Unplugged #6: Maybe we should all care a bit more

'Life cannot be delegated.'

No big essay from me this week before I dive into my news and links, just a thought that has been circling around my head lately.

People who care deeply about things tend to pour that energy into creating something new, maybe something special. I don't see that drive in people who switch off and autopilot their way through life. If you don't care very much about your job, even your hobbies, what precisely are you living for? I guess this is why I'll always celebrate people with geeky passions – especially highly specific ones!

The complex modern world we live in – the machine – wants to convert meaning to control and predictability and efficiency, passionate enthusiasm to a shrug of the shoulders and 'let's just automate it' or 'why even bother?' Meaning, for me, is more important. I'd rather be fully engaged with whatever it is I'm doing.

The people who are resisting the numbing spirit of the age – the overwhelming drive to just switch off, autopilot everything and doomscroll until the cows come home – are the interesting ones. And the ones to watch.

Recently published

Sidetracked Volume 32 is available for pre-order now! The tagline of this issue is 'Resilience, Truth, Curiosity', because many of the stories in 32 revolve around these topics. I'll have much more to write about 32 on this blog when my copies arrive, but for now I'll leave you with these quotes from the blurb I have written for the issue:

When we move beyond narratives of discovery and conquest, something special happens: we learn, are engaged and present, create room within ourselves to grow. In shifting from the trope of the heroic individual to the riches around us – nature, people, environment, history, fighting for a better world – adventure can become something more mature. But no less majestic.

As Sophy Roberts writes in her foreword: 'To hell with success or failure. The time of heroic exploration has passed.' Now, perhaps, adventure at its best is about asking questions, telling the truth, and seeking a more resilient future – for ourselves and the world around us.

Sidetracked, for me, is a perfect living example of caring. Everyone on the team cares deeply about this magazine and its mission. I pour a huge amount of care into the crafting of these stories. John cares about the photography, the design, the people we elevate. Every single person we choose to be represented within the pages cares about what they do in the field, the writing and photography they bring back, and how they want it to be presented to readers.

I hope we continue to live in a world where that level of care is valued – at least by some corners of society – for a long time to come.

Upcoming

We've been putting the finishing touches to issue #44 of Like the Wind magazine, so now is an excellent time to subscribe. In this issue, we have collected a number of stories on the subject of place, how we experience place through running, and (on the other side of the coin) how running can displace people and communities. There's some very fine work in here... including a fabulous photo essay shot on 35mm film. I'm sure I don't need to spell this out for you, but a deep level of care comes through in this work too.

What I've been reading

Books

I'm nearing the end of The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth. Buccmaster remains a deeply unlikeable main character and the novelty of the unusual format has worn off, but I'm still reading and overall I'm glad I picked this one up. I think I'll switch back to a non-fiction title for my next print read.

Online stuff

‘…the less said about it the better’: the wisdom of shutting up about adventures and why I am still thinking about it – Immy Sykes writes well here on a subject I have been thinking about for many years; a concept I once called 'Silent Adventure'. In the 2020s, to have an adventure and then tell nobody about it is a radical act of resistance against the machine. 'To be able to completely reject external validation and rely entirely on your own internal sense of accomplishment seems testament to a wonderfully resilient mental framework [...] Nowadays, we’re all too connected to each other. The social media companies and oligarchs that make money off your data have made you feel that the right to complete privacy is an exclusive luxury that you don’t have and can’t afford. We’re all a brand now. We have to keep selling our adventures, our thoughts in exchange for likes, views, kudos. [...] ‘The less said about it the better’ feels almost radical in its intent to refuse to repackage your precious time alone with your body, outdoors, seeking adventure.'

AI and the art of caring – Gill Moon, a fabulous photographer from Suffolk, on the relationship between photography, experience, adventure, and the entirely dead voice of AI. And, yes, caring about stuff. Some of the images in this piece appear to be from Staverton Thicks, a forest that made a huge impression on me as a teenager and steered my perspective on so many things. This makes the important message hit home doubly hard for me. 'My heart bleeds for this world we have created where real adventure becomes secondary to artificial experiences played out in closed rooms in front of screens. [...] AI can never be a substitute for experience. It can never replace the hours spent out in the landscape learning and connecting with the world around us. Ultimately it might be able to create amazing images but without the knowledge to understand what we are looking at I think they become meaningless.'

The world is the size it always was – travel beyond the algorithm – 'Take a glance across the internet, and you could think that the globe has shrunk, that tourists have blanketed the world, and that nothing is left to astonish us. All this is an illusion.'

My Baptism of Solitude – I enjoyed this short essay on a 'baptism of solitude' experienced in the Sahara Desert. I'd venture that such experiences can be found in a number of wild places, but I can imagine how the Sahara (or perhaps Antarctica) might offer it in a powerful and concentrated form.

On Film – yes, I'm banging the film photography drum again, because it fits so perfectly with today's theme of caring more. And this comes through so powerfully in this Substack piece by Sam Hill on what film photography means to him... and why he's starting to shoot film professionally. 'Recently, I was asked to be part of a production for a major outdoor brand. We traveled to Japan to shoot an upcoming campaign, and I was asked to shoot everything on film alongside another photographer and videographer. An opportunity like that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.'

Life cannot be delegated – finally, diving back into philosophy again, the marvellous L. M. Sacasas articulates the fundamental truth of why we simply must care about things if we are to live a good life. Like all of his work, this is worth reading carefully and in full. 'We ought to be especially careful in the cases where what we delegate to a device, app, agent, or system is an aspect of how we express care, cultivate skill, relate to one another, make moral judgments, or assume responsibility for our actions in the world—the very things, in other words, that make life meaningful.'

In other news

I won two photographic awards this week! The Forfar & District Hill Walking Club held its annual photography awards night on Monday, and I was awarded trophies for best overall picture as well as best set of three. The judge remarked that my image of Coire nan Lochan was 'reminiscent of Ansel Adams at his best', which I don't honestly believe is true, but I'll take it. Apparently this is the first time a single person has won both awards. I'm honoured and humbled to be recognised in this way, especially given the club's long and rich history in the local area.

That's all, folks

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