When I'm free of the constraints of every day life, when I no longer work in regular intervals (or when traveling, work at all), the emotions come in fast and loose.
I find myself in a small mountain resort town, one I last visited when I was six or seven on a family vacation. Walking my dog downtown, I'm struck by how bland, how uninteresting, how similar this place is to other resort towns: Steamboat, Hood River, Jackson, Bend. Boutiques that cater to rich white women, "local artist" co-ops selling overpriced art, seven dollar lattes. Wealthy, attractive people walking around town, browsing the shops in their Patagonia and North Face, talking of the latest run on the mountain or their investment accounts. There's a palpable insulation here — news of the larger world rarely makes waves in towns like this, unless said news affects the stock markets.
At the end of a long day, I'm in a dirty motel room, bathed in sickening white LED light from the nightstand lamp, reading a book about a remote Colorado valley, where people live on five-acre tracts of barren land in trailers and shacks and sheds, just thankful to be left alone. On the balcony above my room, a woman hangs over the edge, ashing her cigarette onto the hood of my car. She must live here. A few nights ago, at a motel in a middling city in the center of the country, I rented a $35 room for the night and was put in the middle of several families, all living out of their rooms. Late at night, the noise of an argument down the mezzanine woke me up. A few hours later, the muffled pops of gunshots in the distance, several blocks from where I slept. I woke up to the sound of a kid learning to ride his bike in the hallway.
When I'm out America-ing, I often think back to my hometown, to the people I knew as a child. I wonder what they'd think of this place. I wonder how I'd describe it to them, to someone that hasn't left Indiana. There American West doesn't translate well to someone from the heartland, and I think I prefer it that way. Some days, I feel as though I accomplished something just by making a life out here, as if it imbued me with some sort of unique understanding of human nature. I think of people back in the corn and soy fields of the Midwest, no mountains or public land in sight, and wonder about their lives.
And I look around at mine. What, exactly, am I trying to find out here?
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.
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.
What kind of memories could I have shared with my loved ones if I had known the difference between what I thought I wanted and what I didn’t want anymore?
I largely don’t feel lonely around my family anymore. In my twenties? Absolutely. In my early thirties? Yes. But now, I’ve come to appreciate my time spent with them, even if I know myself enough to want it in fits and starts.
Reading this piece, I’m struck by the plight of any writer in a relationship. Writing is an attempt to get at some truth, whether I arrive there or not. But how does one maintain relationships with people when doing so?
There are so many things I want to write, but don’t for fear of disrupting my relationships.
I once thought that all truths must be laid bare, the cards left to fall where they may. But now I’m not as sure. ‘Telling it like it is’ can feel both indulgent and crass. It can feel a little too good.
I still feel an insatiable need to write or say what’s real, but it’s tempered with, well, call it what you want: age, experience, cynicism, common sense, defeatism.
When I am still, I wither.
I’ve long known this, but it doesn’t take me long to forget it, either.
I look at people that can be still for long periods of time with a combination of fascination, respect, and pity. Why is it that I feel the most alive while on the road, when leaving, while in the between?
Put another, and maybe more honest, way, I have commitment issues. I so cherish the feeling of leaving that I cannot tell if it's grown into an addiction. As I age, I recognize the material benefits of...whatever's the opposite of this. Stability is half the rent, emotional support, breakfast in the mornings. It's a warm house, a roof over my head. It's not having to get up every 5 hours to stoke the fire.
But there's something lost, too. There's no more surprise, no more wonder. It's convincing yourself you know something.
But somewhere deep in my brain, I'm uncomfortable with convincing myself I know anything, because it's always an illusion.
…Harris’s insistence on attributing Hamas’s violence entirely to apolitical motivations reflects a broader tendency to reduce the Israel-Palestine conflict into a simple, “good” versus “evil” binary. At one point in his monologue, Harris argues that “if the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace; if the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be a genocide.” But this is only true in the most facile sense. In the West Bank, which is governed by a secular Palestinian Authority that cooperates with Israel, the Palestinians have largely abstained from terroristic resistance. Yet putting down their weapons has won them repression and dispossession by a Jewish supremacist settler movement, not peace. Of course, if Palestinians gamely submit to indefinite occupation, then there may be “peace” in some sense of the word. But it would not be the sort of peace that any Israeli would find tolerable were they put in the Palestinians’ position.
