David Foster Wallace interview on German TV
This interview only becomes more prescient.
A model of life…in which I have a right to be entertained all the time seems not to be a promising one.
What It’s Like to Be a Sociopath
I think my sociopathy is entirely beneficial to me. I see my friends struggling with guilt. On an almost daily basis I think, I’m glad I don’t have that. The psychological characteristics of sociopathy are not inherently bad. Lack of remorse and shame and guilt has been misappropriated to mean this horrible thing, but again, just because I don’t care about you doesn’t mean I want to cause you more pain. I like that I don’t have guilt because I’m making my decisions based on logic, based on truth, as opposed to ought or should. Now, there is a flip side. I don’t have those natural emotional connections to other people, but I’ve never had those. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. Just because I love differently doesn’t mean my love doesn’t count.
This, strangely, describes a tension I feel within.
I am at times consumed by guilt and remorse. I am also fiercely logical, and when I let logic guide my decisions, I feel far more at peace, yet far more isolated from others.
Because this is the internet, I feel I have to disclaim: I don’t think I’m a sociopath, nor do I have sociopathic tendencies.
But I know a few people who are, and they are each intelligent, kind, relatable people. There is an ease with which they move about the world that I envy, and often live lives that are far more interesting that most.
What I find as I age is that empathy is exhausting. It has become draining. I have a hunch this has something to do with our culture. Perhaps the Internet has twisted our ability to relate to one another, because there are precious few interactions I have other people that don’t involve projection.
Many of us are desperate to be understood. Myself more than most, and now more than ever as I embrace middle-age as an only child and most of the people I love and relate to have begun the slow process of dying.
This profound-yet-unsated desire to be understood has become fuel for my anxiety, my anger, my disappointment.
Shit.
I’m really, really fucking depressed.
I am in a dark place.
I’ve been focused on other people, not myself. Lest this sound selfless, fear not — it’s a compulsive habit more than thoughtfulness. And now that I have a few moments of time to myself, I’m evaluating my life and don’t love what I see.
I’ve lost my sense of purpose. Work, i.e. staring at a screen and telling other people what they’re doing wrong, isn’t fulfilling like it once was, perhaps because it goes against the impulse of what I know I need less of in my life: certainty. I know, deep down in my bones, my life is a house of cards predicated on the illusion of certainty. People will die, I will age, things will change. The more I resist, the more control I attempt to wrest, the more miserable I will become.
Right now, I feel pretty miserable. I’m not accepting inevitabilities, being terribly honest or gracious or thoughtful. I’m afraid — of what, I don’t quite know — and the fear is shaping me into someone I don’t want to be.
I am, I think, sad.
I sit here on my perch, thinking about my relationships. I’m lucky to have so many, to have friends and acquaintances the world over, though these days, in the era of the internet, it’s not all that uncommon.
What does feel unique is the type of person I gravitate toward: older. I have always been drawn to older people, likely by virtue of being an only child. There was no one else my age around, so I learned to relate to older people.
When you’re raised by older people, you learn to raise other people. I’ve learned by watching those raising me to help other people. To most, this seems to be a positive thing, an attribute. And of course it is! But it’s become a compulsion, too, and I’m wearing myself thin from all of it.
I’ve noticed that I spend much of my time with others asking questions. Only recently have I come across that infamous Dale Carnegie quote, “to be interesting, be interested,” of which I’m slightly embarrassed given its context. But there’s truth in it. And for the last few months, I’ve been hoping to be asked those very same questions with reflected curiosity.
I haven’t felt terribly satisfied in my relationships. I haven’t felt seen or heard or ‘known’ in a way that feels deep and meaningful. I feel alone.
I wonder what I’m doing wrong. I’m quick to demur, to turn questions around, to ask about others. It’s probably deflection as much as habit, a learned midwestern behavior. But while I love talking about myself, I also feel terribly self-conscious when doing so. I worry people feel I’m taking up too much space. This is partly due to my experiences of the last few years, of being in groups where identity has paramount, where I am above all a very privileged white man. Why should I take up even more space than I already have?
