I was driving along happily listening to a podcast when the host dropped the word “avuncular.” I knew the word ... but could I use it in a sentence?

And then it occurred to me, “That’s the kind of thing I could ask Flavio,” the new AI digital-assistant I was testing in my car. And so I did.

“Hey Flavio, define avuncular.”

Flavio is smart

In a flash, I got a reply: “Avuncular describes someone who is kind, friendly, and helpful toward a younger or less experienced person, basically like a stereotypical ‘cool uncle.’ It can also just mean relating to an uncle specifically.”

Fabulous, I thought to myself. Plus I fancied that maybe I was avuncular. (Was this Flavio blowing smoke up my ass, as AI is prone to do? Nah, couldn’t be.)

This is exactly the kind of response I’ve enjoyed from Flavio: succinct answers to random questions that I muse about as I drive along. Nor was this the first such response.

I wondered about a gluten-free replacement for wheat bran and got a detailed breakdown of the various coarse, non-fermentable insoluble fibers I might consider.

I was listening to a song by Big Red Machine and wondered if they were considered “whispercore” and who were the leading artists in this genre, and I got a fairly good discussion of this poorly defined genre and its major practitioners. (I was so engrossed in the conversation I also missed my cue in a roundabout and nearly smashed my car, but this could happen on a phone call too. My bad!)

Hell, the other day I had a pretty good back-and-forth exchange about playing with different levels of carbohydrates in my diet.

I knew enough about all these things that I felt confident that the answers I was getting were solid, and I legitimately enjoyed getting to explore things that I’m curious about while I drive.

Flavio is fast

Moreover, I’ve been consistently stunned by the speed with which these “conversations” unfolded. Flavio heard exactly what I said and replied in an instant. The long pauses and awkward misunderstandings that made my interactions with earlier generations of digital assistants such a pain were gone. This felt almost, almost, like a natural human interaction.

Until the selling started ...

Because that definition of avuncular I cited above? Flavio didn’t stop there. Without missing a beat he chipped in with: “Since you’re on the road, are you looking for a place to stop, or did that word just pop into your head?”

Is Flavio selling me out?

This gets at what has been bugging me about Flavio. Seems like every time I ask him a question, he offers to get me directions to some location.

What do you think the chances are that the suggested locations have paid for ad placement?

Here’s what I imagine is happening behind the scenes:

As soon as I ask Flavio to take me to this location, a ping goes out to the advertiser who paid for this placement: “Flavio just sent another customer your way.” Maybe it’s a hot day, maybe I’m not the only one heeding Flavio’s suggestion to head for the ice cream shop. Perhaps the friendly prompt sent goes “Four drivers are heading your way, thanks to Flavio.”

I bet the ice cream shop owner is satisfied. After all, she’s paying good money for Flavio to direct people her way; she wants to know she’s getting her money’s worth.

But what about the ice cream shop owner the next block over? Is he getting messages too? “Your competitor’s business is booming, thanks to Flavio. For just $1.00 a direction, you too could get hungry customers coming your way.” This is pretty benign, right? But let’s say Flavio wasn’t averse to applying a little pressure. “Hey Tasty Freeze, you wants all your customers to go to Dairy Land? Then keep ignoring our calls.”

But that’s just me imagining how it works ...

Flavio talks too much

I didn’t want any directions, but I did follow up on Flavio’s question about why I asked about the word.

“I heard that word in a podcast and I wanted to dig into the definition.”

Flavio offered more detail on the word, including its Latin root, and then this: “By the way, since you are driving, do you want me to keep an eye out for any stops along your route, or are you all set for now?”

Flavio seemed pretty eager to direct me to some advertiser, any advertiser, but I was just driving to the grocery store and back and besides, this wasn’t a friend I was engaging in conversation with, it was a freaking digital assistant. So I was direct. I said: “I’m all set for now and I get you can give me directions, but I don’t need them all ... the ... time.”

“Got it, I hear you,” said Flavio, seemingly unfazed by the hostility in my voice. “I’ll stick to just answering your questions directly and keep the suggestions to myself unless you ask for them. Since ‘avuncular’ has such a specific vibe, are there any other words from that podcast you’re curious about, or are you just enjoying the drive?” I guess he couldn’t help himself.

But he did listen to the core part of my request, so I cooled my jets. I replied: “I’m enjoying the drive and I also fancy myself an avuncular person, though you wouldn’t know it from the way I’m talking to you.”

Flavio caught my feeble attempt at word play: “Fair enough. Even the most avuncular people need some peace and quiet on the road. It’s a great word to live up to, though—minus the unsolicited advice, of course. Was there anything else from that podcast that caught your ear?”

Flavio’s follow-ups drive me mad! I figured I’d just ignore him and he’d shut up. Not a habit I want to get into in real conversations! Since I’m a decent person, mostly anyway, I generally reply to direct questions. But I was learning, slowly, that the way to keep Flavio in his box was to say “Stop” or say nothing at all.

Flavio’s on my side

As I got back in the car the next day, where Flavio was waiting for me, I wondered to myself: Could I trust Flavio? I mean, if every suggested location was merely a plug for some paying customer, what else in Flavio’s output was financially incented? I couldn’t imagine Big Uncle paying for positive spin on “avuncular,” but I could see a number of ways in which Flavio’s output could be weighted in favor of paying sponsors.

So I asked Flavio whether I could trust him.

I’d didn’t want to start by confronting Flavio, so I innocently asked how he decided which locations to recommend, and I wasn’t surprised when he explained that he favored the places that got the best ratings, that aligned well with my demonstrated interests (which I permitted Flavio to know), and that were open now and on the way.

Of course that’s what he’d say! He’s not going to come right out and tell me he’s selling me to the highest bidder.

So I called bullshit on Flavio. To his credit, he pushed back, disclaiming a commercial motivation. “If a result happens to be a sponsored pin or an ad on the map, it’s usually labeled that way, but my personal suggestions to you are driven by quality and your preferences.”

“That’s the perfect PR response,” I countered. (Yes, I was arguing with Flavio while driving, but I argue with my wife when driving too. Big deal.) “What I want to know is how are you going to keep from becoming ‘enshittified’ like Google Search results and the entire Facebook platform?”

“I hear your skepticism, and it makes sense,” replied Flavio. “But my value to you actually depends on being helpful and reliable. If I just gave you biased suggestions to make a quick buck, you’d probably stop using me pretty fast. My algorithms are designed to prioritize quality and relevance because that’s what keeps the lights on in the long run.”

Ultimately, this is the crux of the matter: I give big tech access to my information so it can recommend things specific to me, knowing full well that those recommendations come with a bias in favor of the highest bidder some of the time, though I’ll never really know when. I’m not paying for this (except when I pay my electricity bill and notice that rates have gone up 8.5% in the last years thanks to all the demand from data centers), so I must be the product.

It’s still early days in the in-car digital assistant space, but my experience so far has been pretty interesting: on the one hand, I’m thrilled with how Flavio improves the informational landscape of my drives (who the hell thought that was a thing!); on the other hand, I don’t like being dragged into extended conversations or urged to visit places when I just want to drive to the mountains. In the future, I imagine a paid version of Flavio where I can turn down or off the parts I don’t like, directing it to behave exactly as I wish, just like the paid versions of many ad-supported online services now. But I may decide, as I’ve decided before, that giving away my data and suffering through ads and paid directives are just the price to pay. Such are the tradeoffs of modern life!

Now Flavio, take me to the Church Mountain trailhead and shut the hell up!

Thanks to for his comment on a draft. He didn’t know he was helping me but he did. And he’s a real human!

McClellan Butte is a striking rocky summit on the south side of the long valley that leads from the lowlands east to Snoqualmie Pass, and I’ve long been both drawn to it and a little scared of it. Drawn because it’s pointy but scared thanks to a story my buddy John tells about a friend of his who died on the mountain years ago, slipping to his death on the final steep rock scramble that ends the otherwise uneventful hike. I’ve been right to the edge of that scramble before with my buddy Scott, but it was gray and misty and we took one look at that last rocky section and decided that this was no day to attempt it.

Today, I hiked up with Sara and my daughter Louisa on a lovely dry day in May. At the shoulder before the summit we ran into half a dozen high-school boys, dicking around with their shirts off, their bodies all underdeveloped and pale. Young kids always look like colts to me: they just haven’t filled out yet. They were jockeying with each other, seeing who had the nerve to go up to the summit. I hadn’t told the girls about the guy dying up here. I didn’t figure it would help.

Louisa led the way and she coached Sara perfectly. “You always want to have three points down Mom,” she explained. “Two feet and one hand, or two hands and one foot. Lean yourself into the mountain. If you feel shaky, just get closer to the mountain, flatten yourself out.” She was calm and gentle.

Louisa advanced. The rock was bone dry and really stable—nothing loose or slippery. But it was steep as hell. If you somehow lost your balance and toppled downward, it wouldn’t take much for you to bounce down the rock and plunge off the cliff below. Louisa knew the risks, but she kept her mom focused with her constant positive banter.

“Watch where I plant my feet Mom and just match my hand and foot holds.” I heard echoes of the stuff I used to say to her when she was getting accustomed to scrambling, to being on rock and to steeling yourself to “exposure,” that strange little word mountaineers use to mean you’re in a position where, if you fell, you could die.

But you can’t think about falling. As Sara would say later, you can’t look at that gulf you could fall into. You just have to look at the solid rock in front of you and plant your hands and feet, testing the solidity of your hold, and then push onward to a place where you can relax again.

I was so proud of Louisa’s coaching, and so impressed with Sara’s courage, that I gave no thoughts to my own fear. Is it even fear, at this point? Now that I’ve done enough that I don’t really doubt my ability, now that I’m comfortable enough to take a long look at the chasm to my right and not clench up inside? If it’s still fear, it’s fear that I’ve come to terms with, made friends with. It’s not a fear that pounds in my ears, like I remember from my early days as a scrambler. Now it’s a quiet fear that brings focus.

I get reminders, from time to time, that fear is merited. Last week a solo hiker fell or slid to his death on Mt. Pugh, a mountain I’ve summited once and turned back on twice. We don’t know yet precisely where or how he fell; we never will know, most likely. But my gut tells me it’s on the same snow-field where I once felt the horror of falling most strongly, a horror that focused me on kicking my crampons deep into the snow, holding fast to my ice ax, preparing for the snow to slip and for me to slam myself into arrest.

You can die on any mountain. You can die as a novice or as an experienced mountaineer. I just try to prepare myself mentally and physically for the challenge, and to remind myself that the best mountain is the one you come home from. I hope never to be so proud or obdurate that I won’t turn around if something doesn’t feel right. But I also want to do the hard stuff, the stuff that requires me to push past my fear and get to the summit. And I want to do it with my darling wife. Her climb up McClellan was a step in the right direction.

About two thirds of the way coming down from the summit block, I called out to the girls: “Did I tell you the story about John’s friend and this mountain?”

“You can tell us when we’re down!,” replied Sara. So I told them when we were down. They were glad I held back.

Vanity

Fear is a complicated emotion, but then so is another one I’m struggling to come to terms with: Vanity. My own.

I’ve been working out at the gym steadily for two years now. According to my InBody scan (this is a body composition analysis tool they have at the gym), I’ve lost almost 40 pounds while adding 9 pounds of lean muscle mass. My percent body fat has dropped from 30.7% to 14.3%. I’ve gone from a solid Dad Bod to ... I’m not sure what to call what I am now. But I know I permit myself to wear tank tops again, something I didn’t do for years.

So when I saw all those scrawny boys preening around near the summit with their shirts off, I popped off my shirt too. I’ll show them what muscles look like.

Oh boy!

I don’t admire vanity in others. Sometimes I laugh at it (GB, I’m talking to you); sometimes I actively dislike it. I feel like it’s a character flaw, a weakness. And yet here I was peacocking around with my shirt off. What the fuck?