A counterpoint to my previous post about Sam Harris.
If it’s not obvious, this conflict has long been important to me. Many years ago, it motivated me to take college classes on the region, and not long after, to live in both Israel and Palestine for a lengthy stint.
My allegiance then was firmly pro-Palestinian. I saw this conflict, as many on the Left now do, as a simple binary: Israel has the power, and therefore they are not to be trusted. Palestinians have no power, and therefore I must sympathize with them. This speaks to something deep within me — a near-pathological desire to sympathize with people I perceive as overlooked, ignored, on the fringe, without power. Old dogs, small towns, mountain cabins… I’m not really all that complicated.
I haven’t had a strong opinion about the Middle East in many years. My attention and anxiety are now domestic, and while the events of October 7 changed that to some degree, I’m far more interested in how the effects of that day play in my own country than I am in hashing out the decades- and centuries-long grievances — and the very hard work to be done by all sides of this conflict — in the Levant itself. (In this way, I’m hopelessly American, perpetually gazing at my own navel.)
But since October 7th, I’m stunned by how powerful the Palestinians have become. No, obviously not militarily, but culturally, here on the American Left, support for the Palestinian people is de rigueur. In some ways, I find this thrilling — everything I felt so strongly all those years ago now seems to be in vogue.
Yet any time there’s a big social swing, I’m inherently skeptical. I do not trust the mechanisms of social media and how they magnify or perpetuate certain narratives, and more importantly, I’ve lost faith in the American Left over the last several years to rise above the fray. At risk of beating a dead horse, a political movement I once thought to be grounded in pluralism, liberalism, and equality has become something else entirely, something that feels like a naked grab for power. (And, though I resent having to, I feel obligated to say that my mistrust the Left does not mean I endorse the Right.)
So now that the Palestinian cause is front-and-center on social media, I’m not sure what to think. And I’m horrified by the corollary rise in anti-semitism. Young people on American college campuses calling for the eradication of Israel? Really? Much like Sam Harris, I’m morally opposed to any religious state, be it Jewish, Christian, Hindu or Muslim, and while I think far too many people willfully conflate anti-Zionism (which is legitimate) with anti-semitism (which is not) in order to blunt criticism of Israel’s policies, I cannot fathom how the eradication of the state of Israel seems at all like a legitimate outcome of this conflict.
And yet…
I was once twenty-one. I had strong opinions about this region, some of which were grounded in reality and others born of emotion. To my credit, I traveled to the Middle East and lived there, living in both Palestinian refugee camps and on Israeli kibbutzim. I saw things with my own eyes and came to some conclusions. If I didn’t have the restraint to admit that I didn’t know what I didn’t know, how can I expect anyone else to do the same?
I want so badly to trust my fellow humans. The young tend to be open and the old tend to be wise. In my middling age, I’m not sure where I fit anymore.
…it feels strange to be happy? Yes! We are living in the strangest period of human history. We are ending this year with two wars: in Ukraine and Israel. Then there are natural disasters. Things are not getting better. We have to understand that the only reality we have is living every day as if it’s the last. Which is also the philosophy of performance: to be in the moment. How important are we? We are dust. I was also thinking how interesting it is that in war, when everybody was making art that reflected what happened, Henri Matisse was painting flowers. I finally understand that. The way to fight is not to reflect horror and put your spirit down. It’s to create something with beauty that gives you hope.
You don’t think any good art comes from happiness? Louis Armstrong or Stevie Wonder — Ah! Music is a whole different issue because singing, in general, you have to sing from your heart and open your heart. I’m talking about visual art. I’m talking about literature. Especially writers. You think Beckett is happy? You think Kafka is happy? Do you think Dostoyevsky is happy? Is Proust happy?
“Especially writers.”
Marina, more than any other artist aside from Prince or Daniel Quinn, has been a central, singular inspiration. Her work has changed my life. The Artist is Present found me at just the right time, and it’s not an understatement to say that her work helped me persist at a time when I felt lost and alone, not far from suicide.
Her sentiments on writing echo something you hear often, especially in the halls of a creative writing MFA, from which I’m currently on a, well, let’s call it a ‘sabbatical.’ Pointedly, pain is art.
I’ve long suspected this to be true, and it once filled me with insecurity. I’m no stranger to pain, sure, but in our current moment, when trauma is traded as cultural currency, I have no interest in doing so.
