“I should have studied hard in school, like you.” – my contractor to me, just before dropping into the crawl space beneath my kitchen floor to look for water damage.
“Beyond those who disappear into computer games (which often involve activities that mimic actual work), many of the most popular hobbies people choose to spend their free time on involve doing forms of work that in the past we might have been paid to do or that other people are still paid to do…Indeed, many hobbies and leisure pursuits…involve the development, refinement, and use of the kinds of manual and intellectual skills that we depended upon through our evolutionary history, and that are increasingly absent in the modern workplace.” - Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots by James Suzman, pg 371.
I.
Every year for about a decade now, my childhood friend Mike and I have backpacked a different national park, carrying enough food, water, clothes and shelter to survive five to seven nights in the backcountry. So far, we’ve done the Smokies, Yosemite, Glacier, and Zion, to name a few. It was in Zion a few weeks ago, actually, that I began sketching the outlines of this essay, which I am now finishing in a climate-controlled room about 2000 miles away, in the heart of an East Coast city.
For me, each trip generates many opportunities for learning, not only about what is going on around us but also between us—two lifelong friends whose relationship, like anything natural, is always changing. Observations typically fall into one of three categories: New, Old, and Rediscovered. An example of New this year was the history and terrain of Zion. Old was the soul-expanding feeling of waking up in the morning—usually well before Mike—and having a few hours to read, write, or walk around in the warming sun. Rediscovered is what I’d like to explore here: specifically, the passive-aggressive dynamic we fall into around the third or fourth day—regarding reality—which I always manage to forget about before next year’s trip.
Generally speaking, the first two days are bliss. Mike and I are too immersed in the great outdoors, too preoccupied with the absence of desks, screens, and everyday annoyances brought on by other people, for anything less than contentment to reign. Our mouths continually open and close, the first at the natural splendor around us and the second to form words: there is never a shortage of personal news for us to share in the beginning. By the third or fourth day, though, a somberness usually comes over Mike that is difficult to crack; and while silence is welcome between us, I am typically hankering for more conversation by the fourth or fifth day than he is willing to provide. He remains a good listener, but will offer little by way of response or initiation. Instead, his focus is increasingly on the world around him. And so our conversations, to the extent they happen, transition into low-frequency debates about that reality. Here’s an example:
“Hm, some sort of tracks here,” Mike says, hovering his pole over scratches in the dirt. “What do you think that is, coyote?”
“Could be,” I say. “Although look at these droppings here. Probably a deer.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Mike says after a while. We move on.
A few minutes later he calls back: “Trailhead!”
Breathing heavily, I come up alongside him. He’s picking at his boot with a pole.
“Takes us South, right?”
“More East,” he says. “Judging by the sun.”
We consult the map: it is East. As he’s folding the map—
“What would you say it was, though,” I ask. “Probably 4 miles in just over an hour?”
“Not quite four, I don’t think.” He unfolds the map again.
“Thought we were going at a pretty good clip, and there wasn’t much elevation. I’d guess close to four.”
“Yeah, I guess it was,” he says from behind the map. “Next little bit’s going to be tough though. No way we’ll keep up that pace.”
“You don’t think so? It’s still early in the day.”
“Sun’s coming up, though. Might be five degrees hotter in an hour.”
“True. Although we’ll be gaining in elevation.”
“Which might slow us down.”
“Speaking of, are you hungry?”
“I could go a little longer.”
“Alright, maybe at the end of this next stretch we can break for lunch.”
“Sounds good. I might not eat, but we can definitely break.”
See what I mean?
II.
I believe the natural world represents, for Mike and I, a concrete backdrop against which we can test our observance of reality, in contrast to the abstract world of our educational upbringing (and, for that matter, current employment). Growing up, we weren’t taught animal tracking, you see. We received no thorough lessons on flora. Neither our teachers, nor our parents, showed us how to forage for food, listen for water, erect shelter, or read weather. Instead we learned advanced math, how to conjugate Latin verbs, U.S. History, the basics of corporate finance, political theory, and “Race and Sexual Fantasy in European Literature,” according to my college transcript.
Our education reflected two supposed privileges, one of modernity and the other of class. In the modern Western world, there is little need for basic survival skills. Technology has by and large “elevated” us from an animal’s state of existence. Yet Mike and I also never learned how to change a car tire, which is still useful in the modern world, on the unspoken assumption that it’d be unnecessary. I.e., we’d pay someone else to do that, and learn what ‘i.e.’ meant instead. It is indeed strange, as I look back on my education, that crafting (“Shop”) and food preparation (“Foods”) were not valued at all, as no doubt they would have been throughout history and still would be in many parts of the world. Instead, these classes were for Level 2 students.
Level 1 students, meanwhile, were learning how to think critically, which is less a body of knowledge than a way of acquiring or questioning it—a capacity Mike and I put to ample use on our trips by debating whether this form of education was good for us. Increasingly, as the years wear on, we agree that it wasn’t. We begin with a sprinkling of perspective, of course. Our education has allowed us to bypass a slew of worse alternatives—we recognize this and are grateful for it. For example, we both have jobs that allow us to take a week off and spend a few thousand dollars every year for our hikes. But our dissatisfaction with our education is beginning to mirror our dissatisfaction with work. Specifically, we lament the absence of concrete, physical—dare I say real— interaction with the world. Our trips through the wilderness only make this more apparent.
III.
