helped me unearth and process some blocked emotions related to the loss of my best friend Dan in 2021, and grieve more fully the loss of Mike in October.

• The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership (Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, & Kaley Warner Klemp) - Principles & practices to get 'above the line' - open, curious, & committed to learning, vs. remaining 'below the line' - closed, defensive, & committed to being right.

• The Identity Trap (Yascha Mounk) - Why woke won’t work. History of identity politics with powerful arguments on the hazards presented by the ideology. Provides good examples of identity-based policy failures during the COVID era.

• The Republic (Plato) - My first tangle with philosophy, read during a 10-week seminar series organized by Niko Kovacevic and led by Paul Diduch, via Parnassus House. I’ll be writing more on ideas from the Republic later, but briefly I’ve noticed two outcomes of this reading style. First, (per ‘chewing on ideas’ in the intro above) I find myself questioning how and why I know what I know. Internally, I treat my judgments and thoughts alike with an internal boundary, ‘why do I feel/think this way?” Second, I find myself deploying Socratic dialogue in conversations — pausing more to ask clarifying questions, follow-up, and check in. I find it leads to much better discussions overall, with a greater chance of my learning something, vs. reinforcing something (I think) I knew.

• The Righteous Mind (Jonathan Haidt) - A very good book. Outlines the psychological underpinnings of morality, and how different people may think differently about what’s right and good. Particularly useful to interpret how folks of different political leanings (left vs. right) have separate moral pillars they rely on. “Morality binds and blinds. This is not something that happens to people on the other side. We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle about sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects.”

Other Nonfiction:

• After Geoengineering (Holly Jean Buck)

• And There Was Light (Jon Meacham) - Lincoln’s biography. A benevolent dictator & monumental human.

• Cheaper, Faster, Better (Tom Steyer)

• Free Range Kids (Lenore Skenazy) - It all boils down to “Don’t try to kidproof your world. Worldproof your kids.”

• Getting Things Done (David Allen) - Too long a book for simple principles, but a useful notetaking system to clear the mind. Rather, read the sparknotes version in “The Great CEO Within.”

• Hooked (Nir Eyal)

• How to Know a Person (David Brooks)

• Land (Simon Winchester)

• Sapiens (Yuval Noah Harari)

• Supercommunicators (Charles Duhigg)

• Thank You for Your Servitude (Mark Leibovich)

• The Age of Addiction (David Courtwright)

• The Wager (David Grann) - Wonderful piece of historical nonfiction including maritime battles, imperial competition, indigenous badassery, a batshit crazy survival story, and unlimited scurvy. Amazing opening line: “The only impartial witness was the sun.”

• Timefulness (Marcia Bjornerud) - “Rocks are verbs, not nouns.” Another wonderful line.

• Tribe (Sebastian Junger)

Essays:

• Lessons from the Anthropocene (John Green) - I give Lessons from the Anthropocene five stars. Delightful nonfiction essays which each end with an overall rating, e.g. “Canada Geese get two stars”. Green is a solid observer of the outrageous.

• Self-Reliance (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

• The Serviceberry (Robin Wall Kimmerer)

Fiction:

• Playground (Richard Powers)

• The Mountain in the Sea (Ray Nayler) - IMO much better than Playground.

• Storm (George Stewart) - The very first eco-novel, which describes the story of a storm and its knock-on effects. My two favorite characters are the storm and the coyote.

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Gabrielle Zevin) - A+, powerful read for me as a kid who grew up playing video games and has used them to escape physically painful times.

Where I am staying near the municipality of Bunyola, the mountains rise dramatically to the north and west, from farmlands to the south and east. Standing below a covered porch I had a unique meteorological experience. Looking to the farms and directly above, the night sky was starry. But clouds shrouded the mountains. Every minute, heat lightning would flicker through the cloud banks, wordlessly, without thunder. Winds gusts pushed out from the cloud bellies, carrying a spritz of rain onto my feet. 

I’d left my phone out on the pool deck, and grabbed it. A few missed calls from Jesse at 1:30 AM Mallorca time. One text: “Hey dude, give me a call if you can”

There are times in life when you know before you’re told. I spent 30 minutes watching the storm before I called him to confirm that Mike died. I spent the following three hours calling friends back in the States. 