(This is the corrosive effect of identity politics: it really does trap us in boxes, it limits our imagination, it separates us from others. But that’s a digression for another time.)
For now, I’m just feeling disconnected. I’ve ended a Relationship, and many of my close relationships are with people far away. I’m watching people I care about age a little faster than expected, though I’m approaching 40 and reminding myself it’s time to begin to be ready to usher out the previous generations. This is abjectly horrifying. In a few years, I will be alone.
This anxiety manifests in strange ways. I resent other people my age for making things look so easy. Careers, Relationships, children, the way they refuse to put their lives on hold for others. Putting my life on hold is all I’ve ever known, and while it’s born of fear, it’s also born of caring, of stewarding others. (Maybe so that I don’t have to steward myself?) I take on projects, as I’ve been told. Confused or angry young men become surrogate younger brothers. Clients and neighbors become wards. My ex-partner told me recently that he “wishes he had a partner, but instead what he got was a therapist.” He’s not wrong.
It’s this very thing that keeps me from others. I am happiest, most content, when things in my life feel complete, and nothing feels complete about the mess of most people. Their anxieties and the volatility that flows from them is deeply unsettling. Only when I’m around others do I feel as though I may be on the autism spectrum, as I just cannot seem to handle their complexities.
But I’m discontented with relationships. I want something more. I want someone to sit across from me and ask with matched intensity how I’m doing. How am I feeling? How does it feel to begin the process of preparing for the deaths of people I love? (Preparing for death is something most people never do.) How does it feel to watch so many people at once start the pivot toward the ends of their lives?
It isn’t easy.
I woke up this morning having had very little restful sleep last night. I can't pinpoint why beyond a lingering anxiety about the future.
Are we really about to face another Biden-Trump election? What the hell is wrong with this country? Yes, I'm horrified that Trump is running and somehow gaining in popularity, particularly among the young, but I'm beyond angry that the Democratic party — a private organization, remember — has somehow anointed Biden for another run. I don't give a shit how effective he's been (and I think he's been a decent president), he is too old to run. He might be mentally present, but he appears like a doddering old man. In relief, Trump looks downright virile. What do the Democrats think is going to happen in November?
Just a few days ago, there's a woman (though to call her such feels generous) walking down the aisle of the grocery store in her mid- to late-20s, purple hair, in a full-body cow onesie, complete with tail. She's pushing a cart while talking a little too loudly to her friend, clearly desperate for the attention of passers-by. What type of person is this? I don't know her or anyone like her, and yet there she was, in real life. And in a small town, no less.
Contrast that with some of the gun-totin', bible-lovin', lifted-truck, fuck-all-taxes conservatives I'm surrounded by. What fantasy world do they live in? That without government, without pesky taxes and laws, they'd ride around in their gas guzzlers and, what? Survive off the land? Bullshit. These cowboys are just as delusional as Cow Girl, they're just far more common.
I try not to use the word 'hate' too often, but gosh, some days I get a little too close to hating people. It's a terrible place to be — corrosive, insular, and a delusion of its own. But I no longer know my place in this country. I go to Portland and I feel horribly out of place. I come out to the rural spaces and I feel more at home, but surrounded by people who are struggling and suffering, all while pretending they aren't, afraid to be vulnerable. They’re all — country folk _and_ city folk — propping up these insane delusions, the biggest being the most dangerous: that we can't trust other people.
This country is such a mindfuck, and the ever-increasing pace of technological development is making things exponentially worse. The anxiety we all feel from no longer having a tomorrow we can reasonably understand cannot be overstated. I often think of my grandparents, of how in their lifetimes, they had what all humans have had thus far: some certainty that tomorrow will be like today. Of course there were exceptions, but these days, with AI and social media, even knowing what is true and real can't be taken for granted, let alone what tomorrow might bring.