There used to be a time, not so long ago in the history of our species, when our only education was immersion in nature—as every other animal’s education continues to be, except for those we have domesticated in some way. Nowadays, actual nature is something very few of my friends have experienced, or even know where to find. They think a city park with tree-lined paths, imported flowers, and a few songbirds counts. Even those professions we tend to romanticize for their association with nature—farmers, for example—aren’t actually immersed in nature, but rather something faux. A farm is a perversion of nature, originally speaking. Meanwhile, as a subject or body of knowledge, “nature” has become boutique for those with privilege, passé for those without. Someone who knows a lot about mushrooms, for example, is either a hobbyist, researcher, or farmer. The first two could have a much longer discussion with each other than with the third, in part because they have the luxury of time.
What am I saying? There is a felt meaninglessness to the work Mike and I do and the lives we lead, a sensory inability to understand how what we do matters, that we must placate by gardening or woodworking or some other hobby on the weekends—like hiking—because it’s not integral to our mode of living. During our trips, we fantasize aloud about lifestyles that would be better suited for our physiology, and in these moments the conversation is as spiritual as the setting. But when our trip is over, so is the fantasy.
As neighbors growing up, Mike and I went to the same grade school, middle school, and high school, albeit a year apart. After graduation, we both went off to prestigious liberal arts universities: his in New England, mine in the Midwest. Mike majored in math and English, and took a consulting job right out of college where he’s been ever since. I majored in English, got a job in publishing, quit after three years, returned to school for counseling, and am now a therapist in private practice.
Mike has put on weight every year since college except for when he lost 50 pounds hiking the Appalachian Trail back in 2012. He admits to sitting down the vast majority of the time—all 12 to 13 hours a day that he is working—and drinking 5 to 6 cups of coffee before lunch. He eats terribly (usually at the office), doesn’t exercise, and sleeps but little and poorly. He talks about spending what free time he has on recreational drugs because “they take minimal planning and are a great escape.” All this coming from someone I’ve known almost my entire life as a deeply curious person—someone who, whenever he’s had the time and energy, loves to inspect whatever passes under his nose.
As for me, I like my job much more than he likes his, and no wonder: I work a third of the hours, have a flexible schedule, stay away from screens, don’t receive much email, and have meaningful conversations with other people. What I do certainly seems more in line with the design of the human body.
I was in sales before I became a therapist, though, and I can still remember the visceral feeling of unproductiveness after a day in the office, even if I had accomplished everything on my To-Do list. For some reason, a finished spreadsheet didn’t light up my productivity sensors as much as it should have given the hours I’d sunk into it. Meanwhile, if a client called during the day and we bullshitted for half an hour, I often felt productive enough to close my computer and call it quits. Being social resonates with the body in a way that answering email and creating PowerPoint presentations (80% of Mike’s job) just doesn’t. So does being physical, even if it means hiking 60 miles over five days to end up where you started.
Because Mike and I spend our time reading and not hunting, we know enough about Karl Marx to use the word ‘alienation’ and cast a suspicious eye toward the prevailing economic structures that dictate, in many ways, our relationship with work. We are discontent with—displaced by, almost—the fact that in this hyper-specialized world, we’ve become experts in one thing and one thing only, and use the money this expertise procures to outsource everything else. For example, Mike works 60-80 hours a week on a few specific issues within strategic business consulting, makes $200k, and subsequently never cooks, cleans, fixes, or creates anything. And while there is nothing wrong with focus, nothing bad about pouring all your energies into a small number of things, the body does not quite understand how PowerPoints put dinner on the table. How they matter. This leaves Mike listless, awash.
IV.
But enough of all that. Let’s return to the scene. Here were are, Mike and I, two enormously educated people debating something we are only vaguely educated about: nature. We were taught rocks in middle school, I guess, and biology in high school; and I once picked up a book on birding. But the debate is really about something else: we are using the natural world to sharpen our theory-making knives because so much of what were taught, and so much of the work we do now, is abstract. Has no hard-and-fast answers. Nature, on the other hand, does. We might not know them. We might not have the skill to discern them. Even humanity, as a whole, is unsure of many of them. But we have faith that an answer exists—and just as importantly, that we could see it, smell it, touch it, hear it, and/or taste it. Nature’s truths, in other words, cannot be dodged or debated.
That, right there, is what makes the arena worth fighting in. It is the complete opposite of our discussions about education, or any other academic debate we might have. In those, there is hardly a right answer—only good and bad argument. We spend too much time there already. The natural world offers us a vacation from abstraction and all the ambiguity that comes with it.
One of these years, it would be fascinating to bring someone along as experienced in nature as Mike and I are at abstract thought and argument. No doubt, the tenor of the conversation would change:
“Hm, some sort of tracks here.” Mike indicates with his pole some markings on the ground. “What do you think that is, coyote?”
“Deer,” our friend replies.
“Hm, but look at these droppings. Looks like they’re from a bigger animal,” I say.
“That’s from a cow.”
“Oh—I thought you said deer?”
“Those tracks are deer,” our friend points to the first. “This is cow shit.” He next points to a different set of tracks. “Cow tracks there.”
Mike and I mutter “Hm” and move along.
After a little while:
“So, Adam. Any thoughts on the UBI?”
“What’s that?” our Level 2 friend replies.
Mike and I lock eyes and hold back a smile. We don’t need to say anything to know what each other is thinking. After all, we’ve been friends for basically our whole lives.