In July, I visited the memory of my friend Dan in the Enchantments, where he died climbing in May 2021.  And in August, I visited Mike in Squamish to catch up with him over four glorious days of our favorite shared pastimes: play, laughter, and soul-baring. I am sparing with the photos I take, but after a run at the end of our visit I asked him for a photo together. I told him, “I trust you in the mountains, and I want a photo of us.” Mike replied, “Jimbo, it’s always good to have photos together.” And he is right about that.

There are many things that we caught up on during the trip. His journey as a professional athlete. A movie project he was working on, and the way he was working to be true to himself and his story. His plan to help family and friends out with newfound earnings. How he was in love like never before.

For all of these things, I am so, so proud of him. He was becoming the man the world invited him to be. “The force of character,” Emerson wrote, “is cumulative.” It sure is. 

There will be many stories and elegies written for Mike. Mike loved creating and sharing stories. But he was also a man of idioms. I have three favorites.

• Rationing is for the birds. On a 2016 trip into the Alaska range together, poor weather lasted three weeks before we got a decent climbing window. Mike and I brought a liter of whiskey in total. On or about day six, we were trying to decide how to apportion our whiskey for the rest of our time. I argued for temperance. Mike said “Rationing is for the birds.” We finished our whiskey that night. The next day, we started finding dead sparrows on the glacier. Out of guilt and fear of karmic retribution, we held a tiny funeral for each one. 

• The mullet is the most sensitive organ on the human body. You bet it is. There’s nothing like feeling wind flow through your shaggy mane, to make you feel alive.

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• We’ve got to see the whites of her eyes. We were in Telluride for the 2019 bluegrass festival, and Kacey Musgraves was on the lineup. When she came out, we were in the middle of the pack, but Mike grabbed my arm and shouted “We need to get down there! We’ve got to see the whites of her eyes.” Whether it was karaoke at the Fairview or navigating a sea of people at a music festival, he wanted to be as close to the music as possible. And, in this case, I think he wanted to marry Kacey.

For me Mike is — will always be — the silent storm in Mallorca, the winds across Wyoming, the salmon twilight of the Alaska range.

A force of character.

A force of nature.

I was one of those people. In 2010 (my second year at university), I made a new friend in my job as a resident assistant. My friend’s name was Dan, and he was a glowing, energetic personality. Dan and I became close over that fall, and he was very excited to try ice climbing that winter. So during our winter break, I climbed ice for the very first time with the VICE crew. In fact, it was the first time I climbed, period. We took a bunch of photos that day, and Dan made a Facebook album that I’m happy to have screenshotted before I deleted my Facebook — “No More Global Warming”.

After that day, ice climbing and by extension alpinism (climbing mountains via technical routes with a mixture of rock, ice, and snow), became a fixture in my life. I selected a graduate school partly based on its proximity to great ice, and became a student of the craft by reading guidebooks, training manuals, and histories of the sport. I spent lots of time climbing with Dan and other friends. From that wealth of experiences, being an ‘alpine climber’ was, is, and will forever be an identity I associate with. 

During the time I pursued alpine climbing with the most vigor (2014 through 2018), Dan was more focused on his career and community, an election I respected. He worked his way through several big tech companies, precisely engineering tiny components for ever smaller phones and watches. Whenever we spoke, he’d tell me another step he’d taken toward his philosophy of ideal design, captured by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Every time he’d visit Colorado, he’d insist on replacing his friend’s phones with the newest and best version of his handiwork.