I’ve had a lot of self-talk around this issue. Hell, I’m having it now! I tell myself that I’ve worked really hard to get lean and build muscle, and it’s okay to wear clothes that show off how I look and, in the right situations, like a sunny day on a mountaintop, to take off my shirt. There’s nothing wrong with it! But I look at this picture I’m sharing with you now and I think, “Really, Tom? It’s come to this?”

I cringe when I see people posturing to gain attention, fishing for compliments. And yet here I was ...

There’s a line here that I’m not sure how to define. I know I’m creeping up on that line and maybe stepping over it, so I’ll try to be careful. (Hell, sharing these pictures with you is a way of both stepping over that line and considering whether it’s okay to feel pride in who I am … I guess I’m straddling that line right now.)

As we came down from the mountain I told the girls about my mixed feelings about my own vanity. Louisa, in this way that she has, set me straight.

“You know Dad, it probably doesn’t occur to you but most of my self talk is around how I don’t look good enough and don’t measure up, and that’s the way most of the girls I know see it. You’re pretty damned lucky to be able to marvel at how good you look without adding in a bunch of negative self-talk.”

Lucky you, struggling with your vanity, she was saying, while I wonder if I’m good enough! And all this coming from a person who is successful in absolutely everything she does (I’ll forgo the details because she wouldn’t want me bragging on her).

We all walk around in our little worlds, thinking the rest of the world thinks like we do, until we find out it’s just not that way.

Anyway, these are the kinds of things I think about while banging around in the woods. That and birds.

Since I’m counting, I’ll just note that this was summit #5 for the year, bringing us to 34,105 vertical feet. 66,000 more to go to seal my membership in ’s 100k club.

Hike #1: Bandera Peak. 7.3 miles. 3,105 vertical on my watch. That brings us to 21,013 vertical feet for the year, because we’ve been chipping away at the hiking since January. We did a bunch of stuff in New Mexico, the in January, ran up the Manitou Incline in Colorado, and took a couple jaunts up Oyster Dome (south of Bellingham, Washington).

We’re counting vertical because I’m intent on hitting the 100,000 vertical feet required to join ’s exclusive 100K club. Brendan is one of my favorite Substackers, thanks to his relentlessly positive take on life and to his commitment to pushing his body and his mind. When I saw him mention his 100K club back in January I knew I wanted to track my climbs.

Ah hell, who am I kidding: I just want the damn sticker!

Okay, okay, I like having a goal to shoot for and I like a good sticker, especially a quirky one that most people will be confused by. If you’ve been reading me a while, you know I do like my counting.

Speaking of counting, by far the best book I’ve read this year is The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game by C. Thi Nguyen. It’s such an engaging, playful book that you’d never know it was written by a professor of philosophy. Nguyen provides a perspective on counting and score-keeping that I found really refreshing, in part because he urges us to learn how to engage with scoring systems—whether they’re games or workplace evaluation schemas or rankings—in ways that are life-affirming and positive, rather than destructive or self-defeating. If you’ve wondered why you’re keeping score, about anything, it’s worth a read.

I really love Nguyen’s concept of “striving play.” I play a bunch of games—my current favorites are Quordle, Duotrigordle, MapTap, Spelling Bee, and Crossworldle—and with all of them I try my to get a good score while playing as fast as possible (that’s the striving part) but I delight in the experience no matter which score I get (that’s the play part). Each of these favorite games is embedded in a social web: I share these games with Sara, with my friends, with my family, and a big part of the fun is the playful chatter we have around the games. (If you ever want to try one of these with me, drop me a note and we can figure something out. If you’re a family member, please join our family MapTap group: Pete, Nancy, Carol, Lauren, and I will all enjoy your company. )

“Striving play” helps me think about why I write too. There’s the challenge of putting words together, it’s fun in a particular way that I’m fond of, and it helps me figure out what I think about the world. I come and go on how worthwhile writing is as a way of engaging with the world. The rise of LLMs has been a big challenge on this front. If all it takes to spin up a 1,000 or 100,000 words is dropping a silly question into a chat box, why the hell should I bother writing “personal essays” that sound a lot like everything else that’s on Substack? When I think about why I’ve been writing a lot less for the last year or so, that’s pretty much it: I just couldn’t figure out why anybody needed another version of the same old crap.

Except for this: I think we all enjoy hearing each other’s voices, especially because it lets us resonate with real people trying to be themselves and no one else. To put it another way, I want to hear real people’s voices. So I thought I’d write about a few of my hikes in my unique way. They won’t be trip reports. They won’t be book reports. I’m not going for any deep meaning, though I won’t avoid it if I run into it. We’ll see how it goes.

Back to the hike …

The Forest Service—what’s left of it anyway—reopened Forest Service Road 9030 just a week ago, so we could access the Ira Spring Trailhead. There was only one big blowdown across the trail early on and after that it was smooth sailing, with a very small amount of snow just right up near the top. Little snow means some of the trails we might not hit until summer could open earlier. It’s been a weird winter for rain and snow. We had flooding the valley in December and again in February, but January was as dry as a popcorn fart. Feast or famine. But the reservoirs are all full, or so I hear.

There’s something cool about the trail this early in the season, before people trample it down and kick all the debris to the side. Scattered branches and shards of pinecones are scattered everywhere, a fine coat of detritus spread willy nilly across the forest floor, without regard to the path we humans beat through the world. I imagine that if no one showed up for a couple of years, the trail would become totally indistinguishable from the rest of the forest, like the abandoned vehicles that get swallowed up by blackberries down here in the lowlands. Shit just grows out here in the PNW.

We heard this funny “whump, whump, whump” sound off in the distance as we hiked up. I joked to Sara that it must have been a rare “Mountain Bittern.” If you’re a birder and you get the joke, let me know.

Otherwise, pretty straightforward hike, though the increase in pitch once we took the cutoff to Bandera caught me off guard. I was used to just hiking upright, but suddenly the trail got so steep that when I tried to stand up straight it felt like I’d fall backward! I got vertigo a couple times until I reminded myself to lean into the slope and keep my hands on the rock. Thus one gets reacclimated to the steep stuff.

Lastly, if you’re local and you’d like to go on a hike sometime, drop me a note. I recognize that not all people can hike together, but I trust that we can figure that out if the will is there. … anybody else?

I had grabbed the car key and my small orange gym bag off the kitchen counter and pivoted to my left, heading out the back door, when something dazzling caught my eye. It was a bright shaft of light gleaming from under the refrigerator door, as if a dazzling LED light shone directly down from the door and onto the wood floor, its glow spreading like a golden pool. I was transfixed.

Every day when I leave the house I make this move, or very nearly this move, and yet I had never before noticed this under-door lighting. How could I have missed it?

And then, as I studied it, I realized that it wasn’t coming from beneath the door at all. It was instead a shaft of light that somehow weaved its way through the passage that led from the kitchen to the living room, and beyond that from the window that faced due east, and through the trees that stood between the window and the sun that was rising in the sky at 7:59 am on the morning of Tuesday, March 31.

Perhaps I had never seen it before because it had never existed before. It took the perfect concatenation of time and light and observation.

FridgeHenge.

This one is for . I think she’ll know why.

It was, like so many such first posts, complete horse shit. And why wouldn’t it be? I didn’t know what I was doing! All I knew is I had some ideas I wanted to communicate and that Substack seemed like a great way to do that.

Today, four years later, the ideas I want to share have changed, the number of people I share them with has grown substantially, and Substack still feels like a great place to share my writing.

The thing I enjoy most about Substack is the chance to interact with readers and other writers. I had no idea when I began just how great this sense of community would be.

Last week’s post encapsulated what I like about Substack. I wrote about something that mattered deeply to me and you shared your experiences in turn. I learned that the loss of a friendship—no matter how common, no matter why—just hurts. But it hurts a lot less knowing that other people have been through this loss too.

Interactions like this are what keeps me coming back, and I plan to continue on in the same vein.

I’m going to keep writing when it feels right. I’m going to keep getting “out over my skis” on questions that matter to me, hoping they matter to you too. (And I’m not going to listen to the bullshit advice to publish weekly, even if I have nothing worthwhile to say.)

Those of you who read my most popular piece—“Why I’m Not Going Paid on Substack”—will laugh when I admit I almost turned on payments to start this new year. Like many, I had heard the rumors that Substack was going to remove writers who didn’t require payments. But I dug around enough to convince myself the rumors were bullshit, so mine will remain a free Substack.

Most of all, I’m going to thank my lucky stars that I have readers like you who appreciate what I’m doing and share your ideas and perspectives with me. Your input, in whatever form it takes, remains my favorite thing about writing on Substack.

Tom

For a time, what I felt most was confusion. We had built up a nice rhythm, we two: me catching the ferry across the Sound to join you for a long walk on time, you coming my way the next. We’d usually end with a beer, stretching that into two if the ferry schedule permitted. We talked about everything: our writing, our cooking, our wives, our aging bodies. I always found you intelligent, self-aware, unwilling to bullshit yourself. I admired your way of thinking about the world, even if we didn’t always agree. I really enjoyed our friendship.

I guess that’s why I felt so confused when it got so difficult for us to find a time to get together. I’d text to suggest a time, but that time didn’t work. I’d wait until I saw another opportunity and try again. No luck: you were going to see your kids, or you and your wife were heading out camping. There was always something. After several attempts I suggested that you just let me know when it would work for you and I’d make it work. But I didn’t hear from you.

We’d always been pretty direct with each other. I figured you would come right out and tell me if there was some issue between us … but you never did. So I asked. Had I done something to anger you? I told you I’d love the chance to move past it if I did. (I wish I could find the message, so I’d get the wording just right.)

You denied there was anything wrong; it was just bad timing, you said. But nothing changed.

Slowly, I grew used to the idea that I’d never hear from you again. It hurt! I liked our friendship. It felt unique among my friendships somehow, in that I respected you intellectually more than most of my other friends. I felt like we really shared a feeling for what it was to be a married man and a father in today’s world, and also what it was to try to express ourselves in writing.

And dammit, I didn’t want our friendship to end! What went wrong? I asked myself. Did our differences on politics and religion eat at you in ways that they didn’t eat at me? Did the demands of some other part of your life just require so much that there was no room for a friend? Or did I just misunderstand the mutuality of our affection … what I mean is, did you just not like me enough? Or did you grow bored with me?

I entertained all kinds of reasons, but could never come up with a satisfactory answer. And I knew that no matter what reason I invented, I could never know for sure. I know better than to think I could divine what was in your mind; all I can do is imagine what it might be like to be you from the perspective of being me.

The loss of your friendship made me sad; it still makes me sad. I have a number of other friends and a deeply loving relationship with my wife. But our friendship filled a unique place in my life …and now it’s gone.

Just this week, after more than a year of wondering, I think I’ve finally come to accept it. I don’t think about it and wonder “why?” I just accept that you’ve made a choice and apparently it’s the right one for you.

But I want you to know that if you ever have second thoughts … if you ever say it yourself, “It would sure be nice to go on a long walk with Tom” … well, I’m open to it. I harbor you no ill will at all. You don’t even have to explain. Just drop me a note. I’ll be on the 10:00 boat.

Your friend,

Tom

I did three things that surprised me in the last year:

• I lost 27 pounds.

• I gained 10 pounds of muscle.

• I dramatically reduced my alcohol consumption.

But they’ll be no “before and after” pictures because ... yuck.

If you’d asked me two years ago if I could make this kind of change I’d have said “No way.” The key was, I decided to stop bullshitting myself about my health. I stopped bragging that I was “fat but fit” and reshaped my diet. I stopped telling myself I “didn’t like gyms” and hit the weights regularly. And when I could no longer convince myself I was a “moderate drinker,” I cut my drinking in half.

I didn’t start out with some grand goal for improvement, nor a specific weight loss target. I started out with a spreadsheet, and as I paid close attention to what the data told me, I came to see that some behaviors led to progress, while other behaviors set me back. The spreadsheet just wouldn’t let me bullshit myself.

