An Animist Rambler’s Duties
Yet another intermission, and a quick note to subscribers --- [Estimated reading time: 5 min.]
Hello and welcome to all new subscribers that have joined over the past few months!
(The same goes for all new “followers,” of course – although I am a bit uncomfortable with this terminology. I’m not some sort of guru, and the last thing I want is to appear like I’m creating some low-key personality cult around me and my private life, like so many of the “creators” & “influencers” out there do, more or less inadvertently. I like my life as quiet and peaceful as it is right now.)
As you perhaps already noticed, I’ve not been too productive when it comes to this blog in recent months; a detailed explanation as to why will follow soon. Nonetheless, it somehow continued to gain subscribers – and now that I am aware of how many people I potentially reach, each time I open my substack dashboard I suddenly feel a non-negligible unease, almost a sense of guilt, like when I entered a class for which I didn’t do the assigned homework back in school.
It’s definitely not the most pleasant feeling. Truth be told, it is actually one of the many annoying sensations that characterize life within the dominant culture for me, sensations that I’ve been running away from for the past decade – another one on the top of the list is the frustrating combination of the urge to relieve yourself, but finding yourself stranded in a busy urban environment where that’s not immediately possible (or at least not without paying money for the most basic of animal pleasures: the emptying of one’s bladder and/or bowels).
But I’m digressing.
Suddenly, I feel like I have a responsibility to you, dear reader, to “produce content” – to use my least favorite term for what I’m currently doing (without trying to pretend that it is all that different). But do I need to voice an opinion over every little (or big) thing that happens? As a writer, do I have to try to keep up with something? Is this perhaps some sort of race?
Not for me, it isn’t! While I do occasionally comment on ‘current affairs’ (or use them as examples), I’d like to believe that much of my work withstands the ‘test of time’ and remains relevant even a few months or years later.
Sadly, in the current accelerationist phase of the “information age” search results are always listed with the most recent piece atop, automatically implying higher relevance – and thus influencing the readers’ choices and priorities ever so slightly.
After all, what’s older can’t be that important, because surely someone has already written something better, more concise, and more up-to-date. Right?! The future is always better than the past, and anything that’s not on the very top of the list is probably already yesterday’s news! FOMO!!
( ↻ Refreshing feed… )
Now, I could just refer you to my archive, and defensively list the many places in this blog (the ‘About’ section, for instance) where I point out that, due to my rather extraordinary lifestyle, I simply can’t write regularly, as there’s just too much seasonal variation in our life as subsistence farmers and other garden-related activities for me to set aside a certain amount of time for writing every single day.
Moreover, my brain doesn’t work like that. If I would force myself to sit down in front of the screen for a designated period each day, I would too often find myself procrastinating, making memes like this one (or this one, or this one), or (as most recently) designing “old-looking” warning signs for landmine-contaminated areas in Thai, Khmer and English.1
Or I could explain how I write down notes, keywords, quotes I come across, and random thoughts pretty much all of the time. There’s actually several pieces that are almost done, and just need the notorious “finishing touches” that so often take me longer than writing the entire raw structure – the standards I set for myself are high. I have another Rewilding Update idling in my drafts for months, which I simply didn’t publish yet because I don’t think it’s good form to start out with something so negative and controversial after such a long period of silence, so I want to write something more cheerful first.
But there’s good news as well – more on that later!
On an intellectual level I know that by now I should be able to bring some sort of balance into my “professional” life, some “adult” sense of duty, but I persistently find myself unable to muster either.2
If I start a book that reaches a certain threshold of allure and significance, I will do little else besides reading it and some basic garden & household maintenance, for however long it takes to finish said book. When I’m having a good written conversation with one of my comrades, colleagues or co-conspirators, I’ll spend my mornings formulating responses and thinking about how to not come across as too frenzied. When there’s friends or family coming to visit, I like to spent every free minute focused on them and their physical and mental well-being, so I really don’t have time to write (or even to look at screens) then.3
What this all boils down to is that if I don’t have time to write, well, I don’t write. I don’t enjoy forcing myself to do things that run counter to the everyday Tao of my life.