How will we survive this? In my circles — my hometown, the small town where I now live, some of the surrounding rural areas — talk of civil war isn't out of the question. Sure, the talk of one has died down since the fever pitch of 2020, but it hasn't gone away. In some way, I understand it: while most people haven't a clue what war looks like, there is some purpose to be found in a potential conflict. I was never more certain of my purpose than when I was living in Palestinian refugee camps, and if we've gotten to a point in this country where the Right and Left feel that each is an existential threat to the country? Well, then defending your way of life is a hell of a purpose. This should not be underestimated.
Some days, this all leaves me feeling helpless. Tiny and helpless.
Growing Up With Cats Linked to Higher Schizophrenia Risk
Growing up with cats could have a strange effect on your mind, new research suggests. The study, a large review of existing literature, found that cat ownership at a young age was associated with a noticeably higher risk of developing schizophrenia and related disorders—a risk possibly fueled by increased exposure to the cat-hosted parasite Toxoplasma gondii.
Some things are true, and some things feel true. This might be both.
At the time of his suicide I would have thought that, though he once attained a level of literary celebrity that was rare then and hard to imagine now, he would in short order slip gracefully into the realm of respected but little-remembered dead writers. Ah, but he has his champions: people who want everyone to know they hate him.
Much of my work is drying up. AI is moving into my field faster than most others, and I have been both late to realize it and paralyzed with indecision. Given that many-if-not-most of my clients work in the intersection of tech and journalism, they’ve watched the rise of ChatGPT and that ilk over the last six months with great interest, which is perhaps why they’ve been so quick to adopt, despite some lasting reticence. For years, I’ve positioned myself at this intersection, creating a small-but-comfortable living for myself.
But now, that position is no longer tenable, or won’t be in the very near future, and I’m realizing that despite convincing myself I hadn’t, maybe I made my career into an identity?
Who am I if not an editor?
I’ve always felt secure in my work, which has allowed me to feel anything but attached to it. For years, I’ve worked digitally from my computer (or more recently, my iPad), which has afforded me tremendous freedom. Much of my contract work has been on-demand, and coupled with a lack of debt, I’ve been able to remain flexible in ways many people have not. So I moved to a small town in 2019 — a small town many, many miles from the nearest city — and now as I see my work starting to dry up, I wonder if that move was short-sighted.
Four years on, I’ve created a little life for myself, but as my work disappears, I’m starting to feel a little empty. Why am I here? If I can no longer do my job remotely — a job that’s afforded me modest financial stability, which includes the ability to leave this town when I want to see friends or family — why am I here? Is this house I bought four years ago — a house I love — becoming an albatross?
When people ask me why I’m here, I usually respond with something like “the mountains,” which, if I’m honest, is a half-truth. I didn’t move here for the mountains, I moved here in part because there was an unexplored mountain range not far from town. What a reason to move somewhere. I’ve since fallen in love with those mountains, and they’ve become a large part of my identity. I know much of this side of the range (“the southern flank,” as I call it) quite well, the twists and turns of this-or-that road, hidden springs, little caves and detours off the trails and old landslides and the best viewpoints.
But ‘the mountains’ no longer feels like a tenable identity. It seems that it was only in relation — or in contrast — to work, and now that one is disappearing, the other seems to be, too.
I’m left in a vacuum. Why am I here?
I’ve struggled to foster community in this place. While I have a few friends, I’m still wanting. As I approach forty in a rural area, there simply aren’t many people here like me. Most people in their late 30s are pairing up, having children, settling down. Most people, mindfully or not, follow a certain path I’ve come to call “heteronormativity.” Careers, children, marriage (and divorce)… it’s the typical story of American life. Growing up, that future wasn’t available to me, but now that I’m in my 30s and homosexuality has been adopted (or co-opted) into mainstream society — a marked change from my childhood — I’m feeling out-of-place. Looking around, I don’t feel at home in straight culture and I don’t feel at home in gay culture.
