This was not my first bike. I don’t remember anything about my first bike, except that I rode it around the vast weedy parking lot of an abandoned amusement park. My father would haul us kids out there every now and then to give us riding lessons in a place safe from cars. He would pull each bike from the back of the truck, hold it steady while one of us clamored aboard, and then give us a gentle push so we could pedal up to balancing speed without falling over.
I don’t remember how many times he did this, but I do remember one of the last times, when I clamored over my bike, put my foot on the pedal, and pressed down. I thought my Dad had his hands on the back of the bike and was steadying me, but he was actually turned around and hauling out another bike. He saw me take off and let out a whoop of happy encouragement. “Look at you, you started all by yourself!” Astonished, I turned my head and smiled, wobbled slightly, and then kept riding.
I don’t remember what happened to that bike but a while later it was replaced with that beast you see above. A single-speed BMX with kid-friendly upright handlebars. To brake, you pushed the pedals in reverse. I was delighted to have my own bike, but what really lit up my eyes was how shiny it was, like a gleaming metal space robot, big enough for me to ride around and pretend I was a rocket.
I remember that it seemed to weigh a ton. I remember not caring. I remember crashing it dozens of times, mostly while trying to do jumps. Plenty of holes in my pants and skinned knees. I remember riding it up and down the patchy gravel road near my house endlessly, standing up in the pedals to grind slowly up the biggest hill. It gave me a sense of personal freedom and mobility that encouraged my already developing habit of quiet, semi-random exploration, inside and out. It was easy to get around on a bike, and easy for me to think about things while riding.
8 years old and ready to roll!
I rode it for years. I don’t remember what happened to it, but it was probably stolen one day after I rode it to elementary school and didn’t bother to lock it up, one too many times. After that I got a larger bike with gears and handbrakes, but it was awkward and I didn’t know how to maintain or adjust it properly. It got covered in rust and it too was eventually stolen. For a while – years perhaps – I didn’t have a bicycle at all.
Then in my last year of high school, one of my sister’s boyfriends sold me his old bike. He’d assembled it from mail-order parts, using a Bridgestone mountain bike frame as the foundation. The components were all excellent, and his price was extremely low.
With that bike, I finally started paying attention to basic maintenance. I learned how to change a tire, how to adjust brakes, and so on. I rode it sporadically for about ten years, but for big chunks of time it just sat in the weeds of the back yard, leaning against the side of the house.
Then things got serious. I began to spend a lot of time working behind a desk, which starved me for exercise, and the thought of sweating on weight machines in a gym felt depressing. I hauled out the bike and started commuting to work, once or twice a week. It was ten miles through dense urban sprawl. I stayed late at work so the return trip could happen at night, when the air didn’t stink so much.
That got me familiar with long rides, in a way I’d never been before. And then, one day at my workplace, a man walked on stage and unveiled a device that would rearrange the world: The iPhone. I got one for free. In just few months I found a way to attach it to my bike.
Now I had a way to stay connected and socialize, while pedaling far afield. On the weekends I took trips way up into the San Jose hills, and sometimes over them and down into Santa Cruz. I stuck bags on the bike to hold sandwiches and extra clothing. I installed different pedals and gears. I got a generator so I could go for hours in the dark. It was exercise and adventure, with music and audiobooks and texting and phone calls. It was glorious.
Somewhere in there it moved from a hobby to an obsession. The idea of a multi-day tour, with a tent and sleeping bag, snuck into my mind and began quietly rearranging the furniture.
Just before I was set to embark on my first tour, I got a recumbent. It was a total impulse buy. A co-worker was selling his, and gave me a test ride, and in two minutes I was hooked. It was the bike for me. In a few weeks of frantic adjustment, the recumbent was kitted out for my first major tour, and off I went, starting at Crater Lake and zig-zagging into the middle of Idaho.
As I write this in 2023, I have ridden that recumbent and its successors at least fifteen thousand miles.
