Started as Field Note but turned into something different by the end of the day.
Good morning. If your’s is anything like mine, you are waking up to sun and shadows pouring in the house. Yesterday in western Montana it was so warm we not only turned the heat off, but opened up the windows and doors and had a full late spring feel to the day. I wore shorts and a t-shirt much of the day. The birds were out. And the angle of light… that’s what I notice. It’s moving northward and at a higher arch and rapidly so.
So here we are, the first morning of March. I slept in a little and now coffee with sunlight hitting the wall beside me, spreading the house plant shadows and shapes of the outside trees across the wall.
I’m still working slowly on this review I’ve intended for 3 weeks to post, a comparison between to of my pocketable cameras, but as of yet I’m not happy with the photo comparison part, as I’ve been bad about taking them both out at once together. I think side by side photos are really a critical part of any thorough photo review, and what I have right now is only a collection of photos from each. So more on that… Maybe during this first week of March?
And of course there is the news we could discuss, but alas, even in my ten minutes scrolling my Substack feed I saw too much, and still know too little. And to put it in perspective, I’ve read no less than 30, maybe upwards of 50+ books on the subject of Central Asian & Middle Eastern & Eurasian oil and gas development, geopolitics, and matters of energy security, along with countless articles and academic studies. It’s the very thing I studied in graduate school in geography. And even as such, I’m not prepared to tell you what exactly is going on, even while I think I have a fairly good idea. Maybe I’ll throw my thoughts in the ring eventually but not until some dust settles. But probably not. Why? Because the people making these decisions have information in their heads that I don’t know and while I could speculate all day, without knowing them, without knowing who they are talking to, what they’ve seen and studied, what parameters and metrics they are basing their decisions on, even if I know a lot about part of the subject affected and seemingly connected to the actions we see being taken, even then I don’t really know what’s going on because there is a connective network of other information for which I’m not even remotely an expert, and the roll of the people making these large directional shifts in geopolitics are basing their decisions on much more complex networks of information than someone like me, a supposed expert in a single small arena, could know. So when people say things like “it’s because of oil” or “Iraq 2.0” I know I’m wasting my time.
And for me, as some entering my second half century of life, the time I have on earth feels too short to waste on speculative nonsense. And in this new digital age in which we have electronic information devices at our disposal during any waking hour, I’m not willing to waste my time on speculative ramblings. Well, not much anyways. I dabble of course. Then I move on. And I do my best to not build my world view on 15 second snippets from strangers I know nothing about, or on memes, or on video clips that have zero real world context and which this day in age can be easily generated in a seconds to create a narrative no where close to reality.
These modern stories of war are for better or worse, mostly fiction. We all hate to hear it. We hate even more to think it. But the truth of the matter is there are very few people pulling the levers of geopolitical change, and we aren’t them. The shifts are real. Public influence is real. But the meme posting, and likes, the hot takes, the “did you see that”s and most of what you will see in your feed for the next couple weeks until the modern attention span moves on to something else, are mostly directed and promoted by powers you’ll never see. The rest of us are merely invited to the latest outrage with hopes that our data can be collected and sold and that we might like to buy something from an advertiser.
Too cynical? Perhaps. But if I’m certain of one thing, its that the last paragraph holds the truth of the modern internet.
And that’s why I do my best to find what I want on it, share some work, some thoughts with people I find connection with, and then go outside and move on. Read a book. Draw a picture. Walk under the sun and shadows through space and time. The more I experience this digital atmosphere, the more synthetic it feels. Not without use, or a place, in fact there are components I love. But we are still in the stage of finding balance, as individuals, and as a culture. That balance is challenging when the voices screaming from within are yelling, “But it’s important in here! Don’t look away! Don’t you care? Don’t you want to change the world?!”
We see those that succumb to the terror. They put a flag in their bio and thus change the world. They stay on all day. Their cortisol is constantly elevated. They ask their friends and coworkers, “did you see [insert the latest outrage - it changes every 4 days or so]_” They are tired. They are overwhelmed. They don’t see the purpose. And it’s incredibly sad.
