Of course I am a random person online. Great things can be found online too.

Imagine my dismay when I realized that the second issue I received was about…sports. My snooty somewhat highbrow literary magazine was going to make me read about a topic that I had actively avoided for my entire life. I considered multiple times giving it away to some random friend or acquaintance that might appreciate it. I ultimately decided to keep it because I pride myself in being a very open person when it comes to ideas. I wasn’t about to let that self-concept be defeated…by sports.

I ignored the issue for months and didn’t begin reading it until the next quarterly installment of the publication had already arrived. Every time I looked at it, I groaned and viewed it as an adversary.

Yes, I can finally recognize that I am actually a snob—at the very least I am susceptible to snobbish tendencies. I would apologize but I’ll probably prove again to be a snob at some point in the future.

Throughout my 20s I viewed myself as a floating brain navigating the world. I’m not saying that I actually found myself to be a genius in everything or in anything—but I valued my thoughts about 100x times more than I valued my physical abilities. I’m the person that forgets to eat if I’m reading or writing. I’m also the person that falls down the stairs because I’m thinking about something else.

Not surprisingly, I don’t follow sports. I recognize talent but I just haven’t cared about physical talent. I’m attracted to people (as friends or more) by what they think and how they express themselves. I have shown up to Super Bowl parties in the past. I have never paid attention to the game. I guess I should say I showed up for friendships and community but that is not strictly true.

It has always been for the buffalo sauce. I love buffalo sauce and somehow that always gets paired with sports. That has by far been my favorite part of sports.

I did finally pick up the magazine—they did not feature buffalo sauce but I have found it interesting nonetheless.

To be honest, I am glad it took me so long to start reading this magazine. I don’t think I would have been ready to read it when I received it. In a previous essay, I mentioned that someone signed me up for a 45 mile trek in Peru. Earlier this year, I started training because I didn’t want to hate my vacation.

I started with long distance walking. I figured training for what I was actually doing was smart. My legs started getting stronger and I realized that walking in particular is actually one of the best things you can do for thinking. A lot of my best ideas in the last 6 months came to me on a walk.

Now I do believe theoretically in the connection between the body and the mind. I have always been a very healthy eater (despite the buffalo sauce confession) and I have always prioritized sleep. In the back of my mind I knew that I would eventually start exercising at some point. The aches of the body as one ages affects how you think. I don’t want that to happen to me.

I’m also turning 30 this year. I had heard some things about muscle loss and early problems with physical performance beginning at 30 for most people. I would be lying if I told you I understood all the details. Since I was already getting into hiking and long distance walking, I decided to also go to the gym.

When I entered the gym, it was very foreign to me. Everything looked intimidating. As someone who gets injured walking down the stairs, I didn’t want to do anything wrong. More importantly, I didn’t want to look like a fool. For the first couple days I walked around the track that circles the gym and stared at people.

I may have made some people uncomfortable. Oh well.

By staring at people I started to figure out how to use things and began experimenting with not only cardio (which to be fair is easy to pick up) but also weight training. I quickly realized that the skills and characteristics that I had picked up from doing other things transferred very well. I am very mentally strong and resilient and that was extremely useful when pushing myself to become physically stronger.

I guess I realized that I didn’t have to self-identify as a floating brain. I was actually way more prepared to inhabit my body than I gave myself credit for.

With that very meaningful character arc in place—I finally picked up the literary magazine issue that focused on sports. I wasn’t even really dreading it.

I should have realized that this somewhat highbrow somewhat quirky literary magazine was written for people like me. It was obviously not just a written down version of ESPN.

Nick Hornby in the very first piece talks about his experience publishing a book about the Arsenal Football Club in 1992. It was an ambitious book that interwove the intellectual with the physical. He talks about the state of sports publishing at the time and why he experienced perhaps a little bit of an uphill battle:

“There were lots of good books about cricket, for the most part the gentleman’s sport, but publishers mostly seemed to think that football fans couldn’t read, and therefore wouldn’t even buy the bland ghost-written autobiographies of players and managers, so why bother aiming any higher? It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that the reason the ghost-written autobiographies didn’t sell well was because they weren’t very interesting.”

I can’t lie that reading things like this makes me feel a little bit vindicated. We have culturally separated the thinkers from the athletes for generations. If I had it in my head that sports fans aren’t intellectually interesting and don’t read, at least I didn’t get it from thin air. Maybe I was wrong but at least I didn’t make it up myself.

I guess I’m not immune to propaganda.

Even more interesting than Nick Hornby’s discussion of publishing an ambitious book in the sports space was the next article in the magazine.

Jenny Odell opened her piece describing a situation uncannily similar to mine—although separated from me by a decade. She discussed how she went to the gym as a 40 year old after finally recognizing the need to train for her health going forward.

“Exercise, gyms, and sports in general were like parts of a video game that failed to render. They just didn’t exist to me. Relatedly, I was uninterested in what my body, with its cryptic aches and pains, might have been trying to communicate.”

She describes the gym as a foreign country. She herself chose to hire a trainer as a tour guide. With her trainer’s help she was able to make the gym a part of her weekly routine to give her the strength she needs to live out the rest of her life.

Like me, she realized that she was in fact quite wrong about her assumptions on sports and training. She chose to interview creatives who were also athletic to see if they had any insights about the combination of living a creative and an athletic life.

R.O. Kwon, a writer, has been powerlifting since 2020. She credits powerlifting with not only making her strong but improving her mood which impacts her resilience as a writer.

Most writers acknowledge that it is tough out there. Many fall into despair.

When she is deep in writing she says:

“I forget I have a body, I forget I have eyes, I forget to eat…I drape like a drunk octopus or something when I’m writing, and then I emerge and everything’s fucked up. But with lifting, I feel better the minute I pick up the barbell. So yeah, that first step does feel better.”

Throughout her section she talks about powerlifting being her form of meditation. It is hard to focus on anything else when you are lifting at capacity. For overthinkers and people who spend the majority of their day engaging the brain—that can be a good thing.

She also views powerlifting as a metaphor. You continually take a load off of yourself again and again. The symbolism that can be found in training and the confidence boost it can give the creative person shouldn’t be underestimated.

Writers and creatives who leave their rooms, see the world, and do hard things usually become better at their craft anyway. I’ve always known that but have never applied that knowledge to the realm of training and physical endurance.

In retrospect, that was quite silly of me.

Alexis Madrigal, a runner who was interviewed for the same purpose, puts it very aptly.

“I started to think a lot about how kinetic intelligence is wildly underrated. The ability of a wide receiver to jump and catch a ball and land with one foot in the end zone—the processing speed and cognitive ability, in addition to all the physical ability—is so obviously genius to me…And yet there are these drives within human civilizations, in some cases, to remove all bodily elements from what it is to be intelligent, from what it is to think, from what it is to do these things. And that feels wrong, like it’s a loss of possibility not to realize that all our body’s capabilities have bodily components as well as mental components.”

I now tend to think he is right. I now view the image of a floating brain that I had for many years as a youthful arrogant fancy. It can be otherworldly to focus in on a project for so long that you forget yourself and your body. I still enjoy those moments. I no longer idealize them. The physical world is not one that must be dealt with to continue to have a functioning brain that does the important work. It can add something meaningful to your life in itself.

Which might be obvious to the vast majority of the population but it wasn’t obvious to me.

It probably should have been.

For simplicity’s sake—let’s just say someone else signed me up. I was at no point looking for hard hikes to complete in the Andes. That is not something I would ever organically look for.

For context, climbing high mountains is not part of my identity. In fact being athletic at all is not really part of my identity. I have always been a fairly healthy eater with sedentary hobbies. I like reading and playing strategic board games. I’m a nerd.

I’m also pretty good at everything I put time into. I do not struggle with my self esteem and I generally like myself.

However, I quickly excuse whatever I’m not good at as part of my identity. I have a terrible sense of direction, I’m not always the most present in the moment, and I’m clumsy enough that I usually have a bandaid somewhere on my body. These are all things I’ve accepted as counterweights to my strengths. No one can be good at everything.

To be honest, I am a little naturally competitive. I have had the mindset before of not wanting to waste time on things I will never be good at when I can instead become one of the best at something I already excel at.

Unfortunately, analyzing books and creating strategies to win a board game don’t really help you climb a mountain in Peru. My skills from my corporate office job also didn’t seem particularly useful. I found myself in a situation where all I could rely on was my innate stubbornness.

Well and some hikes I did in preparation. I didn’t exactly know what I was preparing for though.

We walked over 40 miles over the course of five days and almost none of them were flat. I was not the most confident, especially when walking alongside steep cliffs where I could plummet to my death, but I did it.

I also imagined myself having a heart attack at the young age of 29 after some of those never ending inclines. I didn’t.

I came to realize that I was way more proud of myself for being a mediocre hiker over those days and completing the journey than I have been for everything else that I have done lately. I broke through the concept I had of my identity and did something that I normally would assume I could not do.

After the hardest day of the hike, I really broke through my internal barriers and started imagining a different version of myself. I could get really good at the practical day to day stuff that I at times neglect when I’m lost in the clouds. What if I started elaborately cooking every day? What if I started running every day? What if I became a gym rat?

Maybe I would be the type of person to take cold showers just to randomly flex to my coworkers and watch them wonder about my sanity.

The point is identity is very powerful. However, it can also be powerfully limiting.

Too many of us stick with one version of ourselves for too long. Some things should be prioritized for the entirety of life like being open to new ideas or being kind. I personally also like the idea of staying resilient (it got me up a mountain). Other things can be overcome—falling on the stairs and bruising myself because I’m not paying attention can be worked on. I don’t have to hold onto the idea of being clumsy forever.

I like the idea of identity being malleable and changing over time. Real limitations do exist but fake ones do as well.

The most important thing I gathered from this experience is that I can choose what I want to believe about myself and that can be powerful.

I have been going to the gym almost every day. I’m still not convinced to take a cold shower.

I am a young millennial. Many people like to point out that it is hard for us to buy houses, we made the birth rate decline, and many of us are saddled with student and consumer debt. Inflation has been rough and even the most responsible of my generation don’t seem to be thriving at rates similar to the generations immediately preceding us.

It’s all very real. House prices are high. Kids are expensive and you can get a lot of love from a dog. I have two.

That and of course if you have kids there is a high expectation of care. You have to spend half your paycheck to put them in daycare or attempt to live on one income which is increasingly difficult to do. You can’t make your kids useful. You can’t do something like sell them for a horse.

Which is what happened to my great-grandfather.

We’re always talking about boomers and the privileged life they live. They tend to disagree when remembering their actual life. Then some young person points at a convincing graph that pinpoints the trend of affordability.

I find the conversation boring at this point. It’s a standard one that gets repeated over and over with little change. Instead, I want to talk about my great-grandfather. He was born in 1898 which makes him a member of the Lost Generation. He raised my grandpa who is a member of the Silent Generation and my grandpa played a heavy role in helping to raise me—a young millennial.

