The weather was always worse in the north. Each morning our friends there messaged to say so. They’d speak of wind and rain while we enjoyed clear, calm days in the south. But not today. There was violence on the shore. You would not have known it looking up, there was the usual pleasantness, the air still and the sky cloudless, and yet something had stirred the water, had truly agitated it.

Last week a submarine volcano sent tremors through the islands. Strong enough, residents said, to move furniture—and to produce a freak wave that killed a British mother. Perhaps the earth had shaken anew. Who knows. And anyway, it will have been moot to the family gathered on the steps at the foot of our terrace. More pressing was that their house underwater. Never happened before, they said, as wave after wave lashed at the windows. And high tide was still an hour away.

For hours they sat watching the sea flood their living room. Meanwhile we could not help but look leisurely. How insulting the sight of our parasol. “It’s strange to be on holiday while this family is losing their house,” my friend said to me. Yes, I agreed. It was very strange—and stranger still for the fact that we arrived already guilty of being there. Indeed, our offense seemed to precede us. Over the years, the islanders had become increasingly hostile to visitors. They were slashing tires and everything, spray-painting TOURISTS GO HOME on the walls. And though nobody in the village made us feel unwelcome, it was probably true all the same. Well, what to do? One’s holiday is always near another’s misfortune.

A little later a truck came with bags of cement mix. One by one we put them on our shoulders and carried them down near the ruin. "Like ants,” I said, somewhat idiotically. The family thanked us for helping. I thought about how they had probably cursed us before, and now had to think well of us instead. I felt bad for that. Then I felt bad for thinking about myself at all. Even helping felt like a form of intrusion. Perhaps we should have accepted our role as nonparticipants.

Most affected was the elderly woman. At her feet was a bag of hastily compiled belongings, and it was probably dawning on her that that she would not be putting them back. She possessed all the calm of someone absolutely devastated. Or perhaps she was merely resigned. It was, after all, a reasonable disaster.

The next morning, the husband and son returned to survey the damage. I brought our breakfast back inside so as to avoid once again flaunting our okayness in plain view of their tragedy. Apparently more than good health, more than a loving partner, more even than a sense of purpose, the thing most people wish for is a house by the sea. The sea, of course, neither grants nor denies. The water goes where it goes. We are in the way or we are not.

Here is a confession of staggering cultural negligence: I lived just off Kollwitzstrasse for years without once looking up who Kollwitz was. Then, one day, I came across a statue of her in a park, which was also named after her, and Googled her on my phone. In the Images tab, I scrolled through her work. I remember it moved me, but only just—as tends to happen when physical art has been transposed into data and light. More years went by, until last week, when I finally decided to visit the Käthe Kollwitz museum, which houses a small but impressive collection of her paintings, prints, and sculptures. It was a particularly Kollwitzian day: bleak, bone-cold, the colour sucked out of everything.

𓄧

When Kollwitz moved to Prenzlauer Berg in 1891, it was not the Bugaboo-parade of today but a genuinely wretched quarter of Berlin where people starved and froze and had too many children and not enough of anything else. A doctor’s report from the time describes infants dying of summer diarrhea, men and women coughing themselves to death from TB, rampant venereal disease, women dying of botched abortions in flophouse rooms, and endemic prostitution, the oldest profession, practiced here in its least romantic form. “The children only cool down when they lie on their deathbeds,” the doctor noted.

Through her husband’s own medical practice, Kollwitz became intimately acquainted with the miseries of proletarian life and made them the substance of her art. When the Nazis came to power, they banned her work partly on account of its sympathies with the poor. Too degenerate, they said.

𓄧

I was the only one in the museum. It was dead silent. I drifted slowly through each of the six rooms, often spending several minutes transfixed by something I saw: a mother’s face pressed into a child’s skull, bodies compressed into a single mass, mouths agape in agony. After I’d seen everything, I went to the lockers, grabbed my jacket, and put on my headphones. Then I went back to see everything again, this time with music—Bremer/McCoy. There is devastating, and then there is staring at Unemployment to the slow bleed of piano wire.

𓄧

Werner Herzog once said that his attention has always been drawn to the screams that emanate from certain images. Kollwitz’s figures are silent and often alone with their grief. But they are definitely screaming.

𓄧

For roughly all of Western art history, the depiction of rape was handled exclusively by men, which is to say: by the people doing the raping, or at least the people whose anatomy placed them, compositionally speaking, on the penetrative side of the transaction. And they made it GORGEOUS—Bernini sculpting Pluto’s fingers into Proserpina’s thigh-meat with such obscene virtuosity that people wept at the dimpling.

True, there was Gentileschi. Raped at seventeen and tortured at her own trial to verify she wasn’t lying, she painted Judith sawing through Holofernes’ neck with her sleeves rolled up and her rapist’s face on the body. But it was Kollwitz who first drew the part that belongs entirely to women, long before revenge is even thinkable: a body spent and discarded, the man long gone, the transaction’s wreckage still lying where he left it.

𓄧

Given that I saw Hamnet the evening before, it was rather jarring to find myself surrounded by images titled Woman with Dead Child, Mother with Dead Son, Mother at the Bed of Dead Child, and so on. All her life Kollwitz was consumed by the tug-of-war between mother and death: of who gets the child. In 1903 she sat her son Peter in her lap, faced a mirror, and drew herself holding him as if he were dead—rehearsing a grief that arrived 11 years later when he volunteered for the war and was killed almost immediately. She wrote in her diary: “I could make a hundred such drawings and still not get closer to him.”

But she made them anyway, and in 1937 she cast the image one last time: a small bronze pietà, barely a foot tall, of a mother bent over her fallen son. In 1993, the sculpture was enlarged fourfold and placed in the Neue Wache, Germany’s central war memorial. There is a wound in the ceiling for the sky to come through. I watched the snow settle on her back until my vision swam.

𓄧

One of Kollwitz’s most famous sculptures shows two figures in deep embrace. Before I read the placard – The Lovers – I thought it, too, depicted the maternal lament.

𓄧

Kollwitz drew the annihilating miseries of life without the slightest suggestion that any of it ennobles. And then, in her late lithograph phase, death arrives, and something strange happens. The figures don’t recoil. Some of them turn toward it. Everywhere else in Kollwitz, the body is under siege—pulled, pinned, starved, emptied, buried. Here, for once, it isn’t. Death comes and a woman reaches for it. It was the only moment of peace in any of the works I saw, and it asks the oldest question there is: whether it is nobler to endure all of this, or to stop. To be, or not to be. Perhaps death is not the catastrophe but the answer to it.

𓄧

Standing in front of these images, my own life became irrelevant. I have never buried a child. I have never gone hungry, or been held down, or imprisoned. I have never been too poor to mourn properly. None of it is mine. And yet something in the room made all of it mine, if only briefly, and I wept for it. Art, if it is honest, closes the distance between what we have lived and what we haven’t.

𓄧

Clarice Lispector: “I think I had a vague feeling that being in such unbearable pain was proof that I was brimming with life.”

𓄧

Käthe Kollwitz died in 1945, at 77 years old, just days before the German surrender. She would have drawn the perfect Hamnet poster.

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I remember the Internet lived in a room, and that the room had a door.

I remember not knowing blood lapped like waves when it spilled from the neck onto hard dirt.

I remember Ogrish.com.

I remember the goopy red sauce at the Chinese place.

I remember the smell of the grass we played football on.

I remember the first two lines of O Canada in French.

I remember the parents of two different friends flirting with each other.

I remember finding out teachers are normal adults with normal problems. The men especially. I’d see it in their long, absent-minded stare while the wives were talking.

I remember the mangled cars Mothers Against Drunk Driving staged on the front lawn of my high school, complete with police cars and an ambulance, and people drunk driving anyway.

I remember Kazaa.

I remember Boulevard_of_Broken_Dreams.mp3.

I remember go-karting at Balm Beach.

I remember forging a note from my parents telling the Blockbuster employee to let me rent Saw.

I remember apparently someone brought a gun to school. After an hour of lockdown, I began to wonder if the contents of my bladder would fit in a 591 mL Gatorade bottle.

I remember laughing at the phrase “pint of urine.”

I remember the grabbable flap of skin on your elbow is called the weenus.

I remember a single moment from English class, a line spoken by a student reading his short story to the room. It was: “Shh, said the corpse.”

I remember learning metres and centimeters but speaking in inches and feet. We used a ‘z’ instead of an ‘s’ in words like realize. We said it like zee, not zed.

I remember the Greyhound to Toronto.

I remember giving myself brain freeze on purpose.

I remember Judge Judy.

I remember being enthralled by the guy’s charisma in the Everest College commercial. You’re sitting on the couch / You’re watching TV / And your life’s passing you by.

I remember disobeying the five-second rule.

I remember having to ask if I could use the bathroom.

I remember when going to therapy meant you were insane.

I remember being called a daft sod.

I remember school lunch was rib-on-a-bun and chocolate milk.

I remember “Jerk it Out” in FIFA.

I remember drawing a stick figure running is very close to drawing a swastika.

I remember my parents didn’t move out of town until I had my licence and could drive myself to school.

I remember tucking boners into the waistband.

I remember ‘BREAKING: Vince Carter traded to Nets.’

I remember calling a phone number for the movie times.

I remember wondering, before I knew what it meant, why it was such a big deal that Mr. S “exposed himself.”

I remember Adidas Moves.

I remember Uggs with miniskirts in January.

I Remember - Deadmau5 (Kaskade remix). No, that came later.

I remember thinking you needed fire to burn CDs.

I remember 13 places I slept that year that were not my bed. Four weren’t beds at all. A good way to make life feel long is to remember all the different places you’ve slept.

I remember “time to get a watch” when someone asked what time it was.

I remember my friend opening a drawer looking for a lighter and finding his mom’s dildo instead. Here, catch, he said.

I remember the door chime sound on MSN Messenger, hoping it was my crush who came online.

I remember signing in after school to talk to the same people I was just at school with.

I remember thinking it was, “Objects in mirror are closer then they appear.” After they do what? Appear where? Then as opposed to now?

I remember the jizzy smell of what we called ‘semen trees.’

I remember putting my knuckles on the cafeteria table and someone slinging a quarter at them. Sometimes blood was shed.

I remember a friend of my parents turning 37 and feeling sorry that they were so old. I thought about all the future I still got to live before reaching that age. I turned 37 two days ago.

I remember yawning after the beep test. It looked like I was showing off, but it was just how my body reacted to oxygen depletion.

I remember showering fast and getting out instead of standing around thinking.

I remember being told money doesn’t buy happiness by people who had money.

I remember Claire’s and the smell of pierced ears.

I remember energy drinks being new and terrifying on the news.

I remember the bridge where kids went to drink and cops knew but didn’t care unless it got loud. Because sound travels louder and farther over water, I was told.

I remember my friend’s older sister lacked the conviction to undo what would become the bane of her life (aborting an unwanted child).

I remember my friend’s parents being tired in a way sleep wouldn’t fix.

I remember being sad that barn owls sometimes died unjustly.

I remember walking 40 minutes to Walmart because it was something to do.

I remember dunking on doorframes.

I remember half the school watched me airball a free throw.

I remember wondering if I should put my foot under the wheel when my parents were backing out of the driveway. Just to see what would happen.

I remember the rumors about Marilyn Manson surgically removing his ribs for autofellatio.

I remember the tip of my nose got cold whenever I put my contacts in.

I remember mosquitoes, black flies, deer flies, horseflies, and no-see-ums. And poison ivy.

I remember snowbanks melting down to crusted mounds of gravel. The first sign of spring.

I remember the summertime noise of cicadas.

I remember the corn grew tall into late October.

I remember winter days so cold you could throw boiling water into the air and watch it turn to snow.

I remember making a soft moaning sound to myself when remembering something embarrassing I did.

I remember washing my hair with a bucket of table salt to get that beach holiday look. It didn’t work.

I remember the exact yellow of the mustard on the hot dog at the gas station on Highway 11. The yellow of cheap gas-station mustard.

I remember the sharp lisp of a Coors Light being opened in a garage.

I remember Now they′re going to bed, and my stomach is sick, And it′s all in my head, but she’s touching his chest now.

I remember understanding myself through the expression on others’ faces.

I remember punching the air in gratitude when I woke up and realized I wasn’t actually on trial for keeping body parts in my freezer on behalf of a friend.

I remember telling people certain recurring nightmares that made them slowly back away. That’s what it felt like, anyway.

I remember the bend in the road where the town’s population sign came into view. I was always hoping it showed more people than last time.

I remember my dad wasn’t playing football so much anymore because he was driving me to practice and games in faraway cities.

I remember the tsunami, how it wasn’t a wave but the ocean lifting itself onto land. A quarter million dead from displaced water.

I remember seeing life like in Glengarry, where the first prize is a Cadillac, second prize a set of cheap knives, and the third prize utter defeat and a life of unrealized dreams.

I remember the fear of becoming unremarkable.

I remember the sound of sneakers screeching in a gym that smelled faintly of oranges.

I remember standing in Canadian Tire with nothing to buy and nowhere else to go.

I remember opening the cheat code window in The Sims and typing “rosebud” to get $1,000.

I remember blasting Soulja Boy in my parents’ Grand Am and thinking overcranked bass was what made for good sound.

I remember the pretty girl who worked at Casey’s. When she came to my table, she’d say, “Hi, what would you like?” and I’d say, “Two things. The onion ring tower, and your number.” At least that’s what I imagined.

I remember when restaurants let you choose smoking or non-smoking.

I remember the nose-burning smell of Germ-X hand sanitizer during the SARS panic.

I remember wondering what if SARS is among the 0.01% of germs.

I remember terror alert levels on CNN. Oh no, red again.

I remember standing in the kitchen late at night, opening the fridge even though I wasn’t hungry.

I remember grown-ups speaking in the low serious voices reserved for miscarriages and money problems.

I remember after striking out with a girl I’d tell the guys “mission accomplished,” a reference to George Bush falsely declaring victory 42 days into the Iraq War.

I remember being called a “space cadet” and taking it well.

I remember the moment after laughter ended, when no one spoke right away. Someone would say something stupid just to fix it.

I remember thinking butts looked much better in underwear than naked.

I remember wondering when exactly evening is.

I remember the sound of gravel crunching under bike tires at 2 a.m.

I remember my face swelling with emotion when the piano comes in in Supertramp’s “School.”

I remember the tornado warning making us all go to the cafeteria and someone starting to cry.

I remember the lunch ladies’ hands, red and raw.

I remember tomato juice was popular on planes.

I remember football before video assistant referee.

I remember when someone’s mom had cancer and we didn’t know what to say so we said nothing.

I remember hugging my knees in the pool and sinking to where it was still and I was invisible.

I remember the idea that God created everything struck me not only as impossible but the single stupidest idea I’d ever heard.

I remember the kind of happy that can only be achieved by laying on hot sand.

I remember my eyes burning. (Sweat).

I remember palming the sweat up from my forehead and styling my hair with it.

I remember my heart burning. (Stomach acid).

I remember feeling feminine when I sat with my legs crossed.

I remember personal grooming made you metrosexual.

I remember David Beckham.

I remember wearing pink made you gay.

I remember wearing two American Eagle shirts with both collars up.

I remember going through a spray can of Axe every two weeks because I was afraid to shower after gym class.

I remember smelling weed for the first time and knowing what it was, even though I couldn’t have known.

I remember they used to sell salvia right over the counter where you’d buy bags of milk. Some guys I knew would rip it through a Cherry Coke can using a butane torch.

I remember some guys I knew.

I remember hearing about a guy who traded two snowmobiles for a 40 of Jameson.

I remember someone said every day at 12:45 the girl from geography class went to the pines and flashed everyone who cared to gather.

I remember breaking my ankle and walking around on it at Wendy’s because I had no idea what a broken ankle might feel like.

I remember dipping my fries in the chocolate Frosty.

I remember dating a girl I didn’t speak to once after the relationship began.

I remember we never officially broke up.

I remember saying “I don’t know and I don’t care” was the coolest thing you could possibly say.

I remember wheeling through the Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys on my first iPod mini, the teal one.

I remember wishing I had an English accent.

I remember wanting to be Black.

I remember the Confederate flag hanging above the pool in my friend’s dad’s living room and hearing someone say ‘nigger’ for the first time and meaning it.

I remember how the place smelled like a reptile enclosure: cat piss and printer heat.

I remember thinking, “What the hell?” when my friend’s parents thanked “the lord” for the food we were about to eat. The father liked to declare that family was the foundation of society.

I remember Showtime. They’d play Red Shoe Diaries weeknights at 11. I’d stay up late sometimes, hoping to see bare breasts.

I remember buying Kappa pants marked a significant shift in my self-perception. More European.

I remember that was gay too.

I remember the pair of fake Dolce & Gabbana boxers I bought on the boardwalk of a resort town. I’d pull the Kappa pants down a bit so people saw the D&G waistband when my shirt was off.

I remember lifting weights made me feel contained and expanded at the same time. I liked how my shirt sleeves felt tighter around my upper arms.

I remember it was a great autumn for foliage.

I remember Fleetwood Mac on the radio.

I remember my dad turning it up when AC/DC came on.

I remember Rock 95 FM.

I remember my mom singing along to Phil Collins, and wondering who or what was Sussudio.

I remember the backseat feeling of wanting the destination to be a little further still, of not wanting the car ride to end.

I remember wearing my Death Cab for Cutie shirt made me feel like a poser, a term I learned after refusing to grind curbs on my skateboard.

I remember when a care package came from Germany I’d wonder if you could get drunk from eating enough Mon Chéri.

I remember for the school dance the girls wore dresses so they could tape a flat mickey of vodka or Fireball to the inside of their thighs. When the girl I wanted to dance with got caught and sent home it felt like heartbreak.

I remember, “You are NOT the father!” (Maury Povich).

I remember thinking a friend’s older brother had to buy condoms for you.

I remember “beer before liquor, never been sicker; liquor before beer, you’re in the clear.” A revelation!

I remember the hooded figure of Abu Ghraib and those dumb American grins.

I remember thinking it was so cool my friend’s mom lived above the bowling alley until I went there and heard what that’s like.

I remember swamps were a reminder that my next-door neighbour went to a Halloween party and never returned home. Jake Just. He’s still missing.

I remember being certain they’ll have solved mortality before it became my problem.

I remember starting my days with 32 grams of sugar via two Hot Fudge Sundae Pop-Tarts.

I remember never drinking water pre-emptively.

I remember the bay shining like poured silver.

I remember not knowing what I wanted to do with my life.

I remember no better feeling than driving straight country roads with the windows down.

I remember fiery and glorious end-of-September days.

I remember adulthood seemed both real and not-real, like a jellyfish.

I remember feeling like my life was just beginning.

I remember enjoying this time while I could, and that I should have enjoyed it even more than I did.

⁂

In 1970, American artist Joe Brainard published ‘I Remember’, a memoir comprised entirely of sentences beginning with “I remember,” recounting his childhood in Oklahoma and his later life in New York.

My version takes place in Midland, Ontario, in the year 2004. I was 15.

Losing Saint George’s would finally settle, for me, the question of whether Berlin was over. Take anything, dear market forces, but the neighbourhood bookshop. What about one of the countless carbon-copy Asian fusion restaurants? Or the latest outpost of that parasitic venture-backed coffee chain?

Good thing books are flying off the shelves. If no one’s reading anymore, that’s news to Paul Gurner. “We’re not experiencing it,” he says. “We’re flourishing.”

Paul opened Saint George’s English Bookshop in 2003 knowing nothing about the book business. His only experience had been a failed investment in one, which left him stranded with 10,000 books. Instead of selling them at markets in the UK, where the books were, he shipped them to Berlin, where he had been living since 2000. At that time, Americans in West Berlin were following cheap flats east into Prenzlauer Berg, which 13 years prior had lain across the border of a different country. There was no English bookstore in the neighbourhood, so Paul opened one.

That Saint George’s has been flourishing for 23 years is remarkable if not miraculous. "We've been through a lot,” Paul says, recalling events of the last seven years. First, there was Brexit, which increased shipping prices by 400%. "Then right after Brexit Ukraine happened—well, no, that dickhead in Russia happened.” And on top of all that came the pandemic. Still, revenue held steady. "We have the best customers, I must say. It makes it very easy to run a bookshop. We have a very minor percentage of people who are a pain in the ass.”

Paul has watched bookshops that predated his shutter, and others blink in and out within just a few years. He wants to be a bookshop for everyone, and believes owners who press their politics too hard through their stock tend not to last. “I’d like to think we’re more left-leaning, but that’s not what people come in here for,” he says. He carries Houellebecq and Hoover and Pappé and Luxenberg, but not Mein Kampf, which he considers irredeemably incendiary. As for stocking Hillbilly Elegy (JD Vance), Paul would “rather somebody buy it used than give that dickhead any more money.” Ditto Neil Gaiman.

(Paul only said 'dickhead’ twice in our conversation; that both instances have appeared here may slightly overstate his fondness for the word).

Paul doesn’t radiate the unbridled joy of those who find fulfillment in their work. But he is dryly content. He speaks in a language of emotional economy: “can’t complain,” “not bad, really,” “keeps me occupied.” In that sense, he’s very English. He left school at 15, worked as a photographer, and ran a furniture business. His literary education was entirely DIY. “I remember really late, somebody said, ‘What, you’ve never heard of Pynchon?’” He learned on the job, guided by what his customers are curious about.