There’s a wilderness of land and people out there. More than anyone could know. And then there’s this other wilderness, almost entirely decoupled from the first one, that exists in people’s heads. It’s made of shorthand summaries and untested assumptions about the first wilderness, and it’s cramped and twisted like a funhouse ride and teeming with deranged fictional characters.
People who have done some traveling across the first wilderness – especially if it’s for fun – just love to creep into conversations and point out features of the second wilderness, all the time believing they are saying something meaningful, accurate, and wise about the first. They sorely want it to be true. Sometimes, sounding knowledgeable in the power play of the conversation at hand is what matters. We all love to play the wise mentor role.
This is how you get twenty-something know-it-alls at parties who say stuff like:
“Seattle is just a worse version of San Francisco.”
“People from Missouri are bigots.”
“New York is gross.”
“Everyone in Paris is so rude!”
“There’s more to do in Los Angeles than anywhere else.”
“All these new people moving to Austin are ruining the place.”
“People in Italy really know how to live.”
“Watsonville is full of Mexican illegals and if you go there you’ll get stabbed.”
(That last example may seem especially upsetting, but unfortunately, the inner wilderness is a place that can foster opinions that are not just pointless, but vicious as well.)
I know about this because I’ve caught myself doing it many times. It’s very tempting to point out some very personal, very subjective chunk of my own second wilderness and declare that everyone else will see exactly the same thing if they just go where I did. I keep trying to rein myself in, and talk about statistics instead, or give purely logistical advice.
But, paving the world around us with generalities and wishful thinking is a very human behavior. We do it to stave off madness in the face of an ultimately unknowable universe, because we are all far less capable of dealing with uncertainty than we want to admit. And sometimes our confidence needs the boost we can get by talking out loud, and we say something at a party like, “Oh I would never enjoy living in Canada.” … Conveniently forgetting the fact that 37 million people live there, and if they have a pretty good time of it, we probably could too. It would be no less honest – but far less flattering – to rephrase that confident statement as, “I’m mostly ignorant of how to enjoy life in a place like Canada and I want to remain that way, because I need to narrow down my choices for the sake of sanity.” I mean, let’s admit it: Learning is work, and sometimes we have to prioritize.
I have to be okay with this, and so does everyone else, because we’re all only human. I really only bring it up because sometimes it’s very useful to recognize that we’re wandering around in the second wilderness – in the funhouse of our own assumptions – and if we just wake up a little and look around in more detail, we can find really useful connections, and gain new confidence. Every new place I go I’m astonished at how poorly I actually see things, and how much I lean on previous knowledge and trust that things will be predictable. I have to stop and go back, sometimes more than once, and ask “What did I just see? What did I just ignore?” and most important of all, “What’s being hidden from me because I’m a stranger?”
If you’re traveling, take a page of advice from a slow-ass bicycle tourist, and slow way down for a bit. Ask yourself a couple of those questions and give yourself time to seek an answer. Chances are, it will lead you somewhere way more interesting than the next picturesque monument on the madcap package bus tour you were offered by the tourist bureau. It was hard enough getting to that new place — so don’t forget to be there when you get there.
Didn’t get a chance to pay for your spot? Be a good citizen and leave some cash.
Today would be a quiet day, spent snacking along into a mild headwind. Headwinds are never nice, but at least this one did interesting things to the sea:
I switched between music and books all day, giving myself room to think. My mind kept coming back to the scene of the accident from yesterday, and the behavior of the people involved, especially the victim.
Aha! I think I found the Icelandic version of Pride Rock!
Aha! I think I found the Icelandic version of Pride Rock!
The young woman had not yelled or cried, just sat there in awful silence. As a fellow introvert I knew there was a storm inside her head of course. It was just thoroughly walled in by learned social behavior and disposition. I wondered if that expression would come later – days or weeks from now – ambushing her in a safe isolated place, or perhaps somewhere embarrassingly public. If I was dealing with people back home in California I would anticipate that. But could I expect it here, with Icelanders? Perhaps the stoicism I see around me on the surface goes all the way to the core, and this young person already lives inside it to the point where a more intense expression of her feelings will just never arrive.