I do note that our shared memory seems to be very short. It’s insane to me that someone who was born in 1898 could be close to someone I am close to when I was born in 1996. Time is weird and a lot is forgotten. To be fair, that generational gap might be a little unusually large since my great-grandfather was in his 40s when my grandfather came along (as a surprise ‘extra’ child).

Anyway, when my great-grandfather Lewis was 12 years old he was sold by his father, Thomas, in exchange for a horse. According to the internet, Thomas was a member of the Civil War Generation. You know, since we all like to define people by their generations online.

I should probably note that I have deep roots in the west. This story clearly has some Wild West roots. I come from a long line of Mormons and at this point in time they were settling Southern Utah. Perhaps my family was not as civilized as yours. They most certainly were not.

Anyway, Thomas took the horse and Lewis went to do hard labor for family in a nearby town. He worked for these people for over a year. They did not replace his clothes or his shoes. At some point, the work became too painful to continue because his shoes were so worn out that every step became unbearable. He came up with an escape plan and successfully executed it. He walked 50 miles to find his grandparents and seek shelter.

Oh, they were members of—well, it turns out the whole concept of named generations is pretty new. I’m starting to think it might not matter all that much. They were born in the 1830s.

While walking to his grandparents’ house he stumbled upon a kid that had candy. Lewis was starving. He wasn’t well fed by the family he worked for and he couldn’t exactly take a lot of food with him when making the escape. He pushed the kid down and stole the candy. He needed it more.

Oh, and apparently this kid ended up being a young brother he no longer recognized. He was close to his grandparents’ house by now and apparently they were helping to raise his little brother.

So I guess we could say the Civil War generation afforded having kids by selling their labor indefinitely for livestock and sending the younger kids to their parents—whose generation may or may not have a name.

Or maybe that was just in Utah.

By the way, that horse didn’t live very long. Lewis made wry comments his whole life about the time his father sold his labor for a dead horse.

I imagine you may have guessed by now that Lewis did not get to complete his education. That bothered him because he wanted to get ahead in life. He wanted to have nice things and live comfortably.

He took advantage of the opportunities he was presented with. He worked for a sawmill in exchange for lumber to build his home. He became a sheep shearer and brewed elderberry wine. He built his own well for his home and saved up to eventually buy an electric generator powered by gasoline.

He was hit by many events outside of his control. The Great Depression hit during his best potential earning years. One of his sons recalled him being visibly upset during that time because he could not afford to buy his sons candy.

Despite enjoying few of the luxuries he wished to have, he was able to feed his family as a skilled hunter and fisher. These activities were not only taken for pleasure but also out of necessity.

To be completely honest, he wasn’t perfect. Lewis saw my grandfather as a nuisance. By the time my grandfather came around, they had already raised 5 boys. My grandpa was a surprise and often was explicitly told that he was unwanted.

Lewis still did what he could for my grandfather. Begrudgingly. He didn’t often express love and often expressed contempt but he never sold his labor for a dead horse.

My grandfather was treated as the baby of the family and was raised by his brothers and their wives as much as he was raised by his parents. My grandfather was able to get his education and was the first in his family to go to college. He was able to support a large family and was able to get access to some of the luxuries his father could only dream of.

My grandfather is not a boomer but he saw all of the same cited benefits. One income supported his stay at home wife and family of 7 kids. He retired with money in the bank. The economic events of his life generally worked in his favor.

I tend to think that was a little bit of an anomaly. Most of human history hasn’t been kind to the little guy and inter-generational trauma seems to be the default.

I don’t think this means that people can’t expect more and try to get society to progress in a positive direction. I think we should do that. I think the whole narrative that everything is getting worse is just a little flawed. Most humans have experienced what we would consider a bad life.

I don’t know what we do with that information. It’s kind of depressing. I guess we just do what we can.

And hey, if you are a parent, historically the bar for being a good parent is pretty low. We aren’t degenerates compared to the people who came before us. The bar is on the floor and we’ve cleared it.

I was attempting to play volleyball but have little experience with the sport. I held my own by using terrible technique and hitting the ball no matter what. Sometimes brute force and determination are all you can rely on.

Although I’ll admit that keeping the ball in the air with just the force of my thumb maybe wasn’t worth it for that one particular play.

I still think it was a better use of my thumb than scrolling on my phone to accomplish doing absolutely nothing. Do most people scroll with their thumb? I guess I’ve seen some use their pointer finger. That might just be old people.

The point is: although I am not particularly skilled at volleyball—I still had fun.

This actually all ties in neatly to what I actually want to talk about today: the importance of doing stuff. At least I think doing stuff is important.

This last weekend I was at a large family reunion. My grandfather turned 85 years old. The idea of getting as many people together as possible before he passes away crossed my aunt’s mind. She made it happen. He got to see all 7 of his children at the same time and many of his grandchildren.

That’s how I ended up playing volleyball even though I’m inexperienced. My aunt also joined the game although she was potentially even worse at it than me. Well, maybe not. When I made a mistake the ball ventured off to the side and hit a tree. She just had a hard time getting it over the net. We both figured out some workarounds and were able to play a game that didn’t actually suck alongside family members that actually knew what they were doing—my cousin who played in high school, my sister who plays on the beach, my boyfriend who plays every week, and my uncle who has experience as a coach.

Throughout the weekend I participated in other activities I wasn’t particularly good at. I painted and sometimes couldn’t stay within the lines, I got destroyed in Bananagrams by serious Scrabble players, and I couldn’t make baskets behind the three-point line which made it a little difficult to win silly basketball games against men twice my size.

I obviously participated in things I was good at too. That’s just not relevant for this essay.

I need you to know that my family has aged. We are almost all adults. Unfortunately, some of my family has become really boring.

A large group of adults sat on the couch and did absolutely nothing. For days. They scrolled TikTok if they were under the age of 30 and they stared at the news, a sports app, or YouTube if they were over the age of 30. They barely talked as they sat in the living room watching movies that were generally inoffensive but no one particularly wanted to see. It was just ambient background noise.

They didn’t want to learn a card game because they weren’t good at games and might not be able to figure it out. They didn’t want to play volleyball or basketball because that time of their life had passed them—sometimes a legitimate concern—or they knew they would not be good at them. They weren’t artsy enough for crafts. They didn’t have any ideas for a conversation with people they hadn’t seen in years. They didn’t want to take out the ATVs my uncle brought or explore the nearby town.

This group of people legitimately felt comfortable doing nothing. For days. They didn’t even bring a book or participate in solitary hobbies that they enjoyed. They just sat there and scrolled.

So obviously part of me feels like a jerk. These people I am referring to are family members and did prioritize making long trips to see my grandpa on his birthday.

It still feels true that a large portion of my family decided to be boring all weekend. Even my grandpa sat down and played some cards and did what he could still do at his age.

At times this felt like a weird dynamic. There were adults that participated in activities and adults that did nothing. It made me feel childlike, as if I was part of the group that never quite matured.

As a young adult living in Utah I used to drive by billboards that advertised fun things for kids. Everything was for kids. Fun things for adults weren’t really advertised. As an extremely young adult I wondered if that meant the time to play was permanently over.

I have mentioned before that I was raised in a Mormon family. As a young adult I was taught about sacrifice. I would go to church and they would separate out the young adult women. Older women came into the room to mentor us. The topics always brought up sacrifice. We talked about having kids early and caring for those kids. We talked about how great it was for a woman to work and support her husband while he got a degree so he could later support her while she stayed at home. We talked about duty, responsibility, and what it meant to be grown up.

When we combine this subculture with the greater culture at large I’m afraid we get a strange combination. We were taught to grow up quickly. We were also taught perfection. The culture as a whole encourages children to try things even if they aren’t good at them. The same thing can’t be said for adults. Most adults don’t want to do things they aren’t good at. They already specialized. It is embarrassing to participate in something and not be competent at it.

Most 5-year-olds are willing to sit down and draw a picture. Most 30-year-olds won’t unless they have already dedicated a large part of their life to it. Most people don’t want to be a novice at something if they have the option to not participate.

This whole conversation is of course not about productivity. No one actually cares if you make a painting, or play a game, or jam your thumb on a volleyball. None of those things at a fun, casual, and novice level make you ‘successful’. This conversation is about having fun.

At what point do we stop having fun unless the conditions are perfect? At what point are we too old to be bad at things? At what point do we need to sit in silence on the couch instead?

I have to admit that I have fallen into this trap at times. I’m reaching the point that I don’t want to live a boring life even if it leads me to embarrassing situations. Children might often be braver than adults. I also want to be brave enough to suck at something if it means I get to have more fun.

At the time, the ability to check your grades online was brand new and almost no one used it. We barely knew how to log in to our accounts and most of our parents hadn’t really caught on yet.

Maybe those were better times. When I was a teacher (years later) it was exhausting to have parents checking in on grades every other day. There has to be some sort of balance between checking in on your kids and hovering above them ready to pounce at any sign of change. The parents who had kids failing almost never checked the online gradebook anyway.

That was an irrelevant tangent.

As I said—this was still kind of the before times. My teachers used to print out updated grades every now and then and post it on the wall. We would all pack in around this standard-sized sheet of paper to try to see our updated scores. At the same time.

I was and am short so I was always at a little bit of a disadvantage.

Now our names were not on these sheets for everyone to see. Our overall score in the class would be next to our student number. There were columns of individual scores along the page so you could see how you did on a specific assignment or on a test.

583492 98.7% A

or on a scary day

583492 92.1% A

or an even scarier day

583492 89.6% B

Now, these student numbers never changed. You could say that the code was very easy to crack. This of course created the atmosphere of competition amongst the nerdiest students in the room.

A girl in my class would say, “I got a 93% on the test! Wait…what did Alison get…let’s see 583492…96%…Shoot!”

Or on another day, “Wait! I beat Alison. I got the high score! Woohoo!”

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really play that role. I liked to be seen as a little aloof and nonchalant. I was more than willing to be the standard that other people compared themselves to. I secretly enjoyed it but I was above all that. I loved to appear unbothered.

I was a nerd but I liked to view myself as a little socially aware. I put effort into how I dressed and talked. More importantly, I knew that when the school gave me a letter for academics to put on a letterman jacket that it was a trap. I understood that the most visibly nerdy thing you could do was wear a letterman jacket around school for academics.

My school was just sort of trying to make the point that they cared about academics as much as sports. I said ‘thank you’ when they awarded it to me and then put it in the back corner of my closet.

The kids who constantly compared their grades to mine wore the jacket. They were laughed at behind their backs. I personally always thought the school should have given an alternative award for good grades rather than one that was clearly meant for athletics. I suppose you could say it backfired.

In this group, comparison was everything. It might have been more overt in the boys and girls that actively shouted scores out across the room, but I engaged in it as well.