We see it all around us. We all know, like, and love a lot of these good meaning people who have gotten caught up in the digital abyss. It’s sad to watch. They often seem to become frozen in a state of disrepair and despair. They take certain forms of media so seriously that they are genuinely lost in the digital world, when there is a perfectly good world outside their door. It’s an easy world to get sucked in. Our phones, our televisions, are laptops, our desktops, our ebooks, our music, it is all tied to this digital world that is not tangible yet has an extensive and powerful ability to transport our minds not only through space and time, but to paint the colors, sounds, images of the world, portraying reality, and for a while we thought we could even trust it.
But in the last years it’s become obvious, this is a useful tool for navigating a lot of life’s logistics, but it’s not a suitable replacement for the real thing. We jumped all in for a while, many of us, most of us, and only now has the migration begun away from it. We implemented it in schools, replaced books with laptops, “everyone will need to know how to code” and we logged all our information on board, all our entertainment, our photos, our music, our work, our schools, everything it seemed, must be connected to this web.
And in the scale of time, it really hasn’t taken that long for us to realize, wait a moment, let’s hold off a little, and put a little more time and effort back into the real world. We like traveling, but we need good bridges, and there is no reason to let everything go to ugly just because we are doing things online. We can still make beautiful and useful things. And while all the money is supposedly in tech, there are cravings out there for well made, functional, and aesthetically pleasant things. From cars to boots to pots and pans and pencils, it turns out, humans are made to move through space in time, and tools of craft and hobby are not optional, we are built to interact with the world.
So here is my hope, my plea even. Lets find and embrace the real things, the tactile things, the things that are harder to share with ten thousand people but easier to share with 4 or 5 family/friends. Let’s make music instead of just consuming it. Be the Aunt Hildred who paints goofy paintings and hands them out at Christmas. Our walls need this. Be the guy that shows up with the guitar or a cd you’ve just made. We need that music. Be the woman who aspires to be the knitting grandma. Where have all the knitters gone?
We’ve been told by our Digital Lords that we don’t need to do things. We just need to watch others. Isn’t that fun? You can do it for hours. Aren’t you having fun yet? What do you mean you feel sad. We have a pill for that. Here, take a sip with bottled water, and get back on your screen. Yes people did use to think in long form, but we’ve evolved past that now. Ai will do the heavy lifting. Thinking is hard and scary. Why would you want to do that. Work? Even harder and scarier. Do less and contribute to a “lower carbon footprint.” Wink. There is something sinister in their eye, and now they aren’t even hiding it.
But here is the damn beauty of this situation. This digital power is built on one, not four pillars. It’s built on us being online. The revolution to this is as simple as turning it off. It’s not radical, in fact it’s quite natural. However did we get so sucked into it all, so much so that we barely talk to people around us, feel strange to look strangers in the eye, apprehension and distrust at every corner. Assumptions. But it’s easy to wash away because these things fed with a little too much oversight and forethought as a method of blatant population control are still very new things to us. We’ve been online less than 20 years. We can tone this way back, still utilize the actually useful tools, and not let the digital Lords control everything in our world and lives, and begin rejuvenating our physical spaces. We can make buildings look beautiful. We can make cars… reliable. We can make clothing that doesn’t require being shipped around the world. We can make sweaters for our friends. We can make things. Not remotely uploading CAD files to Taiwan and having them made there, although we can do that too.
My hope is we begin to decentralize. Centralization was an obvious move for humans. Centralization began in fields. What if we planted all these same seeds in one location so we don’t have to wander around collecting the food from miles, instead, we’ll put a big plot of it here. Efficiency.
And it required a push and created a natural migration to cities. People are largely drawn to people. To excitement. To novelty. People migrate to those things, and cities provide.
Big steps: Agriculture. Industrialization. Globalization. Digitalization.
We can learn from all of these and benefit from all of these. And regardless of whether we like them or not, they are here. Some will be trapped by them. Other’s will find freedom by navigating and not letting them take over all of our minds.
Globalization rapidly lead to a rather boring form homogeneity that has not taken over all the world yet, but there is no denying it’s affected life on every continent. I’m not referring to the sort of global trade humans have witnessed since the beginning of records, but the centralization of control that occurred in the last 100 years with a particular turbo in the last 40 years. There is that centralization again, rearing it’s head. Between the likes of the UN, the WEF, the WHO, an endless stream of NGOs, and the ridiculous consolidation that has occurred in the global corporate world… There was a time when Bell Corporation was so big, and central to life in the US that it was broken into multiple companies, because it was considered too powerful an entity as a single corporation. But what has happened now, and been allowed to happen under the same regulatory framework some how, is there can be those same three competitor companies in an industry, but owned by one single larger share holder. And to add insult, that same larger share holding entity can not only own all the individual players in a single sector, they can and do own multiple entire sectors. It’s gotten ridiculous beyond the absurd.