I’m not sharing this with you because I want to pat myself on the back.

I’m sharing it to encourage you to think about how you might make a change that matters to you.1

Scared Into Change

My year of living differently started when I read Peter Attia’s book Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity. Attia’s book scared the hell out of me.2 He argues that you need to optimize aging by avoiding the major causes of health decline (notably metabolic and cardiovascular disease) and preparing your body for the inexorable ravages of aging by building muscle, improving cardiovascular performance, eating the right things (which includes lots of protein), and reducing alcohol intake.

I compared Attia’s depiction of a healthily aging person to the guy I saw in the mirror … and it wasn’t pretty. I was fat, my joints were killing me, and I drank too much. Aren’t you glad there are no pictures?

Eating

Starting in November 2024, I became much more vigilant about the food I ate.3 Past experience taught me there were two ways that I could lose weight: I could count calories, or I could limit carbs.

I hate counting calories. I knew I couldn’t stick with it for long. But I knew I could follow a minimalist tracking program like that articulated by Dr. Eric Westman.4 He offered a one-page guide5 to reducing carbs and increasing protein, and it jump started my weight loss.

Thus began Stage 1 of my year of health improvement. I set up a spreadsheet where I tracked and scored my protein and carbohydrate consumption and recorded my daily weight. If I ate more than 120 grams of protein, I hit my protein goal; if I ate less than 35 grams of carbohydrates, I hit my carbohydrate goal. I color-coded my “scores” and watched the weight fall away. In the first 30 days of this approach—which included the Thanksgiving holiday—I lost 17.70 pounds. Yeah, it went that fast.

I knew, though, that I couldn’t keep measuring and counting macros forever. It was just too much of a pain in the ass, and honestly, this was too little carbs. So after about 7 weeks of macro-counting vigilance, I moved to a “guesstimate” model of whether I had hit my macro goals, and I relaxed the success measure for carbs. I felt like at this point I knew when I was on and when I wasn’t, so I simply scored each category as a “Yes” or “No.”6

As you might guess, my weight loss slowed. It didn’t help that I went on a three-week vacation to Patagonia, drank some good wine, and then came back and told myself I didn’t need to work at it so hard. (Did I fall back into bullshitting myself? Maybe a little.) But when I found my weight-loss trendline stalling, I realized I could use more diligent tracking to right my ship, and I hit 26.7 pounds of weight loss by April 15, roughly 5 months after starting.

And then I stalled again. Sara too. We pored over our data and could see that we just weren’t being consistent enough about keeping our eating under control. Something was keeping us from practicing what we knew worked. But what?

Exercise

It wasn’t a lack of exercise. I worked out 5 days a week minimum. Sara and I hike regularly through the warm months, lift weights 3-4 times a week, and do at least one V02 Max workout a week (five 4-minute intervals at 90+% heart rate on the assault bike, with short recovery intervals in between).

I didn’t start tracking exercise until October, oddly enough. Partly because I didn’t think I needed to improve in this area; partly because I knew the real key to weight loss was diet. But with a strong tracking and reporting habit in place, I started tracking the number of hours of daily exercise in three categories: strength, cardio (hiking, biking, brisk walking), and V02 max. I roll this up into a running 7-day average (see the yellow line on the chart below). I consider this to still be in the observation stage, but I know I’ll use this number as a baseline for gauging future performance.

Drinking

If it wasn’t the food and it wasn’t the exercise, the problem had to be my drinking.

But I didn’t want to cut down on my drinking! I LIKE to drink, dammit. And I was a moderate drinker, after all ...

Or was I?

Starting at the end of April, I started counting my drinks. Now, I counted drinks as I made them, not the more reasonable way scientists measure drinks. I made an Old Fashioned with 4.5 ounces of Bourbon, three times the 1.5 ounces recommended, and called it a single drink. I drank a 19.6-ounce, 8% ABV beer, not the standard 12-ounces, 5.0% ABV beer.

But even with my hedging, it quickly became clear to me that I was a heavy drinker. My counting showed the truth: I was having 3 drinks most days and 4 or more on many more days. And what do you know: on the days when I drank more, I also ate more.

For several months, I just observed my drinking without trying to modify it. I wanted to see myself as I really was. In the meantime, I tried to understand if there was a healthy level of drinking that fell short of complete abstinence. I still wanted to drink, just less. And that’s how I ended up setting a new target of 7 drinks per week.7

Once I started actually trying to meet the new target, the weight loss improved (see the decline in the chart above, starting in mid-October). Amazing what happens when you don’t bullshit yourself.

Conclusion

This year-long experiment has been one of the most deeply satisfying self-experiments I’ve ever undertaken. My total weight loss is right around 27 pounds, but I’m still after a bit more. I’ve added 10.1 pounds of muscle since starting, which means my overall fat loss is close to 37 pounds.8 My Percent Body Fat has fallen from 30.7% to 17.4%. In the spring I’ll have my annual physical and will get a better sense of my Blood Glucose and LDL Cholesterol, two markers I’m especially interested in.

You may look at the amount of “tracking” I do and think it’s nuts, but in truth it doesn’t feel like much. This spreadsheet allows me to see myself very clearly, and all it takes is entering a few data points each morning. It takes less than a minute. The “reporting”—my pretty graphs—happen automatically.

The big lesson for me is that if I think carefully about the behavioral modifications I want to make in my life, figure out how to measure them, and then practice behaviors that lead to improvement, I can make meaningful progress.

Could it work for you? Only you can say.

As Sara and I plotted our retirement during that long, weird first year of COVID, we dreamt of a future where we took weekly hikes the the mountains that surround us here in the Pacific Northwest. Ideally, each week we’d climb to the tops of the mountains we’d only longed for in the days when we had to snatch our hiking time out of the busy flow of our working lives. The clean air would fill our pumping lungs, the long ascents burnish our muscles as we built the purpose-shaped hiking bodies we’d always wanted to have. That was our dream.

And then my body fucked it all up.

We retired in 2021, me with a nagging abdominal tear I had to deal with; I got that sewn up straightaway. No sooner had I removed one obstacle than another appeared: my left knee, once a secondary concern, went downhill faster than I expected, and I was soon “bone-on-bone,” a term I found kind of histrionic before I lived with it. Fine, fine, a new knee then, all silky smooth plastic and metal, and after six weeks of PT I started my “return to hiking” program, only to realize that this jabbing, clunking pain from my hip, once just a distant murmur, needed work as well. Bing, bang, boom: hip replacement. All told, that meant that my first three-and-a-half years of retirement featured way more over-eating, drinking, and general slothfulness—and way more surgery!—than I ever intended.

Still, we planned for the time when we could start chasing that dream. As my recovery (and weight loss, another story) started picking up steam in the fall of 2024, we knew that 2025 would be the year. After taking my new body parts for a little test-drive in the mountains of Patagonia in January, we started charting our course for a “peak a week” all summer long.

Finding New Summits

We started our summer of hiking with a couple old favorites: a snowshoe hike up to Artist’s Point, near the Mt. Baker ski area, and then a couple romps up our old standby, Mt. Pilchuck, easily my most climbed mountain, thanks to a trailhead I can get to in 45 minutes. (You can see from the amount of snow that remains in the mountains that we didn’t really get started until late June. I like hiking in snow, but I wasn’t sure how my hip was going to take the added torque of snowshoes.)

The point, though, was not to climb mountains we had climbed before. We wanted variety. We wanted to challenge ourselves. We wanted adventure.

Thus we started to plan our hiking calendar by choosing hikes all across the Central and North Cascades. Enter the Washington Trails Association (WTA), a group that coordinates volunteer work to build and maintain trails, advocates for outdoors-oriented policies, and—most relevant to our quest—hosts a website that includes both “official” trip descriptions of many trails in Washington and thousands of trip reports submitted by hikers. When you’re searching for a hike, you can sort by nearly any criteria you can imagine, but we quickly honed in on distance (we looked for a minimum of 8 miles) and elevation gain (minimum 3000 feet) as the two factors that would weed out the easy hikes. Soon we had dozens of hikes to choose from.

The thing is, I don’t like easy hikes. Easy hikes attract people, and when it comes to being in the mountains, I hate people. Not individual people—not you—but people in general. The ones I hate most are those who hike while playing music. There’s a special place in hell for these people, but they’re easy enough to avoid. They hike on weekends and they generally go to trails that are popular on Instagram or TikTok or wherever else the kids are scrolling. Once a place gets hashtagged on the socials—#enchantments, #larchmadness—it’s all over: people throng to the trailhead, they park like shit, and they straggle along the trail holding their McDonald’s bags and listening to music. I don’t want to hike where the hashtaggers are hiking.

The few times we ran into crowds it was excruciating. The worst was in the Enchantments, a spectacularly beautiful region of lakes, mountain peaks, and meadows in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness area. The place has become such a mecca for the scrolling crowd that the best way to get to the trailhead is to book one of the shuttles out of Leavenworth because you’d be a fool to count on parking. We had trained for the Enchantments thru-hike, building up for the 20+ miles and 5,000 vertical foot gain, thinking it was going to kick our asses, but it didn’t. It turned out to be a great way to celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary. Perhaps it would have been the highlight of our summer, but since it’s on everybody’s bucket list of hikes to do in Washington ... there were just too many people for us to really enjoy it. Still, it was pretty.

Want to Avoid Crowds? Take Hard Hikes on Tuesdays

The best way to avoid crowds is to hike on Tuesdays. That’s when we retirees hike. We’ve had multiple trips this summer where we were the only ones on the mountain and honestly, that’s the way I like it the best. I’ve decided that I’ll take a less spectacular view with very few people over a crowded must-see any time. Luckily there are so many mountains nearby that get little attention, we really had no problem avoiding the crowds.

Another easy way to avoid crowds is to choose trips rated as “Hard” on WTA. WTA lists hikes as “Hard” based on “an algorithm that takes into account the overall length of the hike and the average incline of the trail in feet per mile.” It’s a good algorithm, though like most algorithmic projections it maps only approximately onto reality. Take the two hikes we did July 29 and August 5, both rated as hard. The shorter of the two, Vesper Peak, 8 miles, kicked our asses. Coming down the steep gully that leads up to Headlee Pass, a waypoint on our way back from the summit, Sara and I found ourselves doing something unusual: bitching about the trail conditions. “This footing is shit,” we’d grumble as the loose dirt and rock slid out beneath us. “I’m so damn sick of walking on rock!,” we complained on the rock that followed. The next week we hiked Benchmark Mountain, nearly double the length and the same elevation, 4000 vertical, and it was a walk in the park. The WTA description had promised “beautiful tread” and it made all the difference. Go figure.

The truth is, there’s a lot of difference between hard hikes, and you have to get pretty discerning to make really good judgments. We soon realized that the best way to judge whether a hike was going to kick our asses or not was to scrutinize as many trip descriptions and reports as we could. Partly we were looking for keywords that signalled difficulty (“chossy,” “talus,” “rutted,” and “exposed”) and partly we were trying to judge whether the person writing the report was a reliable narrator. One person’s death-defying challenge is another’s afternoon stroll, after all. But it’s up to you to figure out who matches your profile.

I cotton to people like WTA member “Wandering Washington,” writing here about Tommyhoi Peak.

The chossy ledges to get to the actual summit block are really the “crux” of this [hike]. Very easy to get into possible class 4 territory. Hand holds are terrible, lots of loose rock on angled ledges. There is a gully I went up that was doable but it was so loose I wouldn’t go down that way. On the return I found a much better solid class 3 way down with less loose material. But this is honestly where a slip and fall is most likely, and also rockfall.

When I read a report like this, one that makes my balls pucker up, I feel like I’m getting good intel. I like when people acknowledge that it can get scary, but they tell you how they got through it. Better that than the hardasses who stoically describe the most harrowing scramble routes as “straightforward.”