In Berlin, one such curiosity is Christiane F. (Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo), the 1978 autobiography of a child prostitute and heroin addict in West Berlin. It was last printed in 2012. “We get asked for it all the time,” Paul says. “Someone should take it on. I’ve suggested it to NYRB. We’d be able to sell it every week.”

Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues was another precious gem that came up. Paul explained that Feinberg – who, in addition to being a famous butch lesbian and transgender activist, was also a communist – didn't want the book commercially republished after her death. It’s now issued by her foundation, with proceeds staying within the estate. He had five new copies perched atop a shelf, beyond the reach of children. “They're really nicely printed.”

I asked if people care about that. "Absolutely. Look at this.” He handed me two identical-looking copies of Miranda July's All Fours, both new. The American one was nice and supple, like it was made of Egyptian cotton. It felt well-oiled, while the British one felt like it was printed by Temu—brittle spine; riffling through it stiff and jerky. "American publishing is just nicer. The feel, the font … I don't know, it's just something.” I held the books for a minute or so, appreciating the something.

Has there been a book that’s changed him? “Not really. The Drinker, maybe. It changed my habit of drinking toward not drinking.”

I hadn’t heard of it. A self-help book? “No. Christ, no. No, no, no. It’s about a small businessman that drinks himself out of business. It’s fiction.” Crazy how fiction can do that, I said. Most people would probably reach for The Big Book and 12-step their way to sobriety. “I didn’t have an issue, but it put a perspective on my life. You know, you have to keep control of things, especially with a kid around. And the business is just like another child. This is the third child I never knew I wanted.”

More than once, we returned to the topic of electric vehicles. “The van can do 400 kilometres on the first charge and about 300 per charge after that,” Paul told me. Battery range is critical to his operations. Every two months, he drives from Berlin to the U.K. to load up on used books—about a ton in total, or 2,000 titles. He handpicks them himself. “I know what will sell … Dostoevsky, obviously … Murakami, Paul Auster, Zadie Smith … things go round and round … Alexanderplatz, which wasn’t available in a good translation when we opened.” (It has since gotten the Hoffman treatment). I ask if he’s seen the 14-part Fassbinder production. “We showed it here as a film night. There was a 24-hour documentary on Berlin and we showed the entire thing. But we stopped doing events. The shop’s just too busy.”

Last year, Paul spent €250,000 on new books, and €50k more on used. On his shelves, used books outnumber new roughly eight to one. “I want people to be able to pick up a book for four or five euros,” he says. He laments the rise of e-readers and e-commerce but he’s positioned the shop to stay largely untouched by their pull, and rejects convenient excuses. “Just because you’ve not got it right, you can’t blame Amazon,” he says. If a customer wants a book, Paul will have it in store in a few days, usually priced within a euro of Amazon. Overcharging, he says, is precisely what drives people to shop online. It also helps that books are one thing people are willing to wait a little longer for.

Despite the platform’s sales and advertising benefits, Saint George’s no longer sells on Amazon. It became too bureaucratic. “Whether it a was moral stand or a hassle stand...,” Paul was saying, before I interrupted with a remark about how decisions tend to look nobler in hindsight. But Paul does care about buying the right way. “When you choose Amazon, you’re supporting shareholders of a company that doesn’t pay taxes ... it annoys me when I have to buy something online because we live in a city where you can get most things.”

Lonely Planet is another platform whose usual advantages Paul has chosen to forgo. In 2012, Saint George’s was featured in one of its travel guides. It was fated to be like this place in Paris, he says. “Just the amount of people wanting to buy a bag and not a book ... they were only interested in posing in the shop.” The following year, Paul asked Lonely Planet to de-list his shop. “I want to be the village bookshop, not a destination or a thing. The majority of our customers live in town and see us as a viable way of getting their books.” Still, he says he's happy when people climb the ladders and snap a photo. Surely rare, I thought. "Every day,” he said.

In reality, Paul is more reserved than my choice of quotes so far may indicate. He answers thoughtfully and only speaks ill of those who deserve it, like the drivers who peacock their garish rented supercars through his neighbourhood. His reluctance to draw attention partly explains why he drives an electric. “It’s pretty hideous,” he says of his Leaf.

Paul isn't interested in being rich. “I’m happy being comfortable.” Expansion – another location or a bigger space – doesn’t appeal to him either. He's in the shop 15 hours a week and spends the rest of his time managing it remotely. “I work hard and don’t feel guilty about earning a decent wage from it.” Much of what he earns goes back into local businesses—a point he emphasized with another well-earned dig at Amazon.

I can tell community is important to Paul. “You take packages, take keys for people. You let people dump their stuff here from time to time.” Over the years, kids of former customers have grown up to become customers themselves. One woman who came into the shop is now his girlfriend. When I suggest he has the best job in the world, he replies, “No—the best job would be to actually work here.” (Saint George’s is currently not hiring).

I was eager to cast Paul as a sort of shaman who prescribes potent things that, once consumed, allow people to authentically say they were never the same again. And I suppose he does do that, though most people arrive with a clear idea of what they want. Paul was telling me this when a woman came in and said, “Can you just give me a good fictional book?” He laughed and she elaborated: “I had a kid and so I haven’t read a book for so long. I just need something easy but not stupid.” He guided her around several shelves before ultimately suggesting something by Paul Beatty.

When he returned, he said, “There’s something I’ve realized. I’ve waited too long to do anything else. Do you know what I mean? I’m stuck with this, and it’s not a bad thing, but I’ve been doing it for 23 years and will maybe do it another 15 years and then that’s it. People say, Oh, it’s a great job, but I’ve never done anything else, never had that sabbatical year travelling. These days, people have very dynamic lives. I’m doing the same thing day in and day out, month in and month out. I spend all my time on the shop.”

That’s business. Doing something well for years comes at the cost of doing many other things. Appropriately bookish in appearance (he wears glasses), Paul is first and foremost a savvy entrepreneur who happens to sell books. “I don’t read anywhere near as much as I should,” he admits. And perhaps Saint George’s thrives not in spite of, but because of, Paul’s lack of literary zeal. Instead of imposing his own taste, he stocks what readers actually want.

As our conversation wound down, two young students arrived to interview Paul for a school assignment. We had been chatting for two hours, and the next day he was driving to England for a book haul. Still, he welcomed the chance to talk with the aspiring journalists. I stayed long enough to catch the first question, about whether Paul had always cared about books. “I do now,” he said.

There’s that quote that goes, “There must be something like the opposite of suicide, whereby a person radically and abruptly decides to start living.”

By that measure, the opposite of suicide is to spend a few days walking and driving the streets of Cairo.

⁂

True, it can feel like self-murder. Cairo has more than 23 million people and no traffic lights. Getting anywhere demands submitting to an unruly accumulation of motion and believing unwaveringly in the ancient concept of going with the flow. It’s very somatic. It made me feel bodily, that I had a presence. It gave shape to me insofar as I became a construction of a thing competing for space with other constructed things. It also made me feel totally irrelevant and trivial. There was a unique spectrum within me and across which I felt myself being thrust toward the extreme ends of: flesh-based conception on one side and disembodiment on the other.

⁂

And where was my mind? Speculating about what it would be like for a bus to run me over and make me flat and, because the vehicles are so one after the other, to squash me several times before anyone stopped, until what was left of me could be used to paint walls, until there was only a granular paste a passerby might skid on and pull their groin.

⁂

It’s no news by now that Cairo’s congestion rivals the world’s great clusterfucks—Delhi, Lagos, Manila. Without a coherent authority, everyone does what they want. I like the self-regulating anarchy. I find it relaxing, even when it feels like it could crush me at any second. What stresses me out is the world of policies and litigation.

Such interconnectedness means individual choices matter. A heedless insistence on one’s own priority disrupts the harmony of the whole. And so there’s a real sense of society in the ceaseless tightening and loosening of the knot, the communal negotiation of space. It can be ruthless, but there are small mercies everywhere. Now and then, a hand lifts briefly from a steering wheel to signal that you may merge.

⁂

As for “living like a local," infused with exhaust and coated in road smut is perhaps the most authentic way to be in Cairo, an experience shared by almost everyone who lives here. You get used to the scratch in your throat.

⁂

An inventory of things in transit, noted over 13 minutes at Ramses Square:

Cars, taxis, minibuses, public buses, tourist buses, delivery vans, pickup trucks, dump trucks, cement mixers, fuel tankers, water trucks, garbage trucks, tow trucks, road rollers, cranes in transit, police cars, police vans, armored police vehicles, military trucks, ambulances, fire engines, motorcycles, scooters, tuk-tuks, motorized rickshaws, bicycles, handcarts, pushcarts, produce carts, wheelbarrows, mule carts, pedestrians, street vendors on foot, men carrying trays, children weaving through traffic, mechanics rolling tires, people pushing stalled cars, refrigerators on carts, mattresses strapped to bicycles, gas canisters on trolleys, rolling crates, rolling plastic barrels, rollerbladers, dogs, stray shopping carts.

⁂

It really is another world. Of course we all know the “we” and “us” of contemporary culture writing refers to a rather narrow Western milieu, but the boundless vastness of humanity to be observed on Cairo’s streets makes it seem like that whole referred-to audience could fit into a single backyard in Williamsburg.

Flaubert wrote, “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” But it was more like I saw what a tiny world occupied me.

⁂

Someone on Reddit said, “Even as a New Yorker, I was scared of traffic in Cairo.” A meaningless statement from a person who believes there’s a center of the universe.

⁂

All the honking can be baffling until you realize it’s just crowdsourced echolocation, a way of letting others know you’re there. It’s been said a blind person can drive around Cairo because they never have to look around. They can see the sound, so to speak. It’s also a great city to be deaf. Daytime street noise averages 90 decibels, a few hours of which can make the tiny hairs in your ear lie down for good. Hearing loss is unsettlingly easy to trigger. You get too close to some air vibrating too much for too long and suddenly What? is the only thing you ever say anymore.

⁂

While reading an interview with Kaveh Akbar, it struck me that I had participated in a remarkable work of art:

Every piece of art that I love can be discussed with regard to its straining against its medium. Brian Eno talks about listening to fuzzy, washed-out guitar or a blues singer’s voice cracking on a vinyl record as examples of an emotional event too momentous for the medium assigned to record it. That’s what I’m interested in in all art. Seeing Rodin’s thumbprints on the toes of Balzac, or the way that time marbles its way into Sappho, the fractures in the medium—the thing that tells me there was something here for which the technology of language or marble or vinyl record was insufficient. There was an emotional event here that eclipsed representation.

Because what are thousands of car horns but the emotional overspill of overstrained infrastructure? The MoMA should rig Tahrir Square with microphones and livestream the audio in a dusty exhibition room. Get a scent artist in there revving a 1995 Toyota HiAce diesel.

⁂

Eno, for his part, simply calls it “the sound of failure.”

⁂

Not that failure’s the right word. When I asked my taxi driver about solutions, he just shrugged: “Where is the problem? Things will never change, inshallah.”

This is my second entry from Cairo. Here is the first.

“To practice Islam is very simple,” said Hussein, the man I’d just met.

He was sat on a step in the luminous white marble courtyard of Al-Azhar, Cairo’s first mosque. He wore a light grey ankle-length robe, which matched the colour of his medium-length hair and beard. When we saw each other, he gave a small nod toward the empty spot next to him, where I was now sitting.

“Listen,” he said. He lifted one hand in front of his chest, palm out, and splayed his fingers.

“There are five parts. The first is Shahada. lā ʾilāha ʾillā-llāhu muḥammadun rasūlu-llāh—'There is no god but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God’. You must say it and believe.”

I nodded. Then he held out his other hand, also like a star.

“The second part is Salah.”

“Salah?”

“Like Mo. You pray five times a day. Five salahs. The first is Fajr, at dawn.”

Each time he named a salah, he folded one finger of the newly raised hand into his palm.

“Dhuhr at noon, ʿAṣr in the afternoon, Maghrib at sunset, and ʿIshāʾ in the dark. But before midnight.”

I nodded again. He now held a fist and a star in front of him.

“Sir, are you a rich man?”

I told him no.

“Still, even if small, you give to the poor. This is the third thing, Zakāt. If you cannot give money, you give goodness.”

“What does goodness—”

“You must go to Mecca at least once in your life.”

“Me?”

“No, listen. That’s number four. Hajj. All Muslim people must go.”

“Everyone?”

“If the body is good enough and they are not too poor.”

“Have you been?”

“Yes, two times. And the last thing is no food. But only in the holy month, Ramadan. What do you call it?”

“Fasting?”

“Fasting. If the sky has light, you cannot eat.”

“Everyone?”

“If you are ill, you don't have to fast. But you have to salah. Like this.”

Hussein demonstrated how to pray. First, you stand facing Mecca. Then you bow, then rise again, and finally, you get on your knees and press your forehead to the floor.

He told me you go through this motion at least 34 times in a day, during the five salahs.

“Prayer is submission. You show it with the body. If you are too sick to do this, if you are laying in bed, you say only the words. If you cannot speak, you say them with your eyes.”

Here, Hussein gave four slow blinks. I took a moment to look around. Young students of Islam, mostly from Indonesia, sat against all four walls of the arcade with their heads bowed over their Qurans. As the sun dipped behind the minarets, I tried to imagine society a thousand years ago, when the mosque was built. There were 250 million of us. Baghdad was the largest and most advanced city on earth, and the Islamic world was about to catapult civilization into radical new heights of discovery and achievement. On the last blink, Hussein put his hand on my shoulder.

“Sir, I’ve given you a problem. You no longer have the excuse of not knowing.” The implication hung in the air for a moment. Then I understood. Now that I know, I must do. If I don’t do, I will go to hell.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “The next salah is soon. What will you eat after? When will you go to Mecca?”

There are two ways through the barrier separating the city of Giza from the pyramids. The first is marked by a long, shallow pavilion of pale stone with “The Great Gate” written on the façade in English, Arabic, and hieroglyphics. Its interior is a museum-like space that offers all the amenities of modern site-visiting, where the daily madness of Egyptian life has been meticulously designed out of existence.

There are touchscreens and QR codes and ads for Nestlé products. “Man fears time, but time fears the pyramids” is emblazoned across a wall, framed as an ancient proverb but likely authored by the marketing department at Orascom Investment Holding, whose giant logotype is likewise emblazoned across a wall.

Additional signage invites visitors to enjoy the elevated dining experience at EL&N, “London’s most Instagrammable café.” In the words of one British journalist, the opening of the Great Gate, last April, had finally made the pyramids fit for the modern world.

I was dropped off at the other way in. Stepping from the cab, I was instantly met with the discomforts that had long defined the pre–Great Gate visitor experience. Camel stink – slightly sour and ammonia-like – filled the air; crowds of men tried to swindle me; mangy dogs nosed at my ankles. I followed a trail of A4 sheets with “tickets” printed on them, which led me to an iron-barred window. I told the man what I wanted, slid my cash through a narrow slot, and got a receipt. It felt like betting on a horse.

Next, I followed a sheet-metal fence to an opening with a low roof and a turnstile, where two official-looking men waved me through a metal detector. It beeped and flashed but all they said was, “Okay.” This pleased me very much, that entering this sacred site carried no greater sense of occasion than entering a lower league football ground. I am, above all, a person who enjoys modesty where it is least expected.

Once through the gate, I was on an empty road that rose gently toward the pyramids. There was no one else around. The morning sun crept across the plateau, brushing first the tips of the ancient prisms, then, nearer sea-level and immediately to my left, stripping the Great Sphinx of its shadow. Its face startled me. It was like I’d never seen it before. Perhaps I hadn’t, not really. The Sphinx, like Rodin’s Thinker, is a posture piece, famous, in this case, for its repose of eternal watchfulness.

I walked and kept walking, my mind bursting with pointless hypotheticals, like whether I could sooner learn ancient Egyptian or grab a wasp out of the air with chopsticks, until I came to a stop, rigid with awe. The road was still empty; I had a completely unpeopled view of the pyramids. A shiver ran from my tailbone to the top of my head. It wasn’t that I was seeing something spectacular. It was that this was the last place on earth I should be seeing it alone. The aloneness, that’s what was spine-tingling. I am not possessive, but for a moment I let myself believe all this was here just for me.

Are the pyramids amazing? I am the wrong person to ask. I often fail to feel the amazement others feel when they’re in an amazing place. One trick is to ask myself what would amaze me about this, if it amazed me. But then the question only confronts me with the fact of the exercise, adding to the moment a needless and self-inflicted sense of futility. I remember leaving places like the Acropolis and the Colosseum of Rome more or less unaffected and wondering what was wrong with me. Only recently have I made peace with it.

But something did amaze me about the pyramids. It was their plainness. Most people cannot see it. They know too much. Of course, it’s important to know things, why they are and how they happened. But not always.

In fact, there is so much to know about the pyramids that I chose to know nothing, so that when I saw them, there was nothing to distract from their material reality. What’s impressive is the sheer amount of stone, the great upheaval of all that bedrock and the air of permanence that pervades its brutal triangularity. It makes the surrounding city seem utterly makeshift. There is no need to look long. The first glimpse reveals as much as is ever possible to take in.

Yes, sometimes amazement demands arriving at the scene like a dumbass—at the wrong gate, with no knowledge of the past. Ignorance preserves a kind of appreciation unavailable to the well-informed. "You get to be clueless in a new place only briefly,” wrote Peter Schjeldahl. “Don’t waste the chance to have truths, great and small, burst upon you.”

Indeed, the link between the Latin stupidus and the word ‘stupefy’ is no accident. Both speak to being rendered numb, overwhelmed, or unable to process what’s in front of you. Which was exactly how I felt, standing dumbstruck at the pyramids. Then I said, or perhaps some other voice said it for me, ‘They’re there. That’s it. That’s the whole thing’.

You’re reading The Stranger in a café. Or rather, you’re not reading it but brandishing it. Like a credential. Like a dick!

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know. Everyone knows the opening. You’ve read it a million times. But today—today you’re reading it publicly, which changes everything, makes it sacramental, transforms you into the kind of person who engages with difficult texts, who thinks about existence, about absurdity, about all the big questions, while others just live their stupid little lives getting dragged around by their jobs, relationships, emotions…

Wielding this book tells others you're not like the others. It tells them you probably smoke. Or should smoke—would look better smoking. You’ve angled the cover toward the door where people enter, people who might see CAMUS in block letters and think, there’s someone whose interior life intrigues me.

The yoga studio next door posts its schedule on an app, so it’s no accident that you’ve arrived at the café just as a class is finishing. You’ve chosen a table where you and your prop will be most visible to the many fit and radiant girls who are about to pour in for their matcha lattes. Your legs are crossed and you’re resting your head on one hand, giving you the shape of an apostrophe. You open the book to a later chapter to create the impression you’ve been reading for a while, thinking deeply about Meursault and his mother and the sun and the Arab on the beach.

A tall blonde walks through the door and you are, of course, the first to notice. She looks like she just stepped out of a commercial for being alive. You glance up, return to the page, then glance up again. She doesn’t look, and why would she? All day she moves among men whose hearts beat with thoughts that will never make it past their teeth. You think, if only she were aware of the book in your hands, she’d know there was something different about you. But she isn't, and she doesn't.

You look down again and furrow your brow, deepening the expression of someone who’s grappling with complex ideas. But really you’re grappling with whether anyone notices you grappling. You’re entirely absorbed in appearing absorbed.

And now a shameful hunger starts to build. You can feel its momentum intensifying and you readjust the book’s position, still making sure CAMUS is legible, because the girls around you have to see what you’re reading, have to see that you’re sensitive and deep, well versed in the philosophy of what it means to be human, which is meant to signal that you would be an attentive lover, someone who cares about their pleasure, someone who sees them as whole and not just bodies, not just objects of desire, even though right now, sitting here as they arrive, you reduce them entirely to the imagined weight and warmth of their skin against yours. And you hate yourself for it, hate that for all your cultivated aura of exceptionality, you’re just another man wanting what he cannot have.

And yet! What you’re experiencing, you insist, is more sophisticated than basic carnality because you don’t just desire their bodies, you desire their desire for you, you want something in this performance to short-circuit their defenses, want them to perceive something irresistible in your depth, want them to choose you over all the other men in here, these enjoyers of dreck like Shantaram and Khruangbin, and you want that choice to prove something—but what? That reading Camus entitles you to sex? Which is clearly stupid, clearly more abject than just being a lech, because at least lechery doesn’t pretend to be anything but what it is.

You recognize there is something whorish about constructing yourself like this, where each gesture – like taking your coffee black – is calibrated to sustain the fantasy that you are the sort of man who reads French existentialist fiction as attractive girls in athleisure orbit you like planets around the sun. Except you are not the sun. You are barely a moon. You are at best a piece of space debris, caught in the gravitational pull of your own neediness. You have taken a brilliant work of art and put it to the stupidest possible use, which is to try to seem interesting. If you were truly interesting, you’d be reading the book at home, by yourself, because it interests you. And you’d be reading it in French.