In fact, I engaged just as intensely in these comparisons. I just processed everything internally. I was smart but I was more nonchalant than others. I was smart but I was also way cooler and socially aware than my friends who wore the jackets. I was comparatively a genius—everyone said so including my teachers. These were also comparisons even if I never shared them out loud.

On a side note, I hate when teenagers think they are geniuses. I had some potential but I can confidently say that I was no genius.

For years, comparison boosted me. I was smart. I was pretty enough. I wasn’t even that bad at running the mile—comparatively of course. I was even a decent public speaker from a young age—compared to others who could barely pull it off.

Looking back, I could say that it hurt me a little bit even then because of the perfectionistic tendencies I was building. I didn’t want Mackenzie or Tanner or some other kid to scream out my score to the class and have it fall short. Even at the winning end of the comparison…I had to keep it up. I couldn’t keep my aloof, straight-faced, genius reputation if I didn’t.

I’m going to have to skip ahead a lot to reflect on landing on the other side of the comparison. As a young adult, I did exceptionally well. I kept a full-ride academic scholarship at my university, I got hired as a teaching assistant to teach classes, and I was hired at a call center and promoted twice in the course of one year.

This is all starting to feel like bragging. More than anything, I just want to emphasize how unfamiliar I was with coming up short. This background made me extremely fragile. I never failed to do anything that I tried to do.

Enter the boss fight. I started dating a man and he was good at board games.

Like really good. It was a problem.

Before dating him, I tried to play board games as often as possible. It was my favorite activity to do with other people. I was married previously and played a lot of games with my ex. I also played games with anyone who enjoyed the activity.

For the record we aren’t talking about Monopoly. Board gaming is a whole thing now. It has evolved!

This dude played games way more often than I had and he was also just very strategically and tactically intelligent. I was used to winning more than my fair share of games. Once I started playing with him, it started going 40/60 or even 30/70 (in the wrong direction) and for a couple particular games—I just couldn’t win.

Early on, he took me to a trendy coffee shop. It was adorable and although it was large it was hard to find a table. It had the vibe of a medieval tavern albeit perhaps a little bit more artsy. People were sipping tea, laughing, reading, and nibbling on different variations of avocado toast.

The problem was: we brought a two-player trick-taking game. It was a simple, uncomplicated game and I just couldn’t win. I really couldn’t figure out how to bet on my hand correctly and get enough points to not only not embarrass myself but also to beat him. I was red and fuming and likely the least relaxed-looking woman in the room.

It might be relevant to note that this man was a professional poker player. At the time, I thought that should be irrelevant because I should be able to overcome anything.

Eventually I just said, “this is a stupid game,” and gave up. I was super lame. I was not nonchalantly beating the competition with my aloof, unbothered blank face. I was losing and acting emotionally in front of other people. It was humiliating.

I do believe the woman next to me who was enjoying a much more relaxing date with her boyfriend thought I was a little much. She was sipping on what appeared to be a lavender latte and occasionally glancing over. Instead of playing cards, that couple was sharing a tray of goodies from the bakery, saying sweet nothings, and cuddling.

In her defense, I am a little much.

The crisis I experienced in this period of time was existential. Was this man smarter than me? Could I date a man that was smarter than me? Did I still like playing games if I couldn’t just steamroll my opponents?

Culturally, we always make fun of men who can’t handle a capable woman. Was I acting like one of those men? Why couldn’t I chill out and lose that competitive streak?

Fortunately, I do have some self-control. I didn’t immediately dump this guy just because I couldn’t beat him at a few select games. I’m not that pathetic.

Around this time I took him on a road trip to see my grandparents. When I introduced him I said:

“Grandma, grandpa, this man is smarter than me.”

Which I admit is a weird introduction. It also invoked a visceral reaction from both of them. Their eyes may have momentarily popped out of their sockets.

Not because it was impossible for a man to be smart but because it was unlikely that I would ever choose to say that phrase about anybody. I didn’t have that kind of personality.

Believe it or not, that man is actually not better than me at everything. It felt like he was when I was actively making comparisons and finding hidden meanings that may or may not have been there.

Oh we’re still dating…sorry boys.

Through this experience, I learned that I was fragile. Being on the winning side of the comparisons that you choose to make your whole life does not make you very resilient. You are ironically weaker and more fragile if you never lose.

I guess I should get to the point where I say, ‘but really comparison is the thief of joy’ or some other common phrase.

That’s probably true.

Practically speaking, people don’t reliably seem to turn it off. It might be more useful to occasionally reflect on it because only the saints among us can actually stop engaging altogether.

It also seems to me that people tend to make really distorted comparisons that they can’t likely win. With the internet, everyone enters the big leagues. Maybe you could have been the best soccer player in your high school but are you the best in the world? According to what you can find online you probably aren’t.

Oh and if you are, I am honored that you are reading this (but I’ll admit I don’t really watch soccer so I have no idea who you are).

I got a comment on a YouTube video recently. In that video I talked about the joy of doing something you love even if you don’t always see external rewards. I mentioned how upkeeping projects that are important to you can be meaningful. I taught the message through a book. If you are unaware, I run a Booktube channel. It’s not the most viral niche on YouTube (on average) but it’s my favorite.

Part of the comment said:

“You’re right. Creating something for itself is already purpose enough. It doesn’t matter if people see it. It doesn’t matter if it has a bigger impact. And hell... your channel isn’t that big, your video doesn’t have that many views, but maybe it really changed something for me. I’ll see. Right now it gave me back a sense of meaning I’ve lost for a long time. Thanks for that.”

First of all, I love this comment. I love that I could offer a useful perspective for someone. Sometimes I write things to convince and reaffirm myself and they resonate with other people as well. That is one of the miracles of being able to publish things on the internet.

However, my channel is 9 months old and when she watched that video it had 11,000 views. I am always pleasantly surprised when I get over 10,000 views. Most of my videos get 2,000–5,000 views (except book reviews which get fewer views).

This woman placed me in the big leagues of the internet in her head. She almost insinuated that I was practicing what I preached because I had a mere 10,000 people watch my message.

I am not in the big leagues. I’m not sure I would actually ever want to be in the BIG big leagues. I really treasure freedom and the ability to keep my full voice. I am absolutely killing it for a new bookish creator and I don’t take that small but dedicated audience for granted. Many of the people who watched that video could have thought the exact opposite about me. In fact, someone later published a video talking about how monetized Booktube channels with thousands of views can’t understand what it is like to get 50 views on a video or 27.

I can’t lie—it did make me wonder how harsh people are on themselves. If someone can see another person get 10,000 views and consider that almost nothing—how do they view their own achievements?

Maybe it isn’t good for us to all enter the same competition. Maybe it isn’t good for us to compare ourselves to the most ‘successful’ person of every group. Maybe we shouldn’t try to measure success the same way as other people at all. I am not trying to be Jack Edwards (a large booktuber).

I do think I harmed myself and made myself fragile when I made a ton of comparisons and entered a ton of fake competitions that I could almost always win as a teenager and a young adult. I made myself a perfectionist that would crack under the slightest bit of real pressure.

I also think we harm ourselves when we make our world bigger and make a ton of comparisons that we can never have the upper hand on. You will stop yourself from trying anything if you have to be the most traditionally successful person that has ever done it. That likely won’t happen and it certainly will not if you don’t allow yourself to get started despite not being the best in the world.

Comparisons do suck and they can be bad for us no matter where we land. However, I’m not sure if we can realistically stop making them.

Even my dogs often seem to make comparisons. Percy groans, whines, and barks every day because he is never able to jump as high as Winnie. Unfortunately for him, she is a terrier and he is a bichon frisé. He’s never going to win that one.

I do think we can choose to take some time to reflect and recenter ourselves. We probably should do that more frequently.

Actually how boring. Yawn.

The opinion I chose to respond to stood a little bit as a challenge to my own position. However, it did actually have some mental work put into it. It took multiple paragraphs to flesh out the idea. There is nothing that I respect more than that. BUT I still disagree with the idea. Maybe.

The comment was on my video about literacy. In that video, I debated myself on the literacy crisis and if it is overblown. I do think there is a crisis but I acknowledged a lot of fair points made by people who think that everyone on the book side of the internet is just panicking over seemingly nothing.

She said:

“Reading will eventually become more and more niche, just as many other skills that were core to humanity are no longer being used or have been reduced to specialized roles in society. Reading will be no different. The act of looking at symbols and decoding them isn’t valuable in and of itself. We already see this with audiobooks - you can bypass the visual coding of abstract symbols entirely. With the idea of bioneural interfaces and other such technologies, the act of learning will be more and more connected to the processing and understanding of information, not really ‘reading’. It will happen eventually.”

and later clarified:

“I’m more looking towards the long-term future. I do think it is an interesting thought experiment to replace ‘reading’ with memorization, tracking and hunting, wayfinding, foraging, tanning, oral recitation, food preservation, spinning and weaving, animal husbandry, etc.”

and left the question:

“Is linear prose reading superior to non-linear information processing that could be enabled through bioneural interfaces? I think computers have shown us that non-linear is way more efficient and less fragmented.”

I am going to spend some time to go through some of these ideas and provide my opinions in return. My position is that I don’t think that reading and writing can be replaced. Her position (from my understanding) is that reading and writing will become niche hobbies that will be replaced by advanced technology that largely makes them unnecessary.

Of course if she reads this and chooses to respond and correct me—I welcome that. I am way more interested in exploring ideas with her than winning some sort of imaginary internet debate. I don’t really care about scoring points. I just care about what is true.

1. “The act of looking at symbols and decoding them isn’t valuable in and of itself.”

I actually have no issue with this. I think to this point using symbols to read and write has just been the most useful and efficient way to engage in the activity. If there is a way to accomplish what reading and writing does without using the particular symbols you are seeing now—or any symbols—I don’t particularly care. If we developed something that allowed us to store our mental work in another way that would be fine by me. I am not attached to the ‘how’ of reading and writing as much as I am attached to the ‘what’ and the ‘why’.

I acknowledge that I am currently using symbols BUT I am typing this on a keyboard that is wirelessly connected by Bluetooth to a laptop.

It’s pink. In case you were curious.

I am not physically writing in the same way as someone would have been writing 100 years ago. It is possible that someone from 1926 would challenge the idea that I even am writing because of the method. I would deeply disagree that it matters how I engage in the activity.

Now I do run into a problem here and I will acknowledge it. The definition of reading really supports her argument—not mine.

Reading is commonly defined as ‘the process of taking in the sense or meaning of symbols, often specifically those of a written language, by means of sight or touch.’

So she kind of got me a little bit.

The thing is this whole conversation is deeply speculative because we don’t really have a valid way of replacing the ‘how’ or changing the definition of reading at the moment. We currently can only do it through symbols.