What a funny thing to have been insecure about, eh? Not having enough trauma? It must be as obnoxious to read that sentence as it feels to write it.
I can’t say I’m still insecure about this, but I’ve largely given up on any dream of writing in hopes of getting paid to do so. Or in hopes of getting much validation at all.
Funny — in my MFA, a person who enjoys writing for the sake of writing is…rare. You probably wouldn’t be shocked at how often someone utters “I’m going to start a Substack,” then proceeds to spill five thousand words on the why of it. It’s all a bit much, a little through-the-looking-glass.
This is why, it seems, that I feel most at home here. I’ve received precious little feedback about my website. After deciding to no longer write anonymously (about six months ago), I’ve sent this page to at least a hundred people. You know how often someone I know has made a comment about something I’ve written?
Twice.
I may as well be screaming into the void. I can’t be accused of selling out or writing for attention. After all, I can’t monetize here (at least not as far as I’m aware).
And it’s precisely for this reason that I’m more excited about writing than I have been in years.
To be a frustrating centrist I would say, “why not both?”. Analog is the better choice for thinking and note-taking 90% of the time. But its usefulness ends when all those insights are trapped in notebooks. Gathering dust and requiring overly obtuse ways of organisation like BuJo.
This is where we can supplement with digital methods of storage. We can review what we’ve written and decide if it’s worth capturing. What we’re left with is a digital archive of our pursuits. Whether they’re intellectual, creative or personal. They are kept safe for generations to come to discover. Especially if they’re captured in a universal format like TXT or Markdown. Even more so if they are stored publicly.
We may not know now whether our insights and thoughts are useful. But they may be useful for those that come after us. By leaving them in an easy to access, long lasting, public format we can ensure our contributions to society last longer than us.
I write on a typewriter, then scan the pages with my iPhone camera or portable scanner. They are then keyword-searchable, copy-and-paste-able just like a document created on a computer.
I write on typewriters because they physically slow me down. My thoughts cannot fly out of my mind at the speed of a computer keyboard or dictated voice memo.
You are about to withstand a barrage of lies about the war that broke out today in Israel.
Some of those lies will be explicit. Some of them will be lies of omission. Others will be lies of obfuscation. Or lies of minimization. Lies told by people who are simply too afraid to look at such an ugly, barbarous reality. And lies told by people whose true beliefs are too ugly to quite say aloud. Turn on cable news and you can hear some of them right now.
I like Bari Weiss. I admire her integrity, her commitment to journalistic ethics, and the compassion and curiosity she shows interviewees and guests. (Strangely, nothing enrages my more liberal friends than saying I admire Bari Weiss - a fellow liberal.)
I was listening to the recent episode of her podcast with Michael Oren and I found some of their language to be…unsettling. One part in particular, when they mention a “clash of civilizations,” and Michael says no, this is not a clash of civilizations, this is a clash between civilization and barbarism.
This. This is precisely why I can’t get onboard with much of the rhetoric surrounding the conflict. Do I condone the attacks on Israel? Absolutely not. But how on earth can anyone refer to their own culture (in this case, Israel) as “civilized” when they let such suffering happen just over the border in Palestine?
While I can’t begin to feel it myself, I understand the anger Israelis must feel. Many Palestinians, including Hamas, the “government” of Gaza, want to wipe Israel off the map. That’s a bit different than “kill all the Jews,” but it’s not an arbitrary distinction. I have Palestinian friends that feel as though their homes were stolen from them when the State of Israel was formed in 1948. I feel for them. I also have Israeli friends that have profound and lasting generational trauma from the Holocaust and so many other despicable, horrific attacks on Jewish people over the last, well, if we’re honest, many thousands of years. I feel for them, too.
But a civilization as I define it is a relentless, dogged pursuit of peace, of justice, of fairness, of civility. The arrogance of throwing a rave on the border of the Gaza Strip? To literally throw a party just over the fence from Gaza? Sorry, but the optics of that are terrible. Talk about arrogance…
Civilization is the pursuit of justice for all, not just those that think or believe as we do. Trust me, I get how endlessly frustrating-bordering-on-enraging it is to always try to be fair to those that don’t themselves practice fairness. (I, a gay man, must accept the strangeness of both caring for the Palestinian people…and recognizing that many among them would want me dead.) But there is no other option.