That's a lot o' geese!
Shallow tidewater, good for straining some nutrition out with your beak.
I don't think I've ever seen so many geese in one spot before.
Just another amazing scene on the Iceland coast.
Lovely calm waters for a goose convention.
It would be silly of course to extrapolate one personality onto an entire country. But it’s still possible, and interesting, to talk about averages, and why those could exist. As I rode along, snapping the occasional picture of the rugged coast and forbidding mountains, I wondered if there was a geographical influence at work.
How much does this terrain influence the people living on it?
This bay is protected by a long thin arm of land that smooths the waves on the ocean.
This bay is protected by a long thin arm of land that smooths the waves on the ocean.
I thought about the young woman, and her age group. What must it be like, spending your teenage years in Icelandic terrain? I amused myself by trying to puzzle it out.
For one, the population here is either super-concentrated, or sparse. There aren’t a lot of suburbs. If your family does farming or ranching, there is plenty of kid-appropriate work to be done. This makes me think that Icelandic kids are not likely to hang around together in large groups unattended, away from the normalizing influence of adults.
Geese on the water near the Hvalnes Nature Reserve Beach.
Am I enjoying this day? Yes; yes I am!
Geese on the Icelandic coast.
Honk honk honk honk honk!
A long, narrow stripe of beach, with the sea beyond.
Geese enjoying the fair Iceland weather.
Time for a nap!
This is the same stuff that's in the pillow packed into a compression sack on my bike!
Iceland may be rural, but it’s not quite big enough to be anonymous. All your socializing destinations are in town, where you stand a chance of blundering across some family friend who knows you. If you drove for an hour you might be among total strangers, but if your embarrassing young-person shenanigans have any real consequences – litter, vandalism, noise complaints – word might get back to your parents anyway.
Your parents are probably quiet people. Farm work isn’t a dialogue-driven process. There isn’t a big dancing or singing tradition relative to elsewhere, though you do get a lot of wickedly funny verbal humor that you’ll appreciate more as an adult.
I wondered about this, actually. In rural places where the winter is harsh, there’s a long chunk of time where people are trapped indoors with each other. Being quiet and polite is a good way to avoid expensive conflict, but don’t people also need an outlet? Like, a tavern down in the middle of the village, where music is playing, and people are drinking and shouting over the din, and getting some chaos out of their system? Maybe a bit of dancing?
But if that exists here, what about young people? Would they get their own youth-oriented places to carouse, or would they be mixed in with adults, as usual?
Got a piece of cardboard? Maybe you can slide down!
Got a piece of cardboard? Maybe you can slide down!
It’s a funny idea that a place made of quiet wilderness could also be socially confining. But the terrain seems to push that way. You can’t go skipping down to the beach for a roll in the surf and some sunbathing. You can’t go wandering into the woods, where the cover of trees gives you easy isolation, because there aren’t really any woods. If you want to be alone you need to hike into the hills, and for that you need gear, and people need to know where you’re going.
Another factor is the separation of the country from its neighbors. It’s pretty hard to leave. You can’t hop in a car and drive for a while and end up in Mexico, or go through an undersea tunnel and emerge in France, where people speak a different language and there is serious anonymity and weirdness. In Iceland you’re more likely to be exposed to other countries via incoming tourism, and that isn’t usually a positive filter. I mean, if my community back home was just comprised of the entitled action-hound subset that went on international vacations all the time, I’d probably be a serial arsonist. Let them all stay abroad, thank you very much.
That tourism – all those loud rude people coming in and setting a bad example – probably makes Icelanders want to double-down on their stoicism. Most of them, at least. And that’s another way geography contributes.
This pressure probably goes in the opposite direction too: If this terrain doesn’t fit your personality, then you can emigrate. The way is open, by the big airport and ferry terminal.
Lighthouse or giant carrot?