She did say, “I’m more looking towards the long-term future.”

So I think I’m allowed to be speculative as well. So I am going to give my own definition of reading. One that feels more like the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ to me personally.

Reading and writing is a way to engage in a long term and in-depth discussion on a topic and mimics the ability to enter another person’s mind. Even when talking about fiction, you get to experience the result of long-term mental work that is not casual and not off the cuff.

It’s very important that it is not off the cuff. Vlogging doesn’t replace writing.

Have you ever been at a dinner table in the middle of a conversation with multiple people when the topic immediately shifts while you have an insight at the tip of your tongue ready to be shared? You then choose not to share it because you missed the moment. Now, no one at the table will ever know what you thought and the conversation is unable to reach its peak depth. However, you can sit there and write about the topic for as long as you want. If you don’t have enough time, you can go back and continue the project and even make edits until it is completely finished.

Many people replace reading with podcasts. I won’t lie, I also like podcasts and I think they can make a very healthy part of a media diet. It is not the same though. Depth can be limited by the off-the-cuff vibe and the fact that one person does not have unlimited time to discuss a topic. They also don’t have time to revise or change or fact check. It’s mental work to engage with a podcast but it isn’t the same level of mental work. Writing is still superior for going in depth on a topic without the pressure of in-the-moment performance and with the ability to go back and make changes before it reaches the reader.

Oral storytelling historically has a lot of the same disadvantages.

2. “We already see this with audiobooks - you can bypass the visual coding of abstract symbols entirely.”

Sure. I like audiobooks. Let’s think about what the audiobook is because in every way that counts, it is still a book.

Someone had to sit down and write it. 99.9999 times out of 100 the author isn’t dictating that book off the cuff into a voice recorder without taking time to think, make edits, or fact check.

Unless you’re some sort of religious visionary a la Joseph Smith or Muhammad. I guess those were translated or dictated actually? Supposedly?

I really shouldn’t touch religion. Sorry for getting sidetracked.

The point is that the advent of audiobooks for me does not prove the concept that we don’t need reading and writing. I suppose it shows we don’t need to get information through symbols? I’m already basically on board with that. I do believe someone can thoughtfully listen to an audiobook. It might take longer than visually reading but you can get a lot of the same benefits.

It still fulfills my ‘what’ and ‘why’. You are able to enter someone else’s mind for a time and experience the fruits of their mental labor. It is not off the cuff because the author did have to sit down and write that book you are listening to. An audiobook is not a podcast.

3. “With the idea of bioneural interfaces and other such technologies, the act of learning will be more and more connected to the processing and understanding of information, not really ‘reading’. It will happen eventually.”

This is very speculative so I will probably mess up a bit in understanding her here. Learning in my opinion is already the processing and understanding of information or the world around you generally. Decoding symbols is just a method we use to do that. In many things we do agree.

My concern would likely be what this means. If we are insinuating any sort of non-human element of processing and understanding—there is a danger. Maybe we could survive if robots did all that work but could we thrive? What is peak human excellence and the purpose of life anyway?

Anything speculative quickly gets existential.

I don’t usually read to solve the immediate problem in front of me. Maybe that is weird. If the bioneural interface teaches me how to change a tire when I’m on the side of the road—I am all for it. I don’t need or want a book for that anyway. Reading isn’t purely pragmatic for me.

I don’t think a bioneural interface could replace the ability reading and writing has to offer us an asynchronous, premeditated, in-depth conversation (although one sided) with another real human. If there was a way for it to play me the equivalent of an audiobook into my brain and allow me to stop and closely examine the ideas written by another human—that would be fine. I still think that is like reading enough to just be reading using another method.

I feel like that would be a similar situation to the previously mentioned one of showing my laptop to a person from 1926. It would blow my mind but if it has those same aspects, I would accept it as a new form of engaging with literature or reading. The method does not matter. The purpose does.

4. “I do think it is an interesting thought experiment to replace ‘reading’ with memorization, tracking and hunting, wayfinding, foraging, tanning, oral recitation, food preservation, spinning and weaving, animal husbandry, etc.”

I think there is an argument to be made saying we lost something as a society when we lost a couple of those skills. Overall, I’m not too concerned so I won’t go in that direction.

In part of her response directly following this quote she says:

“Pointing out a lack of reading in the past is a bit of a strawman as the situation would be entirely different in a modern context. Past illiteracy was due to a lack of access. Future post-literacy would be due to surpassing the need for it via superior tech.”

For context, I talked about how life got better for the average person when reading and access to information became common. I did not mean to strawman. She wanted me to engage in the realm of the future and I engaged in the realm of the past.

I will say casually using the term ‘post-literacy’ does terrify me. A little bit.

Here’s the thing. I never really meant access to information. I am not talking about information in terms of a quick google search for a factoid or anything that could be replaced by a ‘how to’ video.

I would be happy replacing instruction manuals with something that tells me how to build that damn desk without as big of a headache.

I cannot currently picture an invention that supersedes the need for the in-depth, unhurried, and edited conversations had through writing. The nonfiction writer reads tons of primary sources and quotes and synthesizes them to give us a new take on our history, environment, or world. The fantasy author creates magic through the long drawn out process of word choice and high level concepts that require mental work and editing in order to give someone else a believable portal to another world with an engaging narrative. We then read these books to have the experience of being in the mind of another human. Temporarily.

I stand by this comment I gave regarding this:

“It can be hard to picture a future we haven’t experienced yet. I don’t believe we have tech yet that could replace reading and writing but it’s not impossible.

I do think there would need to be a way to hold and flesh out complex ideas. Most books are more than rote memorization. They explore a topic with research and edits in a way that is much more in depth than anything that could be done orally. The tech would need to allow you to sit and really think and analyze something and then store it in a way that other people can experience the mental work you put in. I feel like that would be a more advanced version of reading and writing in my opinion.

So if there is a form of reading and writing that future tech allows that doesn’t require the symbols we currently use—you likely have a point. It will need to be a system that allows you to take an idea in depth which will in a way replicate writing in a new way.”

Side note: I can’t believe I just quoted myself. Cringe.

Anyway, if we are attached to the idea of decoding symbols as the definition for reading, maybe reading could become a niche hobby if the act of sharing information in a deeply similar way could be done without the need for symbols via new future imaginative technology.

If that does start happening, it is important that we actually evaluate what is actually important about reading and writing. It might be worth it to start these conversations now while people are hyped on visions of the future.

Do not give away your own ability to think about ideas and concepts. Do not stop being the occasional armchair philosopher. Do not confuse the utility of reading and writing with the utility of an instruction manual.

These in-depth discussions that stick to one topic and go beyond the surface level are important. I think reading and writing helps thinking in ways that I can’t always define and pinpoint.

The more I write the more I figure it out.

I actually think I have more in common with this commenter than I originally thought. It was interesting to note that she was attached to the idea of reading including symbols. Which is technically correct. If that is all reading is then I guess I don’t think we will always have to read.

I still think reading and writing may look different in the future and maybe we should fine-tune our definitions now before it is too late. We don’t want to lose the best that reading and writing have to offer in the pursuit of efficiency and optimization.

If she sees this and chooses to respond, I would be happy to continue this correspondence and enter each other’s brains for a minute. In writing. I wouldn’t have said all of this in the moment on a podcast.

The YouTube Video:

My dog, Winnie, also has long nails. She is terrified anytime I come to her with the clippers. She runs away and if I catch her she uses the full force of her body to wiggle out of my grasp. She requires someone to hold her down while someone else gently clips them. I have some scratches running down my legs because I have not recently accomplished the great feat of calming her down enough to get it done.

I am no magician.

I did live with magicians once upon a time. They were masters of upkeep. They kept up many projects at once and never tired of them. They took care of me.

I have always had the ability to get lost in a book. Even then. Back in those days, when I surfaced from a book, a sandwich would be waiting for me. The sandwich would be on homemade bread with vegetables from the garden. The tomatoes were flavorful and juicy in the way that supermarket tomatoes cannot match.

Today when I surface from a book, there is no sandwich. When I have tomatoes they are from the supermarket. When I remember to buy them.

I lived with my grandparents for a few years as a teenager. They were impressive. This is that story.

They never had unkempt nails.

My grandfather had a sourdough starter that survived multiple generations. He (or my grandmother) would feed it. They did experiment with different types of flours. It was like a potion. It would bubble up and make subtle movements. It was alive, happy, and well taken care of.

In my early 20s, I took a portion of this sourdough starter and kept it up for about 6 months. Then it died.

When I was in high school my grandfather woke up before the sun. He took out his sourdough starter and made me breakfast—often pancakes. Special healthy pancakes. My grandmother was often very eager to point that out. He did this every single morning.

My grandmother brewed kombucha. It was healthier than anything you could get at the store. The cabinet she stored it in looked like it belonged to a witch. She at times would be worried about that. She was a very religious woman but believed that God would want us to be healthy. She was confronted about this practice every now and then and would stand up for herself.

So I had kombucha almost every day. For my gut microbiome or something.

One thing that especially proves the magician status of my grandfather was the backyard garden that he kept alive. In a desert.

Many people who start backyard gardens in Las Vegas give up after battling and losing to the dry unforgiving heat. My grandfather, the magician and master of upkeep, was not stopped by something so trivial. He learned everything he needed to about growing vegetables, fruits, and other plants in the desert and usually succeeded. He adjusted his growing season, made a soil that fit the environment, and used objects that functioned as sun shades. I do not have the expertise that he does but I can identify dedication and practical intelligence when I see it.

Like I said, in addition to everything else he grew the best tomatoes.

At times it could be a little exhausting to live with magicians. A glass filled with water left unattended for 30 seconds would be washed, dried, and in the cupboard upon my return. I sometimes chafed against the persistent upkeep.

Why was the book I was reading back on the bookshelf in the other room? All I did was use the bathroom.

Teenagers are annoying and love to interpret the world around them in the worst way possible.

As an adult, I look back on this short period in my life in awe. How did they do it? I have a hard enough time making my bed in the morning and often don’t do so at all.

I fear that we don’t always appreciate the right people. The people who keep the world running. The people who nurture us and keep us fed.

I am mediocre at all these things. I am no magician. Yet, there is always someone reading or watching something that I have put out into the world. I get complimented daily for being insightful, smart, or making a good point. Probably because I read a lot of books.

But it might be worth noting that on an average day, I can barely put together a sandwich.

And I was kind of a jerk. I sucked. I really sucked. But also, I was under a lot of pressure. I was also young BUT I still sucked.

Sometimes I didn’t. It was a mixed bag. I could write dozens of essays about good things I did in Sonora and Sinaloa, Mexico. This one isn’…

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Well, I don’t really decide to replace anything. I replace it when the upkeep and cost of repair no longer feels worth it. My screen is turning purple. It confuses me because I did not recently drop it, but I’ve dropped it many times and in the past I even slammed it into a car door.