You loved this book when you first read it alone in private. But now every sentence is contaminated by self-consciousness. What would Camus think? Probably that this is absurd. But not the good and artful absurd. Not the profound meaninglessness he wrote about but more like the small pathetic absurd of a person who thinks reading Camus at a café means something when really it means nothing, means less than nothing, means the opposite of meaning if such a thing exists.

You know from your marketing job that sometimes it's just that the right message reaches the wrong people. Herein is the trouble with your selection. The Stranger sits in an awkward spot on the obscurity-recognition matrix. To lit-girls, your choice flirts with cliché; to the yoga crowd, it’s a closed door. And so for no one among the segment you’re targeting does the book announce what you want it to announce, which is that you see through things, through the bourgeois sentimentality of our materialistic world, through the performance of emotion, the theater of grief, the whole elaborate charade of caring about things that don’t matter. Unlike everyone else who probably weeps at movies like Up or when they hear Mazzy Star, you understand that Meursault’s indifference is the only authentic response to a universe that doesn’t even register our existence.

The irony, of course, is that you are currently the world’s greatest victim of indifference. No one has looked at you. No one has noticed the book or your face or your interest in existential detachment. Maybe you should have brought Shantaram, actually, which would’ve made you more approachable, would’ve signaled adventure-seeker instead of depressive-intellectual, would’ve suggested you’re the kind of man who does things and who exists in the world rather than just thinks about existing in the world.

Obviously, part of you knew this would happen, part of you predicted this exact outcome, which is why there’s this other layer, this meta-layer where you can tell yourself that you knew all along that this was futile, that you were performing the performance ironically, that you were aware the whole time that it wouldn’t work, which allows you to maintain a sense of superiority even in failure because at least you understand that you’re not naïve enough to think reading The Stranger in a café would actually make you interesting—would actually make you anything other than what you are, which is a lonely, insecure and overly rehearsed individual performing for an audience that doesn’t exist.

You’re not even uniquely pathetic, which is perhaps the most devastating realization. There are likely dozens of men in the city doing this exact thing right now, peacocking their Dostoevsky and Kafka covers to the void. You belong to a demographic; someone at a publishing house is tracking you in a spreadsheet. It's dark outside, and as your eyes meet the window, you catch a glimpse of the human-shaped fraud.

The café is now full of people and you envy them all. You envy how they actually feel their lives happening to them while you're still posturing with your book, still trying to manufacture intrigue, still waiting for your carefully constructed persona to register in someone’s consciousness, for this performance to finally pay off in some way. You maintain your pose of absorption while inside you are howling, are screaming, are begging, please see me, please want me, please let me be more than just this miserable accumulation of need and anxiety. Please let me be a body that another body wants to be near!

But there is nothing. The yoga girls don’t look and they don’t care. They order their complicated drinks and talk to each other about their lives, their actual lives, their plans, their small domestic dramas, and you are invisible, you are furniture, you are part of the background and your book, this meticulously chosen signifier of intellectual sophistication—it might as well be nothing at all because it’s producing no effect, no opening through which you might insert yourself into their lives.

It’s like you’re watching the world through glass. You're sealed in by a relentless hyperawareness, a crippling self-consciousness that makes everything impossible, makes connection impossible, makes authenticity impossible, makes anything resembling a genuine self completely and utterly out of reach.

They stood on the balcony, beautiful as advertisements, each with terrible posture, pretending to forget they were being observed. Someone said, “The Seventies never ended.” It was a stupid thing to say, a strange and supremely stupid thing to say, but it stayed in the air like smoke. Everyone was trying to be smart, but they were just getting louder. They laughed and didn’t mean it.

Below, taxis crawled through traffic, yellow blood in concrete veins, the whole world late for something meaningless. A young woman from the balcony looked at me. I liked her laugh. It sounded like a bright little bell. Her dress was plain but the way it held the evening light made her look like she was burning from the inside out. She smiled and it looked heavy on her face, as though smiling was work. I thought, some people live their whole lives like that—always working to look happy.

She handed me a glass and said, “You drink what you’re given.” The bell sound came again, clear and small, and I felt warm and dumb and glad to be alive. Then she said, “Let’s go.” I didn’t follow far. I just watched the space she left behind fill with the same air as before, the same light, the same nothing. I told myself I’d see her again. I didn’t believe it, but I told myself anyway. Sometimes a lie is the only thing that moves your feet.

I went walking after dark. The signs buzzed and the windows glowed. I met a man who said, “It’s always better to know for sure.” But I don’t think so. I think not knowing keeps you alive longer. I’ve seen people die because they needed to know. I’ve seen people laugh because they didn’t. I thought of friends, the way they come and go. You tell yourself it’s fine. You smile and say good luck, and that’s what friendship is.

The rain came hard now. It fell with a moral force. I ended up by the river and stared for a long time into brown water full of things that didn’t belong in it. It was getting late—or becoming early. I lit a cigarette to keep the day from starting. I missed the easy days when the world was small. I missed the big lake and the porch light that made the night look like honey.

To know how alive you are, notice how often you feel the sudden, fierce spark of every part of you switched on at once. This is glory. Aliveness is calculus. Aliveness = (Frequency of Glories) × (Quality of Each Glory). Good glory in strong supply makes life worth living1.

That’s what John Steinbeck was getting at in a brief passage in his novel East of Eden. The passage appears as an aside to the story and reveals his fears for humanity at the turn of the 19th century. Glories were in decline. We're told that "monstrous changes are taking place in the world,” putting our species is on “sad suicidal course.”

Our looming self-murder was being driven by "forces shaping a future whose face we do not know." The forces, though not evil by nature, were deadening “the most valuable thing in the world” – the independent human mind – pursuing, roping, blunting, and drugging it until nothing remained but confusion and misery.

There was talk of a "mass method,” a pattern-driven system that seeped into thought and suppressed all other ways of seeing. The system grew stronger with each person who fed into it. Its influence became so absolute that people would neglect the individual mind and spirit, the only true creative force, even turning from God, until they were indistinguishable from “uncreative beasts.” (Observers of Guardiolan football will know the tragedy of this).

Any portrayal of a dystopian future was purely incidental. Unlike Zamyatin (We) and Huxley (Brave New World), Steinbeck was not in the business of prophecy. In fact, he was looking backward. East of Eden is set around 1900, giving Steinbeck, writing in 1951, fifty years to reflect on the forces he believed were eroding individuality and creativity—industrial automation, totalitarianism, Taylorism, and so on.

A century on, those forces remain no less threatening. And yet reading the passage today, only one force springs to mind. As I got to the last line, I noticed the ink had slowly morphed into what looked like Sam Altman's face in the style of an Egon Schiele sketch.

Sometimes I wonder how certain dead writers would handle returning to a world in which the perils they warned of had mutated into something ten times worse than anything they could have imagined: David Foster Wallace scrolling TikTok; Hannah Arendt discovering Staatsräson; Karl Marx rising from the grave to see a Labubu on his headstone.

And Steinbeck, of course, brought back from 1966 into a civilization whose chief engines of wealth feed on the destruction of our glory.

R.I.P., John, you would have hated AI.

Here's the passage from East of Eden…

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes.

A man may have lived all his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then – the glory – so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished.

And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.

I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good.

It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and our clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our policies, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God.

This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.

At such a time it seems natural and good to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species has taken.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction is wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.

I can understand why a system built on pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

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For a while I didn’t know whether it was Steven Thomas or Thomas Steven.

Names like his can be like that but I also didn’t know him. I’d never heard him say “I’m Steven” or “I’m Thomas.” There were just two first names on a screen, easy to mix up.

I forget who followed who on Instagram first. When one of us posted something the other related to, we’d message back and forth a bit. Steven’s first comment was on a picture of my dad in socks and sandals pouring a splash of Pilsner onto a bratwurst over charcoals: Could this picture get any more German?

Both of us are German but not really. Steven moved to the UK at 15 and I to Canada at six. We both like driving long distances to obscure and unknown destinations. He lives in a van with his girlfriend, while I often wish I did—my own, of course.

On his Substack, Out There, Steven writes about the freedom ("just glad to be here") and challenges – the cabin fever of long rainy days, the sameness of meals – of life on the road. Part diary, part photobook, it is as an ode to being at ease with the way things are. There are no setbacks, only learnings and making do. His present van is just big enough to cook, sleep, and house his tools and some art supplies. “If we wanted it easy we’d be doing this in one of those horribly large RVs you’d see parked up at Walmarts,” he writes.

With titles like Why Worry? and Slow and Steady, Steven’s newsletters function as a digital resting place in my inbox. His photos and words emit utter contentment. He doesn’t write like someone trying to sound like a writer, nor does he obscure his beliefs with layers of irony and sarcasm. Rarely have I read someone so disarmingly genuine. He ends every newsletter with a note of gratitude or encouragement: Thanks for cruising along / Make sure to do some of the art stuff you dream of / Take care / Go create / Steve.

Naturally, stories of van life lead to questions about income. Steven makes a living from carpentry and photography commissions. A little extra comes from selling prints of his work, including three zines of photography from his travels through Portugal, Nova Scotia, and the United States. His creative process, as far as I can tell, is heading out and waiting.

The results are scroll-stopping. His most possessing photos – capable of stirring awe and longing in me even through a screen – are of the sea. It’s on shorelines, in the surf, and at the edge of coastal cliffs that Steven is at his spiritual and artistic best, and I wanted this interview to serve as a kind of frame for the images he takes there.

That was the first part of my motivation. The second was that I could see us becoming friends, and asking a bunch of questions is the most natural way for me to express that.

In one post, you wrote that you never achieved what you were 'meant to'. What do you mean by that?

Throughout my twenties, I lived a hand-to-mouth existence, and many people in my immediate circle didn’t understand how I found joy in a life that didn’t make sense to them. Most of my friends were trying to advance their careers, buy houses, and settle down, and I was turned off by that.

I wanted to avoid that way of life, and my hometown, for as long as possible by working abroad and doing whatever I could to avoid a career or a house. It sounds cliché: the dropout going away to “find himself.” But that wasn’t what I set out to do. I just enjoyed it and felt happy living that way. Leaving has always brought me much more joy than staying put.

There were times, while working mundane temp jobs, when I felt my soul was being crushed just so I could afford to travel. During those moments, I often felt like I wasn’t doing what I was meant to do. I hadn’t followed the traditional route of university or a trade; I was just floating, doing whatever I could to get by.

The older I got, the more I realised many people live this way anyway. But when I first started travelling, I really felt like I was sabotaging my future. Societal pressures and social media amplified that feeling of inadequacy and hopelessness. There was a disconnect between feeling worthy as a person and my career or job prospects. I now know that this never really mattered. But at the time it did, and it brought me a fair amount of grief.

This was all pre-influencer era—you couldn’t monetise your travels back then. A gap year was acceptable, but wanting to just experience life and travel wasn’t as embraced as it is now. In hindsight, I look back with pride. Even when I felt unworthy, I still went out there and got after it.

Photography gave me an aim and a reason to get through the week. It helped me during times when I had little in common with my coworkers. It became a friend I leaned on through dark times. I had no idea how to use a camera in those early days, but for someone who often felt like an outsider, it was a comforting hobby. Looking through the viewfinder blurred out the outside world.

Where does your desire to “belong to nothing and nowhere” come from?

If I had to pinpoint one chapter of my life that shaped this feeling, it would be my childhood. Having parents from two different countries made me, by default, a child of nowhere. My dad was a proud Englishman, and I supported England in the World Cup. But I lived my day-to-day life in Germany, in the middle of Lower Saxony.

I found it hard to develop a national identity, and in some ways, I’ve always loathed flags, nationalism, and belonging to something I had no choice in acquiring. Travelling only reinforced that feeling. I wanted to learn more about this world made up of so many different flags and identities.

What does home mean to you?

It can really be whatever you want it to be. For the last few years, the back of a van has been my home. I’ve had three different vans, each converted to offer me shelter and rest.

People place a huge amount of emphasis on “home.” To me, it can be crafted quickly and efficiently anywhere. Attempting to live minimally goes against the conventional idea of home—where home equals possessions and consumption. To me, home should mean warmth and safety. That’s it.

You called art the antidote to your early nihilism…

I suppose I was wandering aimlessly, with only a vague idea of the life I wanted. At first, art didn’t seem achievable, and there was a disconnect between living in the moment and finding true happiness in it. I found myself chasing the next high, going out partying. But it didn’t fill the void.

Finding art – in my case, photography and occasionally writing – helped me endure those hopeless moments. Art helped me see the beauty around me by forcing me to be present, out there making photos. In a way, it made me feel grateful just to exist and experience it all rather than have to pin rhyme and reason to every aspect of life that I hadn’t yet understood.

What draws you to the sea?

The constant movement of it. The sounds, the smells. One of my favourite ways to experience life is to be in the sea when it’s raining and the waves are small, just tumbling you about. That feeling of surrendering to something bigger than yourself brings a deep sense of comfort. It’s like being a child again, free to play. The sea is a sanctuary for that kind of open play, and I’m forever drawn to it.

You sometimes house sit between long stints in the van. What do you find rewarding about being a temporary resident in other peoples’ homes?

It’s always such a novel feeling. It’s the opposite of home, routine, and familiarity. Working in a different country brought excitement and wonder, whereas at home, everything was predictable—my route to work, the faces I’d see. Learning about new places is best done by living there, trying to fit in like a local.

You don’t seem rushed in how you spend your time or approach your work. Why is that important to you?

Life could be hectic. Working in construction often meant long hours and exhaustion. When I did have time for creative projects, I wanted to savour it, to move slowly and be thorough. Many parts of life felt rushed, but in creativity, I wanted to take things at my own pace, and I was allowed to do so because I was in charge.

I can’t be the only one who wonders why everyone is in such a rush. Our economic system rewards it to an extent, but I believe anything, if given time, flourishes. For me, slowing down and paying attention to the present moment has always been essential. That mindset extends into both my work and my creative life.

How did you learn to be at ease with the way things are?

Creating more than I consume.

I know that somewhat contradicts my previous point about slowing down, but in my experience, overthinking or ruminating has always had a negative impact. Movement and doing help me let go of control and accept life as it is.

In many ways, I think I’ve simply found more purpose. I’m also lucky to share my life with someone who brings me tremendous happiness.

Do you have any notion of digital work life—hunched over a screen 8+ hours a day, increasingly dependent on AI, toggling between various workflow management interfaces, being visible on LinkedIn? Or is all of that totally foreign to you?

That is totally foreign to me. I know of all of those things and obviously have a peripheral notion of them, but they don’t have an ounce of impact on my workday. Of course, there is some hubris to me saying this, but I’d love to see AI troubleshoot problems in a house that was built 150 years ago, or robots that can replace carpenters and craftspeople. I know it’ll likely happen at some point, but I can't see it happening anytime soon.

As for those workflow management interfaces and LinkedIn, they just sound like the worst things invented. I like working with my hands because I have to focus on the task ahead and how I can make a tangible change to the environment around me. It isn’t all roses, of course. Bad weather and difficult jobs can make my line of work unenjoyable. But every industry has its caveats.

You remind me of this passage from a book that I often think about:

“Look at this,” Stephen said, stomping heavily on one of the newly fastened boards. “Fuckin’, I’ve got clients I’ve been working with ten years, and what’ve I done for them? I don’t know. But spend two hours banging nails, you got something to stand on, man. Real progress. This is what I oughta do. Come out here. Live on a fuckin’ hill.”

This passage is very me. I often look at basic things in a profound way and remind myself that working with my hands is something to be proud of. I enjoy it, and it has helped me tremendously. Still, I dream of building a cabin in the woods one day and disappearing from society a bit. It’s a generic dream, maybe—but it’s mine.

In the mood for another good interview?

• Alan Rossi on the illusion of the self.

• Katherine Pomfret on building a zero-bullshit work life.

• Vicky Xu on being an enemy of the Chinese state.

The Unorganised North Algoma District stretches across the hard spine of the Canadian Shield, a vast sweep of rock, trees, and water most Ontarians call “up there.”

We were driving straight up into it from the south. Coming around the bend in Havilland, we saw her for the first time. Mother Superior.

“Inland ocean, man. Big fuckin’ lake.”

Zach, my longtime friend, is an officer of the Canadian Coast Guard at Tobermory. Buddy knows lakes.

The next morning, him and I would hike a tiny stretch of world's largest body of freshwater. It would take us four days.

Day 1

Jimmy greeted us with a hearty two-hander. Put it right there, fellas. He’d drive us to the trailhead.

“So ya picked the hardest hike in the park first. You doin’ the north part too, or?”
“Nope, just straight south.”
“Well ya know you’re not gettin’ a trophy then, eh.”

Known to the Ojibwe as Gichi-gami, or ‘great sea’, Lake Superior is as big as Austria. Very few have trekked its 2,800-kilometre rim. Our route would cover 2.3% of it.

We did not ask that Jimmy elaborate, but he needed no invitation to continue.

“The people before ya, they lost four toenails.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Said they saw a lynx on the trail. Supposed to be a good omen.”
“Hope so.”

Jimmy was the last person we’d see for three days. The German mind cannot comprehend this. Back home, 84 million people are packed into a space three times smaller than Ontario. We began to walk. In the distance, waves hissed on the shore.

A short path led us to a sandy beach. After that came all kinds of terrain: moss carpets, tamarack bogs, boulder fields, rocky ledges, gnarled roots, glacial erratics. Into the lake stretched granite outcrops of exposed Precambrian rock, there since the very first days of our planet.

At one point we emerged from the woods onto an ancient cobble beach 20 stories above the present shoreline—like walking over dinosaur eggs at sea level in the sky. Our ankles held and we were grateful for it.

It was getting close to storm season. In just over a month, cold Arctic air will start colliding with warm air from the Gulf of Mexico. As the lakes, still holding summer heat, feed extra energy into the mix, passing low-pressure systems will unleash ferocious gales, turning the waters savage. They call this the Witch of November.

Fifty years ago, one of the witch's storms sank the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, drowning all 29 on board. Gordon Lightfoot, who grew up not far from where we did, wrote a famous song about it. In the opening, he sings,

Superior, they said, never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come early

—and they say that about Superior because its water gets too cold for bacteria to break down the bodies, which is why they don’t float. Hence she keeps the dead.

I mention this only to underscore a miracle: We had four days of God-given weather. One sun-drenched day after another, air like Swedish midsummer. Nippy at night but never to the bone. It felt like we were getting away with something. All around us the foliage was on fire, a canopy of red, gold, and saffron. Such a glorious Indian Summer was no doubt the work of a higher power—praise be to the lynx!

“Gorgeous, man.”
“Fuckin’ A.”

We repeated this again and again.

After 13 kilometers on the trail, we pitched our tents on the edge of a beach and took a swim. The water was frigid, soothing everything. I drank some out of my hands. Back on shore, arms braced on my hips, I gazed ceremoniously over the cove. Your eyes close automatically when you take a deep breath in a place like that. On the surface I was calm but inside I was bursting with gladness. I walked to our tent and pulled a flask of whiskey from my bag. We each took a sip. Zach combed the shore for driftwood.

“Break off! Break off!”
“What?”
“I’m talkin’ to the wood.”

We lit a pile of pine needles and logs. We poured boiling water into our bags of dinner. The best meal on earth is whatever goes into your mouth after a long hike. The sun went down and the moon got stronger.

“Everything’s coming up Milhouse.”
“It really is.”

Day 2

The morning was brisk. We had oatmeal on the beach and skipped rocks. A moth flew into Zach’s coffee. He’s been eating moths for years so no problem there. No problem getting into gear either; some pain in the hips but otherwise nothing. I thanked my body. Maybe thirty-six is too early for that but I think you should thank your body whether it’s too early or not. We saluted the weather and set off.

It wasn’t long before the language in my head began to change. When I slipped on or tripped over something, I wasn’t upset with it. Wet rocks and fallen logs weren’t in the way. They were only themselves, doing what they do. Being suboptimal for human activity was no fault of the wild. It suddenly became very clear to me that there was nothing to take issue with.

None of this felt extraordinary at the time. In fact, it was barely perceptible. My mind was simply adjusting on its own. Reading Siddhartha recently might’ve made it easier to see things this way, where everything was as it was, ordinary and complete. Or it could have just come from being surrounded by all this wholeness.

Our verbalized thoughts, meanwhile, were far less profound. When Zach and I lived together – first in university housing in Toronto, then in a trap house next to Hooker Harvey’s at Gerrard and Jarvis – we spent hours at night watching YouTube. This was in 2007. When events unfolded on the trail, we’d often quote lines from clips of that era. “Get outta here, you God damn jackass,” from the Winnebago Man talking to a fly; “Fuck it, we’ll do it live!” from Bill O’Reilly freaking out at a teleprompter. I can hear Zach’s wife now, ‘Did you guys just spend the whole time quoting old YouTube videos?’ We did, Katie.

We arrived at our campsite in the early afternoon, in another beautiful cove. I napped in the sun on my sleeping pad and woke up totally lost, then walked into the cold lake to regain a sense of clarity. We milled about and talked nonsense. A jet flew overhead, a bunch of people looking down and thinking, What a nice coastline, Wish I was on that coastline. I scrubbed mud from my shoes with a brittle moss. I didn’t see it, but I knew Zach was eating moths somewhere. We made a fire and prepared the best meal of our lives again.