Clouds chopping the top off the nearby peaks.
Quite astonishingly windy on this particular chunk of road.
Up along the coast road we go!
Ready to hit the beach?
Now, I shouldn’t get carried away. Young people are going to find outlets wherever they are. I hear popular indoor activities for kids here are video games, D&D campaigns, drinking, playing in bands, chatting online, drinking, having movie nights, going to shows, drinking, endless flirting with potential romantic partners, and going on joyrides to any place where there’s a bit of privacy, even if it’s just a 24-hour mini-mart. That overlaps a whole lot with what my friends did back in Santa Cruz.
And sure, you can’t do casual outdoor stuff, but you can still be outside. There are field sports when the weather’s good. Get your legs working and the cold doesn’t matter so much. And anything that you can do on ice, is available in Iceland.
I had fun pondering all this, then switched to some Skyrim for a while to reset my brain.
Lots of travelers want you to know they've been here before you.
Lots of pedaling, running out of food, and having an excellent day.
A nice view of the next hour of riding.
Random rainbow!
Such nifty contours on these hills...
A while after that, the sun broke through the clouds, and I rearranged my layers. It felt like an autumn day back home, and I felt a bit nostalgic. To feel connected to things in my home country I started listening to a news podcast. That sent my mind in quite a different direction.
It was an NPR news report, talking about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. With a shock I realized it would be the 20th anniversary of them in about a week. Had it really been so many years? I could still remember exactly where I was, when I saw the first image that day…
In the report, people were being interviewed who were still active in a support group for the families of Flight 93, the plane that was hijacked with the intent of hitting the Capitol Building but crashed in a field instead. I listened as one of the interviewees, a woman with a low somber voice, reminisced about visiting the site of the crash only a little while after the incident. At the time, she gave a speech about her lost loved one to other bereaved people, sharing their grief, and their determination to build a memorial that would honor all those lost. NPR rolled a short clip, of that earlier speech.
It was the voice of a child.
That traumatic, era-defining splinter in modern history, shared by my whole generation, was now so far in the past that the children involved had grown up into middle age. That timid 11-year-old in the recording is now married and has school-aged children.
A terrible feeling rushed through me, as though two decades of my life had been skipped, and just yesterday I was in that small San Jose apartment staring at a television, watching the world get rearranged. Now suddenly I’m this grumpy old person, with all this gray hair, partway around the world on a bike. What happened? How the hell did I get here? Did I even live during those 20 years? What does any of it mean?
Tears blurred my vision and I had to roll the bike to a stop, and wander blindly to the side of the road so I could sit down in the grass for a while.
Needless to say this was not where I expected my nostalgia to lead. I pulled the phone off the bike and sent a few messages to family, checking in and centering myself. I drank some water. Felt the sun on my back; ran my hands over the grass.
As I calmed down I tried to understand the intensity of my reaction. I think it was because I had already passed into a post-post-9-11 era, and been living there a long time. The recording had dragged me back across two eras, to the beginning of the previous one.
For years the attack formed a lens that shaped my politics, my sense of history, my relationships with Americans and non-Americans, et cetera, but that lens was eventually ground down into a temperate flatness: Politics couldn’t just be about terrorism any more. History wasn’t just about preventing my country from committing atrocities in the name of self-defense in the Middle East. Being American wasn’t just about debating the national stance on Muslims or Arabs or the dangers of petroleum dependency. I passed into another era. We all collectively needed to, because history just kept happening.
I’m here now, and there is so much more to think about than fire and smoke and the drumbeat of war, and for that I am intensely grateful.
Okay, back on the bike. Maybe some nice audiobook? Let’s see what’s ahead on the road…
Awww, don’t run over the dude! He’s just walkin’ here!
Awww, don’t run over the dude! He’s just walkin’ here!
I stopped for a while at a neat waterfall. A few picnic tables were nearby, but I had no food to eat on them. Bike tour metabolism is hard to plan for!
It's a teeny waterfall! I approve.