This commitment to principle in the face of an irreconcilable reality? This is the bedrock foundation of a civilization.
Barbarism is not just the slaughter of innocents, but allowing innocent people to suffer because of your own cultural indifference. And I say this as an American. The suffering that takes place around the world because of my own culture’s indifference is staggering.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point out that indifference wherever and whenever we see it. Israel is a bastion of many good things in the world. But like America, should they allow their neighbors to suffer, no matter how much those neighbors might hate Israel? If so, is Israel — are we — civilized?
In my opinion, the strongest reason for any random person to start a blog is that you will have more awesome friendships—both in the sense that you will meet new awesome people as a result of your blog, but also in the sense that writing will cause you to have more interesting ideas, which will make your existing friendships more awesome because you’ll have better stuff to talk about.
Most other important things in life, like job opportunities and romantic relationships, are downstream of the quality of your friends, so this is pretty great.
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been writing on the internet for much of my adult life, here and there, anonymously and, at least recently, not. The power of the internet is in finding connection, and I’ve made friends or acquaintances via my online presence that make my life far more rewarding. In “real life,” I know at most one person that’s interested in iOS app development, another one person that might appreciate (yet doesn’t love) Star Wars action figures, and maybe two or three that are interested in technology in general. “Real life” is bounded far more by geography and circumstance, but online, people with similar interests flock to each other like moths to a flame.
Thing is, none of this has happened on social media. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok… These companies that tout their “we’re all about connecting people” bonafides are advertising companies and nothing more. Don’t be fooled. The only site that has a semblance of camaraderie (in my experience) is Reddit, and even that has started to undergo some unpleasant changes.
The real fun lies in the small web. What started back on uJournal and LiveJournal back in the late 90s and early 2000s led me here to Micro.Blog twenty years later. It’s the joy of hunting for great writing, for righteous opinions, for scathing dissents, for unique voices, all unfiltered by the cruft of advertising. It’s the human internet.
I am, as ever, torn. I both love my corner of the internet and hate The Internet. But I have to remember: I’m an anomaly. I pay for my search engine so I’m able to tweak my personal search algorithm. How many people do you know pay for a search engine? How many people spend a good deal each year on bespoke software for their iPhones and Macs so that they might use them to their fullest potential? My internet is not most people’s internet, and that’s easy to forget.
But I am, at heart, in love with my internet. I am so immeasurably grateful for the opportunity to have connected with so many people over the years. After all, what else is there?
There is a familiar pattern to my writing. To my actual writing.
I sit at my desk. I start to write. I build up momentum.
A few pages in, I start to think how people might respond to it. I think of the thousands of oh, that's easy for you to says and well, you've never had tos I've heard over the years and I slow down.
Then I stop. And I erase what I've written.
I have a lot of ideas, some of them good. I think I know the way things should be better than most people. I have a strong desire to change the world, to make this planet a better, kinder place for all creatures, not just humans.
But when you've had a life like mine, how can you tell anyone else how to live theirs? When I've been afforded so much, how can I tell others how it should be?
Thing is, all those that's easy for you to says? They're not wrong. It is easier for me to say certain things, to reach certain conclusions. But the irony remains: just because some conclusions are easier to reach, it doesn't make those conclusions wrong.
When you're a beneficiary of luck and capitalism as I have been, no one wants to hear your fucking opinion. Being born to two kind, loving people? Pure luck. I may not have a lot of power and I may not have a lot of money, but I don't have any debt. I don't need anything and I want very little. That is true freedom.
This is why I delete. It's the same urge that drives me out into the woods or up into the mountains. Let's face it together: I am not going to change this world. No matter how good my ideas, no matter how right my conclusions, no one wants to hear that shit from me. This culture loathes imperfect messengers, no matter how good a point they might have.
So rather than complain, rather than coming off as a spoiled brat, even if I'm not wrong... I keep my mouth shut and retreat.
Even if you do have a smartphone, it’s not great to have it be a single point of failure. It could be lost, stolen, away from cell service, or have a low battery. Most electronic tickets and admission passes don’t seem to work with the Wallet app, and who knows whether an e-mail, app, or Web link will fail when you need it, even if it was cached. A common pattern is to take a screenshot of the barcode or QR code, but that requires more tech-savvy.
I run into this problem all the time. Rather, I watch people I love run into this problem all the time.