I had gnocchi, butter, cheddar and bacon bits. Blue-collar umami. We rated our meals. Mine was a nine. Zach’s pour-over braised pork with white wine mushroom sauce was a four, owing to a cooking error. “Pit of the day for sure,” Zach said. We ended each day by reflecting on its peach and its pit. Culinary blunder aside, the day was pure peach from start to finish.

It was a balmy evening. Our gaze swiveled between the sun to our right and the moon to our left. Straight ahead was the unbroken line separating sky and water. We drank Jameson by the fire. After each swig we’d say something dumb or simple.

“What a night, holy shit.
“Unreal.”
“Can’t get over it.”

Day 3

We woke up cold. To our right was some sunshine on the rocks. We made coffee and went there. Nothing needed doing beyond picking the best rock to sit on. That we hardly ever do this says everything about our modern world. Meanwhile, the chorus of Alicia Keys’ If I Ain’t Got You got in my head and stayed there most of the day.

It took the cold shock of a skinny dip to get the earworm out. We sat by the shore and tore into our lunch rations, eating for strength and not out of hunger or gluttony. When I tried to imagine anything better than eating beef jerky naked on a log, nothing came to mind. Wouldn’t have traded it for a Michelin dinner anywhere.

Grace is hard to explain but you can get a good idea of it by watching trout swim upstream. With a bird’s eye view from a bridge we saw their glistening spines on the redds below. Even when they appeared still in the current, they were engaged in constant resistance. This inspired me in ways I can’t quite articulate. As Lispector said of grace, "The discoveries one makes in this state cannot be put into words, cannot be communicated."

That evening, we sat by the fire tossing rocks at bigger rocks. On impact, a rock would burst apart or leave a cloud of dust and we’d get audibly stoked about it. Anyone seeing or hearing us would have taken us for apes. It was pure idiot joy, the day’s peach for sure.

“This is what it’s about.”
“Fucking A, buddy.”

As night fell, we engaged in the oldest, most democratic therapy available to our species: watching embers glow in total silence.

“There’s something about staring into a fire.”
“It just resets everything.”

In a few years, it wouldn't surprise me to see urban wellness studios offer bonfire sessions for burnt-out digital professionals, complete with cacao, gongs, and breathwork. I know I'd go.

Before leaving for the hike, people who cared about me asked what we’d do if we ran into a bear or got lost. I assured them Zach had it covered, though I hesitated to bring it up with him myself. I was already self-conscious about how living in the city had left me untrained for the wild. If I repeated my parents’ and girlfriend’s concerns, I knew he’d hear them as my own.

When I learned he’d packed neither a Garmin nor a gun, and planned to navigate only with a paper map, that was fine by me. In the case of getting lost, his advice to “just go to the coast and then walk down” was plenty reassuring.

I’ve known Zach since first year of high school, when we were 14. In the physical world, which most of us today only occasionally inhabit and where the body may interact with forces, particles, energy, and matter hostile to its well-being, Zach is, above all, capable. (If that sounds like lukewarm praise, look up the definition of ‘capable’). He’s the guy you’d want by your side in a crisis. He can operate all kinds of machines and tie the right knot for any task. He’s a good judge of what matters now and what can wait. I swear he could’ve saved the Fitzgerald. I would trust him with my life.

Day 4

We hiked 13k on the final stretch, for about sixty in total. Zach zoomed off ahead, probably locked in from an edible. My limbs moved without friction and my thoughts were nothing, or several vague things at once. I was just a body. This, I reminded myself, is the goal.

I enjoyed pushing myself to the point of my cells and muscles crying out for stimulants. Snacking on a Clif bar or jerky on the trail felt immediate and vital, serving the same role as coffee but for a far nobler purpose than surviving another day in front of a screen. I could practically feel the protein, carbs and sugars racing through me to where they were needed.

In addition to walking, we also stood, sat, and lay down, often where the posture itself was the whole activity. The Chinese call these fundamental bodily modes the Four Dignities. When I wasn’t focused on one, I was focused on the transitions between them. Each shift attuned me to subtle activations and releases of tension in my body. Such embodied awareness is the foundation for cultivating vital energy (qi). It’s no wonder we felt so alive all the time.

I knew in the moment how fortunate I was, which I usually only realise in hindsight, thinking I should have appreciated things more as they were happening. Out there, though, gratitude came on its own and at all times. I didn’t have to seek it. In fact, it would have been hard work to resist it. In my future nostalgia for this moment in time, there will be no sorrow over its passing—only the joy of knowing I was fully there.

“You seein’ these little blue moths everywhere suddenly?”
“Yeah man, I’ve been eatin’ ‘em.

Back at base camp, things went much the same as in the days before. We planted our chairs by the water, took a dip, and said agreeable things about what we were seeing and doing. Zach announced he was firing up the grill to make smash burgers. Hell yeah, I replied, emboldened by a cold beer in my hand and its attendant masculinity.

Before dinner, I bit into a piece of tropical gum, the chemical tang of which was so electric it actually startled me. For a moment I was surprised by this, then not. Soon we’d back among the fast-casual architecture and McUrbanism of our everyday lives. It was only four days, but it wouldn’t have shocked me to hear they’d started printing people in labs. Last thing we did before bed was look up and see the Northern Lights.

Day 5

Driving out of the woods and onto the Trans-Canada Highway, it was easy to feel like we were exiting the natural world, as if it were somewhere to visit and not the place we inhabit. But the boundary between nature and not-nature is an illusion. While it may seem absurd to put plastic on the same organic plane as a pine, its creation and afterlife are nevertheless part of our ecology. In that sense, we should extend the same care to what we make as we do to what makes us. The same hand that holds a new iPhone each year will cut down a tree without a second thought.

Sitting passenger on an eight-hour drive leaves plenty of room for such thoughts. We passed through town after town of shabby motels, greasy spoons, and little white chapels belonging to one Protestant sect or another. The houses sat on sprawling lots strewn with metal scraps, kiddie pools, hockey nets, riding mowers, firewood, tarps, tires, trampolines, wheelbarrows, discarded doors and windows, and little red slides long abandoned by the kids. One man had plastered the whole front of his house in red letters: CANADA IS NOT FOR SALE!! HELL NO > FU.. TRUMP.

Signs to our left and right announced where to find Jesus and weed and duty-free shopping on the reserves. Only status Indians are meant to be tax-exempt but the shop owners hardly ever ask for ID. We pulled off to get cheap gas and coffee. All the pumps were top-of-the-line and they were building a grand indoor pavilion stocked like a Trader Joe's. How much these Indigenous economic zones benefit their communities depends largely on the competence and integrity of local chiefs and band councils. Still, it was jarring to witness this sparkling service plaza knowing how many First Nations can’t access safe drinking water—a failure on Ottawa alone.

The longer I looked out the window, at the hundreds of lakes, the roads with Indigenous names, the signs with French words on them, at buddy there sittin’ on a steamroller with no mask, inhaling tar fumes and hackin’ darts, the more it felt like home. I had lived in Canada for 18 years, though I was never able to get my citizenship. I’ve now been away for 13. By my next visit, I’ll have had to renounce my permanent residency, and I’ll have no more privileges than a tourist. Nearing home, as the waters of another Great Lake came into view, of Huron’s Georgian Bay, where Zach and I grew up, I just felt really glad to be here.

Back at my parents’ place that night, I learned my Opa – my father’s dad – had passed away in the morning. He was 88 and had spent the better part of his life at sea. At 14, with nothing at home, he joined a ship’s crew and was often gone for months at a time. The work was tough but he saw more of the world than anyone in East Germany had the right to expect. He spent the rest of his days telling maritime stories.

In three weeks, we’ll scatter my Opa's ashes in the Baltic Sea. Water, like fire, just resets everything.

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I could listen to words frolic out of an Irish mouth all day, the way they seem forever on the verge of some epic story. It's the lilt. All great tongues have it, that sing-song quality.

It's why Portuguese sounds sexier in Brazil, why Belgians speak the most tolerable Dutch. There’s this rhythmic rise and fall in speech, a kind of music to the words. There's melody. If the English pronounce, and Americans insist, then the Irish sing.

English can be spoken plenty ugly but you wouldn't know it from listening to the Irish. They produce flawless syllable after flawless syllable. It's a sublime accent, at once pleasing to the ear and unmistakable in character. Most countries have much less to show for centuries of Englishmen coming over and being dicks.

I can't speak to the Limerick accent's reputation in Ireland, but I’ve been taking it in big doses lately through the Blindboy Podcast. Blindboy's the alias of Limerick-born artist David Chambers. You may recognize him by the plastic bag he wears over his head. Otherwise, he's Irish as moss. Every week, up to a million listeners from around the world tune in to his craic.

For me, Blindboy's appeal is less in what he's talking about than in how he delivers it. In one episode, he spins a 57-minute yarn about a wasp that's been trapped on a plane. It's a masterclass in yarn-spinning, made all the more impressive for evoking my sympathy for one of earth's most irredeemable creatures.

Of course, only an Irish mouth could have spun it. Told by someone like me, in my flat and nasally Ontario English, forget it. You can't be waterboarding people’s ears like that. Imagine Avril Lavigne going, "So this prick orders his fucking Bulmers, pours it into his tiny little airplane plastic glass, and who shows up? The fucking wasp.” Utterly charmless.

In a more recent episode, Blindboy talks about petrichor, that after-rain scent people have been gushing about all over the place for some time now. I didn't care much for the subject but I played it anyway. Soon enough that sweet, melodious lilt was doing its thing, working its Hiberno charm. I could feel my right hand cupping for a Guinness. I was getting bousy. Beyond the aphrodisiac of the accent, though, I was gripped by the prose. It was clean and brilliant, polished to the hilt yet no less colloquial than what you'd hear at the pub.

Yarn as it may be, the Blindboy Podcast is, above all, a meticulous writing project. In the first 20 minutes of the petrichor episode, Blindboy segues from a German philosophy, to salmon spawning, to the sensory faculties – such as seeing heat and sniffing anuses – that shape how different species experience the world. What's impressive is how improvised it seems, how uncontrived. What is this narrative sorcery? How do I get it?

No doubt, the Irish have storytelling in their blood. In lieu of a transfusion, I decided to transcribe the episode, to study the craft behind the cadence. What was happening on a sentence level? Which techniques are at play? Reading it typed out revealed what I'd suspected: this was a multidisciplinary work of art. Absent the bewitching voice, there was simply great writing.

I don't care much for podcasts, and I'm not in the business of telling you to listen to this thing or that. What I do care about, though, is sharing great writing, particularly the kind that requires a little excavation—like, say, from a podcast.

Written below are the first 20 minutes of Blindboy's petrichor episode. It's littered with profanities, but in an Irish accent even they become music, like little grace notes. Pretend you're from Cork while you read it.

⛆

If you're wondering what that noise is, there's an absolute deluge outside my window. Very, very, very aggressive rain. The sky is silver. Fat rain droplets. Violent rain.

Can you hear that? The type of rain that, if you looked up into the sky, you might acquire an eye injury. Frightening rain. There's not much I can do about it. I've got a tin roof here in my office. If you've been listening to the podcast recently, you know I've been having a fucking nightmare with sounds. It's… now it's quiet. It's quieting down now.

That was phenomenal. That was phenomenal rain. That was retribution rain. There are seagulls outside my window, pissed off. Ever seen a seagull pissed off by rain? I have. I'm looking at one now. I'm a bit annoyed actually. I'm going to open the window to see if I can get the smell—the smell of petrichor. Hold on.

We're barebacking this week, lads. I didn't put on a limiter, I just opened a window. See, there's been a heatwave in Limerick. Oh, the wind is coming in. Yes, I can smell it. Yes.

I wanted to begin this week's podcast by… by… uh, fuck it, let's not hide anything. That was a magnificent torrent of rain that I just witnessed and recorded, and ye heard. I opened the window there. It's been very hot. It's been very hot for the past three days. It's been 30 degrees. We don't usually get 30 degrees here in Ireland.

If you're from a hot country, you're thinking, 30 degrees, who gives a fuck? We're not accustomed to this here in Ireland. We don't know what to do with ourselves. It's very distressing when we get 30-degree heat. We're not built for it in any way, shape, or form.

And I just opened my window there so I can get that smell. The smell called petrichor. It's a type of floral, oily smell that the earth releases after a dry spell, when you're suddenly hit with rain. It's like the earth is letting out a sigh. There's a sense of relief to this smell.

When you smell that oily petrichor after a deluge of rain, you've got empathy with the ground for a little bit. You just kinda know. It's the soil going: thank fuck, thank fuck. Because I was drying out there—thanks for that. And that's what that smell is.

I'm going to close the window now. I'm going to turn my gate back on now so we’ve got a little bit more silence. You'll notice the sound is clearer. The sky is suddenly blue outside. I fucking love a bit of rain in the summer, I do.

And now my office has been vandalized by the order of petrichor. The rain is returning. Now you can hear it. We'll welcome the rain in. We'll welcome the rain in this week.

I rushed to the microphone as soon as it began raining because I wanted to record, in real time, me smelling petrichor. I'm utterly fascinated by it. It's like doing a line of nature. It's pure and utter life. It's pure and utter existence. Vitality.

It's what I miss. Like, I was in San Francisco a couple of years ago for about a week and it was really hot, and then I went to Los Angeles and I was left with a thirst. Not a thirst for drinking—a thirst for breathing. The air in San Francisco and the air in Los Angeles is very poor. There's not a lot of trees.

After about three or four days in Los Angeles and San Francisco, there's an anxiety. There's an anxiety with every breath that I'm taking. Something is missing. I'm longing for something. And what I'm looking for is what I just experienced right there. A big fat line of nature.

That's what that smell is. Petrichor. That fresh, zesty, oily business. I'm trying to describe what that smell feels like. It feels like I'm back being a sperm. I'm a sperm and I headbutt the outer layer of the egg just before I fuse with it for fertilization. And that smell feels like the moment a sperm literally fuses with an egg. The spark, that little spark, that's what the smell of petrichor feels like when I do a big line of it like that.

By opening the window with that fat rain, I knew by the go of that fucking storm, I knew by the look of that storm, that it was going to give me a big dose of that. A big dose of that smell.

I'm only seven minutes into this podcast… ye heard that rain. That was the most powerful rain that I've seen so far in 2025. That's real. That's summer business, that's what that is.

And right now as I look out the window, the sky is blue, the rain is gone, and it's incredibly hot and sunny again. The sun is fucking splitting the place. And the rooftops—the rooftops are steaming like victorious horses. Blue wisps of steam shimmering in the sun.

And in another seven minutes, if rain doesn’t come again, which I don’t think it will, in another seven minutes the whole place will be bone dry. Fucking bone dry. As if that never happened.

And then straight after that you could have hailstones, gigantic hailstones, and you're freezing in a t-shirt.

Do you ever share a flat with a fucking lunatic? Do you ever share a flat with a lunatic, and you're there in the kitchen, and then they walk into the kitchen and they're slamming doors, they're banging away at the dishes, they're really fucking pissed off about something – fucking this, fuck that – and then they storm out of the room and you're thinking, Jesus Christ, they're pissed off, I wonder, Did I do something wrong And then they come back into the kitchen like two minutes later, all smiles, completely happy, zero explanation or acknowledgement of the behaviour you just witnessed two minutes previously. All happy, absolutely fine. And you don't even ask them why. You just move on with your day.

That's what the weather is like in Ireland. It's t-shirt weather now. It's very hot, very sunny, and very dry outside my window. I wouldn't have it any other way. I enjoy the drama of that, the fucking humour of it, the ridiculousness of it.

I'll take that over – I mean nothing against Spain – but like, it's just the same thing all the time. It's just lovely, perfect, sunny and dry all the time. I don't want that. I want my weather to feel like I'm in a houseshare with a lunatic. I want to be accused of stealing a battery out of the smoke alarm. I want the weather to come home from work, announce that they're a born-again Christian, and then never, ever mention it again. I want weather that makes up lies for no reason. I want a gust of wind that tells me that it's cousins with the singer Dermot Kennedy.

And petrichor is the reward—the reward for all that chaos. Petrichor forces you into the present moment. You can't get a bang of that and not stop and notice it, and then connect with the feeling of just being alive, being present.

Like, I know there's Irish people listening to this now when they're in Australia or somewhere—well, not Australia now because it's winter over in Australia now, so you have a nice little bit of rain. But I don't know. If I have Irish people – you might be listening from Spain, or you're listening from Italy – where you haven't had rain in a long, long time, and you're aching for that. You're aching for the freshness of Irish fucking petrichor.

What I adore about petrichor is, it's one of those smells that makes me ponder the very nature of reality itself and how we perceive reality.

There's an idea in philosophy called Umwelt. And it was coined by this German biologist – fucking Jakob Johann von Uexküll was his name, right – and he came up with this idea of Umwelt. I could be pronouncing that incorrectly because I've only ever seen it written down. I've never heard it. It might not be pronounced Umwelt at all. But that in itself is like an example of Umwelt.

So Umwelt is the idea that there is a physical reality. There is one physical reality. But different creatures experience reality differently because of their unique sensory experiences of reality.

What I mean by that is, dogs experience reality very differently to how you and I experience reality. A dog's experience of reality is determined very much by their sense of smell, which is so profoundly different to how you and I experience smell.

There's no real way for us to empathize and understand what it's like to be a dog—to experience life as a fucking dog. Dogs are trained to sniff out cancer, diabetes, epilepsy. What is it like to live in reality when you can smell disease?

Dogs utilise a thing called stereo sniffing. Now, we have that a little bit too. It's the use of the left and right nostril to determine the location of a smell. But dogs' ability to do this is unlike anything we could even imagine. And dogs can smell time.

We use dogs to track people who are missing, to follow scents, to do things that we can't do. A dog can reconstruct a person's journey based on different intensities of smells. They can read smells through time. Dogs use an incredibly complex form of storytelling with their noses.

My language—my language can’t even communicate this to you. The limitations of speech.

But a dog can't read a book, because I've got language. I'm a human. I live in a sea of fucking language. Very different. And I doubt you could explain to a dog—you can't even fucking talk to the cunts. How am I going to let a dog know what it's like to read, understand, or write a book? There's no way in. You just can't.

Would I get fully nude in front of the fireplace and start licking my testicles? Or screaming at the postman? Saying to the dog, "No, screaming at the postman, that's a bit like writing, but licking your testicles, that's like editing." No! Because dogs don't understand metaphor. Just forget about it. There's no way.

But similarly, I'm very limited in understanding the complex stereo sniffing that a dog is able to get up to. The canine practice of arse sniffing – where dogs insert their noses in another dog's arse – that must be profoundly important. If their sense of smell is so good and they have to go right in there, that must be very, very important stuff. I have no way of understanding that.

Now, dogs have a unique olfactory system and they have a thing called a vomeronasal organ, which is specifically for smelling arses and detecting information in pheromones. When a dog sniffs another dog's arse, they're getting the full biography of that dog. Where the dog has been, the dog's relationships. It's a biometric scan. It's a biography. It's a lore.

If I was nude and screaming at my postman, like a dog, and then I decided to run up to the postman and place my nose in his anus, that would be like me spending eight hours on his Facebook page, going through all his posts, clicking on all his friends and relatives, and farming a vast biography of this postman. Which might be a good way to explain Facebook to a dog.

What is reality like when smelling someone's arse is like spending eight hours on their Facebook profile? Language and empathy fail me. This is Umwelt. This is Umwelt. There's a shared reality, a concrete reality, but different creatures experience it very differently depending on their senses.

The rain is back. The rain is back. Let's open the window. I'm waiting for it. No, not this time, not this time. I only got the petrichor, the first bit of—wait. The first bit of... wait... not really. I have only the freshness of rain, which is beautiful, but not petrichor. Not this time. We got that 15–20 minutes ago with the first deluge, but not this one. Not this new bout of rain. I'm just getting freshness of rain.

Bees can see in ultraviolet. Bees have UV vision, right? Ultraviolet light. They can use it to detect nectar, see what flowers are the best ones to go into. A bee experiences reality very, very differently to me and you. They see ultraviolet light. I've no way to understand this, to empathize with it. I’m doing the best that I can using language. But again, I can't explain language to a fucking bee. This is Umwelt.

Um... snakes. Snakes see infrared. A completely different experience and perception of reality to me and you. Salmon. Salmon can use smell to sniff out the river that they were born in. Fucking miles away a salmon can sniff out its birth river.

I can't stick my nose into the air and smell where the maternity hospital was that I was born in. I can't sniff out my maternity hospital. But I can use language to tell you that I was born in the Limerick Maternity Hospital. And I can use those words and you can listen to it and you and I can have a shared idea of what the Limerick Maternity Hospital is. It's designed in a modernist style. Aphex Twin was born there too.

You see the salmon—the salmon is using its nose to sniff out its birth river, which is phenomenal. Like, holy fucking God, you mean there's a salmon on the other side of the world and it can smell the river it was born in because it needs to return there to spawn? But I've just used words and language to tell you where I was born, and I can use words and language to get back there if I want to. That's Umwelt.

All these different creatures existing within an ecosystem, but having completely different sensory experiences depending on what benefits their survival within that ecosystem. Bees need ultraviolet. They need ultraviolet to identify flowers. We need language and words and systems of communication for things like culture.