While I watch many of my gay peers adopt hallmarks of heteronormative culture, I have this nagging feeling that, no, I’m still not sure I want those things. Do I want to be married when I see so many dysfunctional, unhealthy marriages? Do I want a romantic relationship when most relationships I observe seem to be based in something a little fearful, a little controlling?
And then there is place. I don’t want to live in a city, and therefore I’m immersed in straight culture to a degree I find routinely suffocating. Misogyny, latent homophobia, mental illness, oppressive and painful masculinity, drug addiction… There’s a lot to love about rural culture, but there’s a lot that makes me recoil, too, and I have precious few friends that both want to live in a rural space and remain critical of it, careful to keep its miasmas at bay.
Beneath all this, there’s a clock ticking somewhere deep in my limbic system. While I pride myself on living on the fringes of culture, social pressures find their way in. Marriage, maybe a(n adopted) child… Maybe I do want these things. I definitely want to be closer to family as I (and they) age, and this will mean uprooting the life I’ve created for myself here.
More than any other impulse, this one has started to fill the vacuum. Family and community. I want more of both, and they aren’t going to be found in this place. That’s a painful and disappointing — and in hindsight, obvious — realization. What this means I don’t quite know yet.
The secret push to bury a weedkiller’s link to Parkinson’s disease
In another example of a company tactic, an outside lawyer hired by Syngenta to work with its scientists was asked to review and suggest edits on internal meeting minutes regarding paraquat safety. The lawyer pushed scientists to alter “problematic language” and scientific conclusions deemed “unhelpful” to the corporate defense of paraquat.
Syngenta’s decision to involve lawyers in the editing of its scientific reports and other communications in ways that downplayed concerning findings potentially related to public health is unacceptable, said Wendy Wagner, a law professor at the University of Texas who has served on several National Academies of Science committees. “Clearly the lawyers are involved in order to limit liability,” she said.
America. Where everything is for sale. Even you.
When I tell people that I’ve lost several clients to ChatGPT and its ilk over the last few weeks, they think my anxiety over AI stems from ostensibly losing my job. It does not. I’m fortunate to live a life that requires very little financial maintenance as I have no debt. While I can’t afford any big purchases — should the house need a new roof or something happens to my car, I’m in some trouble — for right now, in this moment, I’m fine. I can afford groceries. I can afford dog food and vet visits. My financial life is already quite lean, and if I need to trim a little more fat, that’s possible.
My anxiety comes from the larger implications of AI. These implications are very difficult to talk about with other people outside the tech world, mostly because I am without useful analogies. Someone recently told me AI is a tool. Well, yes, but it’s also not. It’s less a hammer and more a, well, a hammer that learns to become every other tool. A hammer that then teaches itself language. All languages. And writes code. And can run that code. Someone else told me "it's just a computer program." Well, yes, but computer programs have to be written by a human. We can look at their code and analyze it. We can understand how it works. AI doesn't work that way. These Large Language Models (LLMs) are just code, yes, but the models themselves are opaque. We do not understand how they know what they know. They literally teach themselves.
Long-term, this means that these LLMs can get out of our control. While it takes vast amounts of compute power (think very large server farms) to run these models, should an LLMs get out of our control, what's to stop it from spreading? The internet was designed quite intentionally to be decentralized — without any central hub that can shut it down. So should one of these LLMs decide to spread, how can we "pull the plug" to shut it down?
But as technology progresses, it takes less and less compute power to run these models. Some, like the open-source model released by Facebook, can be run locally on a single home computer. Once these models proliferate, running on just a single machine, our ability to contain them becomes impossible.
The dangers of high-powered AI LLMs are impossible to exaggerate. Human society is based on trust. We (generally) trust the newspapers, the websites we visit, the pictures we see. We trust the music we listen to was created by the musicians whose voices we hear. But all of this goes out the window with the present capabilities of AI. Photo-quality images can be generated in seconds. Videos can be faked. Our voices can be made to say anything. How on earth does society survive this?