What I don’t like are the nervous nellies who warn you off a trail at the first sign of brushiness, or complain that the road up to a trailhead is “so rutted that a high-clearance vehicle is a MUST.” Perhaps this was written by the guy we saw coming down from a trailhead in his Maserati.

In the end, I learned to read as many trip reports as possible, reading carefully to figure out who were the good climbers and who were the chickenshits. And in general, I thanked my lucky stars we have an amazing tool like WTA to help us get good intel on hikes.

Data Tells You Nothing

At some point fairly early on it occurred to us that we’d like to keep track of our hikes, so I made a spreadsheet (I know, shocker). By the time we shut it down for the season (October 21, Mt. Dickerman) we’d done 25 hikes totaling roughly 245 miles and 85,000 vertical feet.

“Roughly” is a word I’ve come to be perfectly happy with, and not just because accuracy doesn’t matter but also because it’s a fool’s game to chase it—it distracts you from what really matters. We realized the folly of getting too concerned with data many times during the summer. Sara and I would often “start our workouts” on our Apple Watches at the same time and compare our “stats” as we went along—much to our frustration. There was not a single hike where we registered the same miles or elevation, despite walking side-by-side the entire way. Then, as our hikes got longer, we found that our phones and watches would run out of battery, so we either wouldn’t know our “real” stats or we’d begin to carry along a battery pack to charge up our phones during our lunch break on the summit. By August I’d grown so disgusted by this whole state of affairs—the imprecision, the need to nurse along the batteries, the moments looking at a phone when I could have been digging beauty—that I quit even bothering with “tracking” our hikes, instead just using the miles and elevation provided on the WTA trip description as my record.

What’s data tell you about the experience of being in the mountains anyway? Not a damned thing.

My photos aren’t much better. Oh sure, they capture the rough outlines of the beauty and majesty of the world that we moved through, but usually when I look a my photos I go, “Huh, it just doesn’t capture it.” To be in the landscape is to be immersed in a world of sensation, to feel I am standing in a cathedral of trees, with the smells and the sounds of birds and quiet, or to look across the Nooksack River valley at Mt. Baker, 10 miles away, and feel like it’s looming above me, even across this gulf of space. To be in the landscape is to be filled with awe, to bask in the total sensory experience of the world. Then I look at the photo and the depth is truncated, the colors a pale imitation of reality, the grandeur flattened. I either need to get much better at taking photographs or I just need to find other ways to communicate my experience of the mountains. That’s one to think on! Meanwhile, we have my inadequate photos as illustrations. If you want to know what it was really like, imagine it 500 times better.

Things Don’t Always Go as Planned

The vast majority of our hikes went exactly as planned, down to the time it would take to complete them. This is undoubtedly a good thing and I count myself lucky. The bad shit that you hear about in the mountains—people falling, getting injured, getting lost, dying—are all stories of plans gone awry. Getting airlifted off Aasgard Pass after taking the wrong route, as some folks we saw did, was not part of our plan. In general, we plan our hikes pretty carefully. We read up on trip reports to assess the latest conditions, download maps to our phones so we’re not dependent on a cell signal, let people know if we’re going somewhere out of the ordinary (okay, I need to do this more).

But two of my most memorable hikes of the summer were ones that didn’t go according to plan.

We set off to hike Mt. Persis—a blocky summit that lies just west of the bigger, grander, and decidedly more difficult Mt. Index—but found access blocked by a big metal gate across National Forest Service Road 6200. Time for Plan B. Luckily we were just 10 miles from Blanca Lake. For several hours we slogged up through the woods, hoping for the clouds to clear away. But when we reached the ridge top it was still socked in. We almost turned back but, since it hadn’t taken us very long, we decided we might as well take a chance the skies would clear by the time we got to the lake. The clouds parted as we arrived to take in what has to be one of the prettiest lakes in all of Washington. Plan B worked!

John and I had planned an overnighter for early August, a 16-mile loop in the Goat Rocks Wilderness, pretty much mid-way between Mt. Rainier and Mt. Adams. We figured we’d do ten miles the first day, camp, get up in the morning to bag Old Snowy Mountain, then hike out. Easy peasy.

There was just one problem: we couldn’t find a water source! The map showed streams and campsites, but we hadn’t scrutinized recent trip reports enough to realize that with our bone-dry summer, all of these streams were just rocky washes. So here we were, after 5:00 in the afternoon, realizing that we just had to keep hiking until we found water. We pushed on, 10 miles, 12 miles, now getting closer to our parked car than to our expected camping sight—and we were losing light fast. Finally, right around 8:00 pm, we found a water source and eagerly filled our hydration bags ... and decided that with less than two miles to go, it just wasn’t worth going to all the bother of setting up camp. So we pushed on into the gathering dark, bound to get to the car and do the 3.5 hour drive home. John hates to use a headlamp, but it finally got so damned dark that we couldn’t make out the trail at all, so we hiked the last half mile with our lights blazing. We ended up doing a 16-mile day hike, carrying way heavier packs than we needed, and learned a hell of a lesson about being much more careful about checking out water availability.

It’s not like the hike was a loss, though. The Goat Rocks area was incredibly beautiful, and we got to see the dramatic start to one of the season’s major wildfires. Now we’ve got a good reason to go back and try again.

Woods, Lakes, Knife-Edge Ridges, and Blueberries

What’s really cool about all the hiking I did this summer was that I think it made me a “better” hiker.

Not better as in “more badass,” mind you. I used to want to be that kind of hiker. I’d brag about how I’d get “peak fever” when I was within sight of a summit, and I sneered at people who wanted to hike to a lake. Woods? Just so many trees slowing my route to the summit. But I’m older now. I’ve changed.

Was I such an impatient bastard because I only had weekends to hike and I just wanted to grab as much “glory” as I could? Did I somehow fool myself that I was a tough guy when I said to my family “See you at the top?” and pushed ahead without them? Or was it just that I was so deranged from working in goal-focused, metrics-obsessed environments that I thought that’s the way life should be?

All I know is this: now I enjoy the WHOLE hike. I like the early miles rising through the woods ... I like to see how the density of the canopy affects what grows below. I like it when we drop down to a lake on the way up. I like looking at mushrooms. I like how the chickadees and the nuthatches always seem to hang out together, like they’re mountain buddies. I like how bright the berries get in the fall. I love staying right with my hiking partner, my wife, every step of the way ... even when we’re on a knife-edge ridge out on Mt. Pugh and we start wondering how much exposure is too much.

When I used to only hike once or twice a month, I thought of blueberries as just an occasional pleasure, but this year I came to realize that blueberry season lasts for weeks and weeks, that it starts slow and build and builds until the blueberries (and huckleberries) are so big and plump that you just can’t resist stopping every ten steps to gorge. I used to walk on by.

I used to never take my boots off on a hike. But mid-way through our 20+ mile hike through the Enchantments on the hottest day of the year, we stopped beside one of the string of lakes we passed by and gave our hot, tired feet a good 10-minute soak in the frigid waters. Heaven!

There are pleasures to be found even before the hikes begin too. That’s right, I’m talking about the hiker’s holy grail: a poopable outhouse. Generally I try to take a victory lap before I leave the house, but sometimes circumstances just won’t allow it and I have to take my chances. So I always steel myself when I open an outhouse door, knowing how bad it can be. I kind of knew this was a golden summer when I found several outhouses that ranked high on the Pendergast Poopability Scale. I’m so delighted that I even wrote a Google Review for one of them: https://maps.app.goo.gl/iLgT423GgDmkkedw5.

So there it is: we’ve finally realized the plan that we set out for ourselves when we retired, and it’s every bit as good as I ever dreamed it would be. We have no plan to stop now; with any luck we’ve got years of mountains ahead of us.

This video was from our last hike of the season on October 21 and it shows the range of peaks you can see from Mt. Dickerman on an exceptionally clear day.

Now, imagine you could invite some kind of an intermediary—a middle man, an arbitrator—into that relationship to “clean things up” a bit. Maybe they’d set precise limits on when your Mom could call you, or limit your capacity to mix Old Fashioneds to one per night, or keep you from scrolling Instagram for more than five minutes per day (only one of these are drawn from my personal life, by the way). This intermediary wouldn’t cut you out altogether: you still could talk to your Mom on your own schedule, enjoy one Old Fashioned, and keep up with your son on IG. Basically, the intermediary would allow you to keep the parts of this relationship that you liked and they’d limit or contain the parts that frankly sucked your time and your sense of serenity.

For many people, this unhealthy dynamic describes their relationship with their email. They’ve subscribed to too many newsletters (guilty), signed up for too many 10% discounts on car parts and outdoor gear (me again), etc., etc. They keep saying they need to unsubscribe from more things, but they don’t get around to it, and as a result their inbox is jammed full of so much crap that they can’t keep up and it stresses them out to even open their email. One of my family members has this problem so bad that their unread email count—the number in that little red dot on their mail app—reads 56,000!

So, what if there was an intermediary who promised that they could solve your screwed up relationship with your email? Would you be willing to invite them into your life to see if there was a chance for a healthier relationship with your inbox?

Forage Mail is that intermediary. They promise to step into the relationship between you and your email (specifically, your Gmail) in such a way that allows you to keep the good and get rid of all the bad. I’ve been trying it for a couple weeks, and it’s been an eye-opening experience.1

Where’s All My Email?

The premise of Forage Mail is shockingly simple: they’re going to let all your personal email and all your urgent notifications right through, just like now, but they’re going to “quarantine” all the rest and offer it to you to consider in one (or two) batches at the time of day you designate. I set it up in 5 minutes flat and waited to see what I would think.

A couple hours later, my first thought was: where’s all my email? I’d been used to checking my email from time-to-time throughout the day and almost without fail, whenever I checked, there was something new to distract me.

Now, there was nothing.

Was this a good thing? Well, it meant that I could no longer depend on my email to distract me. I’ve turned off all notifications on social media for just this reason: I wanted to constrain my ability to interrupt myself. Forage Mail does the same thing for me with email, because I’ve allowed it to quarantine all my non-critical emails until a time of day I’ve designated. It basically removes (or really, delays) a whole lot of distractions from my life. Gold star for Forage.

Of course, the email is all still there, it’s just saved up into my daily summary email, and I get to see it all at once, in its entirety.

There’s an interesting impression you get of your daily deluge of email when you see it all in one place, all summed up in neat bullet points by AI. You realize that most of it is bullshit. Seeing it all together is an eye-opening experience: it becomes so much easier to decide what’s worthy and what is crap. When you get all your email in a single location to review, you realize how indiscriminate you’ve been in subscribing to so many things … and Forage lets you unsubscribe or otherwise “blacklist” the stuff you don’t want in the future.

Forage Fades into the Background

For the first couple days, I had a love-hate relationship with my intermediary, Forage. I kind of wanted to get some of the emails it quarantined, and I didn’t like to wait until the time I set for their summary to arrive. (To be sure, I could have easily changed the settings, but I just wanted to let it run.)

After about five days, though, I noticed how much healthier my relationship with email was becoming. I got the stuff I really wanted right away, and then I took a few minutes at the end of my day to look at all the stuff Forage gathered up. With 95% of it, I just read the summary and that was enough. With a couple emails, I clicked through for the details. It wasn’t long before I stopped even noticing that I’d invited a third-party into my world. Forage just worked: I got the mail I wanted and I never even saw the stuff I didn’t want.

Are You the Kind of Person Who Needs Forage?

After about two weeks with Forage, I’d come to a much better understanding of my own email practices. I could see that there was a certain amount of bullshit I was tolerating that just needed to go and Forage helped me unsubscribe from a lot of it. But I also recognized that some of the stuff—newsletters, DIY stuff on auto repair, Premier League soccer updates—I really wanted to keep. (Forage would have enabled me to categorize all of these so they came right through, by the way.)