A really famous example is sharks can sniff out a drop of blood from several miles away. So if you just put a drop of blood into the sea, a shark will smell it miles away and will come and get you. That was popularized, I think, because of Jaws. I can't even imagine that. I can't imagine what it's like to smell under the sea, and to be able to smell blood from that far away. That is mad. What must that be like?

But here's the thing. That smell—petrichor. The oily wonder. The line of nature that I sniffed when I opened the window, that smell that we all know after it rains. A human being's sensitivity and ability to smell that is 10,000 times more powerful than a shark's ability to smell blood in the fucking water. And I'm not pulling that out of my hole. That's research that was published in the Journal of Nature Microbiology in 2020.

We human beings were, I won't say tormented by that smell, but that's the little spectrum of reality that we exist in. That's the Umwelt. We are freakishly, extraordinarily sensitive to that smell, the smell of petrichor. What's that about? Something about that smell is essential to our survival, the human animal.

Something about that smell is essential to our survival.

⛆

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This is a long interview, kept that way intentionally. I recommend reading with a receptive headspace, away from your phone. Save it for before bed. Send it to your Kindle (here's how). Print it out, and return to it as needed. Enjoy.

It took all of thirteen minutes to know I needed to ask some questions. I'd just finished reading The End of the Story, a micro-memoir in which the 45-year-old American writer opens up about his struggle with wanting. Wanting, you think—hardly a crisis. Actually, it's a terror. By definition, a person in want is restless, needy, and unfulfilled, like a mosquito. Being in such a state for too long breeds dissatisfaction; insatiability manifests. Soon enough, you're in the throes of a full-blown condition. I sent Rossi's piece to a friend. “Almost as if some other part of me had written it about myself,” he said. I thought the same.

Rossi was born in 1980 in Columbus, Ohio, a city whose demographics so perfectly mirror the country’s that fast food chains have long used it to market-test the next generation of culinary monstrosities. Hence its reputation as the most normal city in America. Today, Rossi lives in South Carolina, where he teaches creative writing to high schoolers. His credentials are formidable. He’s published two novels, an award-winning novella, and dozens of short stories. He has bylines in all the right magazines: Granta, The Missouri Review. Two of his short stories, Unmoving Like a Mighty River Stilled and The Buddhist, have won the Pushcart and O. Henry prizes, respectively. Nevertheless, Rossi remains largely unknown. “Painful at first, but then nothing to worry about,” he says, about his books eluding readership. He once believed there was somewhere to go with all this – with writing, with life – but he's since let that go.

The End of the Story, the piece that introduced me to Rossi, charts his path to non-attachment. It picks up in 2008. Rossi's in his mid-20s, teaching literature at a university and beginning the writerly life. But what for? He couldn't see how his work functioned any differently from the fodder produced by the stimuli-industrial complex—a Big Mac, say, or the latest Marvel release. He writes:

I disliked my own desire to be constantly entertained, and I disliked the way our culture preyed on this desire, making me desire more. I disliked that literature was tied into this. But what was below it? The desire for more desire? My wanting seemed the source of everything I did, and within literature I saw only more vain wanting, vain striving to be entertained, as well as thoroughly approved of, albeit in some higher or more transcendent form.

Rossi’s struggle over the point of literature was compounded by a deeper rift with reality itself. All he saw was stuff: entertainment, distractions, superficiality. Looking inward, he observed merely “another thing in a world of things.” Arrogance and cowardice kept him on the sidelines of the burgeoning online literary scene, and he grew increasingly isolated outside of his relationship. Depression and ennui set in—“just repetitive days spent looking at my email wondering when something might occur.” His alcohol, weed, and porn use worsened. Thoughts, doubts, desires, repeat. Going into nature solved little. On a hike, he couldn't see the mountain for the dead stone, nor the idyllic town below as anything but Kinkadian (“overly, irritatingly quaint”). The bigger picture eluded him, while any attempt to find his voice only intensified the screaming in his skull. He longed for stillness.

Then it came. In early 2010, Rossi got into soccer again after 20 years. He trained obsessively. The more he played and worked out, the less he wrestled with his sense of self. The pull of the literary world vanished. So did the matter of being a so-called ‘writer’. Physicality: this was real. More real than identity, anyway, which he came to see as illusory. Around the same time, Rossi began to meditate, guided by a Canadian Buddhist monk on YouTube. He says he was able to get into it immediately—five minutes, then 10, 15, 25, 35…up to an hour. I'd never heard such a thing. Either the monk taught brilliantly or Rossi had a preternatural ability to still his mind.

By practicing meditation, Rossi made a breakthrough in his writing. Rigorously observing his thoughts led him to develop a style that mirrors the way consciousness constructs reality. Though he warns his prose can be demanding, I find it remarkably lucid. His sentences unfold just as thoughts do, full of the doubts, judgments and plays of ego that inform much of our everyday thinking. There's a lot of Siddhartha in there, drawing the reader into the ebb and flow of inner life.

In one story, the protagonist, Blake, falls into a mental spiral over the answering machine message on his office phone. He'd recorded it four years ago to inform clients that if he wasn't picking up, he was out scaling cliffs or running rapids. At the time it seemed like a benevolent heads up. But looking back, he sees it as a calculated move to one-up the caller by flaunting his adventurous life. Recognizing this, he finds himself diminished—“less real, less authentic.” Not that re-recording the message, which he'd thought about over the past year, would have solved anything. He goes on to fixate on how a new, more corporate message might itself become a statement, inviting clients, depending on what they already knew of him, to draw fresh conclusions about who he was. It's an outstanding stream of self-consciousness, 607 words in total, and striking to see laid out over two heavy blocks of text. It gives an impression of the weight of these intrusions on our brain. Almost makes you pity our species for having developed such a mighty talent for self-regard.

All of which brings me back to why I reached out to Rossi. Here was someone who wrestled with many of the same intrusive thoughts and impulses as I did. Here, too, was a path toward managing them, expressed, for the first time, in a way I could grasp. Through my own fits and starts, I know meditation can be a difficult practice to absorb. If that's familiar to you, Rossi's writing might serve as a more light-handed gateway to concepts like non-attachment and no-self. Better yet, start here…

You call your writing style ‘representational consciousness’. Can you explain it? Why do you think it works best for conveying experience and meaning?

The modernists were my very early influences. Early exposure to certain styles really impacts a young writer, and those writers impacted me. Eventually, I came to zen practice, and I began to see the discursive nature of thinking that was layered on top of reality. But equally, I began to see that everything in my “normal” experience was actually my mind.

So, on a simple level, representational consciousness points to two things. One is the idea that you can only “represent” consciousness on the page, and I’m trying to get a reader to enter into that representation of consciousness (rather than entering into a more typical story). The other is that representational consciousness means that the world, as both a person and a character experiences it, is a mere representation. There’s an immediate tension there: what is real? The world or my mind? Both? Neither? My mind, like all minds, constructs a version of the world for me to interact with. It constructs a story of self.

From a Buddhist point of view, the main confusion is that we fail to recognize this construction. We take what we see and experience for granted and believe it’s “real” rather than a construction, rather than a sort of “story.” That representation or story is both true and not true. And so the term “representational consciousness” has to do with both the process of creating a character (I can only represent a character’s consciousness through language) and also with the nature of reality itself, which is that all people have “representations” of reality in their minds, which they then mistake for reality itself. I’m trying to use a style of writing that mimics the way our consciousness works to create our world, and our self, in order to expose it, so to speak.

Representational consciousness, as a prose style, is meant to indicate to the reader that, in some way, a mind works in a particular way – it constantly forms a story of itself, for instance, in order to feel real, stable – and also that this mind is its own world, its own universe. At the same time, that universe, that world, that mind, can be punctured though, if the mind is willing to sort of exhaust itself in a struggle. That struggle can be the attempt to produce a viable story. More than anything, I’m after that puncturing of the story. Unfortunately, that puncturing is the very part that eludes language.

In Buddhism, there's this idea of non-attachment and transcending the self, which is very different from the Western push to self-actualize. But to someone not immersed in the practice, it can look like emotional withdrawal or even moral disengagement, similar to the "protect your energy" mindset common in modern individualist culture.

Is that a misreading? Or is that tension – between inner peace and outer responsibility – something that’s addressed within the tradition?

This is a complex and really good question. I’ll do my best, and for those reading, I’m very sorry, this answer is long. I promise the ones after will be more succinct.

Editorial note: I've divided Rossi's answer into three parts.

I. The Self

I hear you: Buddhism can look distant, cold, and possibly even nihilistic. In order to answer your question about non-attachment, it might be helpful for readers to have a grounding in what Buddhism is really saying about existence. What it views as the basic facts, and how sometimes those facts get confused. Sometimes this is just down to bad translation.

For instance, the first noble truth is often translated as “life is suffering,” but “dukkha,” the term translated as “suffering,” might be better translated as “dissatisfaction.” So, life is dissatisfying. And then the next noble truth is the cause of dissatisfaction. The cause is often translated as “desire,” but attachment, clinging, or craving are equally good translations. Most importantly, though, it’s where the desire comes from that is really the problem. The self. Identity. In a better or more contemporary translation, the first two noble truths, rather than being life is suffering, which is caused by desire turns into life is unsatisfying because the self is constantly craving stuff and never becomes fully satisfied.

What Zen Buddhism is really asking the practitioner to do at this point is look at this self. In the zen tradition, [Japanese Zen master] Dogen says, “To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.” So the study begins there. What is this self that is always wanting, always craving, always desiring, always wishing and hoping for things to be better or different? Always, essentially, calculating for a way to get itself in a better position? What is the deal with that self? What I began to see is that the hinge is the self. It's the whole crux of the problem. And what Buddhism goes on to say is that the self and identity are illusions. (forget the literary cliche “you can never truly know another person”; Buddhism says there’s no other person to know on a fundamental level, that there’s only another person to be experienced. Knowing the self is almost beside the point in Buddhism).

This is why Buddhists practice non-attachment—because attachment, which emanates from and in turn reifies a sense of self, causes pain. We attempt to reify or validate that self or ego (if you prefer that term) over and over and over by craving and wanting and trying to get and seeking approval, and it leads to confusion and dissatisfaction because the self can never be satisfied. The self is an engine, so to speak, of wanting. Wanting is how the self constructs itself.

II. Non-Attachment

Okay, I’ve brought us to a weird place: the self is an illusion. As language, it’s like, yeah, sure, identity is a social construction, we’re formed by our experiences, etc, etc. But Buddhism is saying something much, much deeper than that. It’s too much to get into for this, so I’ll just quietly move on to a more specific answer about non-attachment.

As you said in your question, the whole notion of non-attachment appears to be at odds with ideas like “self-actualization.” In the Buddhist context, non-attachment is really about not clinging to certain mind or emotional states. It could also be not clinging to certain things, objects, or people. Not clinging to ideas. Even Buddhist ideas. But what I have found is that Buddhism has nothing to do with not experiencing things. In fact, Buddhism might be said to be the practice of fully experiencing things for the first time. Many teachers have said that to practice Buddhism is to become fully human, or what zen calls “a true person of no rank.”

“The self is an engine, so to speak, of wanting. Wanting is how the self constructs itself.”

For instance, say a person experiences joy at the birth of their baby girl (like I did). In Buddhism, that’s wonderful. I mean, there are way more emotions mixed up in that experience in reality. Almost nothing is cleanly emotional like that, but okay, just for sake of argument, let’s say, baby girl born, person experiences joy. Buddhism has no problem with this. The problem comes not in the form of the emotion, but in the attachment to the emotion, which reifies a sense of self. So, Buddhism says don’t cling to the emotion. Don’t hold on to it.

That reminds me of this note I saw…

There are a couple reasons why: one, that joy is going to change anyway (impermanence is a fact of reality). The joy is going to go away, so trying to hold the joy is impossible from the beginning. And two, holding on creates a negative, the sense that you’ll lose the joy. When we try to hold the joy, we don’t actually experience the joy fully. We instead experience the joy mixed with the fear of loss. In this way, due to attachment, hidden within the positive or pleasurable emotion (joy) is its loss and therefore pain (sadness at joy going away), which reinforces the need to cling or be attached, to hold on to what we want or see as good.

So, the reason non-attachment is important is because nothing stays as it is. For me personally, this has meant coming to terms with impermanence, coming to terms with the fact that life is incredibly sad. Actually allowing that sadness to be there. The goal isn’t to be detached and not experience emotions. Non-attachment is actually to experience emotions and life fully but not holding on nor pushing away anything (pushing things away is another form of craving, of attaching to or seeking and trying to hold something that is not the negative emotion/experience).

What attachment is, in a very basic way, is a controlling mindset. Almost everyone lives like this. Attempting to control reality, make it as stable as possible, in order to not really experience impermanence, nor directly experience ourselves. That attempt at control is an aggressive position. It’s like manhandling reality, trying to make reality and oneself be a certain way. On the other hand, letting go, not being attached, is to experience all things just as they are: joy is joy; sadness is sadness; compassion is compassion; anger is anger; tea is tea; food is food, and so on. Not adding anything extra to feelings and experiences. But no one does that. We all add the extra stuff. We attach to everything, see it as ours, add the story of our self, and thus, our emotions go up and down. They spin, they’re confused, and we don’t experience them clearly because we’re always looking for the next thing or trying to hold on to the current thing. That is samsara. Buddhism asks the practitioner to investigate whether that spinning is necessary or not. Not whether it is good or bad. Just whether it is a necessary part of the whole process.

The strange thing here is that as a practitioner becomes more and more aligned with non-attachment, they actually suffer more, they feel more sadness, they feel more dissatisfaction. This was certainly true for me. The world started getting in. Whereas the self and all its selfish concern kept the door closed by trying to hold good emotions and get rid of bad emotions, hold good experiences and avoid bad, with a general dissatisfaction kind of humming behind lived life mixed with a general feeling of meaninglessness behind that. But, for me, through less attachment, that filter of self began to open. Sadness was there. It’s the sadness of a confused world. That sadness in Buddhism, when experienced deeply, causes compassion to arise. The practitioner sees that it’s not their life that is important, but all the other lives out there, who need help, who are attached to self, who are mistakenly perceiving themselves as centrally real. The practitioner doesn’t try to convert anyone, doesn’t preach Buddhism, but takes action—not unlike your story about the permaculture farm.

My action is writing stories about it that I hope are impactful enough to make people curious. As the self begins to fall away, and a real experience of the suffering of the world begins to occur, the practitioner begins to sense that there’s another way to be in the world altogether, and that other way has to do with, in some sense, becoming intimate with reality. Eventually, over time, once one becomes truly intimate with reality, there’s no more suffering, there’s no more self, though individual action takes place. It’s sometimes said that the Buddha woke up to personlessness.

III. Self-Actualization

All of which leads me to self-actualization. I don’t think Zen Buddhism has a problem with that, at least not in theory. Let’s say you want to become a great artist. You have to strive in some way to become that. You have to actualize that “self.” The trick here, at least from a zen point of view, is to do that without being attached to results or attached to self. In other words, you strive and make a disciplined effort, but if you’re attached to results, you suffer, you’re dissatisfied. If you’re attached to the idea “great artist,” that’s not going to go well because it’s a further reification of self. Or if you’re attached to your striving, that’s a problem. Zen Buddhism, like Taoism, says, “do your work, then step back.” Striving, making an effort, becoming good at something, Zen Buddhism has no problem with any of that, and there are plenty of wonderful zen poets and painters (or martial artists). But the idea is to do the work and step back, not make it about the self. I struggled with that for years, and wrote about it for Cluny Journal. In America, the idea of “stepping back” seems almost insane, but from the Buddhist point of view, fame and celebrity are insane. Fame is a shrine to an illusion.

As to the part of the question about inner and outer responsibility, Zen says there’s really no such thing as an inner world and an outer world. There only seems to be that distinction. So, in zen, we treat ourselves with a sense of discipline, effort, and also gentleness, and this gentleness extends out to all other people. The meditative realm creates a sense of openness and spaciousness, whereas a strong sense of self creates a small landscape, where all its wants and desires and hopes and fears is the world. This can be very imposing and even powerful (again, we celebrate this in American culture), but it remains incredibly small, limited. The meditative realm allows all that to fall away. The meditative realm reveals that we’ve layered a world of self on top of the actual world. When that self-world begins to fall away, a sense of openness appears, a sense that life is just happening, unlimitedly, that nothing could ever be wrong.

“Through less attachment, that filter of self began to open. Sadness was there. It’s the sadness of a confused world. That sadness in Buddhism, when experienced deeply, causes compassion to arise.”

I’ve experienced this. It’s almost as though a person, for the first time, experiences cosmic energy simply at play, transforming, changing forms. That energy is awake, alive, radiant, unconfused, without self. In Zen, this has to be experienced. Talking about it doesn’t do anything. Writing about it here is a map, but it’s an inaccurate map simply because everyone's lived experience is unique.

Anyway, when this opening occurs, we can really meet the world and others directly. It’s not that we’re not attached and therefore cold; it’s the opposite. It’s that we’re unattached to our own agendas, and therefore open and receptive and warm. Real non-attachment means being unattached to one’s own agendas, schemes, and desires, and welcoming in life. Or, as Dogen says in Genjokoan, “Conveying oneself toward all things to carry out practice-enlightenment is delusion. All things coming and carrying out practice-enlightenment through the self is realization. Those who greatly realize delusion are Buddhas. Those who are greatly deluded within realization are living beings.”

Realizing my own delusions means allowing all things to carry out enlightenment through me. I don’t do anything, I don’t become awake or enlightened or even try to. I only realize my delusions, over and over. Realizing delusion is un-attaching from the self. Un-attaching from the self is letting all things carry out enlightenment through me. Then, it’s as Dogen says: “To forget the self is to be verified by the myriad things. To be verified by the myriad things is to let the body and mind of the self and the body and mind of others drop off. There is a trace of realization that cannot be grasped. We endlessly express this ungraspable trace of realization.”

This doesn’t mean that a Buddhist can’t want an ice cream cone or want to become a great composer or even desire sex or something. It just means that one is unattached to the desire, so that if the ice cream cone doesn’t happen, one isn’t bummed, or if one’s partner isn’t up for sex, then one isn’t annoyed. This is because you don’t see the desire as yourself. It’s just a cloud. And that cloud, like all our thoughts, actions, and speech, endlessly expresses the ungraspable trace of realization.

That’s a long, conceptual answer, and there are a million dangers and pitfalls that I haven’t discussed, but there it is. Where I am is: I try to have an attitude of being up for anything, being open to anything, accepting things as they come, but when I’m cut off in traffic on the freeway, some days it might not bother me, and some days I get annoyed, ya know. Then I meditate later on and am like, I can’t believe I made a weird face at the person in that car that cut me off in traffic. Generally speaking, though, I’m a much calmer, less anxious person than I was 10 or 15 years ago.

I should note: Zen isn’t interested in conceptual answers about reality, like the one I’ve just given. But we also have to talk about it, so it’s a paradox.

I’d love to ask a question directed to you. From some of your own writing, I can see you’re engaged, either directly through things you’ve written, or by way of translation, with some of the most pressing issues of the day. I noticed a few pieces regarding climate change, and one in particular, about sustainable tourism, and eventually about your time spent working on a permaculture farm. This was a kind of antidote to what you called “leisure ennui.” My question is: do you see non-attachment occurring here, in this experience?

Me: Doing the permaculture work in South Africa, the extreme heat and intense labor left little room for anything but the most immediate thoughts and feelings—there’s that stinging in my eyes again; remember, sucking the venom out will only kill us both; fucking ants, God damn these ants, etc. There was very little beyond the moment to attach myself to, no one around to perceive me. I was a person picking things up and putting them down again, directing water to where it was most needed, plucking and pulling and edibles from their respective stems and soils.

The constructed world, so to speak, disappeared. I liaised between various natural systems. That was my identity. I was a liaison, devoid of rank, in service to something so much bigger, so much more essential, than myself. I mean, who are we, really, in the kingdom of living things? Everything and nothing, you know? I really felt that. I felt it in a way I can't explain, which I think suggests some sort of non-attachment occurred.

It was only when I reflected on the experience after, telling people and writing about it, that the attachments re-surfaced. Should something so “real” be expressed through such aesthetic language and images? Will permaculture experts consider me a fraud? Who am I to think I'm being read by permaculture experts? Even telling you this now, I'm thinking, was non-attachment only possible because I knew this experience would be temporary? Does it matter? The self-world fell away in the present. Isn't that what it's about?

As I understand it, you’re only truly responsible for what you intend. How do you understand or work with intention in your own life? Do you consider the karmic impact of most of your choices?

I think it would be nice to be responsible only for what we intend, but I don’t think that’s actually the case. I think we can intend something very good, and often that doesn’t pan out how we imagined. We might intend to help someone, and instead of helping them, we might confuse them further or annoy them. There are consequences, or karma, for that, and we have to deal with it. That being said, having good intentions is important, necessary. It at least gets us going in a decent direction. But life is life: chaotic, messy, confusing, and sometimes even the best intentions don’t see us through, and even good intentions can be a confusing map. From a meditative point of view, right intention arises directly on the spot.