When we can't trust anything we see, read, or hear, what happens to civilization?
This is happening now. Current AI has the capability to do all these things. As these LLMs grow, they get ever-better at generating images, sound, and video that's impossible to discern as fake.
In a recent video I linked to (and one I think to be essential viewing), The A.I. Dilemma, Tristan Harris said that 2024 will be “the last human election” in America. Election Day 2024 is still 18 months away, and I think Tristan might be wrong in his presumption. The amount of fake information, fake articles, photos, videos will expand exponentially in mere months. When anyone can create a sex tape of anyone else, when anyone can use AI to generate photos and videos of our politicians doing and saying unspeakable things, what happens to our political system? Why wait until 2028?
If we thought the despair caused by social media was bad, if we thought it was hard losing relatives to Fox News or the MSNBC echo chambers, we ain't seen nothing yet.
And here’s where I struggle: I don’t want to fill people with anxiety. I don’t want to be the friend no one invites out because he’s always talking about the end of the world. But if we don’t talk about these things now, if we don’t understand how they work and their implications, we’re liable to be taken by surprise, and I’m afraid we as humans don’t have that luxury.
When people compare AI to the invention of fire, the wheel, or the atom bomb, they’re not wrong. The implications of AI are just as profound as all three, which is very difficult for us to understand. But we need to try, we need to use our imaginations now so reality won’t surprise us.
I’m very anxious. The last thing I want is for others to feel anxious. But anxiety serves a purpose. It is our mind telling us to get prepared. Too often, that reaction has been hijacked by social media and 24-hour cable news, permeating our lives with anxiety. What I find so troubling is that now that we might need to feel some anxiety, many of us are too burnt out, too accustomed to feeling anxious that we simply can’t live with it anymore. We numb ourselves to the world and to the very real dangers we face.
I suppose that’s my goal now, to be sure that we are not numb to the implications of our current moment. We need to be ready; we need to be informed.
In a recent letter to a friend, I wrote:
I have a creeping feeling that this isn’t the future I imagined or hoped for. My life — my little life — is good. It’s full of meaning and love. But the world? Some nights I can barely sleep I’m so filled with anxiety for it. For us. For all living things.
I am anxious.
I am not hopeful for the future.
When I go for a walk in the forest, sometimes I see small sections of the forest where one species has taken over. A rust fungus. Caterpillars. Barberry bushes. When one species grows unchecked, the balance of the ecosystem is thrown off, and it collapses.
I am astounded at how persistent the belief in us humans that we are an exception. That we know better. That it won’t happen to us.
When you learn to recognize this cognitive dissonance, you begin to see it everywhere. A friend raising two young boys, hoping they will grow up to play pro baseball. (Statistically, they won’t, and they will have a childhood devoid of dreams of any other possibilities.) Several friends, all vegetarian, all concerned about the environment, yet planning to have children. (And not adopt.) Me, thinking that I can change human nature merely by berating people with facts born of the scientific method.
Climate change. AI. Guns. Political violence. Social media. Our brains have not evolved to handle much of the world in which we find ourselves. We are not as evolved as we think we are.
I have lost faith in leaders, in the political parties, in many institutions. I work in the media and I see people I know — people I respect — succumbing to partisanship over logic and reason.
In my 20s, I thought I could change the world. I was always one epiphany away from a paradigm shift.
But now, as I approach 40, I don’t look to the future with excitement as I once did. I now feel vague-yet-persistent anxiety about what’s to come. I look around my little town and see how the technological changes of the last 30 years have helped people here. Sure, everyone has a phone and access to the world of information, but they’re addicted to social media. Opioid addiction is rampant. Many people lost their jobs when manufacturing was sent overseas.
