The essential ingredients of mythmaking are down here on our tangly planet, species whispering and muttering about each other. Really good gossip across species becomes a story and eventually a myth. So what are the stories that will come from the mysteries of our present moment? I have become more eccentric since my time in the forest, clearer and occasionally kinder. Life doesn’t feel certain, but it feels succulent. Life doesn’t feel assured, but it feels vivacious. - Move from just seeing the world to beholding the world. Seeing is assessment and analysis; beholding is wonder and curiosity. - This kind of work creates a root system that is clear and well watered. Eventually it could create an old-growth human being. Let’s stop devouring for a second and take stock of the innumerable benefits we have already received. This begins by lowering our gaze to what’s beneath us. - Don’t brush your tastes away. Take your delight seriously. You could reach out towards historical figures, cloud formations, and badger tracks in the snow.

In towns like mine, outsourcing and automation consumed jobs. Then purpose. Then people. Now the same forces are climbing the economic ladder. Yet Washington remains fixated on global competition and growth, as if new work will always appear to replace what’s been lost. Maybe it will. But given A.I.’s rapacity, it seems far more likely that it won’t. If our leaders fail to prepare, the silence that once followed the closing of factory doors will spread through office parks and home offices — and the grief long borne by the working class may soon be borne by us all.

We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers — as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe...

Nor can I so neatly separate the gooners as a whole from the rest of us. Think about it for a second: What are these gooners actually doing? Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video content. Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms. Parasocially fixating on microcelebrities who want their money. Broadcasting their love for those microcelebrities in public forums. Conducting bizarre self-experiments because someone on the internet told them to. In general, abjuring connective, other-directed pleasures for the comfort of staring at screens alone. Does any of this sound familiar? Do you maybe know some folks who get up to stuff like this? It’s true that gooners are masturbating while they engage in these behaviors. You could say that only makes them more honest. From these companies’ perspective, the ideal consumer would do literally nothing but goon, lose at gambling, and maybe watch other people play video games. You can try to fight this. You can read a book, pet a dog, buy a stupid box to lock away your phone. You can make a joke about the box, about the absurdity of your need for it. What do these companies care? They’ve won. If they have their way—and they usually do—in time we will all be gooners, of a kind.

“Men only want one thing, and it’s”… It’s intimacy. Men only want one thing, and it’s intimacy. But sex is the only socially sanctioned way that straight men can seek out intimacy without running the risk of being called a fag. And it’s awful, this gnawed-out core of the internal emotional rot of toxic masculinity. But when I see so many professional old-school computer-touchers who wind up building furniture or learning to cook or bake or hitting the gym or turning up in weird endurance events or or or, I think the question’s maybe bigger than we want to talk about, and maybe that it’s hard to talk about this to anyone who’s never felt what’s gone. I understand wanting a tactile connection to the work of world, how losing feeling a bit at a time feels.