And if I’m in a productive period and finish three pieces in a single week, I don’t do the reasonable thing every “creator” gets told (“…focus on posting high-quality content regularly on a set schedule by creating a content calendar…”) and schedule their release regularly over longer periods,4 I just dump ’em all into your unsuspecting inbox, pretty much straight in a row.
So I guess my point is this: on one hand, I do feel sorry for this long period of relative inactivity; but, on the other, I’m also not. I trust that you, dear reader, will be able to understand, and, if you’re really desperate, to simply forage for reading material in my archive in the unlikely case that you can’t seem to satisfy that hunger elsewhere.5
But – on to the good news – I will be back, with another avalanche of essays and updates, very soon. I promise.
(And maybe I will try to stretch them out over a few weeks this time.)
Until then, here’s a visually appealing summary of what I’ve been doing:
Please stay tuned, the regular program will resume shortly!
Previous intermissions:
Don’t even ask.
At this point, having a regular, boring monotonous job would be unbearable to me. I like to imagine that I’d slowly waste away like a sloth in captivity.
This should actually be the norm, and the fact that even in social settings it’s so common for people to start scrolling shows clearly how deep the addiction goes with almost all of us, and how our attention spans could need a good stretching from time to time. Sometimes I can’t help but feel a hint of sadness when I see that visitors start absently scraping their screens (although I’m proud to say that most don’t). We have actually considered a “phone basket,” but concluded that this would be a bit overblown, and we don’t want to seem like the kind of people who would do such a thing.
Maybe I could even gain a few more subscribers like that… But that was never my goal anyway! I do this partly for me, partly to play my small part in the societal discourse shaping the future, and partly so that I don’t need to work a regular job – so if I’d write too regularly, that would clearly defeat the purpose.
I hope that, even for new subscribers, there is no need to point out that this is not sheer hubris, but merely my twisted sense of humor.
Loved this post and it was well worth the wait. You are not the nightly news who has to scrape up some fake drama or human interest fluff when there is nothing worth reporting. I worry about the same issues with my dynamic of weekly substack posts, along with the danger of audience capture and feeling the risk when I do something outside of my core niche. But I am mostly doing this to have fun and share my experiences with the world, so you have to be sincere in everything you do. People appreciate you for it, just like I appreciate you.
a few things:
firstly, I think you have written quite a lot already. when I first found your blog, I had a great time going through the archive and reading a piece each night. I spent quite a lot of time - there is a lot of material that you've put out there for folks.
secondly: I know exactly this feeling you're describing - the guilt-like sensation. I have a Patreon where I post art to subscribers. it's relatively modest now - but beginning in 2007 I developed a sizeable internet following, and it pretty much drove me mad. I ended up quitting the Internet for many years and leaving it all behind. My Patreon is an attempt at finding some balance of sharing my work with an audience, but also living. But truly, it feels like if you aren't constantly "producing", you're not giving the people what they want. but that leads me to my next point.
thirdly: your specific readers will necessarily have an understanding and respect for your choice to live the extraordinary life you have built rather than farming content for us. the heart of your writing resonates with us - so we know that the dominant culture's lifestyle of grind, produce, be chronically online is bullshit. and we all sort of dream to be living the way you are. so as much as we love your words, none of us are going to resent you for doing you. I personally feel really privileged to have read what I have from you, and I think I can speak for everyone else whether they are financially supporting you or not when I say I don't feel like you owe us anything.
I just felt the need to comment here because I resonate so strongly with what youve written here and it's something I struggle with myself. It's easier to have perspective on it from the other end - of a fan rather than the creator.
as an aside, I'm just finishing up Colin Turnbulls People Of the Forest (and listening to his recordings of the pygmy's awe-inspring music) and its making me nostalgic for a life I've never experienced.