Change is inevitable, I know. But don’t we tell ourselves that we are a compassionate culture? Are the foundational myths of this culture — Christianity chief among them — based on compassion? Then why have so many people here been left to suffer in poverty and addiction? Why can’t things change, but we also have grace and mercy for others — and ourselves — when things do?
My dreams to change the world have long since evaporated. I don’t believe we can change human nature, even through education. Most people will always remain animated by their insecurities. Now, my only goal is to stay out of the way, to find a quiet corner somewhere and watch the future happen around me.
It’s likely I’m going to spend the next few days thinking out loud about the recent AI announcements from OpenAI, Microsoft, Facebook. I barely slept last night, as only yesterday did the ramifications of this week really begin to set in.
Bluntly, I think my job as a copy editor is largely gone, or could be within twelve months. This realization only hit me tonight as I was talking to my parents — why it hadn’t occurred to me months ago as I tooled around with ChatGPT 3.5, I don’t know. But thinking back, the very first thing I asked ChatGPT was to write a New York Times article about the destruction of the moon. And it did. It wrote it better than many of my editing clients.
I think I am obsolete.
I read that the new ChatGPT 4 can ingest images, too. Meaning you can sketch a website on a piece of paper. Snap a photo of it, then upload. Tell it to write a website that looks like your sketch…and it does. In seconds. Goodbye, web designers.
I read it now gets into the 90th percentile when taking the bar exam. Goodbye, lawyers.
The way I think about the internet has completely shifted in the last 24 hours. No longer is it a tool for communication between humans, but rather the amniotic fluid of these Large Language Models. And their fuel. They ingest everything on the internet — and ‘learn’ from it. That LiveJournal I kept in high school was food for these things. The purpose of the internet is now something else.
What happens when millions of people like me lose their jobs? What happened when millions of Americans had their jobs shipped overseas in the wake of NAFTA? I grew up in rural America — I spend a lot of time in towns long since hollowed out as industry moved to cheaper markets. Sure, we saved a buck, but the cost was the livelihoods of thousands of people, of their purpose. Humans are many things, and as cliche and unoriginal and obvious as it is, a good job is enough for most people to feel fulfilled in their sense of purpose, providing shelter and food to their families. What happened when those jobs left? Over the last 30 years, hopelessness and drugs moved in, suicides started increasing, small towns withered, and populism flourished.
The technological progress of the next 5 years is going to make the progress of the last thirty seem glacial.
I’m already exhausted by the potential instability.
What happens when children are raised with these LLMs? We thought Google was bad… Who will need to learn anything if we could just ask the LLM? Who will need to learn to code? Who will need to learn to write?
I often wonder where I fit in this world.
These days, it seems both obvious and painfully reductive to start with my list of identities, some of which I have created for myself, others that have been placed upon me — some of which I claim, others that I reject.
I’m a white man in my mid-30s. Millennial. Cis. Educated, with nearly two masters programs under my belt. (One I didn’t finish and another I’m mid-way through…and unsure about.) I was born in a small rural town in a Midwestern red state, and now I live in a small rural town in a Western blue one. I’m gay. I’m an atheist. A Star Wars and Star Trek fan. Raised as an only child, though I have two half-brothers. I’m a landowner, a homeowner, a registered independent (lowercase ‘i’). I’m partnered, though that word makes me uncomfortable, as does commitment. I used be a winter person, and now I’m firmly in the summer camp. I’m a dog person with a soft spot for the older, bigger ones. I prefer the mountains, not the ocean.
If you were to ask all but my closest friends and family, you’d undoubtedly get a salad of those identities. All those things go a long way to defining me, yet none do so accurately or completely. I’m many things to many people, myself included.
Most defining, in my experience, has been my sexual orientation. I grew up in a time and place where being gay was not common or accepted, and as I came into my adolescence, I realized that I was unlike everyone I knew, but I didn’t quite know how. I found myself thinking of other boys in my class in a way no one else seemed to. Most of my male friends talked about girls the way I thought about boys. It wasn’t long into high school that I found myself printing off Backstreet Boys fanfic from the newly-installed internet, reading the pages at night under the blanket. On the walk to the bus the next morning, I would take the pages and burn them in the woods near my house, fearful I’d be discovered.