He’d also share how his Chicago Jewish community was developing in a rich and wonderful way. He joined (started?) a Moishe House chapter. Dan told me he wanted people to feel welcome to join in the fun. A website for “Jews in the Loop” describes it well: “Daniel has really made his mark on the community by designing meaningful Jewish programs and experiences through Moishe House. A former resident of Old Town Moishe House, Daniel organized Shabbat dinners, programs and special trips. Uniquely, he helped Moishe House build partnerships with for-profit businesses, especially ones that tie into his passion for outdoor adventure and rock-climbing.” This photo describes it better:

In 2018, I broke my right femur. It healed an inch short and for years I struggled with that discrepancy. In something like a tide of life, Dan started training hard for climbing about when I first got injured. He was methodical, spending hours at the rock gym to get ready for outdoor climbing. Chicago has about 25 feet of natural elevation gain — so he turned the rock gym into his mountain simulator, climbing laps on the autobelay for endurance, adding layers for heat, adding weight to compensate for the water and food he’d carry. His methodology is well captured in this blog post. And though he had a high-pressure job and a busy training calendar, Dan still showed up for me. He would pick up the phone whenever I called. He would come to visit me in Colorado, and choose crags with easy approaches. He was happy joining me in mild activities that didn’t bring me discomfort, like mellow skate skiing and nature walks. 

Dan moved to Seattle in late 2020, brimming with excitement for life in a city near the mountains. He was especially excited about the alpine climbing opportunities nearby. In December 2020, I started the process of lengthening my femur and was off my feet for about six months. We chatted on the phone every couple months during that time — I was on my way to symmetry, and had thoughts of a possible return to alpinism, while Dan was getting ready for a big alpine season during the Cascadian summer. 

On Friday, May 25th 2021, Dan called me and I silenced it because I was working. He was about to head out on a climbing trip for the Memorial Day weekend. I figured I’d talk to him the following week.

I know the following from an accident report I wrote later that month: 

“On Saturday, May 26th, Dan Meer and some friends including his climbing partner, met up and went for a sail on Puget Sound; it was a beautiful day, they saw pods of orcas and caught up on life. After sailing, Dan and his partner parted ways for a few hours before meeting up at 8 PM to depart for the Enchantments, a range of granitic peaks in Central Washington State. The next day they planned to climb the Serpentine Arete on Dragontail Peak.

They arrived at the Colchuck Lake trailhead at around 11 PM and slept in the car until 4 AM. They woke up, ate Dan’s favorite morning snack (instant oatmeal and an entire banana in just two bites), made some last minute decisions on climbing gear, then set off hiking up the trail at 5 AM. 

They arrived at the base of the route at around 9 AM. Dan and his partner located the start of the climb, prepped gear and set off. They did a mix of simulclimbing, and pitched-out climbing, depending on the difficulty and complexity of the terrain. They found the alpine conditions they expected, with a bit of snow and loose rock. 

At around 4 PM, they were through most of the technical climbing, approximately 400’ from the top of the route. Due to the presence of loose rock and snow, they set an anchor and Dan’s partner belayed, and Daniel led off across a snowy gully on their right, up a face, and onto low-5th class, blocky terrain. Dan communicated to his partner that it was loose and insecure, and he needed to take his time.”

On Sunday, May 27, Dan died in a climbing accident.

Since that day, I’ve thought about the call I didn’t pick up. About how I wish I had picked up the phone and told him to watch for frost-heaved spring rock, or advised him that sometimes you need to go slow to go fast, and to take care — not that he didn’t. About how I never got to say goodbye to him and let him know I love him very much.

Grief is a funny emotion. It is accumulative, a compound of all the grief that comes before. Since the day he died, Dan has arrived at the front of my mind during moments of loss. Every single one. 

Last month, I ran the Enchantments loop, a popular trail through the heart of the range, in clockwise fashion. Cresting the highpoint at Asgard Pass, quite suddenly reveals Dragontail to runners. It’s a beautiful, terrible granite fortress. As soon as I saw it, I collapsed and sobbed for five minutes. 

For the run, I’d bought a bar that Dan gave me five years ago. I never ate it, because Dan had really terrible taste in bars (as terrible as his taste in music, which was largely for death metal, Israeli acapella, and Pit Bull). During the run, I wore it in my vest pocket, next to my heart. 

Over the past few months, I have been exploring ‘embodiment,’ which I define as the way emotions show up within our bodies. The mountains, and the ways I’ve been embodied in them, have delivered me wonder and terror, ecstasy and loss. In practice, high-level alpinism demands immediate emotional control, and over years of practice I got pretty good at cutting off uncomfortable feelings. Until recently, the same went for grief around my leg and around Dan.