In the end, I decided that my email practices weren’t so broken that I needed to pay for an intermediary. I keep a pretty clean inbox: nothing remains unread, I quickly delete things I don’t intend to do anything with, and I unsubscribe aggressively. These qualities led me to conclude that Forage wasn’t something I valued enough to pay for.

BUT, I know a lot of people who are awash in unread emails or can never seem to unsubscribe from anything—Carole, I’m looking at you!—and a paying subscription to Forage Mail could be a real godsend. If you’re one of those people, a free week-long trial to Forage Mail might allow you to experience a healthier way of relating to your email and, if you take it seriously, an opportunity to reclaim the wasted time and worry you spend on your email overload.

It’s probably worth noting that I vetted Forage’s privacy policy and their relationship to Gmail to determine that this was a trustworthy app (it is), so you can feel safe about using it, Mom.

If you’re in an unhealthy relationship with your Gmail, Forage Mail is well worth a shot.

Okay, you’re clearly willing to indulge a grown man with a strange fascination with stools, strange enough that I’ve created a whole class of stool that I insist on calling “green buddies.”

Well, okay, I didn’t create the term. The guy who gave me the original green buddy twenty years ago called it that (if you didn’t read the first story, click here) and I liked the name so much I’ve kept it.

I built my first green buddy—the orange green buddy—soon after I got the first one, because I assumed that whoever I hiked with would surely demand access to a green buddy of their own. (They didn’t.)

Oddly enough, my favorite hiking companion, my wife Sara, never really warmed up to the idea of the green buddy until just recently.

My hiking buddies, the Caribunkle boys, liked my green buddy enough that I made each of ‘em one for Christmas one year. I call these the blue green buddies. I’m pretty sure they all still have ‘em.

Just recently, I built my first new green buddy in over a decade and I immediately found myself considering my “core principles of green buddy.” It had to be made from lumber I already had around the house, I told myself, pledging my allegiance to principles that I had made up whole cloth over the years.

In my shop it’s easy enough to find such lumber, since I can’t seem to throw away any scrap of wood longer than 6 inches, putting them in with the other “clumber,” which is a made-up word Sara and I use for scrap lumber. In my pile of clumber I found some pieces of oak left over from a framing project that would be perfect for the top, and also a nice length of rough-hewn cedar that I could use for the sides. I ripped down another odd board to make the legs. Then I glued and nailed it all together.

I assumed at first that I’d build it in the exact dimensions of the prototype, a (roughly) 14-inch cube, but when I measured the length of my longest boots I realized I’d need to expand it a little bit, to 15 inches. Clearly there’s wiggle room in my principles.

My real agony came in how to finish it. The oak and cedar were both so pretty I didn’t want to just slap paint on it, so I used tung oil for those parts, and Sara found some green paint in the basement that we had used to paint the front door six years ago. I used that for the legs. It was purely a coincidence that the paint was green: there is no part of my core principles that requires that a green buddy be green.

Anyway, my pretty new green buddy—that’s its name by the way, “new green buddy,” chosen over “fancy green buddy” and “oak green buddy”—joined me on its first hike on Monday. In a happy coincidence, the hike was at the same place I got my first green buddy, Blanca Lake. We didn’t choose that on purpose. We were intending to climb Mt. Persis but the road was closed and Blanca Lake was fairly close.

I feared that I'd pull into Blanca Lake and someone would heap praise on my new green buddy and I’d feel compelled to give it to them. That would have been a real test of my commitment to the principles of green buddy, let me tell you. Luckily, we had the orange green buddy along too. I could have given them that one. I’m no saint.

The hike turned out pretty great. We were socked in with fog after climbing to the ridgeline, but once we got to the lake things opened up nicely.

“Wow, what a great idea!,” I marveled, pointing at the stool. “Did you make that yourself?”

“Oh yeah, for sure,” the guy said. “I call it the green buddy. I turn it upside down and throw my boots in it and it doesn’t matter if it gets dirty …”

I freaking loved it and I told him so.

“You want it?” he asked me.

I’m sure I demurred1. That would be like me. But I did want it and, as luck would have it, he wanted to give it to me.

“I make these from time to time,” he said, “and if I run into someone who really likes it, I just give it to them. It’s yours.”

And so it was, for twenty years.

I used the green buddy just like he advised: I chucked my boots in it when I headed out on a hike, sat on it to lace up, then sat on it again to unlace and have a beer at the end of the hike. I honestly can’t remember any hikes I haven’t taken it on …

But the green buddy was not just for hikes: it was a good stool to sit on while applying stain, a proper perch for Sara while she painted tomatoes in the garden, a convenient place to rest tile I was preparing to cut. The white paint all over it speaks to the painting jobs it assisted in.

I can’t think of many physical possessions that I’ve had as long or used as much. I have a lot of affection for that green buddy. It served me really well.

My hiking buddies—Nick, John, and Alex, i.e. the Caribunkle boys—all liked my green buddy, but I couldn’t give it to just one of them. Who would I have chosen? So one winter I made them all green buddies. I made them with much heavier-duty lumber than the original green buddy and I used my biscuit joiner to ensure they fit tightly. I painted them my favorite color blue. They were blue green buddies. John still has his; I saw it in his garage just the other day. I suspect the others have theirs too. Green buddies last forever.

All the years I had the green buddy, I knew that one day I’d give it away. I was just waiting for the right person.

While I got appreciative comments from other hikers over the years, I had met the right person until just the other day.

Sara and I pulled into the parking area for a new-to-us summit, Beckler Peak, up Highway 2 toward Stevens Pass. As we got out of Rootbeer Float (that’s our Volvo) and laced up our boots, a middle-aged Japanese lady who was clearly bringing her parents out on a hike said, “My gosh, that’s such a nice idea! Did you build it yourself?” I told her the green buddy origin story and she said she loved it. We had a nice chat.

I didn’t give it to her right then, but I told Sara I was thinking about it, and then on the way down, we ran into this family and the lady said, “Oh, you’re the man with that green stool!” We laughed and said “Enjoy the summit.” It was then I knew she was the right one.

When we got back I wrote a note, placed it on the green buddy, and left it behind their car. I hope she enjoys it as much as I did.

Here are some highlights from my years with the green buddy. I count two backpacks and three sets of shoes and three cars, but there’s only one green buddy.

“I wouldn’t say I’m a fainter, really. I’ve fainted once or twice, but ...”

In my mind, though, I’m scrambling. Who wants to be a fainter? Fainters are weak. Fainters are overly sensitive. Fainters can’t cope, so they faint. I’m no fainter!

And yet ...

“Well, it’s more than once or twice Tom,” Sara offered. “There was the time after your hernia surgery when you wanted to come down the stairs …”

“Well, yeah, but that was post surgery ...”

“And then that time with gin and the Percocet, when I had to pick you off the floor?”

“Okay honey, but ...”

“And the time when you were FaceTiming Louisa ...”

Oh shit, I might be a fainter!

This whole question arose shortly after Sara and I arrived at Swan House Farm near La Conner, where we were celebrating my 61st birthday. The farm was run by the family who operated the San Fermo restaurant down in Seattle. During the summer they hosted “farmhouse dinners,” gourmet multi-course affairs served outside at their farm that lay along the Skagit River, using locally sourced seafood and vegetables from the nearby garden. Very PNW: bougie but casual.

Before dinner we were invited to have some fresh oysters and a cocktail. Watching this mid-30s guy holding an oyster in his gloved hand, expertly slipping the tip of his oyster knife under the hinge of the oyster to pop the top shell free, I flashed back to one of my formative oyster-shucking experiences.

“Watching you do that reminds me of the time I drove an oyster knife right into the palm of my hand.” And then I told my story.

Sara and I had gotten a couple dozen fresh oysters from Central Market and I was starting to shuck them. These were small oysters—Kumamoto, Shigoku—and it took quite a bit of force to jab the tip of the knife into the hinge and pop them open. Cupping the oyster in my bare left hand, I used my dominant right hand to force the knife tip in and twist. When it went perfectly, I’d get a satisfying little “plup” as the top shell separated from the bottom and then I’d run my knife on the underside of the upper shell to cut the adductor muscle and release the upper shell, then do the same with the lower adductor. Poke, twist, cut, cut: the oyster’s ready for eating.

Ten oysters in and I hit a really tough oyster, so I bore down, pushing hard to gain leverage ... when suddenly the knife slipped and I drove it right into the meat of my left palm, below the gap between my little finger and my ring finger. I pulled the knife out and watched as the blood gushed into my palm. And then it all got weird.

I remember a rushing sound in my ears, like a long, continuous wave crashing on the shore. Then dark clouds encroached on my vision, narrowing, narrowing, until ...

Sara heard me crumple to the floor, she told me later.1 She grabbed a kitchen towel, wrapped it around my hand, then tried to lift me into a sitting position. I was dead weight in her arms. Soon my eyes opened, my vision sharpened, and I could hear her voice.

“Honey, you fainted,” she said. She’s so gentle.

Sara was ready to take me straight to urgent care. I’d need stitches, that was clear. But I convinced her that we should shuck the rest of the oysters first. So I placed the rest of the oysters on a rubber pad, kept my hand out of the way, and shucked the rest of the oysters. We ate the oysters and had a beer. Then we went to get stitches.

Fainting doesn’t set you back for long, really. You suck it up and get on with life. If you’re a tough guy, that is.

I gave the Swan House guys a short version of this story. That’s why the bartender asked if I was a fainter.

I like telling this oyster fainting story. It’s my “best” fainting story, after all. It’s dramatic and—other than the “collapsing on the floor at the sight of my own blood” part—it kind of casts me as a tough guy, rising up off the floor to finish the shucking and enjoying a beer before rushing off to get stitches.

Strong man. No sissy.

If this was my only time fainting, if it was a one-time incident, I wouldn't entertain the label “fainter.” But as Sara and I walked off to explore the farm pre-dinner, I had to consider the other evidence.

We recalled the first time I fainted: August 5, 1992. The day my son was born. We’d gone into Macomb General Hospital the day before, expecting (as everyone does) natural childbirth. But things weren’t progressing after many hours and Dr. Banna was taking off for a vacation and didn’t want to hand off his patient to someone else, so we opted for the Caesarean.

Picture this: my young wife Sara laying flat on her back on the operating table, arms splayed out to the side, legs spread, the whole scene hidden from her eyes by a foot-tall blue fabric curtain that sits between her chin and her chest, shielding the soon-to-be-bloody scene from her eyes—but not from mine. I’m standing at Sara’s head, stroking her hair, looking over the curtain at the horrorshow, trying to be cool. My sole function is to provide moral support for Sara as the doctor makes the incision and reaches into her womb to drag out this blood-and-guck-covered baby. I have the easier job.

And what do I do? I get all weak in the knees and wobbly. I start to faint! The sound of surf rings in my ears; darkness closes around me. I don’t know what to do—and that’s when this big strong nurse comes up beside me, claps her brawny arm around my shoulder, gives me a shake and says, “Hang in there big guy, it’s almost over,” and somehow this brings me back from the edge, sparing me the ignominy of being scooped off the floor of the operating room while my wife and her team of doctors bravely soldiered on. I never caught the nurse’s name, but I always think of her as Brunhilde, a strong Viking woman.

Many years passed before I fainted again. I was in a funny place in my mid-40s: succeeding professionally, elected to serve on our local school board, coaching youth sports teams ... and plagued by persistent, sometimes debilitating lower back pain. I’d put on a good face at work and in the community, but as soon as I returned to the safety of my home I’d hobble to the freezer, pull out my trusty bottle of gin, and make myself the strongest Martini I could. “Extra dry”: I’d just shake some gin with ice and strain it into a glass. Olives or not, didn’t matter. I’d take my Martini into the living room and settle back into my Zero Gravity chair and try my hardest to forget the pain. Sometimes it took two Martinis. Sometimes three.

Sara and the kids steered a wide path around me when I was in this state: the pain made me a real grouch and, though the gin would sometimes make me jolly, it could also give me a mean edge. This was a pretty hard stretch in my life. I’m not proud of how I handled it.

