Ridgeline subscribers —

Hello from the other side of my ~220 kilometer walk through the Kiso Valley.

I sent a shorter version of this newsletter as the last issue of the (the entire walk is) Between Two Mountains pop-up newsletter. This version is quite expanded. The archives of the B2M pop-up are available to SPECIAL PROJECTS members on the members’ site. And if you’d like to follow along in my digital footsteps, the GPX file of the walk is here.

Here are some post-walk reflections on fullness of days, craft, iteration, and how social media and contemporary online-ness subverts it all.

The Fullness Quotient

The biggest confirmation of the walk was something I already knew, but was nice to doubly confirm: I need to be alone to “really do” these things. Folks often ask to walk with me, but as soon as someone joins me, the “spirit” of the “creative muse” disappears or, to put it more directly: the silence and energy required to produce “work” is lost in the socializing. (This is why I don’t publish while doing Walk and Talks with Kevin Kelly; am simply “in the moment,” at most taking notes at dinner.) When walking alone, as I meet people on the road, I modulate interactions to protect that pool of energy I’ll need later in the day to write. Even on a day of meeting “a lot” of people, I’ll only be speaking for 30-60 minutes in total. When even the closest of close friends joins, that energy pool is quickly depleted.

Empirically, for B2M that meant I wrote fewer words in the second half:

Day 1:    3,061 words
Day 2:    2,615 words
Day 3:    2,168 words
Day 4:    2,506 words
Day 5:    2,348 words
Day 6:    2,189 words
Day 7:    2,690 words

Day 8:    1,914 words
Day 9:    1,623 words
Day 10:    1,586 words
Day 11:    1,601 words
Day 12:    702 words
Day 13:    1,139 words

Final note:    2,723 words

Total:    28,865 words

Still: Almost 30,000 words. Nothing to shake a stick at. And not to say I’m complaining — I love that (Book of) John was able to join for the last seven days, but work energy was undeniably sacrificed. The ramp up “into” walking mode feels like it takes about a week. Those first few days? It’s like: Christ, are we really going to do this for fourteen days? (Or thirty on some other walks.) And then by day five or six you begin to believe. And then you do it. And then the fun starts.

Mid-walk, entering “the zone,” on day seven, I arrived to Karuizawa in a state of extreme beatificity. Just felt good. For me, that’s what these walks + popups do. They make me feel like the day is being embraced by / swaddled in / amplified with a fullness inaccessible in the “normal” day to day. And it makes me feel positive and energized. This is why I always say: Aim for fullness if you want happiness.¹ If the creator itself came down from the sky at the end of a big walking and photographing and writing day and asked: Did ya do all ya could today? I’d be able to answer, without hesitation, heck yes. I suspect we’re “programmed” to feel good about this, and this is, fundamentally, how we emerged from the muck, how we walked out of Africa, how we engineered the miraculous (and horrific) bits of modern humanity. Fullness feels good because DNA knows fullness pushes us ever “forward” (to better, more efficient, more fail-safe means of replication).

I’d go so far to say that “full days” is one of the wells from which we derive our humanity.

The modern smartphone, laden with the corporate ecosystem pulsing underneath its screen, robs us of this feeling, conspires to keep us from “true” fullness. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a bit of a day in the thralls of the algorithms.

The smartphone eradicates “space” in the mind. With that psychic loss of space, grace becomes impossible. You see the knock-on effects of this rippling out across the world politically.

Which is why these long walks of mine are so inspiring (to me), and I feel so compelled to head out on them, again and again: They are nothing if not “space generation” machines for the mind. They’re full-bodied reminders of what fullness is and how it can manifest. How close we are to it (it’s right there!!), every day, and how elusive it has become because of our digital habits, our diets of, mostly, garbage.

Insert requisite DFW from … 1996:

Or, I don’t know about you, I’m gonna have to leave the planet. ‘Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die."

A big walk for me is my way of “leaving the planet.”