In my exploration, I’ve learned to feel emotions in my body. I’m learning to let them flow freely, and feel them through to completion. It is a glorious life experience that endears me to others. From Bessel Van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, “Being in synch with others and oneself requires the integration of our body-based senses — vision, hearing, touch, and balance. It means resonating through connecting sounds and movements, such as daily sensory rhythms like cooking and cleaning, going to bed and waking up. It means sharing funny faces and hugs, delight and disapproval when appropriate, playing, singing, and dancing.” We’re all just here on this space rock together, feeling (or avoiding?) our feelings. Why not enjoy it to the fullest possible extent?

Today, I spend my time on community and career, and not so much on alpinism. I play through plentiful and low-consequence embodiment with friends -- by running, sport climbing, biking, and exploring the world with even-length legs. I share books and prose and poetry I appreciate with folks who I think might appreciate them too. I start my workdays invigorated to be developing carbon removal -- towards “No More Global Warming.” And each morning, as I wake and make coffee, I look at my energy bar telling me to “Wake and Focus”, and appreciate each gift of friendship and humanity which Dan shared with me. 

I read this poem at Dan’s memorial service in July 2022.

I stood on the roof of North America three times in the last two years. Each time I summited Denali, I looked out across the Alaska Range and thought, how did I get here? The literal answer is ‘with my legs,’ in addition to those things which make life possible and expedient in this place—the camps my clients and I build along the way, and the airport in Talkeetna from which we fly into the Range. But what really drove me to the top were the experiences I previously had in the outdoors that left me craving more. And ultimately it was the connections and conversations I had with friends and climbing partners that encouraged me to pursue them.

The way humans converse is changing faster now than at any other point in human history. Often, I wonder; how will conversations—about wilderness, and in wilderness—change in the future? Looking back, the relationship between technology and wilderness in my life feels complicated.

As a child growing up in Brockton, a small city in southeastern Massachusetts, I thought ‘the outdoors’ was the smattering of local ponds where my cousin and I would go to catch frogs and fish for bluegills. I thought adventures happened on-page and on-screen, in Hogwarts and Middle-Earth. And I did not so much think of what the wild was; instead I thought of where it was, and that was in ‘the woods,’ a couple hundred acres of undeveloped marshland behind my parents’ house.

Just beyond the property line, three hundred feet into the trees, there was a mossy stone pit—the foundation of a long-gone farmhouse the woods had reclaimed. It was a three-minute walk from the back door of the house to the foundation, but it felt miles distant. With the help of some friends, I covered the whole thing in tarps. To my father, a risk analyst who did not possess my imagination, the result looked like a deathtrap. To me, it was an outpost from which I spent solitary hours wandering the woods, a fort where my friends and I would go to adventure in our imaginations, and a wonderful place to be alone with my thoughts.

Years passed, and adolescent desires and social pressures mounted. My friends and I abandoned the foundation. Instead, we would play video games. At first we would play together, but soon we took everything online. With the advent of Instant Messaging, texting, and World of Warcraft, I could chat with my friends and see new places from the comfort of my bedroom. I took occasional trips out to the foundation when my dog needed to go out. Whenever I visited, it always seemed older and more boring than on previous visits, a shallow stone pit covered by fading blue tatters. My screens promised a world that was always new and exciting. They commanded my attention, far more than the foundation or the woods beyond.

I graduated from high school and started college in Boston. In my first year, I stopped playing video games, cold turkey. Instead, I prioritized studying, partying, and meeting new people. In my second year, a friend invited me to an indoor climbing gym. I enjoyed climbing and after that I visited weekly. Over my winter break, I tried ice climbing on a road cut on the edge of I-93 just a hair north of Franconia Notch. After battling my way to the top of the flow, standing at the anchor barely twenty feet above the ground, I thought; Saddle up, Jimbo. Adventure was mine and I was obsessed.

Thereafter, I prioritized ice climbing. Beyond my studies, before (most) parties, I spent the majority of my time in the White Mountains. Outside of the suburbs, away from Boston, my concept of wild land changed entirely. Compared to the bird sanctuary behind my house, the Whites were expansive. I visited crags pockmarked across the mountains as often as my schedule allowed. There was always something new to climb. Every taste of larger, longer climbs left me wanting more. In my apartment back at school, I pored over climbing magazines and trip reports, dreaming of long expeditions to stand atop frosty peaks. I realized that to fulfill those dreams, I needed to be good enough to face the challenges they offered.