Hey, yo, check out dis heah waterfall!
Often I find myself wondering how long ago any given rock wall was built on this island. 50 years? 300?
Pedal on the way down, pedal on the way up. Then catch breath and do it again!
That's way too tilted to be a house foundation. Some kind of waterside animal pen?
Then I began a long stretch of road that followed a narrow fjord (Hamarsfjörður on the map), with layered mountains visible on the opposite shore. The thick strata of the mountains were all tilted at a shallow but consistent angle, bending down towards the interior of the country. What immense forces were at work here?
Curious, I went poking around on my phone for some kind of geologic chart.
Since this was one of the long fjords on the eastern edge of the island, I was seeing a tilt down towards the point at which new land was being generated between the tectonic plates. Maybe the sheer weight of all the new layers in the middle, without the benefit of erosion to make them lighter, is causing the center of the island to sink a little bit, into the stew of molten rock that everything floats on?
An interesting theory! I made a note to go ask a geologist about it in the future. Also it was a pretty good reference to the colors of the Icelandic flag: “Blue around white around red” clearly means “sea around snow around volcanism.”
Cairn you see what's in the photo?
Tired, but determined.
The fog appears to be clawing its way over the peaks.
Roadside columns.
Leaning layers in the landscape.
A ways after that I found an interesting memorial, in the form of a massive pile of rocks. A saint is buried here, and travelers consider it lucky to add a rock to his burial mound as they’re passing by. This has been going on for many, many years.
Apparently there's an old religious dude buried right around here.
That looks like enough rocks to hold down a deacon!
Qutie an impressive stack built up over the years.
I am amused by the way this burial site has been turned into a picnic spot.
It’s funny how even extremely sensible people will do this, just to enjoy for a brief moment the whimsical idea that the spirits of dead saints can take a role in material affairs. I considered doing it myself, but the rain was picking up and the rocks were a bit slick. It would be hilarious if I went gathering rocks to boost my luck and busted an ankle.
Whole lotta symbols in the next town. Not sure what a bunch of them mean…
Whole lotta symbols in the next town. Not sure what a bunch of them mean…
Eventually I reached the town of Djúpivogur. The sign on the highway showed an encouraging number of little icons. There would be food and shelter!
With so much of my gear wet, and multiple days of camping behind me, I decided to try for a room. All the rooms were booked, but the hotel had a scattering of tiny wooden cabins behind the main building for a decent price. I grabbed one of those.
If you don’t dry your frillies on the radiatior, some other camper will come by and do the same.
If you don’t dry your frillies on the radiatior, some other camper will come by and do the same.
I went poking around the common area in pursuit of a shower and a washing machine, but they were all in use. A few people were splayed on a ratty-looking couch watching television. A miniature kitchen had a few abandoned tupperwares on the counter. Laundry was spread along the top of all the radiators. The place had that cavalier hostel atmosphere. Ah, my fellow tourists. Or rather: Aaaaa! My fellow tourists!
I was pretty hungry. Even a vending machine full of candy bars would have snared me. I tucked myself into the bed of the adorable little cabin and dreamed of snacks at the cafe in the morning.
With lots of downtime in Höfn, one of the things I did was try to settle the romantic dilemma I’d blundered into a few weeks back. I was out of the highlands and there was no barrier to talking with my new friend, but I struggled with whether I should.
Eventually I wrote her a series of messages:
“So, I’ve been thinking. Lots of space and time to think, out on this weird island. It was fun doing that Zoom meeting with you. Intriguing to connect the face and movement with the thoughts and dialogue before. But I it’s no substitute for a face-to-face meeting.”
“Our physical distance is probably not going to change any time soon. If I was back home, I’d be putting together some kind of invitation for a picnic with you in a sunny park, because you’re very worth exploring. Someone as nifty as you deserves full attention. But I’m not there, I’m here, enacting a travel plan whose wheels I set in motion well before I knew you existed.”