A very dear friend lives in an off-the-grid cabin. He’s proudly never used a computer (aside from an Apple Watch, which I set up as his phone and sole electronic device a few years back). Lately, he’s had some health concerns that require near-constant communications with doctors via MyChart… which can only be accessed by a computer or smartphone.
People like him get lost and left behind in a digital world. I say this as an evangelist of the iPhone: the pocket computer is an incredible tool — camera, GPS, offline maps, streaming music, FaceTime, plant identifier, etc. etc. — but the simple fact is that most people have no clue how to use their phones to their max potential…nor do they care to.
There’s a head-in-the-sand element to this I’ve always found frustrating. More than one friend reacts with what looks like rage when their phones (or the internet) doesn’t behave as it “should.” (And when you become known as the “tech friend,” that rage is often directed at you.) I’ve had to learn to handle those people with care and not mirror their anger back at them. Which ain’t easy, because if people just took a fucking second to learn something…
But then there’s my friend in the cabin, who abstains entirely. I cannot convey how much I admire his conviction, and how much I agree when he says that tech is going to be our downfall. “Sure,” he says, “you use it to identify that star, but everyone else uses it to get on instagram and make themselves feel like shit.” He has a point.
The world is leaving him behind, and it can’t rely on people like me to constantly bridge that gap.
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.
Yesterday was the military funeral for my neighbor that died in February. His ashes were interred at a state veteran’s cemetery of a neighboring (red) state, as all the veteran cemeteries in ours are located on the far more liberal side of the state, which he hated.
I’ve been told this should bring some closure — I heard it repeated it all weekend — but I don’t feel any. I had ‘closure’ many months ago, and while it was nice to meet some of his family, this weekend only served to remind me how hollow so much of this feels.
The veteran’s cemetery abuts a subdivision several miles from the city center, the green manicured grass pushing into the sagebrush desert that surrounds it. I presume a veteran’s cemetery is designed to inspire, I don’t know, reverence? But who comes to a place like this and feels anything but horror at the ticky-tacky of it all? Is this what patriotism is now? A few acres beside Shady Acres?
Once, I had an idea of cemeteries as hallowed ground, as spaces that were meant to persist into the future, to demonstrate to future generations the respect and reverence we felt for those in the ground, veterans or not. Yet the more I see, the more I realize the cemeteries of our time are just suburbs of the dead, mere cul-de-sacs of headstones. I rarely see anyone visiting cemeteries, no families picnicking as was once customary and common. Built on the edge of town (on land given as a tax write-off) and accessible only by car, they’re bereft of anything remotely natural. The grass endlessly mowed and sprayed with chemicals, the ground as embalmed as the bodies beneath.
It’s bullshit.
Nearly every principle, every belief, every assumption that undergirds that cemetery is fake. Patriotism, afterlife, “respect for the dead”… it’s all bullshit. Our culture doesn’t respect the dead, we want them out of the way. We don’t create lasting monuments to their sacrifices, we put them at the edge of town so we won’t be bothered. These are not monuments to the dead, but shrines to convenience and willful ignorance.
I’ve been a fairly active Redditor for more than 11 years. Until now, it’s been the website with the best mix of community, popularity, developer ecosystem, and web-search-ability. The non-monetary value Reddit as a knowledge store is literally priceless; it’s a modern-day Library of Alexandria.
By now, you probably know my thoughts on social media. (Fuck social media.) But Reddit was always the exception. When I hear “social media,” I think “toxic stew of projection and posturing designed to make you feel bad about yourself in the service of serving you advertisements,” and by that definition, Reddit isn’t social media.
Reddit was the promise of the internet in one place. A group of people, each passionate about something, talking and supporting and, yes, sometimes fighting with each other. It’s been a good place. The best of human nature.
Everything changes and nothing is free. Not in this culture, anyway. I know this. But it’s still painful when the pursuit of profit comes for a community you love so dearly. We’ll see how these API changes play out, but I’m not hopeful.
(Update: my blogging idol with a very good point over on Daring Fireball.)
Tomorrow afternoon, I have to put down one of my dogs. I'm heartbroken, which is no surprise. I've had him for sixteen months, though shortly after I adopted him, I was told that he had between two and six left. I had been volunteering at the shelter where the manager kept him behind the front desk — the spot for special animals that don't deserve the frazzled nerves of being back in the kennels. As we left for a walk, we stopped at my car for a leash and he propped his two front feet up on the runner. I knew then and there.
