Unplugged #10: adventure plus purpose, in search of winter, a new mountain magazine, and the Great Chiasmus

One of the big questions I've been mulling over for the last six years or so is this: can adventure have a higher purpose beyond our own enjoyment?

It's a surprisingly knotty question, but it certainly isn't new. Better thinkers than me have been pondering this ever since the dawn of modernity spawned what we currently think of as 'adventure'. Perhaps most famously, George Mallory summed up the enigma (while also poking fun at it) with his 'Because it is there' line.

But for the last few years I've sensed an increasing urgency to the question, because I think adventure can offer a path forward for humanity. An escape from the machine when we need it, as well as a framework for how to be better humans and better custodians of our home planet. Pretty much everything I've been doing in outdoor storytelling for the last few years has been about this, in one way or another.

This is why I'm so glad that more of us in the adventure community are asking these questions – asking more from the world of adventure as we know it, including the gear brands, outdoors media, and the online outdoor community. Asking new and challenging questions. Asking for meaning and purpose beyond clicks and consumerism.

Most recently, I was pleased to see that Alastair Humphreys, whose tales of long-distance journeys have been a mainstay of the adventure world for many years, has turned his own writing towards these questions. He has launched a new email newsletter called Adventure + Purpose.

Alastair emailed me to chat about the new project, and invited me to write something for the newsletter. His questions provoked some serious thought:

• What does living adventurously mean to you?
• What's broken with the world of adventure?
• What does Adventure + Purpose look like in your eyes?
• What actions can people take in order to improve the world of adventure / outdoors / nature / the industry etc etc?

In the end I sat on these questions for three months. And I'm glad I did. I'm a big believer in properly thinking about something before putting pen to paper, because I have never regretted waiting to think something through, while I've often regretted pressing the send button on an underbaked idea.

Here is the resulting essay. Alastair has published it on his site, and it'll also be included in his Adventure + Purpose newsletter. I will be republishing it on Unplugged in the next two or three weeks, but for now you can read it here in full:

Resistance, Recovery, Resilience: a manifesto for silent adventure

In this piece I write about the incentives and ulterior motives of platforms, the message in the medium, and my own thoughts about how we can benefit from quieter adventure. At least sometimes. I'm well aware of the contradictions here – after all, writing about adventure keeps a roof over my head. But I'm very clear in keeping boundaries between 'work' adventure and 'personal' adventure these days, and that is so important for me. And I'm careful in only supporting outdoors media that I genuinely believe is creating a positive impact in this world.

Long-time readers might remember my concept of 'Silent Adventure' from the original form of this newsletter, published some time back in 2020 or 2021. I'm not the only person to have had this idea; it seems to be picking up a bit of momentum at the moment, and most recently I've seen it mentioned by Immy Sykes on Substack: ‘…the less said about it the better’: the wisdom of shutting up about adventures and why I am still thinking about it.

Image above from a cold day on Ben Chonzie, February 2025. Pentax MX, Ilford XP2 film.

From the archives

2nd of March, 2015: No Way Home is out — the best new voices in science fiction

I can hardly believe this personally important anniversary came and went without my noticing, but 10 years ago I helped to edit, curate and publish a sci-fi anthology with my friend and colleague Andrew Mazibrada (writing here under his former pen name Lucas Bale). We brought together a talented group of writers and published something we were proud of at the time. Looking back a decade later, I'm still proud of it.

No Way Home was a joyful project from start to finish. I still remember many of the stories vividly, and my own, 'Cold Witness' (published under my old pen name A.S. Sinclair) remains perhaps the best short story I've ever written. Although long since out of print, No Way Home was the first literary project I remain completely happy with. Not just 'OK for what Alex could do at the time' but 'yep, we did a good job'.

What I've been reading

Books and magazines

Just started reading: Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant. I've been looking forward to this for a while. Hammers up!

The Luddites understood technology all too well; they didn't hate it, but rather the way it was used against them. And as we'll soon see, the technologies that people are ridiculed for protesting tend to be the ones designed to profit at the protester's expense.

Online stuff

An Interview with Izzy Wedderburn - Founder of New Mountain Magazine – I keep saying that analogue counterculture in adventure is not just coming, it's here, and this is more evidence. Here we see yet another new adventure journal launching – and yet another one with analogue counterculture and film photography at its very core. A portion of the adventure community is turning towards things that are more real and grounded. Connected to that, film photography is rapidly becoming part of this norm. In this interview with Izzy Wedderburn, founder of the New Mountain Magazine, we see these values clearly:

The end goal isn’t a blog or an Instagram post—it’s a printed thing—I don’t want people just reading it on their phones—I want them to pick it up in their hands and get inspired. That’s why I love print—whatever has been printed on a page I believe has meaning, it matters—someone has thought it through enough to actually want to print it onto paper. And it doesn’t matter if it was printed 2 months or 20 years ago, it still has meaning. [...] So there’s definitely something about being in the moment and enjoying it—and that’s probably why I’ve gravitated to analogue photography too. There’s no reliving the moment—it either happened or it didn’t—you take the shot, you don’t know what it looks like, you don’t even care—you’ve just captured that moment and that’s all that matters.

Q&A: High Schooler Bentley Zylstra on Making Revelry Collection Magazine – new interview with Bentley Zylstra, founder of Revelry Collection. 'Film photography is a lot like adventure; it is slow and hard, and usually you experience the joy from the activity later. But you never regret doing it, it is delayed gratification at its finest.'

A Recipe for the Perfect Trail Run (According to Me) – good wholesome adventure advice from Sam Hill. Accompanied by excellent analogue photos. And I can 100% get behind this: 'A long run isn’t complete without some kind of languishing—whether that’s munching on sandwiches or falling asleep in the sun and waking up in a panic. The moral of the story? My perfect days out don’t involve being in too much of a rush.'

In Search of Winter – Marek Bidwell's trip report of a journey across the Cairngorms... and one that I'd planned to join him on, but was scuppered by my post-Alps illness! A classic route over some fine mountains. Pity about the lack of snow for the time of year.

New scheme to offer campers unprecedented access to wild spaces across Britain – a pretty grim puff piece from the Guardian. Much as I think that efforts to make camping and other outdoor experiences more accessible are to be applauded, I'm uneasy about this on several levels. Rather than create a new paid-for form of 'wild' camping, why not just update existing access legislation so that it's fit for purpose? Must everything be commercialised?

The Great Chiasmus – an interesting piece exploring an idea I've felt for a while: that humans are increasingly becoming disembodied creatures, while the machine strives to create a body for itself.

Could it be that the true boundary between humans and machines is not consciousness, but presence? That ineffable quality of being there, fully inhabiting the moment, the space, the encounter. [...] The question is no longer: "Who thinks?" It has become: "Who is present?". Present to oneself. Present to others. Present to the world. [...] If you lower your eyes once more, then yes... the horizon is lost. But if you lift your head, if you truly look... Then perhaps there is still a world left to inhabit.

Running with Eyes Wide Open – Rachel Taylor on a similar topic, but from a more grounded and less academic point of view, blending her argument with trail running.

I often treat myself like a machine – both while running and generally in life. Sometimes, it is easy to forget that we humans are natural beings, especially as we are plugged in for most of our waking hours: our stats available on our wrists, our lives tethered to the internet, our communications always on. I wonder, are we cyborgs already?

That's all, folks

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