“So, a real chemistry-testing date would be a long time coming. And if you’re newly dating, like I’ve been before, you might be feeling what I often do, which is a sense of overwhelming choice. There are so many different kinds of people! Personalities to bounce off, fun activities to try that your ex didn’t like, and so on! I imagine you could fill your dance card from 9:00am to midnight every day and still never get the whole variety. And given that … it doesn’t make sense to focus on someone so far away. One only has so much energy for these things.”
“I’m not saying I don’t enjoy corresponding with you – I very much do – but being limited to correspondence for such a long time might eventually get more frustrating than fun, and create weird expectations. I don’t want our connection to suffer that fate, but there aren’t any good choices. I think the only choice I have is to suggest that we pause things until I get back. I’m not declaring it quite yet, but the idea has been rolling around in my head for a few days.”
“How do you feel about all this?”
Ten minutes later I got a reply:
“That sounds right to me. I really like messaging with you but I am also actually trying to explore new possibilities right now. And we can’t progress beyond messaging so it makes sense to step back while that’s the case. I’m open to being pen pals in the meantime. I’m interested in your ongoing travels!”
And that’s the way it settled. I knew that stepping back meant drifting away from her, but it was the healthier choice. And better to make it deliberately than just let things fade into nervous silence on one end or the other.
Well, based on that list, the key factor in survivability is the ratio of sheep to people. The more sheep per capita, the better. But I think it’s praa-aa-a-aaa-aaabably more complicated than that…
That report has some really questionable ground rules. For one, it deliberately excludes any factors that might arise from a collapse of external supplies of fuels and materials to these places.
I’m sure you’re aware that Iceland is extremely reliant on industrial-scale shipping to bring in everything from fuel to light bulbs to nails. New Zealand to a similar, but lesser, degree.
But sure, go to Iceland to weather the apocalypse… And remain here, as the airlines and ports shut down, and no one in the rest of the wold bothers to restart them because tourism and banking are dead. Life will not be very comfortable, and probably not very long. Reykjavik will have to depopulate, after a brief period when the trucks burn through their fuel reserves, and then almost all of those people will move out across the landscape, starving as they go, chasing sheep around the highlands.
Geothermal heat is great, when you’ve got time to spend indoors. Not any more. Back to intensive farming, for everyone, as everyone gives a solid try at producing a years’ worth of food in weak sunlight and thoroughly eroded soil. The sheep and goats won’t breed fast enough, and the cattle are too hard on the land so they’ll be consumed almost instantly. The remnants of humanity will go back to cutting grass with horses, and watch as first-world comfort folds in on itself.
It’ll all be truly over when a water pump fails in a storm one too many times and the engineers discover they’ve run entirely out of bolts, and there is nothing anywhere on the island capable of generating temperature hot enough to reforge steel unless you try some truly daring metalwork in the midst of a volcanic eruption.
Before that happens you might try sailing away, except the Vikings already cut down all the trees large enough to build longboats.
Perhaps the moss is edible?
Frankly, in terms of short and long-term survival, my money’s on Texas. They have their own long-term supplies of fertilizer and fuel, the panhandle is extremely productive in terms of crops and cattle, their infrastructure is not nearly as abused by the weather as elsewhere, and (this is the important bit)…
… they are armed to the teeth.
Question
Since you’re hanging around in one place, have you made any new observations about the locals?
Answer
To be honest, no. In public areas the tourists tend to outnumber the locals by a big margin most of the time.
I’m sitting here at a service station that has a cafeteria and electrical sockets, getting some work done. Out the window I can see a car-washing area: Three parking spaces with spray hoses coiled up next to them. There’s a woman there with her 2020-ish Ford F-150 — the kind with the short-ass bed.
I’ve been watching her for a while. She rinsed her car, then applied some kind of spray-on cleaner, then applied a layer of soap with a scrub brush all around it, even climbing into the bed to get the roof, and crawling under to get beneath. Then she did another thorough rinse with the hose, then walked all around the car with two different spray bottles, spraying all the panels and windows.