If you’ve been reading everything I ever write, you might remember I once mused about dropping my phone into a burning candle. Yep…same phone.

For me, replacing a phone is a chore. It is not exciting. Sure, I will enjoy myself for thirty minutes during setup but I don’t look forward to it. If this screen didn’t decide to turn purple, I would have kept the phone indefinitely.

So given that, I wanted to replace this phone as efficiently as possible. I have things to do, essays to write, videos to make, and I’d rather be at the park with my dogs or on a walk.

My plan was to go straight to some store like Best Buy or Target or something and just buy the phone up front and check the errand off my list.

But no…society doesn’t work like that. Apparently, they didn’t want to sell me a phone without a phone plan and even if I paid up front for the entire thing—it could be locked into that plan for 30-60 days. How is that a thing?

No, seriously. Why are we okay with that? I probably could have gone directly to the manufacturer’s store. Anyway, I was annoyed and also a little lazy.

So I went online and ordered the phone from the company I have my phone plan with. Four days later, I am sitting on my couch in the middle of the day because they require me to be home for delivery.

In the middle of the day. It’s Thursday. How convenient.

They did give me a time window and they even put the face of my delivery driver on a map. He has been two streets away from me for two hours. If I decided to do something productive that requires my full attention, he would surely show up right away.

I’m wise enough to know that, so I was reading a book. I wasn’t very immersed in it. Every chapter I looked up to stare out my front window. Now I am writing this thing. He is supposed to be here any minute now.

My dogs keep barking too. I have this idea in my head that they will know he is coming a minute or two before I do. They are actually barking at nothing though. I cannot determine what keeps getting their attention.

So patience. I don’t have it. I never had any patience. My parents at one point realized that if I had an idea, I wanted to make it a reality right away. That was a right now idea…not a tomorrow idea. It was obnoxious.

I’m still probably a little bit obnoxious.

If I can be bluntly honest, not having patience has only ever worked in my favor. I can reach goals fast, I can get degrees and certifications quickly, I can post YouTube videos without getting tired. If I get impatient enough, I’ll seize the moment and start writing an essay on impatience. Movement has only ever given me opportunities and being impatient often causes me to do something myself.

That all feels like the wrong takeaway though. Patience is a virtue or something. I actually don’t think that is wrong.

If you want something to move forward and it gets stalled by other people or by slow inefficient processes, it takes wisdom to know what is in your control and what is not. When this nice man whose picture is plastered on the delivery app shows up, I will be very nice to him. Don’t you doubt it. I would never take my impatience out on him. Who knows why he has been two streets away for two hours? Maybe he is eating lunch or maybe it is the worst app in the world.

Maybe you can be patient with others and impatient with yourself? Being impatient with myself seems to always kick me into gear.

No, that seems wrong too. I can’t imagine being too harsh on yourself constantly is a good idea.

I don’t know if I actually have ever been patient with myself. Most of the patience that I have developed came from external forces. I’ve had plenty of life situations that have forced me to be patient. Ones much more significant than annoying required-signature delivery schedules.

Are there people who have mastered internal patience? Patience with oneself that isn’t forced? Probably so.

Maybe we should all learn something from them. That isn’t me.

The phone still isn’t here.

This all has something to do with gift giving. A subject I do not think I have yet mastered myself.

I’ve heard the argument that gift giving is largely inefficient. I have to admit, as pragmatic as I tend to be, this has at one point in time resonated with me. Don’t buy me dinner. Buy yourself dinner. You take care of you and I’ll take care of me.

Of course there are a lot of assumptions in this approach. The idea that any one human could truly be self-sufficient is laughable. I mean, at the extremes I suppose you can get close.

I think of off-grid homestead channels on YouTube. They grow their own food, build their own homes, and create the illusion of simplicity and self-sufficiency.

Except most of the materials they use are from the outside industrial world and they make money from ads. Some of these channels get millions of views. I watched a man once who showed everyone his whole off-the-grid setup that ended with a computer and desk that he used to edit his content for the internet.

I’m not sure if that is true self-sufficiency.

Even in the pre-industrial world, gift giving in one form or another was everywhere. A gift carried an energy. You receive a gift and then you reciprocate by giving another one back. You should also initiate the exchange — in many communities it was looked upon poorly to always be responding and never initiating a gift exchange. It was about the energy as much as it was about the gift itself.

All of this to say, humans are social. I am not an island. Even if at times I wish to be. To be fair, I usually don’t — otherwise I wouldn’t have published my thinking process publicly.

There is definitely something pro-social about gift giving. Even in a day and age where we have bank accounts and money and some illusion of independence, many people choose to continue giving gifts.

This can definitely send an over-analyzer into analysis paralysis. If a person who makes less money than me gives me a sandwich, do I take them to a sit-down restaurant for my gift to be equal in sacrifice? Or do I give them a sandwich to match what they are able to give?

Also, does a gift always carry the necessary energy?

A man named Fraser Grant asked a magazine columnist why people were always giving him soap. Bourbon-scented soap, artisanal Ren Faire soap, soap hand crafted by monks in Italy. He presented it as what I perceived to be a joke (although, maybe he was sincere).

“What began as a quirky gifting trend is beginning to smell like an intervention. I want to ask if there’s some unspoken insinuation — but if the answer isn’t a hard no, isn’t it basically a yes?”

The columnist, Carrie, responded that he focused on the wrong problem. It probably wasn’t about his smell.

“At best, soap is an innocuous gift, likely to end up in the guest bathroom or perfuming a linen closet for the next three years until it’s thrown out. At worst, soap suggests a last-ditch effort, right below key chains, mugs or their de rigueur equivalent, the tote bag.”

So at this point, the anxiety goes beyond gift giving itself. Is it even worth it if you can’t do it ‘well’?

What is wrong with soap?

I spent some time reading The Gift by Marcel Mauss, which focuses on gift giving and exchange in archaic societies. It’s a foundational sociological text written in 1925. While the perspective on the origin of the spiritual and social purpose of the gift is presented and analyzed — it did not address my soap problem.

The gifts discussed in this essay were often basics that people needed. Something like soap would have been considered a good gift. People weren’t living in excess.

Of course, there were some ornate and significant gifts for special life events. For example, a special piece of clothing that took a lot of time to make and decorate. However, the everyday gifts and exchanges were basic objects. They were meaningful because of scarcity and because of the sacrifice that scarcity underlines.

In a world where we have endless options for gifts, we make gift giving complicated. You should stare into their soul and identify what makes them tick. Import it from another country if you must. It’s the moment to prove that you truly see who they are. They don’t need tomatoes from your garden.

Actually, if you successfully see into my soul, you will realize that I absolutely do need those tomatoes from your garden.

Of course, this whole discussion is from an American perspective. Some cultures have a much easier time with gifts because the etiquette is encoded into strict social rules.

Americans are individualists and pragmatists — we chafe under any strict structures. You have people here who don’t believe in gifts at all, people who will gift soap, and people who stare into the soul of others to determine the perfect gift. In return they are given the soap. Or their friend shrugs awkwardly and says they didn’t think they were exchanging gifts.

Some people would tell me that if someone buys me a sandwich I should return with something of equal value. Others might say that it should be something that is equal in sacrifice. Perhaps it depends on what type of relationship we have? Others will say that the giver shouldn’t expect anything in return. Just because they are a gift giver doesn’t mean you have to be.

We aren’t living in a time of etiquette and strict social rules. At least the younger generations are not. There are undeniable benefits in this. There have always been people who don’t fit into the mold and now there really isn’t an expected one to fit into. You do you.

At the same time, it feels relevant to point out that loneliness and isolation are on the rise. People are having a harder time making friends. Some people’s best relationships in this moment in time are parasocial ones on the internet.

You deserve more than that. I’m aware that our relationship is parasocial (unless you are my mother). I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think there was good to sharing thoughts online. Although positive, it certainly isn’t a replacement for real world connection.

I guess the discussion on gift giving seems to be one on whether we can do it all ourselves or if we require others. Must we always nurture relationships, and is gift giving the way to do it?

It does have a long precedent. I do still feel happy when someone gives me something I could have bought myself.

I like soap.

Regardless of where you fall, I do think there is an argument to be made for being pro-social. Even when it doesn’t feel natural. You probably can’t conquer this entire life on your own and you probably will be happier with more connections.

Gift giving probably was never truly about the stuff anyway.

Further Reading:

1. The column referenced was in the Fall 2025 issue of The Believer

2. The Gift by Marcel Mauss

Yes, I might be calling the average person intellectually challenged.

Everyone has an opinion about education and about how it can improve. Everyone identifies things that are truly important and things that should be cut in order for education to actually help people with their “real lives.”

Some people might have incentives to make claims that sound reasonable on the surface level but are actually nothing but absurd once you think them through. It is to their advantage that many people will not think them through. Some people don’t tend to think. It’s unfortunate.

And kinda sad.

Nothing pisses me off more than an intellectual-sounding claim that masks the stupidity behind the claim itself. Use enough buzz words and people might think you have a point.

Even when you absolutely do not have a point.

This is amplified when people defend the usage of AI in early K-12 education. To be transparent, I do not think AI should be implemented until a kid or teenager has learned how to think and process information themselves. I am not a Luddite, and I acknowledge that there may be use for it later on, especially in higher education.

Regardless of any individual opinions on AI, the cat is out of the bag.

According to Stanford’s website, Victor R. Lee “is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University and is faculty lead for the Stanford Accelerator for Learning’s initiative on AI and Education.”

I do not doubt that he is a smart, capable, and qualified man. However, when your position literally is leading an initiative on AI and Education, it might lead you to put the cart before the horse. You are starting with the assumption that AI is useful in education. It’s your title and position, and you get paid for holding those positions. I could easily defend AI in education if someone were paying me to do so.

No one is, though, so I won’t.

I want to react to something he said because I don’t think the statement makes much sense. Maybe he usually says smart things; in my opinion, this particular statement was lacking.

In the New Scientist magazine’s issue on the AI Revolution, they quote Victor R. Lee:

“Victor Lee at Stanford University in California says there is an opportunity to refocus how we assess learning away from the ability to produce well-written essays towards ‘more sophisticated things like comparison, critique, adaptation, refinement.’”

What does Victor Lee think an essay is? He literally just described an essay. I mean, although this is a casual essay and I am speaking casually right now, am I not in this current moment critiquing his ideas?

Have I not written essays comparing different ideas, refining different ideas, adapting different ideas?

I think this goes over well on the surface level because of how many teachers in the previous and current generation taught the essay. When you have too many students in a room, there is a tendency to make them all stick to a strict formula. The student feels like he is sharing his thoughts and writing an essay in a straitjacket. The thesis must go here, the first claim must go here, the evidence for the claim must immediately follow it.

I don’t blame teachers. Their course load is way too heavy to allow any sense of individuality before young children and teenagers master the basics.