An elderly man with mobility issues, he could never jump, but he's done a damn good job of using his front legs to compensate. For much of our first year, he would pull himself up the steep stairs of my 130-year-old home, insistent on sleeping upstairs. (I didn't protest.) I would lift his front legs onto the bed, then run my hands along his sides and down his back legs, grabbing his back ankles and lifting those into bed, too.
Shortly before I adopted him, he had surgery to remove eight or so tumors growing in his body. Shortly after I brought him home, an x-ray showed a grapefruit-sized tumor growing under his intestine and the vet said he likely had only a few months left. Almost since the beginning, I've been preparing for death.
The last sixteen months haven't been easy. He's a 14-or-15-year-old dog with mobility issues, which means he wasn't able to come hiking with me and my other dog. The two of us would venture out only for the day, always sure to be home to hang out with Vito. He forced me to compromise, to grow up a little. It was brutally hot for several weeks last summer, and I did something I had long been morally opposed to: bought an air conditioner. Anything for that dog.
After many months of him being relatively mobile, his back hips started to get worse. I decided to let him sleep downstairs on his heated bed, and I put a gate up at the stairs to make sure my other kept him company. I did my best to cover my wood floors with something to make it easier for him to walk. I bought traction socks. He takes pain medication each night, usually wrapped in some lunch meat.
But time takes its toll. The grapefruit is now a football. He no longer stands at the window and barks at the neighbors as he once did incessantly. He can no longer control his bowels, so he goes when he needs to. (This hasn't be a problem as it's easy enough to clean up.) His back left leg goes out if he stands too long while eating or getting a drink. His dark skin is beginning to show as his soft winter undercoat has started shedding. A few days ago, I came home to him collapsed by the back door, unable to get up.
I know it's time, yet I'm unprepared. How am I unprepared?
I've been preparing for this for the last sixteen months. I've been emotionally on edge most of that time, if I'm honest, and I'm exhausted by it. My life has radically changed — my world gotten much smaller, more contained — because of him. In the literal sense, he's been a labor of love.
Now it's time to send him on his way. To put him down. To have him killed. To let him die.
I called the vet yesterday and scheduled it for tomorrow. Now that I have, I'm both relieved and anxious, sure that I'm doing the right thing punctuated by moments of doubt. His eyes haven't changed since the day we met and he's every bit as "in there" as he was 16 months ago. Yet his body is giving out, his breathing labored. He's tired.
I wonder what his life was like before me, all those 13 years. I was told a story about his past, though I presume much of it is apocryphal (as stories in small towns like these tend to be). Did he seem so thankful to be home with us because he had been neglected, abused? On the eve of our last day together, I want him to lay next to me and tell me his life story.
He has been such a good friend. I'm going to feel lost without him.
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.
A few weeks ago, my only friend in this town died. Fifty-one years my senior, he was my neighbor across the street.
Four years ago, when we first met, I was wary. He would come to my fence as I was gardening, talking about immigrants coming over the southern border or something else he had seen on Fox News — but as our relationship matured and I learned to steer the conversation away from political issues (or, if I’m honest, indulge him a bit), we struck up a friendship.
Last summer, when his Android phone quit working, he walked over to my fence and asked me about “those iPhones you keep telling me about.” We bought a used SE on eBay. Within a few months, he had upgraded to a brand new iPhone, an Apple TV, an Apple Watch. He took to technology — well-designed, thoughtful technology — in a way I had never seen in someone his age. He loved learning about the capabilities of this incredible tool that fit in his pocket.
Long before he moved to this small town, he was a globe-trotter. He was born in Brooklyn in the 30s, became an Airborne Ranger in the Korean War, and went on to work at IBM, American Satellite, and other long-diminished-yet-bedrock tech companies. He told stories of setting up satellite uplinks in Alaska, of living in Rome, of business meetings with executives all over the world. He moved often — Missouri, Virginia, California, Italy, Minnesota — before settling in this small town in 2002. The tumult of 9/11 on the east coast caused him to re-assess where he wanted to be, and for some reason, he chose this tiny town.