So, to learn the basics of expeditionary climbing, I went with some friends to Katahdin, Maine’s highest mountain. In winter, accessing the established climbing in the South Basin requires parking at the edge of Baxter State Park and skiing in over 17 miles of gently rolling forest road. My partners and I spent a full day skiing in, hauling sleds containing equipment, fuel, and food. Halfway through the approach, one of the poles which attached my sled to my backpack broke. I encouraged my partners to continue on as I repaired it. It took longer than expected, then broke when I tested it. I threw down my backpack, turned around, unhooked the pieces, and waved them above my head while screaming at the top of my lungs. Then I calmed down, feeling a bit defeated. As I stood there, I listened to the silence. Not a breath of air shifted. A smile broke across my face. The next repair went faster and lasted me to Chimney Pond, our basecamp in the basin.

For a week, we lived in rough-hewn lean-tos, covered by tarps and snow blocks. It was construction that dad would approve of. The mountain offered full days of movement in the alpine, over rock, snow and ice. There were certainly times when I got cold and scared, but at least I was getting cold and scared with the people who were quickly becoming my closest friends. We thought about people at home, and talked about them, but they were not with us. Life there was simple—climb during the days, return to camp to talk about climbing and life in the evenings, and chase off hungry pine martens in the middle of the night.

That simplicity appeals to me, so I have since returned to Katahdin in winter three times. There are no new trails and the lean-tos are still drafty. The ecology is maintaining—a healthy colony of habituated pine martens roams the campground looking for bits of freeze dried potatoes and ramen noodles. Nothing has changed about the built environment at Chimney Pond. But between my second and third visits a cell tower was erected outside Baxter State Park, probably along the interstate far away to the east. One member of our group discovered this and stole away to the bathroom frequently. Instead of answering nature’s call, he would answer calls from a friend. My phone was off and under a seat in the car, seventeen miles away, inaccessible. At the time, on the mountain, I did not think it was really worth bringing it to make spotty phone calls.

I changed my mind about the worth of bringing my phone to the mountains during the first trip I guided on Denali. Weather bound us to our tents for most of twenty-one days. I finished my thick paper book in the first week. Other guides had their phones, pre-loaded with books, podcasts, music, movies, and apps that turned their devices into fully functional GPSs. It is hard to argue against carrying a full library, hundreds of albums, visual entertainment, a navigational computer, and a camera when it all weighs a few ounces. I started carrying my phone.

On Denali, like on Katahdin, some people were able to get service by standing way outside of camp on the 14,000’ plateau. On a rest day, I sent a few novel text messages; Hi! from 14k on denali. In my second year guiding, a new tower provided reliable cell service in several camps. News from the outside world filtered in—one day, over breakfast, my group discussed the implications of the successful Brexit vote. Things were different with cell service; life outside was now a part of life on the mountain. I didn’t have a problem with it, because I was working up there, and in my downtime I could check in with friends and family. However, I never once stopped to consider what this meant for my wilderness experience.

It is fair to say that today, possession of a phone is edging towards a human need. In the United States, connection has become nearly ubiquitous—64% of American adults own a smartphone. Among young adults, those aged 18-29, the figure rises to 85%.¹ There’s a reason for that—as I learned on Denali, smartphones are just plain useful. Yet every day, beeps and buzzes in our hands and pockets demand our attention; Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT, studies how mobile devices change human psychology and behavior. She concludes that the constant connection smartphones provide dramatically influence our relationships with other people and ourselves. “Because they aren’t learning how to be alone, [Turkle] contends, young people are losing their ability to empathize. [She writes], ‘It’s the capacity for solitude that allows you to reach out to others and see them as separate and independent.’”² For us, the constant ability to connect creates an equally constant need to connect; “Continuous digital performance leaves [young people] experiencing what ought to be the satisfactions of solitude only as “disconnection anxiety.”² In short, most young people today have grown up holding a device that institutes substantial disruption in our lives. That disruption is so normalized, many of us feel anxious when it is absent—the times when we are alone. The times when it is quiet. This anxiety causes our attention to default to our phones, where we seek connection. As a result we do not pay deep attention to our local environment. Disruption is on tap wherever a signal exists.

