Don't go outside

 Don't go outside. 

The air is too clean. 

The water is too clear.

The grass too green 

and the trees too tall.

Instead go inside.

Where the air is forced

The water is filtered

The plants are potted

and the trees are dead.

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The American capitalist system has failed at a lot of things, but it's succeeded at one; making us all slaves to the system. Unless one has a hidden fortune funding their daily activities and providing a way out of the loop, we are all stuck. Stuck in the race to the grave without opportunity to stop and enjoy life. Sure, the technology of the 21st century is great. I appreciate my smart phone for ease of communication with my loved ones, and I enjoy my laptop and all of mans knowledge at my fingertips. I'm grateful for modern medicine and for widespread transportation. And I am well aware that all of these aspects of modern life come at a cost. I'm not so sure I'm willing to continue paying those costs. 

You see, in exchange for these wonderful pieces of technology, we trade something extremely valuable, though it is invisible. We trade our time. We trade our time by going to these things called "jobs" and doing this thing called "work." But what are jobs and work? There are very few necessary jobs in the world. Doctors, builders, farmers, teachers and artists. With those 5, we've got our body, mind and soul taken care of. And realistically, we could be our own builders and farmers taking the requirements down to 3. These are the necessary and useful jobs. Engineers? Why do we need so many different iterations of the same technology? Why must we strive for betterness in the physical world, as long as betterness means profit and control, while so few focus on their internal world?

We're out of touch, as individuals and as a society. Our beautiful planet is dying and many of us can't or don't or won't stop for just a second and take in the beauty that surrounds us every day. Concrete jungles are taking over, trees are being trimmed, lawns manicured and wild spaces tamed. One can drive to the top of a mountain, or ride a lift up just to slide down it. There are few places one can go without hearing human-generated noise. I believe I read somewhere that the quietest place in the US went just over 7 minutes between human generated sounds such as airplanes. The quietest place! Perhaps rock'n'roll ain't noise pollution but highways and airplanes and HVAC systems surely are. 

I am no exception to this race, this struggle to unchain ourselves and rejoin the world, the real world, the natural world. On a daily basis I feel the pressures of capitalism crushing the living soul out of me. Conform, conform, CONFORM. Even climate change has become a capitalist talking point. Where does it end? I get to work one of three ways, my favorite way is to drive close enough to justify parking and riding my bike, then biking the remaining 3ish miles to the office. This morning, on my bike ride, I noticed a lot of things that had previously not affected me. First, I noticed how the wind felt on my face and how my body felt peddling the bike. We're out of touch with our bodies. Then I heard the noise of the traffic and smelled the exhaust. Something like 40k people travel into this small town of ~7000 every day. The dynamics of this valley are beyond the scope of this writing, but they are worth exploring on their own. The juxtaposition between the feelings of the bike ride, the beautiful fall scenery on the mountains around me and the noise and air pollution taking up so much space around me was shocking. What is all of this for? What was I riding into town for? To go sit at a desk and stare out the window and the small slice of paradise I can see from my chair? And for what? To clickity-clack on a computer all day, sending emails and coordinating applications for life insurance? What the actual fuck am I doing here? What is anyone doing here? As I contemplated these existential questions that are becoming more familiar to my mind, I came to a bridge crossing a stream pretty far down below. I stopped here, and I listened, and I cried. 

As humans, we often forget our place on this planet. We've created a world where nature and reality are often separated as though two separate entities. Human nature is synthetic, a product of Vouge magazine and Apple technology. We light candles in our homes made of sticks and mud that smell like pine and musk, yet we consider "outside" to be a different world. We've created our own world, one that sits upon the natural world, like oil in a glass of water. Rather than mix, we separate, and continue to separate. And unlike that oil and water, which exist separately but harmoniously, we exploit the natural world. We take from our planet her life essence and we use it to fuel our artificial machine. 

Now, I don't have the answers. I don't know what we need to do in order to get back in touch with our world, with our wilder selves. I suspect a large paradigm shift is in order, one larger than ever seen before, and one stronger than has ever existed. We must defeat the systems that keep us chained and fight to restore our place in this world rather than on it. And it all starts by going outside.