Craft and “Art”

It’s in feeling all the above that I’ve come more and more to believe that (trigger warning: lots of loaded words incoming): It’s impossible to be “authentic” (to maintain some kind of “core integrity”) or to access anything resembling “true creativity” when plugged into social media. Social media destroys whatever it is I feel out, alone, in the middle of a big walk, connecting with people, writing, looking closer and closer still at the world (not the train-wreck version of the world; the world as it is in front of my eyes which is often magnificent and beautiful, full of kindness and compassion). The insidiousness of how quickly social media immolates the creative impulse, shocks. Does it get you to “create” things? Sure, but within the bland confines of what the algorithm thinks you should create, what the algorithm “knows” will drive engagement. The mechanisms driving social media are “corrupt,” (in that their goals are not the goals of art or depth or creativity or research, but of boring systems driven by mostly imagination-free people “maximizing profit”) and so they will always steer you in the wrong direction on the whole. “Art” (whatever that might be) cannot happen in most online spaces.

To beat the horse corpse extra dead, allow me to throw some Robin Sloan in here too:

Art is fused with craft; craft is made of practice; and all of it is sort of stretched across the armature of genre. Creative work begins with an impulse for WORK, the kind of thing you want to spend your time doing, to which narrative and emotional material is quickly added.

For me, a walk is a way to force practice on a number of crafts manifesting in GOOD WORK (“the reward of good work is more work”). The structure and modes of social media don’t (I don’t think / feel) allow for practice, craft, or meaningful work. (Not for me, and, I suspect, not for most other people, either.)

Part of “good practice” (deep focus, lots of iteration) is having properly-sized feedback loops. Too short a loop, and it subverts the development of voice (too many other voices jutting in, telling you how to be). Too long a loop, and you might lose momentum (some feedback, properly timed, is critical). For me, the daily popup newsletter is a good balance. I can engage with the placid, inert medium (email)² while filtering your responses. Ideally, I wouldn’t look at any responses during the walk. (As I did with my SMS project in 2019; the responses were compiled into a book I couldn’t see on the road, but was waiting for me back at home.) But, of course, on day five or six of B2M, I peeked. And I’m always sad I peeked — I feel something shift inside me (the chemicals, the voices), wanting to align with “expectations” or “desires” of the readership. And though you, dear readers, may have sent hundreds of nice messages, the single message of a dingdong, alone in his (always a “him”) room, solitudinal in the worst way, “lashing out” for whatever demented / sad / crushing reasons, is the message that feeds the terrible imp of self-doubt. Social media feedback loops are like that, amplified a billion-fold: Lots of dingdongs, lots of food for the imp of self-doubt. Bad news. A field of dead muses.

Apropos everything: The Goon Squad: Loneliness, porn’s next frontier, and the dream of endless masturbation, by Daniel Kolitz, published by Harper’s just last week.

Not to go too deep into goonland (as tempting as it may be, since the farcical extremes of the subculture can make it “interesting” to observe, overshadowing its darkness), but it boils down to: What if you optimized your entire existence to be enthralled by dopamine; chasing, edging oxytocin. There is a clear, sincere (zero irony, zero affectation) endgame vibe to Goonland and Goonlife. These may be some of the most sincere people on the planet right now: Pledging total fealty to the algorithm and what it can produce / surface for pleasure.

It’s easy to Other these folks. In reality, goons and grandmas glued to cable news are one and the same. Kolitz smartly connects the goons to the rest of us, finishing the piece with:

Nor can I so neatly separate the gooners as a whole from the rest of us. Think about it for a second: What are these gooners actually doing? Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video content. Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms. Parasocially fixating on microcelebrities who want their money. Broadcasting their love for those microcelebrities in public forums. Conducting bizarre self-experiments because someone on the internet told them to. In general, abjuring connective, other-directed pleasures for the comfort of staring at screens alone. Does any of this sound familiar? Do you maybe know some folks who get up to stuff like this? It’s true that gooners are masturbating while they engage in these behaviors. You could say that only makes them more honest.

And more broadly:

Peering into Goonworld’s darkest corners has convinced me that what we are dealing with here may well be a structural flaw of networked communication itself. Is there a timeline, a regulatory environment, in which the internet does not turn into a highly efficient manufacturer of niche suicide cults? I find it hard to imagine.

We’re seeing goon variants play out across all facets of society and politics. Online sports betting and crypto are just two example of increasingly underregulated markets that rhyme with jerking off for six hours a day. The more I think about Goonworld, the more I can’t unsee it everywhere.