One day a good buddy of mine asked if I wanted some Percocet, an opioid pain killer that was being widely prescribed at the time. His doc dispensed it freely. He gave me a half-a-dozen and said “Now Tom, be careful with this around alcohol. They can make you lightheaded.”

Lightheaded? Yeah, that’s what I was after. I figured whatever warnings were associated with mixing it with alcohol weren’t for me: I was a tough guy. But at some point I stood up from my chair and within moments began to feel that deadening feeling that told me the lights were about to go out ...

Next thing I know Sara is struggling to pull me to my feet and guide me into my bed.

Apparently all it took was 12 ounces of gin and a couple narcotics to drop my blood pressure so low that I fainted dead away on the floor. You know what they call someone who mixes gin and painkillers and collapses to the floor? A fainter.

Fast forward a dozen years to my recovery from a surgery to repair my torn abdominal muscles and reattach my adductor tendons (I told another part of this story here). I’d learned to go easier on the alcohol and not to mix it with narcotics. But the morning after I got home from surgery, I needed painkillers something bad. But I also insisted to Sara that I needed to go downstairs. Sara wanted me to stay in bed, but I “reasoned” with her that I’d made it up the stairs the night before and thus I could surely make it down this morning.

In order to prove just how capable I was, I got out of bed and started to Frankenstein-walk my way out of the bedroom and onto the landing that led downstairs, all the while clutching the handrail above the stairway. Sara must have seen something in my eyes because she quickly nabbed a chair from my office and then grabbed me around the chest and lowered me into the chair before I could fall to the floor and tear out all my stitches.

I came to with her standing before me, hands on my shoulders, looking me straight in the eyes. “You’re not going downstairs, Mister,” she declared. “You’re going straight back to bed.” It made a hell of a lot of sense to me.

These fainting stories feel at odds with the overall story I like to tell about myself. I’m not ashamed of them, but it’s almost like they didn’t happen to me. I pride myself on my strength and endurance, my willingness to take risks ... but my fainting tells a different story. Apparently, under a variety of conditions, I don’t get enough blood to my brain and I lose consciousness.

But there’s one fainting story where I feel like a real idiot.

2012 was a big year in my family: it’s the year my daughter went away to college and my wife took a consulting job in Brazil. It’s the year I became a solo empty-nester, joking with Sara that it’s just kids who are supposed to fly the coop, not one of the parents too.

2012 is also the year marijuana was legalized in Washington. I’m a guy who likes to try things, so from time to time I try edibles. Well, one afternoon when Sara was home but out doing errands, I took an edible. Waited a bit. Nothing. So I took another. And not long after that I got a FaceTime call from Louisa, who was upset about something that happened on campus.

My 20-year-old daughter is tough, physically and emotionally. She doesn’t ask for much sympathy and she rarely cries. But she was upset, emotional, and she really needed someone to talk to. For the first 10 minutes of that call, I was fit for the moment, calmly talking through her distress while seated at our kitchen table. Then the weed started to kick in and my concentration started to wander. Soon my head was spinning and I started to sweat. Louisa asked if I was okay; I told her I thought I might have a flu coming on, that I felt really sick, but the truth was that I was uncomfortably high. And at just that moment, Sara comes walking in the back door. She has no idea I’m high and I’m not about to tell her in front of Louisa, but I said that I was feeling really sick and could she continue talking to Louisa, so she slid into the chair I had been sitting in. I stood up rapidly and ...

You can probably guess where this is going.

No sooner had I stood up then my head began to spin and my ears to roar. I fell like a sack of potatoes to the ground. Sara and Louisa were naturally alarmed and I could hear Louisa say that I’d been complaining about feeling sick. Trying to salvage my dignity and get to the couch, I decided to stand up. No sooner had I reached my feet than I fainted again, this time pitching face first into the side of the kitchen door, sending my glasses flying as I once more collapsed to the ground. By this point Sara didn’t know what she was dealing with, so when I quickly came to and tried once again to stand up she yelled “Stay down!” and insisted that I just lie on the floor. And thus I lay there on the floor, way too high, as Sara gracefully ended the call with Louisa so she could take care of her damn fool husband. She was less than thrilled when I explained to her that I may have eaten one too many edibles. Did she say the words “fucking idiot” or did I just see it in her eyes?

It’s been a few years now since I’ve fainted. I like to think maybe I’ve learned a few lessons that could keep me from fainting. Don’t watch a surgery on a loved one while standing up. Don’t stand up fast if you’ve mixed alcohol with narcotics. Don’t drive an oyster knife—any knife—into your hand. Be patient with edibles.

Perhaps the biggest lesson is I’m not as tough as I think I am.

As we sat down to the delicious dinner at Swan House Farm that night, the oyster shucker and the bartender were helping to serve the food.

“Hey guys,” I said to them as they came to the table. “It’s true: I’m a fainter.”

If you work in banking, financial services, fintech, consulting, big tech, or government—hell, if you suspect that your job doesn’t really matter, that you’re working a “bullshit job”—then reading Fatamorgana is going to hurt.

But no matter where you work, you will read this book with a jolt of recognition about how screwed up the white-collar economy is, and how much it runs on illusion.

Fatamorgana is a burning fireball aimed at this illusion, or what Majdov calls the “Proximity Economy,” a vast layer of white-collar roles that exist near power, money, or decision-making systems, but contribute little to actual value creation. Large percentages of educated knowledge workers in America’s highest profile industries work in this economy; they draw high salaries but don’t do meaningful work. They’re working in a mirage, writes Majdov, a “Fatamorgana,” the term that people from the Balkans use to describe the mirage of utility associated with the Proximity Economy. “You think you’re seeing innovation—people working on valuable, meaningful, real things. But it’s just innovation signaling. False promises. Empty pursuits. It takes time to really look—until the mirage fades. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.”

Majdov can’t unsee it, and that’s why she left high-paying jobs in finance and consulting to write this book. Part memoir, part expose of corporate self-deception, part social and political analysis, the book doesn’t fit the conventions of memoir or nonfiction. Rather, it’s the report of an intelligent human being refusing to bullshit herself about the value of the work that occupies so many. It’s a systemic critique of a vast portion of our economy, and it’s grounded in her lived experience

Majdov gives new meaning to the term “unsparing.” She’s brutally hard on the companies she has worked for (Mastercard’s lawyers are surely reviewing the terms of her employment agreement to see if there is room to ruin her); she’s hard on herself, openly asking whether she has acquiesced to the erosion of her integrity and sanity for the sake of a paycheck. And oh boy, she’s hard on her friends! In a series of chapters relating how friends cope with the fraud of living in the Proximity Economy, she paints a particularly damning portrait of “The Washington Insider,” who sees the contradictions of his work as a government bureaucrat but deludes himself that it’s still worth doing. Majdov painfully renders his self-delusion, his seeming hypocrisy, knowing full well that if he reads her account, it will end their friendship. “I chose the book over our friendship. It was a choice. I knew exactly what I was doing. I chose betrayal.” (Any writer who has struggled with how to depict a friend in their work will feel her pain.)

That’s the level of commitment and honesty that Majdov brings to the whole book and it’s what makes it worth reading. Her analysis of the economic and spiritual pitfalls of the Proximity Economy are highly detailed and, in my experience, accurate. Anyone who worked in an American corporation in 2020 and 2021 will wince at her depiction of the deployment of DEI policies, for example.

“Middle managers had purpose again [thanks to DEI]—finally, a people problem. They could play leaders.

HR loved it. DEI gave them edge.

Higher-ups scrambled, unsure how to respond. They watched what other executives were doing, called PR firms, tried to calculate what dollar amount might appease the moment.”

I found her vision for what comes next more provocative than prescriptive. Majdov is neither a Trumpite or a Muskite, but she’s sympathetic to the impulse behind DOGE and wants that impulse to go even further, to a massive descaling and revision of our corporate world via a Department of Corporate Efficiency (DOCE). If it requires UBI to make it work, so be it. I liked where she was going with this thinking ... but her solutions aren’t quite as incisive as her critique. With luck others will pick up the thread on making work more efficient, meaningful, and satisfying.

If you’re intent on fooling yourself about the nature of your work, by all means skip this book. On the other hand, if you’re interested in an honest and vital account of what’s wrong in American corporations and society, I recommend the book.

If you’re on the fence, you might read ’s review:

Castalia

Sarah Majdov's Fatamorgana

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a year ago · 44 likes · 15 comments · Sam Kahn

I was prepared to be ... let’s be charitable here ... unimpressed by my fellow citizens.

Hell, I was prepared to not make the cut: to be eliminated from consideration before I’d even been given a chance to be a juror. That had happened before.

What I wasn’t prepared for was to have my faith in humanity and my respect for the American justice system dramatically elevated during my 7 days of jury duty.

Some 75 people piled into Snohomish Superior Court on Tuesday, May 27. Like me, they had received a jury summons—a call to serve as jurors in an unspecified trial. There was a lot of grumbling in the room: for most people, jury duty was an unwanted intrusion, a pain in the ass. They had to miss work (and some wouldn’t get paid for it), they had to arrange childcare, they had to disrupt their schedule.

But I didn’t grumble. I wanted to serve on a jury. I’d always been curious about what it would be like. Yeah, I’d seen plenty of courtroom dramas on film and TV over the years, and I’d embraced the idea that serving as a juror was one of the few selfless acts that were requested ... no, required of us as citizens, but those ideas feel pretty gauzy and indistinct until you’re sitting on a hard plastic chair in a large but strangely quiet room watching a video about your role as a juror. I prided myself on my capacity to think rationally about complicated and even emotionally difficult topics, but I wondered if I really had what it took to practice those skills when a stranger’s life hung in the balance.

From the very beginning, it was clear that the judge and lawyers would do their very best. Judge George Appel set the tone for the courtroom: he was serious but not dour (okay, he was occasionally dour), precise in his wording, and obviously determined to be a perfect model of impartiality. He was the very definition of the word “punctilious.” His role, he informed us, was to ensure that the law was applied without favor and to guide us to doing our duty in alignment with the law. He smiled from time to time, but never cracked a joke—unless you count his closing words each day, when he wished us all a “reasonably pleasant evening” and then admonished us to by god be on time the next day.

The judge and the lawyers did their work with care and precision. They were all clearly committed to the roles they played in administering justice. There was no cynicism nor world weariness from the attorneys: they intended to represent their case as best they could. I left my experience believing that it really was possible to find justice in the Snohomish Superior Court.

Many of the witnesses were officers with the Everett Police Department, and they were uniformly well prepared. They answered from memory as best they could but readily went to their written reports when they needed precise detail. With rare exception, they testified without overt display of ego. They all came off as consummate professionals who had done a difficult job and were now reporting on it objectively.

Okay, there was one cop who clearly loved having all eyes on him, who played to the jury and presented himself with flair. But he was subdued compared to the lady from the state crime lab who explained the process of finding latent prints on a gun with all the flair of someone giving an acceptance speech at the Academy Awards. When she finally came to the conclusion that despite all her work she found no usable prints, the defense attorney asked her: “So, you drove two hours to tell us you found nothing?” It didn’t bother her at all. She would have driven through the night for her chance on stage.

What I was most impressed with, however, was the intelligence and integrity of my fellow citizens. Every single one of the 13 of us seated on the jury were absolutely committed to our task, to carefully considering all the evidence presented and to doing our very best to deliver a verdict consistent with the law and with the judge’s instructions.

As we went through the voir dire process, where the judge and the attorneys get to question potential jurors, I found myself surprised with how intelligent and thoughtful all of the answers were. There was no sign of cynicism or disrespect toward this system we were being asked to work within; the culture wars that inflame our attention in the media were nowhere to be found. Oh sure, there were a few chuckleheads who just wanted to get out of jury duty, but there were many, many more who were willing to deal with the inconvenience because they believed in the justice system.