Then she removed all the floor mats, sprayed them down, soaped them, scrubbed them, sprayed them again, and hit them with the bottles. Then she went over the mirrors and lights on the car with another sponge and soap. Then another full rinse. Then she got out a spraying brush on a broom handle, and scrubbed the rims, including all around the road-facing surface of the tires.
Then she climbed in the back and scrubbed the inside of the tailgate with a rag. She did not rush, and between intervals of writing code I looked up and looked at the clock, and noted that the whole routine took over two hours.
I couldn’t imagine any service station in America tolerating someone who wanted to use their water and parking space for two hours to completely hand-wash their truck. And from my point of view, the truck was already pretty clean when she started. So, was this a tourist being extra-super-cafeful about returning a rental vehicle in good shape? Or was this a local, doing a once-a-year detailing of their workhorse?
I’m no stranger to seemingly wasted time over-doing something. My bicycle is proof of that: I’ve put hours of obsession into every tiny component and piece of luggage on it. On the other hand, I can see it from here, sitting in my service station booth, and the frame is spattered with mud and caked grease, the handlebars are scarred, and some of the stickers are peeling off. And I don’t really care. It’s mostly aluminum, so it’s not like it’s going to rust.
Perhaps I’m seeing an example of Icelanders “taking care of their things” in a more Scandinavian way than their cavalier American counterparts. And perhaps it’s no surprise that, being an American, I’m on the side of the Americans in this case: It’s a damn truck. It’s designed to get knocked around and still last 40 years with standard maintenance; just don’t store it in the snow. The only thing you’re doing by using a hundred gallons of fresh water to wash the dirt off – and it rains all the time in Iceland by the way – is performing cleanliness to a local social standard.
But again: Tourist or local? I didn’t march outside to ask. So, I may not have learned anything here.
I did see this sticker on the bathroom door. I think it counts as local color:
“EMPLOYEES MUST CARVE SLAYER INTO FOREARM BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK.”
Question
What would you do for a living if there were no computers? Like, nothing more complicated than a pocket calculator? What would you do for fun? How would you socialize?
Answer
For fun, I would probably keep riding my bike, but regress to a tape collection and a bookshelf, and end up socializing a lot more in cafes.
I like to write, but if I was reduced to punching a typewriter and shopping my work around to publishers to find some kind of audience, I confess I’d probably just give it up for the most part. I don’t have the chops to make it in the print world. The vast majority of my words would become a rambling paper memoir crammed into binders on a shelf in my garage, read by probably one or two people on the planet at best, fulfilling their main purpose of giving me some way to complete my own thoughts by externalizing them. I really do like nailing down a thought. Perhaps being deprived of electronic transmission would force me to confront just how self-serving my writing habits are.
It’s a funny idea: Whether social media, blogging, or whatever variation you like, the possibility that our work is visible to some random anonymous visitor tossed our way by a search engine lends it a sense of legitimacy that we embrace at the subconscious level and don’t want to think about. I mean, if you spend two days composing a very thoughtful essay about something and post it, only to have the algorithm utterly ignore it, haven’t you really just spent two days muttering to yourself, facing a blank wall, and communicated with no one? Isn’t that appallingly dysfunctional? The vague promise of random future eyeballs prevents you from asking the question. It may even prevent you from doing something more socially fulfilling.
So, I don’t know. I do write these things for my own satisfaction. I need good external memory in words and images or I think I’d forget almost everything concrete, at this point — and I don’t want to forget. It’s something to do with my brain. I struggled with this as a kid and I struggle with it more each year. If computers vanished, this would be a lot harder. Same with photography, and music, and various methods of communication.
Perhaps I’d go back to writing people letters, in actual envelopes with stamps and plant cuttings and stuff in them? Not so bad…
The big issue in my case would be, how do I make a living? I’d probably decide to re-train as a schoolteacher, like my parents. It would take years but I’d enjoy the journey. And heck, I probably already have enough weird facts in my head to assemble a few lesson plans.