If anything is the opposite of gooning for a day, it’s walking the countryside. Over the last six years I’ve gone on a bunch of long walks. I’ve walked thousands of kilometers around Japan and the world. I’ve done most of it abiding by my rules: No news, no podcasts, no social media, no “teleporting.” Forcing myself to contend with the world as it is, and to envelop myself in hours of boredom, with the only outlet being dictating thoughts into a recorder, taking photographs, and saying hello and listening to the stories of people I pass. Here are the word counts from these various walks:

aan:    15,539 words
b2m:    28,889 words
bbj:    70,208 words
kiiiiiiiiiiiiii:    8,549 words
mibaw:    4,230 words
pachinkoroad:    16,953 words
tbpo:    40,287 words
tr2pr:    39,632 words
ttt:    24,925 words
ttt2:    25,305 words
ttt3:    18,007 words
waatn:    33,380 words

Total:    325,904 words

325,904 words. Each one a tiny brick in a protest wall against the banal, anodyne desires of the algorithms. Each one part of a day of total fullness. I regret zero seconds of those walks. I regret almost every second spent on Instagram.

Here’s a secret: The most successful (and certainly most prolific) creative people are pros at protecting and amplifying the number of full days in their lives. Owning your days is a superpower. From my having written those 320,000 words (which is to say, from those many full days of walking, looking, being present³), what’s emerged? A sample of things:

• my book Kissa by Kissa
• the fine art edition of my book Things Become Other Things
• the Random House edition of Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memior (expanded, rewritten, revised)
  • from that, appearances on Rich Roll and Tim Ferris’ podcasts, and a fabulous six-week US book tour
• my photography book Other Thing
• the success of my membership program, SPECIAL PROJECTS
• my deep interest in high-signal, life-abundant mid-sized cities amidst a depopulating and aging Japan, and from that:
  • getting Morioka, Yamaguchi, and Toyama onto the New York Times “52 Places” lists (resulting in $100M+ USD of revenue being funneled into these countryside towns)
  • A Long Walk in a Fading Corner of Japan for the New York Times
  • 15 months of monthly appearances on a J-Wave FM Radio Show
  • doing a TV show with Japanese legend Tamori-san
• the publication of the Japanese edition of Kissa by Kissa along with a bunch of TV and radio appearances

And more more more. I’m in awe of the community that’s grown around all of these projects, and the great friendships I’ve found therein. And (not to be overly reductive, but …) it’s all emerged from: a pathological desire for Moar. Full. Days.

I realize the above might sound like the rant of a crank. But I think the detrimental — psychological and physiological — nature of doomscrolling, of being sucked into the algorithms, is something we all “know,” though — because we’re so cloaked in “onlineness” — often forget. The good thing: It’s easy to experience fullness, to pull your head out of the muck, to be the Goon Antipode, to cleave space from the online sludge in the mind, to hear some kind of “inner voice” once again, and then to act on what inspiration comes from that.

During this recent B2M popup, it was great to feel creative fullness for the greater part of a week, and then to have an enjoyable walk with two friends I love dearly for a week after. Something was, undeniably, lost that second week. That was a conscious trade, though. And while the creative fullness of the second half of the walk was different, the overall fullness was as rich as any good day spent with people you love, offline, beyond social media, looking together at the world.

That said, man it’s one thing to be sitting alone on the tatami mats at the end of the day, 2,000 words to be written, writing app open to a new, blank document, and quite something else to be staring at that screen as two buddies curl up in their futons, already asleep, as you face several hours of work. Herculean tasks, soft Sirens, etcetera, indeed!

I hope this makes a little sense. Hope it resonates with a few of you, kind readers, and if that resonance inspires you to add a handful of full days to your schedule — well, then that’s a win for us all. The more people with control of their attention, the better our art, music, scientific research, political legislation, and, I believe, the more kindness and empathy in the world. Also, the more prepared you can be to fight. Without understanding and cultivating fullness, you lose sight of the battles worth fighting, and lack the energy to go after them. Paradoxically, we live in a time of unimaginable abundance. Let’s make sure we’re focusing on the healthy abundant bits, and doing our best to shake off the onslaught of garbage.

C

Noted