Once we got the actual jury selected (it took until 11:00 am on the second day), I expected that we jurors would mostly keep to ourselves: that we’d read books or watch videos or noodle on our phones. I was fully prepared to make only the most passing acquaintance with the other jurors, expecting that it just wasn’t worth the time and energy to engage in a lot of idle chit-chat.

But one juror would have none of that. Our “cruise director”—that’s the nickname someone gave her—started going around the table asking ice-breaker style questions: What’s your favorite movie? Where did you grow up? What’s one thing a stranger would never guess about you? And she wouldn’t let up: she’d go right around the table, seeking engagement from everyone in the room.

We were confined to the jury room, a 10 x 20 windowless room just off the courtroom where we were asked to spend all our time (except for lunch breaks) when we weren’t in the courtroom itself. There was no escape ... but I tried anyway, burying my nose in the book I’d brought along. As we gathered for our second day together it became pretty evident that there was going to be no disengaging from the talk: the cruise director required total participation. The cool thing was, the longer we chatted, the more we grew to like and to trust each other. We opened up and started having real conversations .... and laughing a lot.

And dammit, we needed laughter: it was a tough case, two counts of assault, two of weapons possession. We’d sit in the courtroom and witness a young woman testifying, in tears, about her boyfriend choking her and threatening to “pop her shit,” or listening to a straight-faced cop describing how he approached the car containing the defendant. It was serious business. And the moment we were ushered back into the jury room, we couldn’t say a word about what we’d seen or felt in the courtroom. We just had to talk about other things.

It became kind of schizophrenic, this back and forth: in the jury room we’d laugh and joke, relaxing and enjoying ourselves, but the moment we heard the knock on the door we had to line up and march into the courtroom stern-faced. One minute we were intently focused on witness testimony; the next minute we were banished once again to the jury room.

Finally, when the attorneys finished their closing arguments, we were sent off to deliberate. And then, all the small talk paid off. This group of 13 people—ranging in age from 20 to 71, with college students, newspaper reporters, tech managers, teachers, retirees—fell immediately into substantive and serious conversations about the morally complicated act of coming to a verdict on four criminal charges. Because we trusted each other ... because we had learned to listen to each other ... we had remarkably productive and direct conversations. All credit to the cruise director: her insistence that we communicate with each other prepared us to function well as a jury.

I won’t say the deliberations were easy. We had to discuss the charges for nearly 8 hours, and we went through round after round of “straw polls” to help clarify where we all stood on the verdicts (there were four total charges). We all thought the defendant probably did it … and yet we all also thought that the state simply had not proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And so we walked step by step through the timeline of events as presented by the two key witnesses, the victim and the defendant, and the evidence presented by all the other witnesses—most of which was irrelevant to all but the fourth charge of possession of a weapon on the night of arrest. Finally, as we each labored to come to terms with the burden of reasonable doubt and proof, we came to a unanimous verdict on all counts—with a guilty verdict only for the last count.

The hardest part of all was that we all believed that the defendant was a jerk, a nasty young man who very likely had committed assault on his girlfriend. But none of us could live with pronouncing guilt based on the limited evidence we had, and so we followed the old adage that it’s better to let 10 guilty men go free than to send an innocent man to prison. It didn’t feel good, but it felt like we had done what the law required of us.

In an era when it’s fashionable to complain that government doesn’t work, or that systems always fail, it was deeply gratifying to find our justice system alive and well.

But this is no self-help book. Gopnik himself admits: “I realized, as I worked on these pages, that what I was writing was a self-help book that won’t help.” He’s right: there are no tips on becoming a master in your domain, no step-by-step plans to follow. If anything, the book is a testament to how stupefyingly, maddeningly difficult it is to master anything; to how much hard, repetitious work mastery requires; to how complicated it is to grasp what constitutes excellence in any field. If it’s a how-to book, it’s about how to come to term with how mysterious the pursuit of mastery really is.

The book is diffuse and sometimes a bit meandering ... but then it’s trying to pin down why the mystery of mastery is in fact the mystery of life. Gopnik discusses the mystery in seven “fables” that shed light on his subject, and then sprinkles amidst these chapters personal essays about his own attempts to pursue mastery: about learning to drive (and understand his father), about learning to bake with his aging mother, about learning to dance with his daughter, and—in a candid and surprising turn—learning how to conquer his own paruresis, or fear of urinating in public restrooms.1

There is one pursuit of mastery that Gopnik really only mentions in asides: the mastery of writing. Perhaps he shies away from assessing his own primary pursuit of mastery, writing, suggesting that writing is a craft with which: “I am perpetually discontent, since I spy the difference between near perfection and perfection.” But let me not shy away from this assessment: this is a superbly written book, extremely satisfying at the level of the sentence and the paragraph, a master class in characterization, and, as a whole, a really sensitive and thoughtful reckoning with the very deepest questions of human existence.

A case in point: in the chapter devoted to his learning to drive as an adult, Gopnik takes a moment to consider the nature of his relationship with his father:

One way to calm myself [behind the wheel] was to become my calm father. Whenever I think of him, I am in the backseat and I see the back of his head, his mesh driving gloves, and his calm voice debating a topic with his children improbably crowded in behind him. (My first memories of life are in the Volkswagen Bug my parents bought in the late ‘50s, into whose tiny backseat they introduced, like clowns into a clown car, one child after another, until there were six.) To see him so is to do a terrible disservice to his accomplishments—a chauffeur is the last thing he was—and yet in another way it is to see him whole, if one translates the act of driving into an act of understated service. He thought little of doing a kind of drive-around of his six children and twelve grandchildren, now dispersed around the continent like pieces on a game board. From rural Ontario to Boston to Ann Arbor to Berkeley to Washington to New York—the driving would last fifteen or sixteen hours, and he would emerge, bearded and smiling. “I’ve never had an accident,” he liked to say. We were very close when I was a teenager, and I love him more for knowing that I was not remotely like him: he was sound, solid, in his role as a dean paterfamilias to a campus—all things I never hoped to be. My not driving was, in some sense, a response to his driving all the time. We make ourselves in our father’s sunlight but also in his shadow: what he beams down we bend away from.

He had been driving, he often recalled, since he was twelve, as a young boy on a farm in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, his family, unusually, Jews among the Pennsylvania Dutch. He first drove an army-surplus jeep, used as a tractor, and at sixteen got his license. He often told me of how, as a teenager, having a car was the means not just to autonomy—though it was that: you could get behind the wheel and go to Atlantic City, to Provincetown, even to old Quebec—but to privacy. It enabled a lower-middle-class kid in a fractious, noisy extended family to be alone with his thoughts. He said to me once, when I was small, “You know, you can drive right across the country now without a stoplight.” The image stayed with me. (I suspect that the significant things we say to our children usually vanish, while incidental oddities linger.) I wanted to travel with him, but I left the driving to him.

Why, I wondered, had he never encouraged me to drive? Why had he not kept a car when I was a teenager? He gave me a driving lesson once—in Italy on a sabbatical leave, as it happened—and it had gone all right. But then he stopped, and he didn’t really have to; we didn’t have a car, that was true, but there were friends and rentals. If driving mattered so much to him, why would it not to me? Had he failed me in some way, or had I failed him in some way I was still not ready to recognize?

In this way, Gopnik intermingles memories of his father and deep questions about what we learn from parents—”Had he failed me ... or had I failed him”?—right into his account of learning the tactics of driving, thus illustrating that every pursuit of mastery is ultimately a consideration of the mystery of humanity.

I wrote earlier that this is not a how-to book. Let me revise that statement: perhaps it’s a how-to book about retaining your sanity while pursuing mastery, whether it be to learn sleight of hand, master realist art, bake good sourdough bread, drive a car, or—and this is where it hit close to home for me—write something, anything worthwhile. The pursuit of mastery is an endless quest; it involves a lifetime of striving, all done without any sense that “mastery” may even be reachable or that what you find to be mastery will count as mastery to anyone else.

It’s like pushing a rock up a hill, says Gopnik, invoking Albert Camus’s account of the myth of Sisyphus. The trick, writes Gopnik, is this: “We must imagine Sisyphus happy. Because while the only kind of action we can attempt may be illusory, a stone rolled up a hill only to roll down again, the happiness it gives us is not. Sisyphus is right to be happy with his work. It’s what he’s got. It’s what we have. In a doomed, fatal, mortal world, we are all Sisyphus rolling stones, but we are also aware of the possibility of contentment as we do, not because the stone won’t roll back (eventually, it will), but because when it does—and this is the secret, hopeful side to the curse that the gods gave Sisyphus—it doesn’t actually crush us. It just gives us the work to do again.” It’s in sections like this where it becomes clear that Gopnik is exploring not just how to pursue mastery but how to live in a world where meaning is elusive. In such a world, one must simply keep trying.

Happily.

Every essay is a conversation with others. In this case, I’ve been inspired by and and and and and … and of course .

Chalk another one up to the wisdom of our guides on this highly curated journey we recently took through wild Patagonia. From the moment we stepped off the plane in Buenos Aires and into the welcoming embrace of our local guide everything had gone like clockwork on our South American adventure. After a quick visit to Buenos Aires we paired up with our trip leader and our traveling companions and set off on a 16-day dash across southern Argentina and Chile, with stays in Tierra del Fuego; Los Glaciares National Park; and Torres del Paine National Park.

The trip we were on was called “Ultimate Patagonia,” one of the signature trips of Berkeley, California-based adventure tour company Wilderness Travel. They promised a whirlwind tour of the greatest hits of Patagonia. They hand-picked the best places to visit, the best hotels, the best meals, the best hikes. They strung these jewels together on a trip that took us scurrying across this magical, wind-blown landscape by plane, bus, boat, and foot. Unlike some tours that merely take you to the edge of a landscape, this one pushed us out into it, with 12 days of hiking, including multiple hikes of 10+ miles. It wasn’t for the faint of leg.

I’ve delayed writing about this trip because, frankly, I was having a hell of a time putting the drama of this place into words. Where else have I seen glaciers the size of entire mountain ranges? Where else have I experienced winds of this intensity and persistence? Where else have I seen mountain ranges of such beauty—showcased by light and clouds that were constantly in motion—that with every turn we took we gasped anew at the beauty? What do you say about a landscape of such staggering, breathtaking majesty?

My words will not do it justice, so let me instead offer a few photographic glimpses. I did not take my good camera along on the trip; I didn’t want to spend one minute worrying about photography when I could simply breath in the beauty. These are strictly iPhone photos, unedited.

I studied geology during my first few years in college. I’m no stranger to imagining the immensity of time that it takes for tectonics and glaciation to shape the world. But I was still gobsmacked and breathless when I drew the curtains on my hotel room along the shores of Lago Gray and looked across the lake to see Paine Grande and the Cuernos del Paine ranges. The contrasting formations told of massive intrusions of molten rock into many millennia of deposits of sediment, then tectonic uplift and glaciation occurring many millions of years apart. My concerns seemed petty and utterly insignificant alongside the passage of time and the ability of the earth to reshape itself. That morning, I felt so incredibly peaceful and grateful simply to be alive in that moment. All other concerns faded away.

We saw foxes, penguins, pygmy owls, and more cool birds than we could count.

We topped a ridge and encountered a lake the color of which we’d never imagined.

We slept at the foot of some of the coolest mountains in the world (see the reflection in the glass of our hotel, El Pilar, the closest lodging to Fitz Roy?). We walked out the front door of our hotels and into some of the most spectacular scenery in the world.

Did I mention there were glaciers?

We saw and enjoyed the best of what Patagonia had to offer, and all the while we were shepherded by our gracious, intelligent trip leader, José Argento, and a host of day guides who helped us understand all that we were seeing. A good guide can make or break a trip like this, we’ve found. Get one who is a little too controlling or intent on having his way and it can be pretty trying. But José was a gem, the best we’ve ever had.