In its true and evolved form, the essay is the place to think critically. It is the place to have kids challenge ideas and defend opinions. It is the place to interact with ideas that came before yours and continue an intelligent conversation. It is a training space for critical thinking, and if taken seriously and taught well, it is critical thinking’s best vessel.

So of course many people realize that AI is a threat to the essay. I imagine he realizes that as well. Since he is positioned to imagine a world with AI taking center stage in education, he needs to demean and diminish the tool that has sparked creative and critical thinking in the human race for generations.

He insinuates it never did that. We were just all following strict and meaningless conventions in straitjackets.

When I worked as a Teaching Assistant for a course that taught college freshmen, and when I worked as a 10th grade teacher, the essay was everything. It got kids thinking, it started class conversations, it made kids feel like I was actually listening to and engaging with their ideas. Of course some did not take advantage, but others did, and those that did legitimately became smarter people. They are probably the people who could use AI and remain skeptical when it hallucinates, mainly because they learned to think first.

If I were in a conversation with him as someone who taught critical thinking in high school — partially through writing — I would ask him what the alternative is.

He says he wants something that teaches “comparison, critique, adaptation, refinement.”

That sounds like an essay.

Kids need essays, or something like essays, and until you give me a usable alternative, I think that AI is a threat to education because it is a threat to the essay.

The article that quoted him suggested that kids could sit on the computer and debate bots. I’m not sure that is the alternative I would want young children and teenagers to use.

Every time I’ve debated a bot, it immediately caves and strokes my ego.

I struggle to tell this story even now. I wonder about my reader. What do they want my life experience to be? More importantly, what do they want it to mean? How do I need to shape a real life experience to soothe the tribal sensibilities of the internet?

In many ways, I write this piece in resistance to that.

Read more

The novelty of encountering a unique perspective triggers some sort of discomfort.

An excerpt from Solvej Balle’s book was recently published in Brick: A Literary Journal. She demonstrates the above phenomena with a fictional conversation. She writes about a woman with an interest in history and a man that fundamentally misunderstands her.

The woman shares her love of objects that people have left behind. She describes her love of archaeology and studying what life physically looked like for people who came before her.

The man she is talking to tells her that he loves history too. He loves to study the battles, the rise and fall of great men, and the rise and fall of great civilizations. She tells him that is cool and all, but she prefers the objects of history to the battles.

“I was interested in shoes, ships, and sealing wax. In the buildings, the arches facing the road. I wasn’t interested in the outcome of the war but in the buttons on a soldier’s uniform. I had traveled through history, watching the battles play out, but I kept stopping at a loaf of bread, a building, a glass.”

Immediately after explaining her hyperfixations, the conversation goes off the rails and it takes an effort to bring it back. He immediately decides that it makes sense that she isn’t interested in real history but instead is interested in objects. You can imagine the woman rolling her eyes.

“He didn’t find it strange that I wasn’t interested in history. After all, history has never been interested in you either, he claimed. I said that it was an odd assertion, but he was serious: Why should I be interested in history? It had always been written by men, for men, about the world of men.”

She challenges him by saying that she isn’t all that concerned about all of that. Her interest wasn’t determined by her gender. She was just interested in objects.

“If I could only be interested in women’s history, then surely he must also believe that my interest was confined to women’s things. Did he really think my interest in things was limited to hairpins and pot lids?”

The woman continues to navigate this conversation with care. She can see the man is trying to be inclusive — to make this about gender and social justice. However, she just wants to talk about cool objects. In that moment, she isn’t looking to rehash the injustices experienced by all women in history. She just wants to talk about old discarded metal.

“I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, I said. I could see that he was trying to explain my world to me by climbing over to my side of the fence, but I felt that he was building the fence as he was climbing.”

I have to say, it has been a while since I have personally felt seen to that extent by a piece of literature. I can imagine the frustration of bringing up a topic that you love only for it to devolve into some sort of culture war think piece. We spend our day-to-day lives recycling conversations. I can definitely imagine a world where one person wants to talk about the evolution of furniture over time and somehow the conversation becomes about feminism.

Not that I dislike feminism. I am a woman and all.

In a society that fits us into tribes, political parties, horoscopes, and personality types, it can be difficult to tune that all out for a minute to listen to the person in front of you. It is uncommon to actively listen. It is more common to categorize the conversation prematurely and prepare the response.

I do it all the time. I’m often a bad listener.

Yet I also tend to want people to listen to me. I want them to understand what makes me tick. I want someone to visit the world of my inner thoughts, see them, and comprehend them. I don’t want to engage in small talk; I want to slow down and really talk about something. Something that does not automatically trigger a conversation that we have every day that ends the same way.

Of course, wanting other people to do something that you yourself don’t excel at isn’t the best look. I’m often quick to judge but cannot be quickly and accurately judged myself. It’s a reminder to slow down. If I feel misunderstood from time to time, it is a reasonable conclusion that I also likely misunderstand.

I guess reading the above highly realistic conversation just offered me the reminder to slow down and listen. Maybe it can do the same for you.

Or not. Feel free to bring Susan B. Anthony into the middle of a discussion on the invention of sheet metal in the ancient world. Just don’t get confused when your conversation partner doesn’t appreciate your efforts. It’s easier not to build the fence that you will later have to climb over.

Begin Reading Solvej Balle: Bookshop.org Amazon

I thought it was amusing to make a snowball and play catch. They always sat at attention, stared at the ball, and then chased it when it was thrown. Every single time (even though it was repeated dozens of times) they were confused when they couldn’t find it because it disintegrated on impact.

They sniffed around, looked behind bushes, and even at times resorted to digging. They were promised a game of fetch and they very much expected one. They didn’t know that a snowball is meaningfully different from the balls they play with on a daily basis. I felt bad but to be fair it was also kind of funny. Are we allowed to laugh at our pets? I certainly wasn’t laughing with them. They weren’t laughing.

In the book Ride With Me by Thomas Costain, the main character Frank does something similar. He is wealthy and in control of an English newspaper. Sure his job matters to him, but his obsession belongs to an aristocratic French woman named Gabrielle. Over the course of years and through many historical events, she flirts with him and teases him but resists giving him what he actually wants. He chases her, saves her (in her damsel in distress moments), and declares love for her. He constantly feels like he is on the brink of getting her to commit to him but the snowball continually disintegrates and she gets away.

To be fair, I spent a lot of time laughing at him too so I guess my mean streak isn’t reserved for my dogs.

I think we spend a lot of our lives chasing illusions. We picture the paths ahead of us and sometimes plan and dream optimistically. The young woman who envisions staying home with her kids envisions economic security, days of baking cookies, growing gardens, and family bonding. The young college graduate imagines finding the job immediately that matches the ‘likely salary’ that they found on google. The newly retired person imagines their final years filled with endless vacations and hobbies that bring the happiness they have been seeking all along. Some people are fortunate and their dreams become reality. Some people watch the snowball disintegrate on impact.

Dreaming is vitally important. Without it, it can be hard for a person to try to do anything no matter what that thing might be. It gives you a sense of control in your life and a direction to have a vision. It is also a worthwhile activity to occasionally adjust that vision as different things become meaningful and important to you. I tend to think a person that tries to create the life they want is often happier than the person who doesn’t.

Unless they take it too far.

I think there are people who dream big but then just get stuck in the grind. I often wonder if the dreams that cause misery are ones that are inherited from others. I see many people (including and especially on this platform) who advertise ‘growth’ and ‘making money’ from building an online personal brand. The success is measured in the metrics and the desperation is felt when the paycheck doesn’t actually come in. I’m also reminded about the promise of the gig economy. In the world of DoorDash, the more you participate, the less you get paid (it’s determined by an algorithm that tracks your desperation).

This is a tough subject because the people who are sold and embody these dreams usually need to put food on the table. It is especially devastating when the snowball disintegrates. I do not laugh at them.

So the snowball is thrown. It disintegrates. The dogs search for it and then

eventually…

they give up.

When they give up searching for the snowball, the smile returns to their faces and they begin to play. Sure they dreamed of playing fetch, but playing tag can be fun too.

I wonder if there is a way we can follow a dream to its conclusion and then be comfortable and happy no matter what the result may be. Is it possible to enjoy and love the process and still feel disconnected from the result?

Maybe not if the dream is feeding your family. I get that.

For everything else, I think the dreamer should enjoy the process. They should enjoy chasing the dream itself. If they don’t like the activity they must engage in to get there, it might be time to choose a new one. The snowball often disintegrates but it’s not a big deal if you had a fun time chasing it.

This began a hobby and family activity for those who lived in and around Cornwall, England. They became beachcombers, walking up and down the shores in search of Lego. Over the years these Lego pieces reached distant parts of the world. The 2020 currents made it possible to find legos from the 1997 spill in Japan, Canada (specifically British Columbia), and the United States (specifically Washington, Oregon, and California).

I learned all of this random information because I decided to take a stroll to the library the other day. It was really more of a walk for my health and well-being than out of any real need to check out a book. The book I found on the subject was quite short and filled with so many interesting pictures documenting the event, its aftermath, and its purpose. I figured I could read it easily in an afternoon and took it home.

Tracey Williams, the author of Adrift: The Curious Art of the Lego Lost at Sea, positions the book and the event as a curiosity. It’s inherently fun to go on a treasure hunt for sea themed toys while exploring the beach. She goes further in her book talking about all the different things that have been lost at sea including pages of pictures of toys going back generations and a couple archaeological finds going back millenia.

Her author’s note says, “I love Lego. I played with it as a child. My own children played with it. We still have boxes full of Lego in the attic, ready to be handed down to future generations. Searching for lost Lego from a cargo spill began as a bit of fun, a treasure hunt with my children. Ultimately, it opened my eyes to all the rest of the plastic in the ocean.”

I’m sure that you have heard about things being in the ocean that shouldn’t be, so I’m not going to focus on that here. I do recommend her book and will link it at the end.

I am interested in talking about legacy and what we leave behind.

As a child, I participated in a different but similar activity. I was nowhere near an ocean and I knew nothing about cargo spills or sea themed Lego but I did go on treasure hunts with my family in the mountains of southern Utah. Previously, Paiute country.

The Bryce Canyon website says that the Paiutes lived in the area starting in 1200 CE. For the most part, they lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers and relied on food sources like pine nuts, seeds, rabbits, and other small game. Some Paiutes cultivated crops like corn and squash.

The whole reason I tell you all of that is to paint the picture that they lived simple lifestyles, did not have a whole lot of excess, and did not leave all that much behind.

But they did leave something behind. Arrowheads.

My family stumbled upon them constantly. Okay, ‘stumble’ is a bit of a stretch. We would take out our fourwheelers to remote desert locations, eat lunch, and look around. It was a fun activity as kids. More often than not, we would find an arrowhead (sometimes multiple). An arrowhead in good condition was the greatest possible trophy of the expedition.