I didn’t come out until two years into college, at least not to the people that mattered most: my parents. I had been admitted to a top-20 university after having spent high school obsessed with class rank and academic success. A year-and-a-half in, I had what can only be described as an emotional breakdown, and I moved home. I started therapy, and after a month or two and many hours of practicing exactly what I was going to say, I came out to my mom. A month or two later, I came out to my dad. They were unexpectedly kind and loving, though in hindsight it wasn’t unexpected at all. I was afraid to come out to them, but I had been blind to an obvious truth: that my parents are good, kind, loving people, and were never going to be anything but accepting.
But this didn’t make my adolescence any more pleasant. I had been riddled with fear and internalized homophobia for so long that it took many years after I came out to deal with that fear. I moved around a lot. First Nashville, then Chicago, then Missoula, then Portland. I’m indebted to each place for different reasons, but I came of age in Missoula. I turned 21 in Missoula. I had moved there on a whim (a running theme in my life) and fell in love with its remoteness. Being so far from any major city, I felt both independent and secluded, about to create and play with and assert my identities for the first time. Though I lived there for only three years, it feels as though I lived a lot more than that in three year’s time. To this day, my closest adult friends are people from that period in my life.
In Missoula, I was openly gay for the first time, and it was a wild time to be. The late 2000s were a heady time — my own political awareness had started to assert itself. George W. Bush was president, the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan were in full swing, and memories of being gay in the rural Midwest were still fresh. While I was politically active, I was politically aware. I remember the day of Obama’s election, of crying tears of joy at the dive bar, drunk with a hundred other young people, all of us elated at the symbolism of his election. The world felt wide open and new, and above all, safe.
I moved to Portland, Oregon not long after, beckoned by its unspoken and illicit promises of a liberal utopia, of radical acceptance. I moved there the year Portlandia debuted, and I was awash in good vibes, in comfort. I enrolled in graduate school, walking several miles through the city to class each day. I made friends, went out drinking at least three nights a week, and had far too much fun. I was headstrong. I slept around. Sometimes a few men each week. I was open with my sexuality, asking for what I thought I wanted, asking to try new things with new people. I played. I loved every minute of it.
But three years went by, and I became unhappy. I was “living the life,” as they say. I had a little apartment to myself, a cat, some close friends. But underneath it all, I was miserable. How could I have all these things yet somehow be so unhappy?
I’ll save the next part of my life for another time, but thanks to the sudden intervention of a new friend, I moved away from Portland, away from a large-ish American city. I moved to a rural town in the mountains. No more traffic, no more driving an hour to go on a hike. I made new friends, I slept with more men in more adventurous places. I took up mountain biking, kayaking, canoeing. I got a dog, then another, then another. I bought some land and lived out of a tent on that land for a few years. I grew weary of tent living, so I bought a small home in another town, a town 200 miles from the nearest friend. I work from home, so I’m able to live anywhere, and I had long admired this place. Just a few days after moving into my 130-year-old rental, I made an offer on the place. Eight months later, the deal closed, and I was now a homeowner in a very remote town where I knew no one.
I set about getting involved, going to city council meetings and joining the board of a local medical nonprofit. I made friends. Months passed. Small-town politics caught up with me, and I left the board. People I had considered friends — my only friends in town — turned out to be anything but. I was alone.
I kept at it. I shoveled my neighbors’ sidewalks. I mowed their lawns. I introduced myself to people I didn’t know, thrusting out my hand as I made direct eye contact. I changed the way I spoke, however subtly. I was no longer so quick to smile or wave. I spoke quieter, in fewer words, less effusively. I became quieter. I steeled myself to life here, a town with several churches just a few blocks from my house. I took care of my lawn, painted my garage, repaired the fence. Slowly, I became part of the fabric of this town, however reserved I might be.