For many people, being in the ‘wild’ may be part of the reason to be ‘wired.’ Sometimes, day-to-day communications in the backcountry are about important things. Up-to-date weather forecasts and the ability to call for rescue can provide a significant margin of safety in wilderness recreation if they are applied responsibly. Cell towers aside, satellite communications allow connection without cell service pretty much everywhere on Earth. However, most satellite options require additional hardware and a clear view of the open sky. When I have to physically move to find service, as with a satellite phone, it is easy for me to find the self-control to resist connecting unless I need to. But when I can look at my phone from a sleeping bag, it becomes easy to ‘just check’ for connection. And once I ‘just check,’ repeat impulses become hard to ignore. Instead of the fruits of the wild, my thoughts are drawn to the world at home. I expect many others have had similar impulses.

The behavioral implications of connectedness are at odds with some of the core benefits of wilderness. In Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Frazier Nash details the role of wilderness in our culture. Of the many philosophical benefits of wilderness, he describes one of Edward Abbey’s tenets, “ [He] observed that in wild country we ‘confront, immediately and directly… the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental.’”³ He also describes research on practical effects of wilderness visits; “Professional psychologists and psychiatrists… supply clinical evidence in support of… the ability of a wilderness experience to simplify and slow down lives made overly complicated by civilization. In wild country people could find relief from noise, stress, and especially, from the presence of too many other people.”³ One clear value of wild space is that it provides a place to think, free from a world of proliferating choices; to get down in the grit and question what’s important in our lives. An escape from the world ‘outside.’ In my experience, and in the experience of so many others, wilderness is one of the best places to think without interruption. That, coupled with physical challenge, means wilderness experiences can be transformative. For me, one critical element of those experiences has been the development of self-confidence and independence that I brought back to daily life.

Without deliberate consideration of how we use our devices in wild places, that breed of experience is at risk. This is a new paradigm in the Northeast, where dense settlement demands universal coverage. Towers have gone up all over the place. Signal seeps in where it did not a few years ago and is available on most mountaintops. As networks get more powerful and additional towers are built, we can expect the continued erosion of ‘quiet’ areas. Most of the wild spaces in the Northeast that are easily accessed are already affected. They will serve as gateway ‘wilds’ for the next generation of outdoors people. Some federally designated wilderness areas in the Northeast are service-less. Perhaps the federal definition of wilderness should extend to cellular service and protect these lands from connection—after all, is a place wild if a person can call the world outside? Perhaps satellites make this question moot. But satellite technology is not by any means ubiquitous, whereas smartphones essentially are. To me, it seems there are two options left to pursue truly wild experiences. They both rely on personal choice. We can bring devices and exercise extreme self-control, or leave them behind and abstain completely. Either way, before we set foot on the trail with ourselves or our friends, it’s important to think about what kind of experience we really want to have, and start a conversation about how we converse in wild places.

This year, I took my fourth trip to Katahdin. Service improved since my previous trip. One night, after a day spent sitting out a storm in our lean-to, I turned on my phone and held it towards the ceiling, searching for a signal. Suddenly I found it, and messages rolled in. My phone died before I could respond to any of them. I sat there, frustrated by my sudden lapse in self-control. Then I mentioned some of the messages to my partner, who was also on his phone. We had some great conversations on that trip. But we were talking about things we learned from the outside world. We did not give each other, or Katahdin, five days of undivided attention.

Earlier that afternoon, he had an hour-long text exchange with his girlfriend. Halfway through the conversation, I asked him what he wanted for lunch. He kept typing, his face wrinkled in concentration, the screen reflected in his eyes. I shrugged to myself and turned over for a nap. I brought my phone for the GPS, but I found my finger tracing it in my breast pocket as I dozed. I shouldn’t turn it on, I thought. I lay there thinking about it until my partner put his phone down and asked, “What’s for lunch?”