Now, I’m sure archaeologists and local museums would enjoy these. In my opinion, I don’t think we actually employ enough people to preserve the history of different locations. That’s why so many important archaeological discoveries have been made by random people throughout history. So many treasures have to exist inside the homes of random people. Regarding this specific situation, it’s also probable that only so many of these arrowheads need to be preserved. There are a lot of them and they are all quite similar.

The Paiutes were a nomadic people who left almost nothing behind. Yet in the 2020s, unskilled random people are still finding the remains of what they DID leave behind. I don’t think future generations will have to work nearly as hard to find the remains that we leave behind. You know, consumerism and stuff and things.

Overconsumption has been the internet’s favorite topic for a handful of years. Some people get famous online for ‘influencing’ you and another set of people get famous online for ‘deinfluencing’ you. The deinfluencers who have narrowed themselves into a small but powerful niche also have to come up with weekly content and things to be shocked about. They might be critiquing the broader and more harmful trend, but they are still on the hamster wheel of social media and content creation (the structure that prioritizes brand and message over the person in the video). It’s the type of creation that would never let you talk about how you used to look for arrowheads as a kid. That’s a little too off-topic.

Anyway, the overconsumption topic is still one worth talking about. My personal approach is to ensure that every object in my life has a place in my life. I don’t have a lot of random things that do nothing. I also don’t have a lot of clothes. I am often willing to buy a book or a board game. I read every day and I play board games every Sunday. I don’t have a house that borrows minimalism as an aesthetic, but I don’t need to buy the new Starbucks cup to be happy.

There is a huge discussion about why people buy things they don’t need. I question if all objects bought on a daily basis actually improve the lives of consumers, but what do I know.

What I do wonder about is legacy. I’ll be honest. I don’t necessarily care about how people think about me after I die (or if they will think about me at all), but I know many people who do. Many people want to leave a positive legacy that people can look to and admire.

I tend to think it is hard to leave that legacy if you spend your time consuming at the cost of doing anything else. Watching videos, buying products, and collecting things for the sake of collection makes you feel productive, but it doesn’t actually make you productive. Even most book collections (and I love book collections) aren’t admired by anyone but the person that put them together. The next generation gives them away in auctions and boxes them up to send to used book stores. You can’t leave a legacy with your stuff. The fine china for one generation is old, outdated, and yellowed to the next.

Even I knew nothing about the Paiutes who left behind those arrowheads. They were just strange oddities. Childhood curiosities. I had to google that shit (I only appear smart to some because I read).

So if living a consumerist lifestyle doesn’t lead to legacy, what does? I think relationships are important. Connections made with other people are powerful. Art is important. Writing a book, learning how to paint, or how to take beautiful pictures is something. Science is important. If you are in a career that positively impacts the human race, that can also be important.

Just do something you find meaningful. Save money so you can gain time. I don’t care what your passion is.

I do think that a lot of wise people have come before me though. A lot of those wise people weren’t worried about legacy (some of them got one anyway). They said that you are happier if you detach. If you allow yourself to be. If you don’t spend too much time connecting the efforts of your soul to real world outcomes. Not everything good is appreciated and not everything that is appreciated is good.

I went to a Buddhist session once (and only once). They discussed how we are like a wave in the ocean. It builds up, travels, and then crashes on the shore. No one remembers that wave, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t beautiful.

In fact, imagine leaving no trace. Physically, I mean. Anything I leave behind one day will be a chore for someone else. Something they have to pick up, sort, and figure out. I won’t ever accomplish that ideal because certain stuff does in fact make me happy, and I think that is okay.

When it comes down to it, I don’t need to leave a legacy. If I do, I hope it helps someone who needs it. As far as I am concerned, I’ll be dead.

Buy Adrift: the Curious Tale of Lego Lost at Sea Bookshop.org Amazon

Read about the Paiutes: https://historytogo.utah.gov/paiute-indians/

When I was in college I had a very gross job. I worked for a catering company and I cleaned the kitchen after the day was done. I had to get the gunk off of all the appliances, I had to pull out sticky gross vents and run them through some sanitizing machine, and I had to clean out the drains on the floor that were filled with discarded food.

I mean, I didn’t have to. I liked that it paid more than all of the other ‘unskilled’ positions. I was willing to handle a little bit of a gross job for a higher paycheck.

Since this job did not require me to talk to people or interact with people, I was allowed to listen to whatever I wanted to with headphones on. I listened to YouTube videos. The year was like 2018. Probably.

I got into board games in this period largely because of the Dice Tower channel. I basically watched these middle-aged guys sit there, laugh, and make fun of each other as they did different top ten lists. It was kind of weird actually that I hyperfocused on that and let those videos autoplay in the background but I’m a big board gamer now. No regrets.

They often mentioned things like their ‘youth groups’ or things they did ‘at their church’. None of those little comments bothered me but I was Mormon at the time. I guess it would be unsurprising that a frequent reference to religion didn’t bother a religious person. I digress.

One of those three men I watched that year recently wrote some dumb public political opinions on a public post. Dumb in my opinion. I am sure he thought they were pretty smart. Tons of people responded by pulling their funding from the Dice Tower. He willingly resigned and was not technically fired.

On a side note, I think part of the reason he and I would disagree on the political opinion that lost him that gig is because of different sources of information. It is one of those gross and useless public debates that only exist because we do not have the same facts. Those are by far my least favorite. Those really suck.

Curiosity led me down the rabbit hole and I found his personal board game YouTube channel. His most recent Q&A video references the incident. People who align with him and want to support him followed him over there. It kind of turned into this ecosystem where he by circumstance is growing an audience that agrees with him. Politically.

Did I mention this is a board game review channel? I don’t think he sees himself as the next Ben Shapiro. He wants to talk about 7 Wonders and Clank and maybe Catan (I have no idea…I don’t actually remember which board games he liked in those top ten videos).

So this might be the beginning of board game review channels being separated by politics. We do seem to be going after that virtual ‘third space’. I have played board games with a lot of different people. I feel like it can be harder to be around people you don’t agree with when you are engaging in an activity that relies on conversation and discussion of current events. It’s even hard in the book space because books talk about ideas and ideas are inherently political.

Board games aren’t like that. Everyone learns the rules. You are in a little world where everyone at the table is playing with shared information. Shared facts. Any disputes that come up are handled with an authoritative booklet that everyone can agree on. Funny moments happen that bring a group together even if they know almost nothing about each other.

Now, I have seen a lot of opinion pieces online that say that we cannot change our political opponents unless we cause them pain. They say that it is time to disown that annoying uncle. The theory is that if you cause a person pain you put them in a position to change their mind.

When I took political science classes in college that didn’t seem to be the approach. Those professors often said that people form political opinions based on their group and the people who surround them. There is plenty of research for example that shows that people become less racist when they are around people of a different background. The personal relationship and exposure to people who are different from them is what made them more accepting.

I’m not saying that you have to put up with everything on a personal level. If someone does something to hurt the relationship, you can choose to not be around them. There is a difference in my mind between someone holding a common political opinion they heard on a podcast and being an asshole to you or someone else you know. Those are separate issues.

Having a space that you allow to be politically neutral doesn’t mean that everyone in the group is politically neutral. I sat with a conservative that I played some board games with at dinner once. Somehow he misread the room and brought up how he just doesn’t get all the ‘trans stuff’. I basically said that I don’t care what people do with their lives and that it is a really lame political topic to constantly focus on when I think we have more important issues. By the end of the conversation, I asked him what he would do if one of his kids ended up being LGBTQ. He said it wouldn’t happen. I mentioned that it happened to a conservative family I knew. He just kind of sat and thought about it.

I don’t think me causing him more pain than that in that moment of time would have done anything. He would just have found a conservative board gaming group. He would have had a story about how he was thrown out just because of his opinions. He would never interact with other viewpoints. To be fair, if I constantly did that I would never interact with other viewpoints either.

My conspiratorial take is I don’t think the people in power want us to sit around a board game table. I think they want to keep us online arguing about issues that are not as important as the ones that matter the most to us. I think they want us in our echo chambers. They want the term ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ to be a shortcut for your identity. It’s hard to control the effects of human connection, so it is in their best interests to limit it.

If the board game dude had said something dumb on the board game channel itself, I would have agreed with the outcome. I’m not sure I like monitoring his personal social media. It’s kind of weird. Just my opinion.

But I’m just a person who has changed my opinions over time because of exposure to other people and other ideas. Never because of pain inflicted upon me by an opponent. Take that as you will.

Read more:

If you choose to read about the situation remember that I do NOT AGREE with the opinions shared. It could be argued that Sam Healey could blame himself for the situation with logic similar to what he used on his personal Facebook post.

https://boardgamewire.com/index.php/2026/01/30/veteran-dice-tower-reviewer-sam-healey-resigns-in-wake-of-saying-alex-pretti-renee-good-to-blame-for-ice-killing-them-after-comments-began-impacting-review-giants-annual-pledge-drive/

Internally I was the same person but externally people made very different assumptions about the young woman beneath the uniform.

This isn’t a new idea, concept, or conversation. We have argued throughout the years whether these social shortcuts are helpful or if we make too many assumptions about other people. To be fair, the assumptions you could make about me in each uniform would be accurate. The first girl would have flagged you down to try to engage you in a likely unwanted conversation about Jesus Christ and Joseph Smith. The second girl would have smiled at you warmly, asked if you were having a nice day on vacation, and made you a sandwich.

Both of these uniforms in some ways were given to me by chance. I was born Mormon and I would argue that not many people have fully examined and chosen their own beliefs by the age of 19. I was doing what I was primed and taught to do and only later realized that it wasn’t for me. The second uniform was given to me because I needed a summer job. Casino pool jobs are usually summer jobs, and they pay considerably more money than anything comparable (and I needed money). Of course, there was choice in both of these uniforms, but everything was primed for me to take on both of them.

I have had to deal with the negative effects of assumptions made throughout the years based on where I lived, what my job was, and what I looked like. People have crafted different narratives about what I was good for and how intelligent I might be or not be. I will say, everyone has always allowed a place for me and a role to fill. No one has ever stripped me of my humanity.

I have never been human garbage.

In her article “Vanishing Time: Portable Country,” Zoe Valery talks about Venezuelan refugees in Mexico. She spends time going to locations where many refugees are found. One location that she talks about is called “El Basurero,” which basically means trash can. It’s an uncharted train station that is home to a gigantic mountain of trash. Some refugees who are ill-equipped also dress in things that look like trash. One man that Valery talks to fashioned a raincoat out of trash bags. Here you have humans, wearing trash, who are surrounded by a landscape covered in trash.

What a uniform.