Now here I am.
Some days, I wonder how this all happened. There’s no reason for me to be here — I can work from anywhere — so why am I here?
Politically, I’m unlike most people in my town. They’re largely conservative, and I’m not. Politically, I’m unlike most people in, say, Portland, too. Much of my unhappiness living in Portland was because everyone thought, broadly, as I did. I was (and remain) liberal, but while there was a modicum of diversity in the city, there wasn’t much diversity of thought. Many of the problems facing Portland today — rampant crime chief among them — were obvious a decade ago.
Fundamentally, people here and people there seem ignorant of human nature. People here are far too angry, too fearful of change. Some of that is justified, but fear and anger won’t stop change from happening, nor will it ingratiate you to others. People there move far too quickly and, in a strange turn of events, have become far too angry. My liberal city friends have no compunctions about putting down rural people, insulting their intelligence and voting record. I used to think that liberal people knew better. Specifically, I thought liberal people used to be more compassionate, more understanding, more forgiving. It was was attracted me to that side of things to begin with. But that no longer holds true.
I no longer feel at home around many of my more liberal friends. The casual nature of their derision, the way they look down at rural or conservative people, it all feels too familiar. It was me, not long ago. I was as shocked as anyone by Trump’s election, sinking into tremendous despair for many years after. But as easy as it would be to blame his election on the ignorance or hatred of some folks, I realized that, like everything in the world, nothing is that simple.
Moving out here, I’ve been moved by the plight of rural poverty and the populism it fuels. Alcoholism, drug addiction, homelessness, food insecurity… Not that these things don’t occur in cities, but the entrenchment of these issues out here is remarkable. Four years of living in this town have shown me that many people are right to be angry, right to feel that they’ve been left behind. Close friends’ remarks about people in towns like mine continue to take me by surprise, continue to remind me that many of my friends are the embodiment of what people here have grown to resent: an educated liberal that long ago left her own small town behind to move to a big city, only looking back with disdain.
My small town had three mills — flour, lumber, paper — at the start of the 1980s. Those industries have long since disappeared, the jobs moved overseas. The remaining business have dried up, no longer able to make a go of it. The pharmacy, the lumber yard, the hotel. They’ve all disappeared. Full of interesting old buildings, main street now sits largely empty.
It’s a strange sight to behold. It’s a stranger thing to come to terms with, to tacitly accept. As I walk to the post office, I pass many empty buildings, most of which are owned by wealthy people in other parts of the country. Their vacancy has become mundane, but to someone only fifty years ago, it would have been unrecognizable.
So many towns in America have been hollowed out. What people love about small towns has threatened to be hollowed out, too. Jobs and a sense of confidence in the future have disappeared, and drugs and alcohol and religion have filled in the vacuum. Shame and regret and anger are palpable — and understandable. I’ve yet to find a secular way to express this sentiment so succinctly, but there but for the grace of god go I.
And here I am.
Living in a small town.
Most days, I have to actively stave off the creeping mistrust I feel for those around me. I am, after all, assuming a lot about them, making judgments. I know that if I were to get to know them, I would find in me the compassion to do everything I could to help alleviate their suffering. But this position takes work and, if I’m honest, a little distance. I do not trust most people here to see me as their equal, and this weighs heavily on my mind.
Yet this is home, by choice.
And each day, I have to choose to be open and kind. And to feel as though I did when I was younger, to feel as though I need to defend, however subtly, my very existence? It’s exhausting.
And now I see some of the same intolerance from my friends, all of whom I know mean well. All of whom I know have goodness in their hearts. All of whom should know better.
I no longer feel at home on the political left. I never felt at home on the political right. I never felt at home in the midwest, and I don’t think I feel at home here.
I don’t know of a place where I do feel at home, and the weight of it sits heavy on my shoulders.