I do consider karmic impact, definitely, but not on a global scale or anything. Just right down in my life with the people I live and relate with. I try my best to eat responsibly, buy responsibly produced things, live sustainably, etc. But we live in a system of harm. I didn’t create that system. Neither did you. And yet I have to weirdly be an agent within it. I’m typing on a computer that is using materials mined from poorer countries, probably using exploitive labor practices. Yet here I am, typing away. Best to focus on the immediate situation, the other people around me, the other life around me. That's where my intentions can make the most difference.

In sum, I do the best I can with my own intentions, but I also try to cultivate a sense of openness toward all situations. Openness is an intention of a certain kind, and it really invites in the most possibilities. Sometimes my own intentions can begin to look a bit too much like an agenda, and then it’s my self getting in the way again. My feeling here is that too many rules, intentions, or forethought is restrictive – I mean, I do it all the time, but I try not to – because then all these expectations get set up, and often, expectations don’t get fulfilled. So, for me, intentions should arise immediately, right on the spot, within the situation itself. This is trusting what Trungpa called our own basic sanity, our basic goodness. I’m curious about you. How do you think about intention?

Me: More retroactively, unfortunately. Obviously, I try to make decent decisions in the moment. I try to consider how my actions affect others. I try to act in ways that minimize unnecessary harm. I try to stay aware of the ripple effects of my choices. But things are unpredictable, and when my actions go awry, I tend to soothe myself with the righteousness of my intent. This is bad because righteousness gets stronger over time, I feel, which introduces an element of delusion. Instead of my present self taking responsibility for the course of things, there's a past self saying, Aren't you proud I tried to do the right thing? I don't think that's helpful to anyone, though delusion sure can soothe.

Someone wrote this on the r/Buddhism subreddit: Your decisions shape the quality of your life. In many ways, your life reflects the choices you make. No one else is responsible for your life but you. This perspective appears to challenge many popular narratives today.

The implication is that we have far more control over our feelings and minds than we often admit, and that our past actions and identifications may come under scrutiny as a result. Is shame a useful emotion in Buddhism like it is in Catholicism?

Oh, interesting. Yes, I’d say we have total control over our minds and emotions, but you’re right, we don’t experience it that way. Especially with emotions. They almost seem to come from outside us and then we have to deal with them. Having control of one’s mind, though, is very tricky. Repressing isn’t control, but also following every impulse isn’t control either. Even ‘control’ is a tricky word. It’s more about flow, letting things flow through, accepting them, not trying to control. In not trying to control, one gains some control. In allowing the mind to just do what it does, it calms down, and there’s a way to experience thought and emotion with clarity, without being overwhelmed or confused by these things. That really is what meditation practice is: reining in the mind, taming it, by allowing it to be just as it is. Then all emotions and mind states become opportunities for insight.

I think when we have a thought we don’t like, we go, “Oh no, that thought’s bad, get rid of it,” but that just gives the thought more power, because we reify its existence as being bad. At the same time, indulging in it is just as foolish. Let’s say I’ve been getting frustrated too often and maybe my wife has pointed that out. When the next frustration comes up, I can easily go, “Oh no, frustrated again, that sucks, get rid of that, why I am doing that?” But all that does is concretize the frustration further. Now I’ve identified with the frustration, and now I’m frustrated about the frustration. Instead of just seeing it clearly, letting it be there, and letting it go away. Problem is, we’d often rather not do that. The frustration seems to be ours, seems to who we are in that moment, so if we don’t repress it, we follow it, indulge it, and we often say, ‘This is real because it’s what I’m feeling, and I need to speak my truth’, which only further entrenches us.

Shame is useful because it points at something else. Guilt is useful. Anger is useful. All mind states and emotional states are opportunities to see more clearly, to see something being pointed out. Shame might be indicating that a person feels unworthy. Unworthy of love or existence. Unworthy of outside validation. So messed up as to be unworthy of other people’s time and consideration. I’ve certainly experienced that. But beneath the shame is something else. Shame usually indicates that we understand we’ve made some mistake; it indicates that we understand that something in our thought or action is out of alignment with reality; it might indicate that we feel impure or broken. In this way, shame points us back toward reality itself.

In Buddhism, reality is the following: all conditioned/assembled things are impermanent, all conditioned/assembled things are unsatisfying, all conditioned/assembled things are without self (those are the three characteristics of reality that we don’t like to look at). Additionally, there is that which is unassembled and unconditioned, which is the nature of everything, that is fundamentally pure, luminous, and perfect. Shame is often pointing us back to this original, primordial perfection that we can never not be, that we always are. Shame is actually a reminder of the inherent purity of all life, beyond concepts. Anger, on the other hand, is pointing back toward compassion or generosity, usually.

In your short story The Buddhist, we meet Sean, a Canadian monk who’s let go of almost everything—his violent upbringing, his home country, Western materialism, even his relationship to physical pain. During a conversation with his student Elise, he finds himself noticing her beauty. He comments on how her face lights up when she talks, and he imagines what she might look like in bed. These thoughts seem to slip through no matter how committed he is to detachment.

Do you think sexual desire is the hardest thing to let go of, even for someone who’s given up so much? Which wants do you find most difficult to resist?

I think what’s happening with Sean there is that he is playing too much at being a Buddhist. He’s attempting to let those thoughts go, but he’s really judging himself a little bit for having them. So, he’s not really accepting that a human mind just does this, has sexual thoughts sometimes. Rather than being detached, or non-attached, though he’s working at it, he’s actually attempting to repress the thoughts. Of course, I based this on myself. I understood this about myself. You can see here how a rigid intention can become a trap: A spiritual person should be like this, should only have sexual thoughts for my direct partner and then only pure thoughts for everyone else in existence. Thinking like that is a total trap. It’s a trap because sexuality itself isn’t bad. But we create scenarios in which it can be, or we cling to it in order to reify the self. All that does is cause confusion. But just letting those thoughts exist, we begin to see that they’re no big deal, and they go on their own. Easier said than done, but that’s the idea.

But yes, sexuality itself can be extremely potent and difficult to work with. It’s hard to let go. Sex is so cosmically validating! The emotional component coupled with the physical component is powerful. But the question here is very tricky. Letting go can often disguise repression. It’s really about getting to know one’s mind and learning to be very accepting of whatever goes on in there. Making friends with those thoughts, emotions. Not being intimidated by them. Sean is very much intimidated by these thoughts, really thinking he needs to let them go, controlling too much. I’ve written a character here who maybe understands a good bit about Buddhist philosophy but doesn’t understand it deeply yet.

“Shame is useful because it points at something else. Guilt is useful. Anger is useful. All mind states and emotional states are opportunities to see more clearly.”

Robert Aitken, a great zen teacher, has a quote that goes something like this: “The things of this world are not drugs in and of themselves; we make them drugs by our use of them.” I think we can turn just about anything into a drug or addiction. Actual drugs, alcohol, sure, but also food, TV, material items, sex, power, social media, anything. Those I mentioned are all difficult ones. Online life will increasingly take over the traditional addictions of alcohol, drugs, and sex. But I don’t really resist any wants. The ones that come up for me are typical. For instance, even though I don’t really like drinking, I crave a beer about every night. I drank or smoked almost every day of college, so I think it’s just encoded now. But I pretty much never have a drink. Not because I’m sober, and not because I’m resisting it, but because I just don’t like how it makes me feel anymore. But then friends will come over or whatever and I’m very happy to have a few drinks, and inevitably I’ll drink too much, and it’ll be really nice, but I’ll feel like garbage the next day, and not drink for the next couple months. It’s like that now. I’m older.

As for sex, it’s the exact same. Just kidding. With sex I feel now I can watch the desire arise and watch it flame out. Zazen [meditation] has taught me that’s just what happens. But I’d also say I’m not a monk or something. If I want a beer, I have a beer. If we treat things like drugs, they will be drugs; if we act like we’re not in control of our minds, then we’re not. The opposite is also true, and if we kind of abide in impermanence, not act from a selfish position, etc., we can enjoy most things in a wholesome way. Most importantly, if we stop turning things into drugs, reality totally opens up. New possibilities, freshness, curiosity everywhere.

In 2009, during the down period of your life, you got sick for a week—fever, hallucinations, thermal chaos. Here’s what you wrote about the morning you started to recover:

I ate chicken noodle soup from a can. It tasted better than anything I’d ever eaten … I saw the sunrise for the first time in what felt like forever, cresting over Buffalo Mountain. I felt wiped clean, empty, personless. The sunrise was beautiful. I was grateful for it. The sun’s rays felt as though they were prying open long-closed parts of my heart. I wrote a story that began, ‘If I lived in a hut, a lot of my problems would be solved.” The feeling of personlessness, identitylessness, lasted the day. People seemed friendlier. I felt freed from something, but by the next day I was back, able again to see nothing but myself.

I went through something similar. A bowl of phở from a bus stop in Hanoi had me laid up near-dead for four days. I wrote:

I emerged from my tomb with a sort of post-dissociative clarity, the kind you get after meditating or running or horse drugs. It was like I had just come into existence, living each moment as if it were my first. The buttery evening light over the rice fields, the highly edible smell of the air, the caress of a breeze—every impression made on an organ of sense produced an agreeable shift in my mood. My awe was so complete it was indistinguishable from air. But no sooner had things awed than they’d become awful.

Did we feel light and free because illness had, perhaps for the first time, put us in an extended state of not being able to think or want?

Yes, it had something to do with not thinking or wanting, I agree. How I’d describe it is that your normal reference point was wiped away for a moment. Your self or ego had dissolved. I think most people believe (from ridiculous media they’ve consumed about it) that when they experience a moment of self falling away or egolessness, they’ll be transported to the middle of the universe or the earth will fall away and they’ll be floating in black space, but that’s not really what happens. I mean, it can happen on psychedelics, and it’s pretty interesting, and there are some extreme things I’ve experienced during sesshins (long zen meditation retreats). But ego can fall away in many ways. I think of Joshu, when he wakes up, what he says is, “Oh, that’s what it is—but it was there all along.”

So it’s not like your individuality goes up in smoke and you’re a pinprick of light in the center of the universe (such a rather selfish image, really). It’s that your reference point has changed. The normal reference point is the small, collapsed self. When that structure broke down – and illness can do it – we got a glimpse of what life could be like if not attached to the self. Zen calls this “ordinary mind.” And that phrase is trying to point us back to the idea that the big cosmic notion that you’ll wake up and enlightenment will be this gleaming thing where the supernova of your real being finally explodes into action is nonsense. Ordinary mind is another way of saying primordial mind. But it’s not the mind of the self either. It’s not the mind we experience in day-to-day life. It’s way beyond all that, but Zen also calls it ordinary because we’re never without it.

After your immersion in Zen Buddhism, you wrote that your wish to live in a mountain hut had been fulfilled, but that the hut was metaphorical—“for the first time, my problems were not really mine, they were constructions of the mind, of the self.” Is solitude a useful tool for transformation, or just another fantasy of control? I'm reminded of the idiom, Wherever you go, there you are.

For me, solitude is definitely helpful. To practice zazen, or writing, one needs a lot of alone time. You have to be willing to work with your mind. Only being alone can facilitate that. That being said, being alone has to be balanced with being with others. I spend a lot of time alone (even though I’m part of a family), but I also like being with other people, probably in a more small-scale way than other people. I don’t like crowds, for instance.

I can easily see how “solitude” could be turned into a fantasy, or that it could be used as a mechanism for control. But to practice zen, being alone – to some degree, anyway – is necessary. Most people have no idea how to handle being alone, nor how to handle the boredom of being alone. And boredom, especially in our culture, is seen as an enemy, the worst thing that can possibly happen during a normal day (we like leisure but hate boredom).

“If we stop turning things into drugs, reality totally opens up. New possibilities, freshness, curiosity everywhere.”

When someone says a meeting is boring (and they often are), what they usually mean is they want to be somewhere else, doing something else. But there’s actually a way to be bored and alone that is totally refreshing. Trungpa calls this “cool boredom.” He says it’s the boredom of the mountain stream, moving along lazily. My own thought is that if we just alter our attention and awareness, we can take something that is seemingly boring, like being alone, and see what’s really going on there.

What’s something you read that changed you immediately?

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill. Realizing Genjokoan by Shohaku Okumura. The Blue Cliff Record. A Portrait of the Artist. The Waves. Crime and Punishment. So many others.

All art changes a person in some way, even if you don’t notice it. All media and experiences do, too. But those were all impactful when I was younger.

Recently, so many: Dag Solstad, Tao Lin, Yuko Tsuhima, August Lamm, Jo Hamya, Daisy Hildyard, ARX-Han, JL Carr, Caleb Klaces, Jordan Castro.

You said playing soccer leaves you “feeling as though my mind had dissolved in my skin, just a body moving through the world, thoughtless and happy.” The other day, during a break in play, I felt exactly that, just perfectly at peace and grateful, which I guess is a thought, but still: it's so great to just be a body, isn't it?

Oh yeah, I completely agree. I love being a body and getting out of my head. I love playing sports, and I love sitting still in meditation—both are very physical things. I’m up for just about any physical thing, and while I’m a writer and a teacher, physicality is hugely important to me. It’s sort of why I don’t have social media. It’s just a waste of opportunities to be physical and out in the world.

Cate Hall says “much of life, and increasingly so, is a battle against superstimuli encroaching on your mental autonomy.” Do more sophisticated mechanisms of distraction require constant re-fortification?

Probably yes. But the best thing to do has been and remains to just turn screens off and go outside and be a body.

Most of us want to break free from constant, restless thinking. Many have tried meditation but stumbled early on. What would you say to encourage them to keep going? What small signs of progress can beginners look for that prove their effort is paying off?

If you’re just starting out, I would say go for a long walk or a long run, and then, at the very end of the walk or run, lay down, and just breathe. Just let yourself stop after a long walk or run and pay attention. You’ll feel the energy of the walk or run calming down. That is meditation. You’ll get a sense of how the body and mind slow down. It might look really weird if you have a roommate or a partner, so maybe let them know what you’re doing. Don’t do this in public. You may confuse people. Or, go ahead and confuse people.

“The best thing to do has been and remains to just turn screens off and go outside and be a body.”

On the other hand, if you just “start meditating,” that can be very tough. It’s much, much harder to notice how the body settles, and how the mind settles in turn. Instead, you’re sitting there wondering, “Am I doing this right, am I really following my breath.” All that. But if you start with intense activity, and then really stop and pay attention to that stopping, you’ll get a clearer idea of what happens naturally in meditation simply because the change from action to rest is more pronounced. I’d do something like that, then try to begin a formal meditation practice afterward. Start with 5 or 10 minutes and just relax. In-breath, attention, out-breath, relax. Attention, relax, over and over.

A small sign you can look for is feeling like things don’t get to you as much. You might notice that you’re sort of okay if something doesn’t quite go your way. That’s a great sign. This isn’t apathy. It’s becoming okay with how things are.

Another small sign is that you feel like you can focus a little longer. Meditation naturally develops concentration.

Another small sign is that you get annoyed when you find yourself overthinking something. That annoyance is sort of reminding you that there’s another option for your being.

Another one is a sense of humor about the absurdity of things. You might notice social situations are really bizarre. Having a sense of humor about that is important.

But: don’t look for those signs.

If you’re meditating and enjoy meditating, but are a little stuck, don’t know where to go next, I recommend finding a good teacher. A good teacher is someone who acts as a guide. Who isn’t there to impress you or make you feel like you don’t get it. But just someone who can share their own experience and give you an idea of what to do next.

I can't help but feel that concepts like progress or failure simply dissolve in a state of isness, where there's only raw experience and no interpretation. Isn’t there something a little unsettling about that?

Yes, definitely! Why do you think that is? I’m curious about your point of view on this. My own take here is that it’s unsettling because it reveals that our sense of self is not really solid or permanent, and that there is something else, much, much bigger than the small self that is endlessly expressing itself. It’s like stepping into the living void, and when you do that, your little ego-point of reference is decimated, no longer in control, but you’re also interrelatedly still there.

Me: I can only answer this from the perspective of someone with a strong sense of self (derogatory). I guess what unsettles me is that progress, failure, achievement, etc. are key indicators around which we've built our world and our selves, and without them, I'd lose my sense of orientation. Of course, I know that life is much more than a tally of wins and losses. And I would love to just be there more often, there being a place where the ego's points of reference are decimated. I'm just afraid I'd become inert and one-dimensional, like a toilet brush. Short-lived periods of action, otherwise unceasing passivity.

You’ve said that the less we experience the world through our wanting, the more of it we actually see, and that this is essential for writing. How do you bring that into your teaching? Can your students actually internalize and apply this perspective?

I try to talk to them about why they want to write. They’re often very aware of the contradiction between creation for creation’s sake and the need for approval. I tell them to investigate that. To make it part of their writing. The way out of wanting so much is to explore it, not be controlled by it, and be honest about it. Most of them really understand that in an intuitive way, and I try to only point them in a certain direction without telling them too much. It has to be personally realized. On another note, I’m extremely hopeful about the younger generations. I see them as great beacons, very intelligent, and willing to go to difficult places. I’m excited for them.

During long stretches when I’m not writing, I tell myself I’m just collecting material for when things finally click and the work begins—letting things simmer, etc. At the same time, I’ve never had fewer obstacles. I don’t have kids. I have time. And still, I wait. I can’t shake the fear that I’ll spend my whole life deferring.

In some sense, you’re correct. You are collecting material. That is necessary for a writer. But you also have to do the work. Doing the work is frightening, you’re faced with nothingness, and you have to create something out of that. You know this, I’m sure, from the articles and essays you’ve written. But there is a point when you know you really have something. You have to be honest about that. You have to be willing to look directly and go, Okay, I’ve got something here, it’s time to try to put it down, even if I might fail at it. Even if I don’t think I’m ready to do it yet. You have to go for it, and you have to be brave in the face of failure, basically.

Again, not to belabor the point, but the self, the ego, it’s going to find all kinds of ways to either keep you comfortable and not writing, not putting yourself out there, or it’s going to find ways to make you aggrandize yourself. And part of the whole thing, for me anyway, is finding a way to thread the needle between those two extremes. How can I be brave and really put myself out there, while also not aggrandizing myself? It’s a bit like soccer; you know when you’re playing well, and it’s almost effortless. That same area can be found in writing. The problem is, it doesn’t last. But, if you can hit that same sort of zone, even if the writing needs to be revised later, you usually know you’ve captured something important and can trust it.

I spent a lot of time writing when I didn’t have kids, and much of that writing no one will ever see. I wrote several novels, for instance. They weren’t good, but each one got a little better, and then eventually, I became decent at it. Those failures were necessary, and it was painful to kind of realize those books weren’t good (and I’m sure my wife would tell you I really dramatized that pain), but I also learned so much, and most of what I learned was what sort of writer I was and what sort of writer I wasn’t.

“You might notice that you’re sort of okay if something doesn’t quite go your way. That’s a great sign. This isn’t apathy. It’s becoming okay with how things are.”

Now I have two children, and I write more and in a more disciplined manner than I ever have. And yet failure still exists, it’s just that the failure is different now (not that I can’t write a bad novel, I know that I can and probably have). For instance, my agent is currently sending my new novel on sub under a pseudonym because the sales figures for my previous two novels were so abysmal. Editors look at bottom lines. It’s an unfortunate part of the business, and there’s a good chance this new novel won’t be published. Since I believe the novel is fairly strong, that would be a failure of a different kind, but a failure nonetheless. And that’s okay. I know my prose is demanding in a certain way, but that book was important to me, and the ideas in it were important for me to articulate.

Do you have ambitions as a writer?

My ambitions as a writer are to become a better writer, to challenge myself without causing myself harm, to challenge others with my prose style to enter into more complexity than is present in most novels, but to try to find a way to do this that feels possible and rewarding. To challenge readers just the right amount. I’m less interested in being entertained than in being immersed and feeling another’s way of seeing reality and being moved by that in some way, and so I aim for that in my own writing. I know a lot of people will disagree with me, but we’re a culture so hooked on “entertainment,” I can’t even read novels that are so-called “entertaining.” They often feel so false to me. I’d much rather be challenged in some way. I don’t read novels for pleasure or enjoyment exactly. I read them to learn others and to forget the self.

If by ambition you mean market success or fame, my feeling is that I’m happy to make some money because I have a family, and it’s nice to be recognized (like now, doing this interview) to a certain degree, but I’m not interested in fame or money. I think even in my twenties, when other writer friends wanted to win big prizes like the Pulitzer or something, I didn’t have a sense of that. I didn’t care about it, and I actually thought it was strange to think that way. I just wanted to write well, and in writing well, I hoped to learn more about life. This also makes me think of Dogen, in Regulations for the Auxiliary Cloud Hall: “Those who have a way-seeking mind and have abandoned fame and profit should enter. Those who are half-hearted and lack sincerity should not.” This is my feeling about writing and about people reading my writing. If you want to enter, there’s a certain way. I’m not writing for fame and profit, not writing to entertain the reader. I’m writing for the same reason I sit zazen [meditating in the lotus position]: to drop the self, to meet and express reality, and I hope others want to meet there.

You quote John Muir, the American naturalist, in your Cluny Journal piece. Muir never studied Zen, but his immersion in nature seems to have led him to something uncannily similar. How does being in nature and reading about it bring you closer to reality?