She tells the reader that some people are happy to see someone who wants to bring light to the situation because they are in a desperate situation. They have hope that awareness might bring a positive outcome. Others respond by hiding themselves from cameras and anyone who does not look like they belong to the area. They are not prepared for the assumptions people will make of them in this place and in this uniform.

A man she talks to directly addresses this and shouts, “It doesn’t matter, the garbage. There are a lot of people who are professionals too.” That is a point that many people miss. If your country experiences a sort of economic collapse, it might not matter if you are a doctor or a lawyer. Valery points out that the primary thing people in this situation want others to know is that “the refugee is not refuse.” Being surrounded by garbage does not make you garbage.

Making assumptions about people can sometimes be helpful in the moment. I also walk the other way when I see missionaries because their uniform gives me the information I need. It does not tell me who they are or what they are worth, but it does tell me that I don’t want to have the next immediate conversation.

We do need to be careful, though. Making assumptions can disconnect us from each other and from humanity. We might not see the woman who wants to be an honest public thinker beneath the culty looking name tag, and we might not see the trained doctor who can save lives alongside the pile of refuse.

I don’t know how we should handle crises that bring refugees to other countries. If there was an easy political answer, I imagine we would have it by now. I do think that as we come up with and try to implement different solutions, we should remember that the refugee is not refuse.

Wearing garbage as a result of something beyond your control does not make you human garbage. You only get that title if you make that assumption about someone else.

Don’t be human garbage.

Read Zoe Valery’s Article in Brick 116 (Winter 2026)

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You know, the 19th century fossil hunter that uncovered the first ichthyosaur, the first plesiosaur, and a pterosaur.

I’m sure you think about her a lot too.

Some people speculate that she might have been the first person to take up fossil hunting as a full-time career. Of course, that was only an option in the first place because fossil collecting was considered cool in the early 19th century. Some people used them as amulets with healing powers, others just thought they were natural wonders worthy of the mantel in their home.

Now if she found a unique and valuable fossil, it was worth her time because she could get a good amount of money for it. She was poor, uneducated, and a woman, so the prospect of being able to use a talent like fossil hunting to feed her family must have been alluring.

She definitely became passionate about it over time though. As her discoveries were submitted to science, she began receiving more visitors. She would often ask to borrow pieces of literature about the scientific musings on dinosaurs and would spend hours at a time copying their contents. Although she submitted many of the important early discoveries that scientists oohed and aahed over, she could not afford to buy any written publication that talked about them. Her drawings of how the different fossils might fit together to form a skeletal structure show considerable skill. She dedicated her life to this. She never married and she never had children.

This work ended up being very important to the field of geology and paleontology. It was not easy work either. The best time to find fossils is in bad weather. Anning would oftentimes be the one to take the risks to find the fossils, partly because she and her family needed the money. It wasn’t a mere hobby. The danger of the work was viscerally proved when her terrier was killed in a landslide that almost took out Anning herself.

Thank goodness my terrier is safe and sound on the bed surrounded by plush toys. I would never get over that.

This is a good reminder that there is not a strong correlation between how important your work is and how much you get paid. Anning understood that the way to get paid for her work was to sell what she found—but she consistently found things that became essential to science. To be clear, her labor was skilled labor. Not everyone can find multiple prehistoric creatures that have not previously been discovered. She couldn’t even afford to read about them in the paper.

We do like to believe that people get what they deserve. There is a strong desire for justice among most people. We want to believe that hard work and skill will pay off, even when the skill you have, no matter how valuable it may be, is hard to monetize.

Mary Anning did have men who respected her work. She would often be consulted about the fossils she found. I think that desire to see people rewarded for hard work moved some of them. After she lost most of her life savings in a bad investment, a man pleaded her case to the British Association for the Advancement of Science as well as the government. They ended up giving her a small pension that did offer some financial security. Now it wasn’t much, but it kept her family fed.

Don’t get me wrong, she deserved more. I still think there is something very human in how this story concludes. Someone else took a moment to consider how the system in place let someone who had made a valuable contribution fall through the cracks and there was an attempt to try and correct that.

No one had to do that at all. Mary Anning was the first woman given a pension for science and there wasn’t really a precedent for this. She knew from the start that her way to make money was to make more discoveries. The decision was made to help her out when things went south because people took a moment to consider the circumstance and show some amount of humanity.

This humanity was shown again in 1846 when Mary Anning was diagnosed with breast cancer. The Geological Society raised money to help with her medical expenses in appreciation for her work. Unfortunately, Anning did die of breast cancer. When she died, they created a beautiful stained glass window in her memory.

The sexier take is definitely to talk about how Mary Anning was not given the credit and recognition she deserved during her life. Who would have guessed that sexism and gender roles would have affected a lower-class, uneducated woman in the early 1800s?

I think that story is one that is too easy to prove, as obvious as it is. I think the more interesting story is the people who had the humanity to recognize when someone fell through the cracks of the system and didn’t get what they deserved. No one had to give her a pension and no one had to fundraise for her medical expenses.

In 2026, I don’t think a woman (in the West) would be gatekept from the scientific community. If she made a contribution she surely would be able to afford to read about it. I do wonder if her community would be as reliable. Would anyone care if someone who made the next scientific discovery was drowning in student debt or dealing with a diagnosis not covered by her health insurance? I hope so but I can’t be sure.

What I will say is I don’t think social progress is linear. I’m happy a woman can prove herself more easily in the field she chooses to study today. I am not happy that we live in an individualistic society where we don’t always seem to care for our neighbors regardless of how much they may contribute. I’m not sure that 2026 is in fact morally superior to 1846. We seem to have some systems in place that could be seen as an improvement. I also think we are more isolated from each other and unlikely to swoop in and take it upon ourselves to do something when a colleague falls.

I could be wrong.

Read this Related Book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/dinosaurs-at-the-dinner-party-how-an-eccentric-group-of-victorians-discovered-prehistoric-creatures-and-accidentally-upended-the-world-edward-dolnick/b24ccb23661e6770?ean=9781982199623&next=t&next=t&affiliate=120692

Some people might be far more confident in their opinions and political affiliations. They see the full picture, or believe they do. At least they believe they understand everything that matters. This tends to be reinforced by the people around them, both on the internet and in person. In college I was asked to engage with social science arguments that pointed to “the Big Sort” when describing American communities. The claim is that Americans tend to live in or move to areas of the country that align with their views. I tend to think that this leads to overconfidence in political understanding because everyone around them affirms their beliefs and deciphers that fuzzy image built on limited information in the same way.

I haven’t had that luxury. I grew up and live in a purple state—a state where a Democrat lives in one house and a Republican lives next door, and they have to be friendly and say hi to each other’s dogs.

Home means Nevada.

Now Nevada is not the most important swing state because the population is not particularly large. However, there is an argument that Nevada is the purplest state in the nation. In the last 12 presidential elections, Nevadans voted for Democratic candidates 6 times and Republican candidates 6 times. Nevada voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and Donald Trump in 2024.

This is important information because before I tackle a lack of confidence in political engagement, I want to tackle overconfidence. To do this, we are going to talk about the 2025 government shutdown and Nevada’s role in ending it.

Nevada in 2025 (and currently) has two Democratic senators: Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen. If you do not remember, the longest American government shutdown was in 2025. Democrats were holding out and banding together to get concessions that included healthcare subsidies via an extension of enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium tax credits.

Senator Catherine Cortez Masto never fell in line with her party, voting to end the shutdown 15 times. Senator Jacky Rosen did vote with her party for a while but then broke rank to end the government shutdown. Of the 8 Democratic senators that broke party lines, two were from Nevada.

Both of their faces were plastered on liberal-run YouTube channels and forums in shame. Commentators spoke up and asked all viewers to make sure that they did everything in their power to vote these senators out in the upcoming election. The senators obviously had no moral backbone and did not do what their constituents, who voted them in, would have wanted.

As a Nevadan (who is, for the record, liberal), I just chuckled. If Jacky Rosen had not ended the government shutdown, she likely would have been voted out and replaced with a Republican.

Nevada is part of the West. On the outskirts of our major cities and in our rural areas, you will see ranchers in cowboy hats who love their guns. We also have a lot of federal land, and many educated Nevadans work in the federal government. We have two Air Force bases and are home to the famous Area 51. Many Nevadans outside of government work in tourism. Las Vegas suffers quickly when people stop flying in for any reason. Nevada has also seen an above-average increase in housing costs compared to the country as a whole.

So most Nevadans wanted the government shutdown to end because they cannot survive it. A large portion of our upper-middle class was furloughed because of the government shutdown, and much of our lower and middle class was suffering because of a lack of tourism. The idea that our senators broke ranks in that environment is complicated.

It comes down to this question: Is a senator meant to do what is best for the country (in their opinion) or for their actual constituents? I don’t know the answer to that question. As a Democrat myself, I was okay with the government shutdown, but I never had to worry about feeding my family.

All of that is just to say: I think there is a tendency for overconfidence. When I watched liberals and leftists condemn the actions of Nevada’s senators with no conversation around what forces actually existed in the state that “caved,” it reeked of overconfidence and hubris.

Many people who choose not to engage in politics because they can “never see the full picture” see this hubris and don’t want to embody it themselves.

There is some pride and ego involved. You don’t want to throw yourself into a cause that you believe in only to find out later that you were played for a fool. These people would just rather not engage at all. The picture is fuzzy, so why pretend you can actually see it?

I think this line of thinking might be more dangerous than the arrogant overconfidence I described before. If we stop engaging altogether because we can’t know and we are tired, we stop holding our government accountable. A government that is not held accountable by its people is dangerous.

I think there is a lot of wisdom we can look to in order to solve this predicament. I am not religious myself, but when Jesus said, “by their fruits you shall know them,” he was imparting invaluable wisdom to his followers. You might not know all the details of what someone does or thinks, but you can see what the result of those thoughts and actions are.

A non-religious way to look at this is by thinking of the famous iceberg analogy. When you look at an iceberg above the water, you only see a small portion of it. There is a lot unseen beneath the surface. You do not know much about that iceberg from looking at the tip, but you do know something.

I acknowledge that as I engage in politics and view the news, I will never see the full picture. It will always be fuzzy. I will always be subject to misinformation, and I will often not be able to recognize it when I see it. I might be fooled, but I would argue that trying my best and taking that risk is worth it. My ego isn’t that important.

I can see something. I can see the tip of the iceberg, and I can see the fruits of the decisions made by people more powerful than me. If what I can see is bad or not ideal, I can imagine that what lies below the surface likely isn’t great either.

We need to engage in politics. It is human to engage in politics. It is necessary to engage in politics. Even if we sometimes question the current effectiveness of checks and balances at the federal level, we always can rely on one final check, and that is the people.

The ‘Swingingest’ States: https://brilliantmaps.com/swingingest-swing-states/

Senators that Broke Rank: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/09/senate-democrats-shutdown-vote-00644146

The Big Sort: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10126553/