Seventeen years later, I would move here, into a 130-year-old home across the street from his. We got to know each other over the next four years. I painted his garage as he told stories. I would help him with his new iPhone, or try my best to help him with his old Android. I mowed his lawn, shoveled his snow. Initially, he asked how much my services would cost, and when I told him to knock it off — he was a neighbor, after all — he took to me. I don’t think he was accustomed to people being decent without a price of some kind. It wasn’t long after his new phone that he’d start calling 2–3 times a day, asking about this or that, how to use the Find My app to share his location with his niece, or just to ask where I was hiking that day. Once, I FaceTimed him from the top of a mountain not far from our houses and he was amazed. Just that morning, I had been in his living room helping him with something or other, and now I was on a mountaintop? And we were videochatting? He relished those moments.
On a very snowy night a few weeks ago, I walked across the street to shovel his back porch. He heard the shovel on cement and cracked the back door. His voice sounding weak, he asked me to come inside. “I’ve got a question for you.” I walked in a few minutes later to him sitting on his couch. His hair was disheveled, his voice thin. He was clearly not feeling well. He had been vomiting for nearly 24 hours and asked if these were symptoms of covid. “I don’t think so,” I replied, “but I have some tests across the street.” I walked across the street, grabbed some covid tests and Thera-Flu, and walked back to his place. He didn’t want to take a test yet, so I put them on the counter. I asked if he wanted anything, if I could take him to the hospital, told him that I was worried about dehydration. He insisted on staying put, but if in the morning he wasn’t feeling better, he’d let me drive him to the hospital.
“Call me if you need anything. I mean that. Anything.” I told him as I got ready to leave.
“Thanks, buddy,” he said. He thanked me that way often, but this time his voice sounded different. Resigned. I heard both gratitude and finality. I walked across the street and messaged a friend of mine, telling her I was unsure he would survive the night.
I was right.
He died later that evening. At some point late at night, he got up to use the bathroom. He had a heart attack and fell back onto the floor of his bedroom. We found him there in the morning.
I struggle with what I want this space to be.
A journal? Morning pages? Links and ephemera?
Not settling on any one things means nothing is committed to the page, and that’s no longer tenable. I have this sneaking suspicion that I am some kind of writer, so I should follow through.
But writing outside the confines of my notebook and letters to friends means I have an audience, and I’m particularly sensitive to being watched. I describe it with the same revulsion I do going to a gym: why do I want to go be watched doing something that is, in theory, just for me? Visibility changes how I comport myself, how I behave, and I’ve found visibility to slowly erode my keen sense of self-trust. Am I writing this for me? Or am I writing this for to be validated?
This is why I can only trust the art if I’m in a dark corner of the internet with a minimal feedback loop. This is where I might trust myself to be honest.
It has always been difficult to start writing. I sit down with a cup of coffee and full of motivation, but within a few minutes, I’m disheartened enough to quit.
I have competing motivations to write. I want to be honest, to articulate things as I see them. I also want to be kind and fair, to afford people the same grace as I’ve been afforded countless times in my life.
But what does it mean to ‘be nice,’ anyway? In the rural Midwest, I was raised to believe that if you didn’t have anything nice to say, you didn’t say anything at all. Life there prioritized social harmony—conflict avoidance by another name—over honesty. It’s this social harmony that kept me in the closet until my 20s. It’s this social harmony that kept a close family member’s addiction to painkillers a secret until just recently. It’s this social harmony that leads to a lot of guilt and shame.
In my 20s, as I moved out of the Midwest and came out of the closet, I swung wildly in the other direction. I began to prioritize truth over harmony, and spoke my mind to anyone that would listen. It felt good to finally say what I thought, though I stopped caring how what I thought might make other people feel. I have hurt a lot of people by prioritizing ‘the truth.’ Yet it felt good to finally say what I felt needed to be said.
In my late 30s, I’m struggling to integrate these two approaches. I do not want to hurt anyone or make them feel shame or guilt—the very things that burdened me much of my life. But I also want to speak the truth, and sometimes the truth hurts. Life is at times painful and uncomfortable, and anyone that thinks otherwise—or attempts to live their lives avoiding pain or discomfort—is delusional.
Perhaps we should all be allowed to live in our delusions. Maybe that’s a small kindness we can offer each other, to be allowed to live in the little worlds we’ve constructed to avoid the confusing, scary reality that A) our actions have consequences, B) free will might not exist, and C) death is inevitable.
But the most meaningful relationships I have are with people that don’t allow me my delusions, but gently shake me free of them.