Nature is a gateway. Everything is a gateway. But nature is a good gateway because it speaks immediately of interdependence, stillness, and impermanence, and also something beyond all of that: emptiness. It speaks directly to our inherent nature. Nature can bring about this stillness and emptiness. Nature is in a meditative state all the time. The rabbit being killed by the coyote is nature meditating, and so is the stream quietly rushing through a mountain valley. If we’re willing to really be in it, that meditative realm arises naturally in nature. In zen we call this “thusness.” Everything immediately as it is, without overlay of concept. There’s an intensely frightening aspect to this. And in the end, zen is just a concept, and has to be let go of too. Nature speaks directly to this in all of us, and also asks something of us.

This reminds me of Yunmen, talking to his assembly. “Everyone is in the midst of illumination, yet they don’t see it. Everything seems dark and dim. How is it being in the midst of illumination?”

Do you find the idea of being reincarnated as a single-celled organism appealing? Some sort of microalgae perhaps?

A revered zen teacher said, “When you are born, not one atom comes into existence; when you die, not one atom goes out of existence.”

Despite all the talk of non-attachment, I’m pretty attached to being a human, so I’d have hard time converting to a microalgae. A tree might be cool.

The Jungian psychoanalyst Dr. James Hollis says we go through two phases of life. In the first, we're preoccupied with what the world asks of us. In the second phase, it's more about what the soul asks of us, the soul being a metaphor for the purposeful expression of the living organism. In other words, the goal is to figure out what is wishing to be expressed in the world through you.

Do you relate to the idea that something deeper – soul, essence, whatever – is trying to find form through your writing?

I love Jung. Yes, I definitely resonate with this. Buddhism wouldn’t use terms like “soul” or “essence” because that makes it seem like there is some realer part of you within you that is yours. But that’s just semantics on some level. Buddhism says nothing is yours, but also that there is something, which is neither being nor non-being, which is the nature of everything, which is asking each of us if we’d like to express and embody this mysterious something.

“Nature is a good gateway because it speaks immediately of interdependence, stillness, and impermanence, and also something beyond all of that: emptiness."

You can always more and more deeply express it, more and more fully embody it. Dogen says that we already express it, we just don’t realize that we do. Another take, in Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness, goes, “Consciousness evolves in the sea of birth and death.”

I have to admit I’m questioning my own motives for publishing this interview. Yes, I’m genuinely interested in your insights, and I know others will be too. But there’s also a part of me that hopes the depth of your responses will reflect well on me by association. And when I start thinking like that, I worry I’ll overthink myself out of seeking conversations like this at all.

I’m smiling at this because I completely understand what you mean. And I hope my answers reflect well on you, too—I mean, I don’t want this to be a flop for your audience! But I get what you’re saying: there’s some small selfish motivation here, too. And I’d say we all have that selfish part of ourselves. But you’re seeing it, which means you’re working with it, and it’s balanced with this conversation, which I’m grateful for, because it’s nice to be seen. Plus, noticing that selfish tendency, that’s what Dogen means when he says “studying the buddha way is studying the self.” Studying how the self has these little selfish motivations, it’s pretty subtle, and often daunting or irritating, but that’s the study.

We’re all doing this interplay of selflessness and selfishness all the time, and paying attention to that is the meaning of “consciousness evolves in the sea of birth and death.” On an ultimate scale, there’s nothing to worry about.

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About a year ago,
Eva said something that,
in all the times we’d be together after,
would, when I remembered it,
cast a sort of halo over the present,
as if my recollection of her words alone altered the atmospheric conditions of the moment,
softer, yes, but stabbing,
right in my sense of chronological time,
like when we were in the sea and I couldn’t perceive anything else,
no restaurants, no people, no cars, no shops, no commerce, no horizon,
it was just us in the sea and I made a small approving sound as I watched her tread water and thought about all the tiny actions coordinating to keep her afloat,
the unimpaired integrity of her body's working order,
the most essential thing about her, about anyone,
and I loved her more intensely than usual because I remembered that all of this will end.

About a year ago, we were in bed together, and what she said was,
If something happens to me, I want you to know that life with you was beautiful.

P.S. Happy birthday, my love.

On April 14, 2024, Katherine Pomfret announced a career change on LinkedIn: "I'm leaving marketing,”—then a line break, true to form for the genre. She was done with the sexism, lies, and stupidity, of making rich men richer. “A million pounds can't delight me more than a leaf does,” she wrote. She was going to live off-grid, in a caravan by a lake, and work with her hands and brain. Waitressing part-time would cover the bills. She was 46, with less than 10,000 pounds to her name.

Katherine’s posts since the announcement read like a manifesto for anyone seeking a zero-bullshit life. “You are a beacon of sanity and fast becoming the only person whose posts I bother reading,” one copywriter commented just a week after publicly gushing about “changing the world” with the amazing team at emailMarketing.com. My suspicion that she must have powdered her face and fastened a bright red nose to it before posting is strong but unprovable.

But it's true: I feel saner on Katherine's feed than anywhere else in LinkedIn's circus of pathological inauthenticity. She lays it bare: Use your talents, stay true to yourself, or pay the price for faking it. It’s not always comfortable to be reminded of what we know deep down but often avoid. For the disillusioned, what follows is a progression through the five stages of grief. Is this woman seriously calling me a fraud? (Denial). Who's to blame for my ennui? (Anger). Shouldn't I be grateful things aren't worse? (Bargaining). I wish Mark Fisher were still alive (depression). And finally: Can I summon the courage to change my life? (Acceptance).

Martin Amis said it: “The professionalization of ordinary existence: this is the enemy within.” We weren’t meant to study the humanities only to end up pretending we’ve always been passionate about payment technologies. We weren't born to chase KPIs and die with a pension, "met quota” carved into our tombstones. It is absurd to stare at screens all day, passive and distracted, incurious and inert, and toggle between a dozen digital infrastructures, always wondering what else you could be doing. We can reject the performative passion for products we don’t believe in, and the nodding along to bad ideas. We can walk away from the roles we're assigned by society. It is possible to make a living with integrity and to do business without greed.

Katherine's message isn't just for the burnt-out laptop class. It's for anyone eager to build a life with purpose and authenticity, anyone feeling trapped between what is and what could be. The first step is to get real with yourself. Clinging to false hope is just self-deception. At some point, you have to make a move. Maybe you'll find this conversation right when you need it.

You summarised your marketing career as having spent 25 years making things look a whole lot better than they were. Is there a specific moment where you were like, ‘This is not a life'?

I felt that way almost daily for a year before quitting. For years, really.

I published two illustrated satires on marketing in the tech world: Just Make It Pretty and How to Be Friends With Sales. The first one, in particular, sparked hundreds of messages of recognition, which was cathartic for both me and the readers—finding dark humor in the daily insults, microaggressions, and stupidity of those profiting off your talents.

The books really wrote themselves, and the characters are ones we’ve all met. It’s a lunatic asylum. But they also dive into the darker places, addressing the psychic harm that comes with it. For me, using humour and illustration in the style of a children's book was the perfect way to express what I wanted to say.

It’s been a year since you left your career to live off-grid and work in hospitality. How has your perspective on work and labor evolved?

Hospitality is just one part of what I do. There’s also silversmithing and writing (both fiction and non-fiction). My work life now is diverse, built around my passions, talents, and values. The last year has also brought new connections with others on similar paths. This has deepened my conviction that much of our approach to work is unhelpful.

We need to build around our talents and channel them toward values that matter to us. We need to outgrow childish obsessions with status, titles, perks, and kudos. We need to re-evaluate our beliefs about money, which doesn’t equal security or happiness. We need to stop participating in relationships and networks that perpetuate myths like "we’re worth what we’re paid" or "we're valuable if we abandon our goals to help others get rich."

Ultimately, the idea that we suppress our emotions, values, beliefs, and personality for 45 years in exchange for cash is looking stranger by the day: like a wasted life.

What was the hardest part about taking the leap?

Nothing. The hard part was everything before. Though, surviving the British weather in a van has certainly been a challenge.

What was surprisingly easy?

Here’s the thing: when you're living according to your values, immersed in nature, and putting your talents toward things that matter to you, life becomes easy.

There is no cognitive dissonance, no exhaustion, no fear, no guilt. There’s peace and ease in everything, and a rhythm to it. The sense of freedom that comes from refusing to wear the itchy mask anymore gives you energy and optimism, which you channel into your projects.

Of course, there are frustrations and disappointments, but they lack the ‘grand importance’ that everything in corporate life is given. (I once had a CEO call a 30-minute meeting just to ask why I’d posted an image on our socials with a less than 1mm white border on one side.)

To make a change, you mentioned overcoming things like ego, status, pride, reputation, attachment to material possessions, traditional markers of security, and the bland comfort of a conventional life. Did you have to unlearn these attachments one by one, or was there a moment of realization that dissolved them all at once?

I started buying and studying Buddhist literature when I was 13. I began seriously studying Yoga (including Vedic scripture and stays in ashrams in Rishikesh) eight years before I quit marketing. I started regular wild camping and hiking about six years before I quit. I began studying neuroscience about eight months before I quit. I started therapy about four years before I quit.

So, there was a years-long journey – though it wasn’t a structured program; I was just following what interested me – in exploring alternative models of understanding the world and learning to manage emotions and reactions, and operating from a place of space.

There was a LONG period of questioning: How have I been taught, and how much of it is actually true? And it's the same for others like me. The process of change takes about three to four years—overcoming cognitive dissonance, building self-awareness, and developing new frameworks.

There wasn’t so much a moment of realization as a moment of commitment when I could no longer afford to give the corporate world another chance or try to negotiate with it. I knew, without a doubt, that 100% of my life was for me.

Were you not afraid of anything? How important is courage?

Three months ago, I found a kitten in the woods. I invited her into the caravan for food and shelter. It was freezing and raining. She had no fear. She came right in, ate, and curled up in bed with me.

She had no fear because her life was so frightening that the chances of coming with me being worse than her current reality were low. There are foxes in the woods, it was bitterly cold, and although there were things to hunt, she was just a little kitten, and she was alone.

There’s a purity of mind that comes when we face the possibility of losing something truly important, like our lives or our sanity, that makes it no longer scary to lose trivial things like status or money. We see this all the time with immigrants to the West, taking dangerous journeys and leaving behind businesses and careers, all in search of safety.

A sad truth I observe often, especially with addiction, is that humans generally don’t change until they’ve suffered greatly. Until the suffering reaches a sufficient level, fear wins out. And afterward, we realise there was nothing to be scared of.

In “Bullshit Jobs,” David Graeber notes that our economies have become “vast engines for producing nonsense.”

This is well put. So few people understand what is truly needful. Only a tiny number could tell you:

• Why sleep is essential for emotional management

• How daylight helps regulate neurotransmitters

• What nutrition we require

• Anything about the basics of evolutionary biology

We don’t understand, intellectually or emotionally, what we need. And so, it’s easy to be distracted by things we don’t need and neglect ourselves.

On the other side, most traditional entrepreneurs are driven solely by money. They create things to make money, rather than being fueled by purpose or value. Combine these two – people making things only to sell them, and people who don’t know what they need – and you get the situation we have today.

Everything we need is mostly within us. Very little external to us is necessary. This is at the heart of most spiritual practices: stripping away possessions and distractions to focus on ourselves and grow detached from the world, able to move through it, but not seduced by it, not craving it, not dependent on it.

Do you think we can restructure our economies to prioritise societal benefits over profit?

I’m not an economist, but human greed and malevolence are real, and it’s hard to imagine how any political or economic system could entirely eradicate them. Players gonna play.

It would be remarkably easy to prioritise societal benefits, but these are often applied at the family level – maternity leave, miscarriage leave – rather than at the community level. The loss of real community, and the corresponding insular focus many now have on their family in isolation, has had a much more profound impact in the last 75 years than is often acknowledged.

We got private cars instead of public transport. We got TV at home instead of pubs, cafes, community centers, and theaters. We listened to recorded music alone instead of making live music in our social groups. Technology made it feel ‘easier’ to stay within our homes and connect less with our neighbors, and from that came many of the later problems.

Now, most people don't belong to a community in any meaningful sense. They have no community obligations, no community service, no values beyond the law, and no sense of connection to others through shared goals. There is only the individual, or the individual family.

And because of this, there would be no public support for prioritizing societal benefits. You’d have to stage a coup to force it on people. So, I don’t see it happening.

“Alternative entrepreneurialism” is a term you use often.

Yes, it’s about reclaiming entrepreneurialism and returning to its original meaning: venturing out to discover and create. Four beliefs underpin the Alternative Entrepreneurialism manifesto:

1. Our talents are gifts, and it’s our duty to share them with the world in pursuit of valuable goals.

2. Happiness comes from a sense of connectedness and contribution to our community and planet, alongside the open expression of our passions and talents.

3. The concept of a work self and a non-work self, along with overspecialization, is modern, harmful, limiting, and unsustainable.

4. We have the right to be compensated for expressing our gifts, but exploitation and greed harm our peace of mind and our communities.

As a result, there are key differences between conventional and alternative entrepreneurs. An alternative entrepreneur:

• Delivers a social, community, human, or environmental benefit

• Enjoys a work life based on their passions and values

• Adopts a portfolio approach to talent expression and income generation

• Rejects old models of greed, exploitation, and control

A lot of what we do in The Society of Alternative Entrepreneurs is use members' experiences and insights to create frameworks and pathways others can follow in a shorter time frame. But it’s never going to be quick. Our manifesto goes deeper into this.

Can anyone apply alternative entrepreneurialism to their lives?

Yes. We talk about 12 focus areas that need to be worked through first, and from all our research with members, we know this process typically takes 3-4 years. While our resources aim to reduce this time, it’s still not a quick fix because it involves undoing trauma from toxic workplaces.

The 12 focus areas are:

Section One: Reprogramming the Mind

• Healing from trauma and toxic workplaces

• Banishing ego and redefining identity

• Changing your relationship with money

• Self-reflection and self-awareness building

Section Two: Rediscovering Passion and Courage

• Unleashing creativity

• Learning new skills

• Redefining self-care as a life fully lived

• Intentional relationships

Section Three: Centering Around Your Talents and Values

• The passion and values audit tool

• Centering around your values

Section Four: Lived Experiments

• Financial downsizing

• Multiple income streams

Ultimately, it’s about examining inherited narratives and rebuilding new frameworks and relationships.

How can one turn disillusionment into a productive force?

First, you need to heal from your work and career trauma. Whether it’s a layoff, decades of low-level sexual or racial harassment, or simply the trauma of being chronically undervalued and questioned about your competence and motivation, you need to address that.

I talk to a lot of people in this space, and what happens when you don’t deal with the trauma is that you go back for more. You try to heal your wounds by proving yourself again on the same battlefield. But really, you need to leave the war.

Maybe it would help to think of this not as disillusionment, but as enlightenment. It’s about recognizing that not just your boss, or his boss, and your last boss, and her boss, were all idiots—but that the fundamental beliefs driving this behavior have no evidence and are easily disproved.

When you’re enlightened, not disillusioned, you gain an incredibly powerful fervor and capacity to take action.

We were born into a culture that demonises idleness. Do you think the value of non-productivity could ever gain meaningful traction on a larger scale?

I’m not sure I agree with this. As someone who has no car but cycles or walks everywhere, including to a launderette six miles away, and who has to walk to do the washing up or even go to the toilet, I seem to be quite unusual.

I think we valorise idleness: get a car, buy domestic appliances, use work hacks to look productive, throw things out and buy new instead of fixing them, buy what we could make or grow, order takeaway. Idleness is the capitalist dream.

I’m very pro-productivity. But productivity, to me, is using your body in space, creating things, and developing ideas with others. Making money beyond what’s needed to live isn’t productive because money is dead; it’s inert. Rest is important, but the concept of work life in The Society is different. Instead of splitting ourselves into 'real but inactive' selves and 'non-real but active' selves and trying to “balance” them, we exist in constant pursuit of our passions, applying our talents toward goals that truly matter.

This means we don’t need rest in the usual sense, because we aren’t pushing ourselves to exhaustion or trying to exist in environments where we don’t naturally thrive.

Something like universal basic income comes to mind…

Yes, this will certainly come. But it will come too late, after many who can’t find the high-paying jobs they’ve built their lives and identities around are forced into work that doesn’t match their talents or passions.

But to me, the question isn’t aligned with my thinking. The goal isn’t to quit your job to be idle or not work. The goal is to quit a job where your assumed talents (what are commonly known as skills) are used in service of goals and values you find morally repugnant. Then, you can use your real talents in service of communities, others, and the planet.

Universal income won’t lead to people doing great things because they haven’t realised that work isn’t a chore but a joy.

Recently, you wrote, “When we quit these purposeless jobs for valueless organisations and clueless bosses, it’s not because we are lazy or unambitious or don't make the mark but because our dreams are bigger than their tiny minds can even conceive.” Why is ambition so often confined to conventional definitions of success?

Because after the age of four, we stop allowing people to judge their own success. From the age of five, teachers award marks to students, teaching us early on that success is only real if it’s externally recognised and judged. Making ourselves happy or doing things that bring us joy—especially if they are kind or meaningful—don’t earn marks or certificates, so they get categorized as ‘play’ or ‘hobbies.’ As a result, ambition becomes linked to success in socially approved tasks, judged by others.

We then quickly discourage children who express ambitions in creative or socially motivated areas, labeling them as unrealistic, too difficult, or reliant on luck. So, children learn to stop pursuing those dreams. Finally, we tell them that accumulating worldly achievements will increase their chances of finding sexual partners and reproducing. And that’s incredibly powerful during teenage years.

There's this passage in one of my favourite short stories that, right after I read it, I was, like, yes. Damn it, yes! I think about it constantly: "Look at this," Stephen said, stomping heavily on one of the newly fastened boards. "Fuckin', I've got clients I've been working with ten years, and what've I done for them? I don't know. But spend two hours banging nails, you got something to stand on, man. Real progress. This is what I oughta do. Come out here. Live on a fuckin' hill."

Yes. Using our bodies and hands is what we’ve evolved to do. We’re not designed to spend hours indoors, immobile, using only our brains. It’s harmful to us.

I often reflect on what my mind and body have evolved to do. And I try to honor that. Who hasn’t experienced the mesmerising, calming effect of a log fire? There’s a reason for that! Or the joy of a spring walk? It’s the same with making or doing anything by hand.

We’ve created a bourgeois distinction between work of the mind (which is high status) and work of the body (which is low status).

We all feel time-starved, so we automate everything, using gadgets or machines to get through our daily tasks. But what do we do with the time we’ve saved? We scroll on our phones for two hours a day, watch TV for another couple.

At the very least, learn to knit. Bake a cake once a week. Pick up the guitar for a few minutes every day.

Have you heard from others inspired by your lead to seek an alternative future?

Yes. When I posted about quitting, that post got 12k likes, 1,000 comments, and another 1,000 DMs from people who were too scared to comment publicly (which says everything about the performative nature of LinkedIn). Because I wanted everyone in my DMs to be able to connect, I founded Unplugged Ambition, which has grown into The Society for Alternative Entrepreneurs over the past eight months.

But I wouldn’t say people are following my lead. They’re on their own paths, and some are further along than I am on mine.

On a daily basis through The Society, I speak with people who are downsizing and creating new ventures that improve the world. And without exception, these are people who held incredibly senior roles in business. So there’s a talent drain happening, and frankly, the people you see on LinkedIn complaining about a lack of jobs were never the best talents—they just talk the loudest.

If you had to distill everything you’ve learned from this journey into one piece of advice for someone feeling stuck in their current life, what would it be?

Your true talents come so effortlessly to you that you likely underestimate their value to others. Your true passions are best discovered by reflecting on what brought you joy as a child.

You’ve been taught many things about the world that aren’t true, probably by people who loved you but simply didn’t know any better.

Start appreciating the gifts you have. When you do, you’ll want to put them to work for worthwhile goals—goals that don’t revolve around making rich white men richer. Your project doesn’t need to be huge or world-changing. In fact, it’s beautiful precisely because it’s small.

To do anything else is really a waste of a life.

Your enthusiasm keeps my writing alive. With every new subscriber to lol/sos, I'm motivated to explore new ideas and share them with you. Subscribe now.

Shortly after I shared a list of the 8 best online articles I read in 2024, many readers wrote me something to the effect of, Cool stuff, but I can't read long texts on the Internet. Tab fatigue, digital overwhelm, attention drift—all that jazz. The spirit is willing, they said, but the brain is ⋉⟟⌁⟜⊶⟙⋔⤬⌇☖⟴⍑≇↯⟊⌦⤒⟢⟁. Here’s what I told them: Buy a Kindle.

Did you know you can send web articles to a Kindle? No one seems to be aware of this, and yet it is the single greatest digital feature in my life. I think kids should be learning about it in school, if we still have kids and still have schools, which I wouldn't know anything about now that I'm reading all the time. Just yesterday I read about the hippie capitalist who changed British food, a tragic wrongful rape conviction, and that we are, in fact, going to die. Could I have read these without a Kindle? Yes. Would I have? Not in this lifetime.

Partly to blame is the way we encounter new things to read online. Inboxes, chats, feeds, notifications, comments, push alerts, algorithms, and roundups are all terrible jumping off points for longform. After opening a link, I’ll read about seven words before a momentary lapse in mental vigilance sends me reeling back into the ceaseless digital churn. I don’t even try to read online anymore. Instead, I’ll send the link to my Kindle, to a future, calmer headspace.