And with that in mind, you can quickly see the potential dangers come about as a nation when those ownership entities no longer care about the single state they were derived upon. Their power is now based globally. Countries are just pawns in this regard. They will own nothing and be happy, as they like to say. There is a new Central Power, and it’s not in England, the US, or anywhere specific. It’s where ever the summit heads meet. (Not ironically, it’s usually in Switzerland.) We see it happening. We still could get trapped by it. The centralization of power has gone global, and if it happens we can expect more bureaucracy which, as anyone who looks at it long enough realizes, is the death of beautiful things. It’s a pathway to genericification. And the digital space is by far the best opportunity any power monger in history has had to seize broader power. The only reason geography is challenging to take over is because there are people who will defend it. But if you erase those minds, or even better, convince them they are fine, their world is online anyways, they can have any cheap thing they want in 24 hours, but they need to obey some simple rules in the meantime, and oh, by the way, you will own nothing and enjoy it. That’s become the digital model. And a lot of folks bought into it.
But here is where my optimism kicks in… It seems like people are coming out of the digital fog and craving real life again. Sturgill Simpson is releasing his new album on cassette, disc, and vinyl. (He also, without coincidence to this broader topic, released it in it’s entirety, early, and for free, on YouTube here.)
People are craving doing things. Our health as a nation has gone to shit in large part because we’ve quit moving through the world. Insert the Vonnegut story HERE about the loss that occurs when we quit taking the time to do the simple tasks of life that lead us to interacting with the places and people around us. The small stuff is important. And it need not be sweated. We are are meant to do things in life. We are meant to go break a sweat, bump into others, get a little sunburn, cold, and hungry. We’ve been told we need never have hardship again, and it’s true, especially with regards to the hardships that many of our relatives just two or three generations ago were forced into, and we need not repeat them, but we tipped the scale too far, and we missed the point. Hardships are not be confused with doing hard things. We are made to do hard things, to make the push required to overcome obstacles and to create things of immense beauty and value. We are meant to push our minds, to stretch our bodies, to get out and about in the world and sometimes bump into things.
My day got away from me. It’s night now. The moon is out, and nearly full. There are stars out too. It’s beautiful. I’m going to go walk in the cold air with Acre for a little bit before bed.
Side note for those of you who’ve been around for a bit. As you may recall on August 29 I smashed my knee and I haven’t been able to run since. I’ve been able to do many other things luckily, including snowboarding, but running, my single central force in physical and mental sanity, was impossible. I’ve basically been trying my damnedest to get back to the point of being able to run, even if just a couple days/week. I’ve never had an injury last this long, but here I am, in my early 50s discovering that recovery simply isn’t playing out in the way it did historically. And also realizing that I’ve been incredibly lucky to not have a serious injury but for one in my early 20s from which I healed relatively fast. But this round has been good for my mind, requiring me to push into new arenas and to really, really try to be patient. Patience takes a long time for some of us to master.
And I remember years ago giving the advice to a friend who wanted to start out running to do so slowly. Very slowly. I was not a slow runner necessarily but I’ve always been convinced when you are injured or starting out, slow is a runners best friend.
Last Sunday I ran a couple miles, on flat, and very slow.
It felt great.
Today I did it again, with a bit more distance and vertical. 50 minutes. Slowly. Very slowly. And damn it felt good.
I tell this only in tying this up and closing down for the night because I think we are on the verge of seeing some great cultural shifts occur if we put the work in ourselves. I think there are enough of us, and we can slowly pull our culture back from the edge of the digital abyss. As more of us pull back, slowly even, and begin building back up in the physical world, I think we are in for some great things. Simple day pleasures. Pouring a cup of coffee and sitting with it on the porch. Putting on the new Sturgill record while we are cleaning the house or apartment. Slipping on our favorite shoes and going for a walk with the dog and seeing that bird that’s been hanging around that tree. It’s going to be great.