Works Cited

(1) Smith, Aaron. “U.S. Smartphone Use in 2015.” Report. 1 Apr 2015. Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech. Web, accessed 8 Apr 2017.

(2) Weisberg, Jacob. “We Are Hopelessly Hooked.” Review. The New York Review of Books. 25 Feb 2016: The New York Review of Books. Web, accessed 5 Apr 2017.

(3) Nash, Roderick Frazier. Wilderness and the American Mind. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. 2014.

I really enjoy meeting new trees. I can recall time after time when I’ve been approaching a climb or running along a trail, and I stopped to look closely at a tree and find out a little more about it and its neighborhood – what’s the texture of its bark, what sort of needles or leaves does it have, how many are growing around here? For a long time, I harbored fantasies that I one day I would befriend Treebeard and command an army of ents. But I’ve (mostly) turned from anthropomorphism to appreciation. This is a partial cast of trees I’ve met in the past six months:

Paper Birch: There’s something very comforting about the symmetry of birch forests. I love trail running through the woods around Talkeetna. Every so often on my runs, a spruce grouse would explode out of the understory, and inevitably I’d think OH SHIT GRIZZLY BEAR!

Douglas Fir: I have a bad habit of calling everything tall and green a ‘pine tree.’ But it’s the fir tree that rules the rainforests in the North Cascades. I walked beneath some firs that shaded beds of moss eight inches thick, great for quick trailside naps.

Ponderosa Pine: The Ponderosas of Yosemite Valley don’t seem to be doing very well. When I visited three years ago, the occasional brown tree dotted the valley floor. This year, while high on El Cap, I was struck by the checkerboard of brown and green across the valley floor. They’re being ravaged by bark beetles.

The Trees in Hyalite: I have no idea what kind of evergreens these are. Probably pine trees. Whatever they are, their dark-green boughs are covered with blue-green moss. After snow falls, it’s harder to find a prettier setting to climb in than Hyalite Canyon.

Lenga: My absolute favorite of all trees, ever, bar none. The lenga forests of Patagonia are incredible for the shelter they create – whereas winds sweep the pampas bare, forcing shrubs to hold on for dear life, the lenga forests host grasses and wildflowers galore. While Chris and I were in Patagonia, we learned to use the forests. If we camped on the moraine we’d stay up all night, trying not to think about the wind and thinking of nothing but the wind. In the forest we’d sleep comfortably as the lenga danced the night away.

The trees abroad are wonderful. But, by virtue of the time I’ve spent here, my strongest vegetable associations are with the trees of New England. I’ve played in and around stands of birch, beech, spruce, fir, hemlock, pine, oak, and maple. Growing up I thought the trees around here must be very old.

In fact, most are quite young. In the mid-1800s most land in the area was farmed – about 30% of the region was forested. Forests have come back in a big way since then. Only a few stands of really old trees exist. A year and a half ago, I asked Tom Earle, who’s probably the closest approximation to Treebeard I’ll ever find, if he’d like to go see one of those stands with me.

One afternoon in the fall of 2015 we drove to the hamlet of Wonalancet on the south side of the White Mountains. We hiked a few miles into a natural area called ‘the Bowl,’ and ‘shwacked our way into the old-growth. Most of the maples I’ve seen in New Hampshire are big enough for me to wrap one arm around. Some of them are big enough for me to wrap both arms around and still clasp my hands together. It’s fair to say, after most of a lifetime in the woods of New Hampshire, that Tom’s seen a few trees in his day. But the trees we saw there, some 400 years old, were behemoth.

He ran over to the first big maple we saw and declared, “Look how big this one is!” Reaching our hands around the trunk, we tried to touch our fingertips together. Not a chance. We spent a few minutes looking up into the canopy looking at how the light filtered through the foliage. Then we waded through a carpet of crispy golden maple leaves to the next tree, and repeated our efforts.

That day I got to see what a New England forest was like before people came and chopped down the biggest trees around. In the 1800s people living rurally probably had very good reasons for chopping down big trees. Life was objectively hard work and trees meant lumber, warmth, and open land for agriculture. But the New England clear-cut and the exploitation of forests was unsustainable in the long term, so the forests have come back.