The people I've tried to convert to the Kindle always say the problem is the screens, that they need to read ink on paper. I know what they mean but they are wrong. As a technology, the Kindle is, at its core, anti-technology, hardly more advanced than a Furby. It looks like it sounds like dial-up. Experientially, reading on a Kindle is maybe 10% different from reading a print magazine. Yes, it's a screen, but unlike a laptop or phone, the Kindle silos you in with the text, separating you from the ⩔⊘⨞⩞⧬⩈⧪⪸⧨⤈⩯. I imagine it to be like reading on Adderall.

You can use Send to Kindle™ through a Chrome extension or from the iPhone's share menu if you have the Kindle app installed. Presently, the extension has a 3.2-star rating in the Chrome store. Do not be alarmed. Send to Kindle™ does not cater to the modern consumer's insatiable appetite for sophisticated digital experiences. It operates with a refreshing single-mindedness, like Bluetooth or Velcro, sending your reading material from a place where it sucks to read to a place where it does not suck to read. Most importantly, it sends it to a time that does not suck to read, namely later. The transfer can lag a minute. Listen to Burial while you wait. File a content violation against a Zionist on Substack.

I’m guessing you’ve already been tempted to click away from this post and scroll elsewhere. This urge is now routine whenever many of us engage with something that doesn't deliver quick, repetitive rewards. I feel it all the time. I'll make it through half a page of The Master and Margarita before I'm driving around Patriarch's Ponds on Street View. Soon enough, I'll be reading reviews of Moscow restaurants I'll never attend. How to stop this? Reading, for one. The irony is that while reading can alleviate our attention span crisis, it’s also the first thing to suffer from it. Restoring our ability to focus involves not only reducing activities that shorten our attention but also increasing those that lengthen it. More deep dives, less dopamine hits.

With this context, I feel duty-bound to raise awareness for the ability to send longform to your Kindle. This feature has singlehandedly revived my habit of reading the transfixing type of work I think more people would love if only they could actually stay fixed on it. There is incredible writing everywhere. In the last month, I've sent articles from 19 different publications to my Kindle. More and more are coming from Substack, but this app and your inbox are horrible places to get absorbed in something. You wouldn't meditate in a mosh pit. Don't read online. Buy a Kindle.

First, all the pieces linked are accessible—no paywalls or buyer journeys.

Second, they embody the sort of lucidity and resonance that mark true brilliance. I thought so at the time of reading, and I still think so now. In that regard, they’ve already stood the test of time.

And third, sharing what I read is my love language. Now that so much of what we consume is driven by algorithms and favours, I think recommendations based on genuine human enthusiasm count for something. In that regard, thank you for your trust.

Some of the articles were published in the past year, others were not. There are no predominant themes or subjects. All are exemplary of writing as art, which is mostly what I care for as a reader. Someone once told me they'd rather read something poorly written but interesting than something beautifully written and boring. Unthinkable.

Remarkably, no Substack newsletters made the cut (though I think everyone should read ). One reason for this might be that the finesse professional editors – the kind employed by most of the publications on my list – bring to a piece remains invaluable. “I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil," Truman Capote said.

Finally, you'll notice two of the stories – Scocca's and Preston's – are tied to the precarity of being a writer today. In few other fields is work that's worth so much rewarded so little. Please do consider paying for writing you find valuable. It might require a shift from thinking about what you will get for your money to what your money will provide. For what it's worth, my new year's resolution is to put more stock in the latter.

Wishing you happy reading and a safe return to linear time.

1. Forty-One False Starts, by Janet Malcolm

The incomparably clear-eyed Janet Malcolm profiles the "acutely intelligent, reserved, and depressed” artist David Salle, "an unhappy moth helplessly singeing itself on a lightbulb,” through 41 distinct intros. An endlessly quotable piece.

“Sometimes it almost seems as if he were provoking the interviewer to put him on the spot, so that he can display his ingenuity in getting off it.”

2. My Unraveling: The Year My Body Fell Apart, by Tom Scocca

I’ve admired Scocca’s writing for over a decade, ever since he called out recipe writers for deliberately understating how long it takes to caramelize onions (great read). once said about him that "he always has the smartest, most reasonable analysis of issues that make everyone else sound idiotic,” and I agree.

In 'My Unraveling', Scocca’s struggle with a mystery illness brings to life the well-documented reality that most Americans are just one health crisis away from ruin. A gorgeously written nightmare.

“The able and the disabled aren’t two different kinds of people but the same people at different times.”

3. The Anxiety of Influencers, by Barrett Swanson

A great but bleak read. I could die happy if I ever wrote something of this calibre.

"…if we sneer and snicker at influencers’ desperate quest to win approval from their viewers, it might be because they serve as parodic exaggerations of the ways in which we are all forced to bevel the edges of our personalities and become inoffensive brands. It is a logic that extends from the retailer’s smile to the professor’s easy A to the politician’s capitulation to the co-worker’s calculated post to the journalist’s virtue-signaling tweet to the influencer’s scripted photo. The angle of our pose might be different, but all of us bow unfailingly at the altar of the algorithm.”

4. Human Fallback, by Laura Preston

Are we training bots to think like us or are bots training us to think like them?

"...he told me he had a bad feeling about the way the world was going and that I would be wise to buy a firearm."

5. Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide, by Fargo Tbakhi

A manifesto for writers reckoning with the futility of their craft, the linguistic sanitizer that “keeps us polite while the boot is on our neck or on somebody else’s.”

“…what Palestine requires, is an approach to writing whose primary purpose is to gather others up with us, to generate within them an energy which their bodies cannot translate into anything but revolutionary movement.”

6. Ben Ditto Interview: Internet Ethics, Taste, and Making Art Online

A case for chaos as the ultimate creative force.

“I think all of us have a natural thing that we should be doing and some of us spend our whole lives in denial about that.”

7. We Need to Rewild the Internet, by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon

Applying ecological principles to the digital realm.

“Ecologists also know how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control. We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it.”

8. The Pugilist at Rest, by Thom Jones

At 47, Jones was working the graveyard shift as a high school janitor, a job he had held for 11 years. Battling alcoholism and an addiction to prescription drugs, he wrote ‘The Pugilist at Rest’, a fictionalized story about the Vietnam War, in a single sitting. Then he mailed it, unsolicited, to The New Yorker. “Reading Thom Jones is like watching magnesium foil burn,” according to one fan. “It's just spectacular.”

“I know that my buddy Jorgeson was a real American hero. I wish that he had lived to be something else, if not a painter of pictures then even some kind of fuckup with a factory job and four divorces, bankruptcy petitions, in and out of jail. I wish he had been that. I wish he had been anything rather than a real American hero.”

Ok, your turn: What was the best article you read this year? Share the wealth by linking it in the comments.

When Vicky Xu alerted the world to the plight of the Uyghurs in March 2020, she became, alongside advocates for an independent Tibet and Taiwan, adherents of the Falun Gong, and members of the democracy movement, an official poison to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

China soon declared Vicky, who was living in Australia, a traitor to the nation. What followed was a ruthless campaign of transnational repression, a tactic whereby regimes surveil and harass dissenters abroad until continuing to speak out becomes intolerable. When Vicky renounced her Chinese citizenship, it only exacerbated her status as an enemy of the state.

One day, she noticed strange men lurking around her Melbourne home and photographing her at the beach—men whom Australian police later confirmed were Chinese spies. Death threats flooded her Twitter inbox and she was repeatedly caricatured in lewd cartoons. Chinese media branded her a she-demon, a drug addict, a mega-slut, and a Western pawn. She developed PTSD and receded from public life—but not for long. She had, after all, sworn allegiance to the oath of journalism: If Reporting The Truth Shall Fuck My Life, So Be It.

Recently, Vicky has shared her experience of transnational repression on Substack. I was intrigued by her introduction and the way she writes about her predicament. In one post, she claims to have taken a cosmic dose of acid without feeling a thing: "What can five tabs of LSD affect if a government can’t do shit to my precious brain?” It's a compelling theory: Can the psychological strength cultivated to defend against a superpower's attempts to break a person make them immune to the effects of psychedelic drugs? I’m inclined to entertain it.

In 2023, Vicky moved to Taiwan—double poison in the eyes of China. In June, she left. She's secretive about her current location and has pared her physical life down to a couple of suitcases. Living as a nomad drives up surveillance costs and make it easier to flee when shit hits the fan.

Just turned 30, Vicky's trying to cobble together some semblance of normal existence, training in martial arts, dating, writing a memoir, doing comedy. But what is normalcy in the crosshairs of the world's most vigilant security apparatus? She trains partly to defend against stalkers, and her every public word provokes new attacks. I’m fully aware this piece could land us both in a CCP-sponsored cartoon.

It’s been almost five years since Vicky’s total estrangement from her former life. In that time, she’s had no contact with her family. Returning to her homeland, where she spent her first 19 years as a model patriot (she only recently covered up her ankle tattoo of China’s national flag), would all but guarantee her imprisonment. Yet she remains deeply invested in the future of the Chinese people. "In my death I no longer wish to fight the regimes," she writes, contemplating her will. "I just want to save the children."

I asked her some questions and she was kind enough to answer them.

Most people I asked were unfamiliar with transnational repression. How common are stories like yours?

It’s essentially impossible to measure how prevalent transnational repression really is. In my circle, all my friends and acquaintances know about it, and many have personally experienced it, but my circle is not a normal one by any stretch. Most everyday people have no reason to spend time thinking about transnational repression. The politically savvy would probably have read about Russia’s assassinations of dissidents and oligarchs, and news junkies may remember the Indian activist killed in Canada, or Khashoggi, who was dismembered in the Saudi embassy in Turkey. 

There are also cases of transnational repression that people know but don’t label as such—like Edward Snowden’s situation. Snowden lives a very elusive life in Russia. Why? Can we consider him a target of transnational repression?

I am both a target of transnational repression and a researcher of this phenomenon. Despite extensive study of its patterns and trends, I still couldn’t give you hard data—like how many people were repressed by a certain government in a given year. Among affected individuals I know, the vast majority have kept their heads down and their mouths shut.  

Another important point: If Country A is committing transnational repression within the borders of Country B, does Country B have a duty to protect its residents against such repression? The answer is obviously yes, yet in practice, it’s often no. And if Country B isn’t fulfilling its duty of care to residents, wouldn’t it prefer that transnational repression remain a less-discussed topic?

Important context from Freedom House: “China conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world.”

Why is maintaining a favourable global reputation so crucial for China? On one hand, it makes sense to suppress the Uyghur story. On the other, doesn’t harassing critics like you damage the country's image abroad?

I think you’re essentially asking “Why target you?” I get asked this a lot, and wrote a few paragraphs about it recently on Substack:

I think it’s because, as a person born, raised, and educated in China, I had the audacity to openly criticize Chinese policies in the public space—mainstream media articles, academic reports, television commentary, legislative processes, standup comedy. While doing this, I was also having a lot of fun (I was 21-27) and basically live-streaming my fun life on Twitter (news, comedy, fitness, amusement parks, dinners, beach, boyfriends). This rubbed Chinese nationalists and CCP loyalists in a particularly wrong way.

Then one day during some state-led nationalistic campaign, someone in the propaganda system remembered me and pushed out a manufactured news cycle that lasted months about how awful I am as a human being. I was literally called a witch by state media outlets. It’s ridiculous. I became known in the Chinese media as a massive traitor to the Han race (because I wrote about minority rights). Once that reputation was established, the paranoid security establishment tried to pursue me like a real traitor to the nation.

An analogy I like to use is that transnational repression is like a water tap—once it’s turned on, sometimes people forget to turn it off, especially if the security establishment has too fat a budget. The more ideological enemies they make out to be, the cushier their jobs become.

All I did was be in my early-mid 20s and be good at my job, which is to provide accurate analysis about China.

Coming back to your question, I believe the targeting of me has less to do with reputation management and more with enforcing ideological control through punishment. As the Chinese saying goes, 殺雞儆猴. Kill the chicken to scare the monkey. The goal is to make my life as miserable as possible, permanently, and ensure there won’t be another Vicky Xu. This approach aligns with the notion that individuals are seen as “owned” by the nation-state, expected to uphold and serve the state's values and interests, all of which is reinforced by a strong current of ethno-nationalism.

With the knowledge that you’re constantly being monitored, do you ever intentionally behave in ways to throw off or entertain your watchers?

I don’t believe I’m being constantly monitored. Twenty-four-hour surveillance is very costly and logistically challenging. It took me a while to reach this understanding, as the Chinese state clearly wants dissidents to believe we’re being monitored every step of the way.

When the severe targeting first began a few years ago, I did feel as though I was under constant watch. At the time, people’s first impression of me was that I was very “shy,” trying to make myself as small as possible. I never acted out to entertain or throw off spies. I did the opposite—constraining myself within a shell and losing the will to speak openly or share anything about myself.

These days, I no longer try to make myself invisible. I live as I please, taking necessary precautions but at peace with the idea that someone might be watching. I’ve accepted that someone may or may not be peering into my residence with binoculars, and carry on walking around naked. My need for natural light and preference for comfort outweigh any worry about being watched. I’ll even sit on the couch, fat rolls showing, picking my nose. If someone feels the need to watch or take photos, so be it. I think this is preparing me well for a career in acting, as I’m developing an incredible amount of confidence and ease in front of any gaze or scrutiny.

How do you stay sane?

Overall, my life is somewhat monastic, even dull compared to the average person. Every day, I wake up, train, and write. I pretty much eat the same thing every meal (Taiwanese braised pork rice) because I’m too lazy to look for new food. I find this monotonous routine grounding and necessary, given all the debilitating circumstances I face. (You mentioned the time when I took a ridiculous amount of acid – I’ve only done this once and probably won’t again anytime soon.)  

Every few day or months I have an “oh shit I’m fucked” moment, and then it passes. It happened again recently, and I wrote about my coping mechanism on Substack: 

What's the point of trying to think while under the influence of overwhelming, unprocessed emotions? What good decisions could I possibly make? My priority should be to expedite the impact-absorbing process through rigorous body-movements, and once my nervous system calms down, I’d be able to think and plan and strategize more efficiently. This is my life hack. So I spend entire days at the gym, punching, kicking, wrestling, throwing…

I think It’s always good to match internal and external pain, or chaos, so the body stays balanced and the mind centered. I am not encouraging self-harm, to be clear. 

A couple years ago, when I first learned how to ride a bicycle, I practiced on a busy road that was way too dangerous for beginners. Accidents were had, nothing too serious. More importantly, I was fascinated by the soothing effect of the rides to my mind. Whenever I received shocking or upsetting news (there were a lot of those that year) and couldn’t stop fixating on the worst possible outcomes, I would go for a bike ride. Before the ride, the bad news would feel like the biggest threat to my well-being. But once I was surrounded by the chaos of traffic and the immediate danger of being hit, the news wasn’t even on my mind anymore. After the ride, I would have learned that the news was at best the second most shocking thing of the day, or even the hour, and thereby gain perspective.

Now I use fights to regulate my mind. After sparring, the emotional exhaustion is often so great that I feel compelled to return to logic and logic alone.

Besides training, deep breaths can always help. Grounding techniques like naming five colors around you or counting backwards can calm the mind and body. Being a target of transnational repression really does equip one with psychological and neuroscience knowledge! 

In July, you wrote, "Omg just opened WeChat for the first time in like 2 years and I’ve got zero messages. Family and friends truly moved on." Are they protecting themselves from being persecuted for treason by association? Do you hold out any hope of reconnecting with them?

I don’t know and won’t speculate on others’ thoughts or motivations.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I may never see my family and friends in China again. I find comfort in knowing that during the years we had together, we shared so much love and laughter. No one can take that away from us. The Buddhist concept of 緣分 (yuanfen, or predestined connection) helps me accept the reality that we’re now apart. As much as we love each other, perhaps our predestined connection only extends this far, and there is no point in dwelling in sorrow over it.

You've been falsely accused of participating in mass orgies and using sex for political gain. You’ve also been portrayed in wildly degrading cartoons. Why do you think sexual attacks are a central tactic in attempts to defame you?

I’ve been asked this many times and never answered this question directly. 

Now I will: Because I’m hot and probably turn individuals in the propaganda and security departments on. I make their jobs that much more fun and they’re welcome. 

Once it was clear that returning to China was no longer an option, you doubled down on your reporting of forced labor in Xinjiang. Does having less to lose make it easier to do your work?

Absolutely. Another important factor is that all my work has been written in English, my second and more “logical” language. When I write in English, I feel almost fearless. My brain is busy with grammar and flow, and I’m less likely to censor myself or feel the inhibition that would arise when writing in Chinese. This psychological phenomenon can be explained by the concept of emotional distance in second-language processing.

This following paragraph was written by ChatGPT. I completely agree but have not fact-checked: “When we use a second language, especially in contexts requiring precision and structure, our brains often focus more on analytical tasks like syntax and word choice rather than the emotional weight of the content. Research in bilingualism suggests that when people use a second language, they’re somewhat buffered from the intense emotional responses that may accompany using their native language, partly because the second language often feels less personal or instinctive. This distance can create a sense of freedom or detachment that makes us feel bolder, especially in expressing thoughts that might otherwise be repressed by cultural or social conditioning in our native language.”

What has been the most surprising source of support or solidarity?

Gangsters in Taiwan. Before arriving in Taiwan I knew from research that they are contracted by the Chinese government to harass and target Chinese dissidents or Hong Kongers who live in Taiwan. And yet during my time in Taiwan I met many lovely gangsters who became my friends and had my back. Many of them completely disagree with my politics but they appreciate my humanity and never sold me out. 

And the most disappointing letdown or betrayal?

I’d rather not remember. 

What do you miss about living in China?

I can’t go back, so there is no point missing anything.  

Have you gained anything of value from your objectively terrible predicament?

A lot. I tweeted out a video of me writing on the lawn in a park recently, with the following comment: 

If it weren't for the years of turmoil from the Chinese Communist Party and transnational repression, I wouldn't have trained so hard or become so energetic and vibrant. My spine wouldn’t be so flexible, and my muscle mass wouldn’t have increased so quickly. 

Those who watched my media appearances a few years ago might remember that I looked quite exacerbated back then, especially when the targeting first began.

Without the Communist Party, there wouldn’t be a lovely me! 👍🥰🫶

Here’s the video: 

I’ll also share some pictures that can show you my “transformation” through this objectively terrible predicament:

I look so much healthier, happier and lighter now. Isn’t that some miracle. 

I’ve also become a lot wiser, more resilient, and a million times tougher. While I wouldn’t say I appreciate my circumstances, I definitely appreciate myself for how well I’ve adapted and how gracefully I’ve endured. 

Your persecution is a central theme in your comedy. What’s funny about your situation?

I don’t know. There’s just something objectively funny about misery sometimes—like a person being kicked off a hill and rolling down, a toddler trying to walk but continually falling, or a dog squirming on the ground with its belly up. What’s so amusing about these moments? There’s a fine line between cruelty and humor.

I have often compared my comedy to Borat's. We both put ourselves in ludicrous situations that highlight cultural differences and misunderstandings. Like Borat, I’m always stumbling through interactions or making outrageous comments. I suppose audiences laugh out of sheer disbelief. People also tend to laugh when they find a comedian likeable, and I’d like to think I’m generally likeable.

If you could speak directly to those coordinating your persecution, what would you say to them?

I’ll love you if nobody else will. Please let me live. 

After several years of laying low, you’ve recently started publishing again and are now writing regularly on Substack. What makes it an ideal platform for the stories you want to tell?

I wasn’t exactly trying to lay low. I was contracted to write a memoir just as severe targeting began. As I mentioned, I’d lost the will to speak to other people anyway, so I stayed inside trying to write my book. It turned out that trying to write a memoir while my life was falling apart and my existence was being challenged was a terrible idea. The writing process took three years, and the manuscript was completed earlier this year—then I learned how slow and painful publishing could be.

By that point, I had settled into the role of an autobiographical writer and genuinely enjoyed the process. I started working on what could be regarded as a sequel to my memoir, You’re So Brave. However, I didn’t want to go through traditional publishing again. Briefly, I considered publishing pieces of this sequel in a magazine or something, but after all those years of working in newsrooms, I was tired of being edited and censored. I remembered my old colleague at The New York Times, Bari Weiss, and all the fun she’d been having on Substack.

After spending a weekend figuring out how to use the platform, I’ve been publishing weekly for the past two months.

What impact do you hope your work will have?

My investigative report, Uyghurs for Sale, has made a significant impact by revealing how the Chinese government transfers Uyghurs outside their homeland and subjects them to forced labor for brands like Nike, Adidas, and Apple. It has been cited in multiple legislative bills around the world, making it an achievement that's hard to surpass. I do hope to outdo my 25-year-old self at some point.

China ranks as the 7th-worst country in the world for press freedom and is the leading jailer of journalists. Do you believe this will change during your lifetime?

Nope. 

Might this conversation land me on a watchlist with the Chinese government?

Not really. Unless you continue interviewing Chinese dissidents or start doing investigative work yourself. I’d advise against traveling to mainland China. It’s not impossible that you’d be invited to a police station for tea.

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