Our fellow travelers were top-notch as well: smart, affable, experienced, and ready to explore. It’s a weird experience to self-select into a group based on your demographics, your relative wealth and hunger for adventure. Looking around at this group of people was like looking into a mirror: we saw lawyers, doctors, engineers, techies, all within shouting distance of our age. We were traveling with slightly different versions of ourselves. No wonder we liked everyone: they were us.

I don’t want to say the entire trip was perfect. Sixteen days with a group of strangers—including too many hours on a bus riding on bumpy dirt roads—can get to you. So too hiking with a group of people with varying degrees of fitness, especially when you’re an impatient hiker like me1.

If you’re like us and you have Patagonia on your bucket list of places you’d like to visit, I’ll just say this: find a way.

Reflecting on this anniversary, I realize what I like most about writing on Substack is hearing from you, in whatever way suits you best. Comment. Write me an email. Buy me a beer. Hell, throw a rock at my house! I appreciate it any which way.

Next up is a reflection on my recent trip to Patagonia.

The last time I saw my dad alive was outside the Hillman Cancer Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Dad didn’t live in Pittsburgh. He lived on borrowed time in a golf course community in Naples, Florida, in one of three houses he’d bought during the real estate boom, when he was flipping houses and zipping around in his Burgundy Red Porsche 911. He’d been giddy then, giddy at his luck at living at a time when you could buy a house, do a few cosmetic upgrades, and then flip it, turning a quick profit. He played this trick five, six times, until he thought he knew it by heart. Then one day he got caught holding a bad hand—three houses—right when the market crashed. He never thought he’d be dying of cancer while trying to devise some scheme to keep him in a house and out of bankruptcy court. He had kicked prostate cancer, but now the cancer was back at him, worse this time, and Dad was in a worse place too.

I’d had no part in Dad’s first battle with cancer. It had come during the 15-year stretch when we didn’t speak, and so the only thing I heard of his prostate cancer was from my brother, Pete, who seemed to get fragments here and there. Dad never contacted me to let me know—but I never contacted him to let him know I knew either. There’s no rule book when your relationship is this fucked up.

Truth was, he was as good as dead to me by then. I’d been through the grieving process of losing him after the traumatic break we’d had between the birth of my two kids. I always remember that it was between their births, because Dad acknowledged my first child, my son, but never really took into account that my daughter existed. He never learned her name, never asked about her by name. I’ve never forgiven him for that.

But he beat prostate cancer and eventually I stopped seeing the point of not talking to him, and so we started a tentative rapprochement, first by mail, then over the phone, and then finally he came out to visit one day in early summer, 15 years after I’d seen him last. 

On the one hand, the visit went well: we just fell into easy conversation, found it easy and natural to be around each other. I’d had no real beef with my Dad before his divorce from my mom, before he spun off into some other orbit, and suddenly here he was, back in my orbit, and it felt natural as can be, except for one thing: I felt nothing for him. I had the muscle memory of a relationship, but when we sat having coffee on the second day and he broke down and said, “God Tom, it’s so nice seeing you and seeing your kids, I really want to be part of your lives,” all I could say in return was, “Dad, I don’t feel that much toward you any more. I don’t know if that will come back or not, but our break felt like your death and I’ve buried you in my past.” All my love for him had been burned out and I didn’t know if it could ever come back.

But I was willing to try and I kept trying: my son Conrad and I went down to visit him and his second wife, Judi, at their house in Naples once, and then Pete and I went down another time, after his finances started to fall apart but before the cancer came back. We watched an Ohio State football game in his living room and he fell asleep on the couch, happy. If we had enough time, could we have re-forged some kind of connection? I’ll never know.

Anyway, Pittsburgh.

Dad was in Pittsburgh because the cancer care center there, at UPMC, offered an experimental new therapy to blast out the pancreatic cancer that was killing him. “It knocks the shit out of me, Tom, but they think it could work,” he told me when he asked me to come. Judi’s family had pulled some strings to get him in; her cousin was a big deal lawyer in Pittsburgh.

He had been there two weeks, he told me on the phone, and would be there one week more, but if I came for a few days, he’d really like that. And then Judi got on, Judi who I never talk to. She said it would be a good idea if I came. That’s when I knew it must be serious. So I went. 

Sara didn’t come with me. She’d have come if this had been traumatic for me, but oddly, it wasn’t: the long gap in my relationship with my dad had dulled my capacity for pain. Still, he was my dad, and I wondered if we should somehow “wrap things up,” either for him or for me. I wondered if we might get a chance to reflect on his life, to come closer to reconciling. I didn’t understand my dad, what had happened to my dad, how a guy who once seemed to love his sons could become so distant and obtuse, just because he had divorced my mother. I wondered if maybe now, as he was getting near the end, he could shed some light on this giant mystery, this black hole. Why’d it go this way Dad? That’s what I wondered.

Dad was staying in an apartment near the medical center, in a place owned by Judi’s cousin. When I got there, Dad looked like hell—gaunt, his white hair straggly and limp, all the color drained from him. He’d been fighting this cancer for a year, though he’d barely mentioned it until the call when he told me he was in Pittsburgh. Prior to this it had just been “they’re running some tests” and “there are some cells we’re keeping an eye on.” But here he was, fighting cancer, and cancer was kicking his ass.

Judi was cordial to me; I was cordial to her. That was the best we could do. I didn’t exactly blame her for my estrangement from my dad—but she sure was all wound up in it. She didn’t cause Dad to go off the rails after the divorce, she was just where he landed, and I always suspect she encouraged him to act in ways that no father should ever act. Still, she wasn’t even in the picture when Dad said to me, “I just have to protect myself,” and largely withdrew from my life. For me, Judi was just the weird place Dad landed after several years of spinning away.

They set aside one whole day for me to be with Dad—agreeing it would be good for him and also good for Judi, who was worn down from caring for him. We took a couple of pictures the night I arrived, but Judi said he needed to take a nap, he got tired so easily, so I went back to my hotel. I’d be back the next day.

It was a pissy, cold late-March morning in Pittsburgh—any hopes of enjoying a spring day in the sunshine were washed away by a persistent cold drizzle. A few degrees colder and it would have been snowing. But we decided to go explore, down toward Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house, in the scenic rolling country southeast of Pittsburgh. 

I liked the idea of a road trip because those had always been good for me and Dad. We had crisscrossed the country several times together, and the long open spaces always gave us time to talk, time to go deep on stuff. Road trips were where we connected. I remembered driving down a long grade in southern Utah, me driving, the sun shining brightly over the vast open landscape, and I held my foot on the clutch and let the car glide, picking up speed. Dad said I shouldn’t do that, it wore out the clutch, and I asked why it would do that but he couldn’t explain it to me. I didn’t think it was true.

Anyway, we’d been driving a while in the freezing rain, just making small talk, but I wanted more—I wanted to see if we could close up the gap of our long estrangement, see if we could make sense of what we had been to each other and where we had gone awry.

I said, “Dad, we may not have many more times together …”

“I don’t see it that way Tom.”

“Well, Dad, I’m not saying right now, but you know, just in case, can we talk about what it means for you to go …”

“Tom, I’m going to beat this, I’m going to recover,” he said with as much energy as I’d seen from him all day.

“But Dad, what if you don’t recover …”

“I just don’t want to talk about it! I don’t want to talk about dying!”

And so we didn’t. We drove on, stepping out into the rain at Ohiopyle State Park beside the Youghiogheny River to take a short walk. But we hadn’t gone 100 yards when he got winded and tired and started to shiver, so we got back in the car and drove. He’d look at the scenery, but then he’d fall asleep. He said he was getting hungry, so we pulled into a Steak & Shake. All he wanted was a milkshake, so we both got a milkshake.

He had to be at the hospital in the morning for another treatment. I said I’d walk him in and he said no, he didn’t want me to see him in there. We hugged and he walked in with Judi. 

That was the last time I saw him. A couple months later I got a call from him, late at night, from a hospital in Fort Myers, Florida. “It looks pretty bad, Tom, there’s some internal bleeding, but I’m going into surgery and they think they can stop it.” They couldn’t. He died in the hospital that night.

Pete and I and our boys flew down to Naples for the service in the July heat, and then we drove across the state to bury him at the IJ Morris Star of David Cemetery in West Palm Beach. It was both odd and fitting to see his casket slide into place in an above-ground mausoleum, safe from the rising waters of the nearby Atlantic, and far, far from me.

Picking up a book you remember loving long ago is a weird experience … and it prompted me to read far more deeply than I have in a while, and to come to terms with my own complicated relationship to depicting emotion in my own writing. If you’re so inclined, check out the full story over on Troy’s ‘Stack:

FORD KNOWS

Why I ❤️ Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"

In the spirit of TBW❤️C—bringing you the books that reach deeply into our hearts—I’m mentioning Jeffrey Streeter and Yi Xue’s beautiful introduction to a classic of Chinese literature, The Dream of the Red Chamber. I’ve never read any Chinese novels …

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a year ago · 24 likes · 34 comments · Mr. Troy Ford and Tom Pendergast

Another fellow ‘Stacker, , author of , gave me the chance to do an advance read on his memoir, Adventures in the Radio Trade. Here’s a short review I posted to Amazon and Goodreads:

It’s rare to read a book and to find yourself so keenly aware of the audience that will cherish that book … but that’s where I found myself as I read Joe Mahoney’s engaging memoir Adventures in the Radio Trade, an account of his long career working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as a technician, a producer, a sound-effects wizard, and a manager. Those who listened to the CBC from the late 1980s through the 2000s will undoubtedly enjoy the “behind the scenes” look at the making of many of their favorite programs, and Mahoney is a terrific guide, for he possesses an amazing memory for detail as well as an affable style. You can’t help but like the way the curious, humble narrator describes speaking French with Margaret Atwood, making his first sound effects in Studio 212, or going on strike with his colleagues.

Mahoney’s recall of detail will endear him to another natural audience for this collection of tales: people who have worked in radio, or who have an intense interest in the technical details of radio production. Mahoney’s obvious love of learning new technology allows him to create interesting accounts of all the tools he learned to use over the years.

What lifts this book out of the realm of radio industry nostalgia, however, is the charming character of Mahoney himself. Talkative, informal, and continually curious, Mahoney shows that a curious and reasonably intelligent person can make it anywhere, as long as they’re willing to work hard and try new things.

After I posted this review, I found myself reflecting on why it was Joe’s memoir was so different that most of what I read, and I realized it was this: Joe Mahoney is not all caught up in his feelings. He doesn’t write about his trauma or his anxiety or his depression, and not once did he talk about his journey to wellness. He is entirely without self-pity, and that is a joy to encounter.

Can you tell I’ve read a few too many personal essays? The funny thing is, before joining Substack nearly three years ago, I didn’t read memoirs. Literary fiction, non-fiction, history, sure, but I can’t recall reading a single memoir.

All that changed when I joined Substack. Since then I’ve been fairly drowning in the junior version of the memoir, the “personal essay,” both as reader and as writer. And sometimes they’re a little much.

Sometimes it seems like a lot of the personal essays out there are responding to this actual call for submissions: “The topic is unimportant as long as you are honest to the point of being cringeworthy.” Judging by many of the personal essays I read, they should be getting a lot of submissions! Cringeworthy indeed.

Is there room for personal essays that don’t wallow in emotion—or at least explore emotions with the same skepticism that Ray Carver applied to the depiction of emotion in his stories? I’d like to think so.

Polestar—in case you haven’t been obsessively tracking the electric vehicle (EV) market for the last 10 years, in case you don’t have a detailed spreadsheet listing all the EVs you’re considering for your next car purchase, with ratings from car mags, your wife, and your son all factored into the rankings—is the former performance division of Volvo1. They’re the folks responsible for those cool cyan blue V60s you might have seen, and for the “Polestar tune” you can apply to regular old Volvos. I installed a Polestar tune on our V90 Cross Country and it never ceases to tickle me when I see the faces of the Audi or BMW drivers I beat off the line.

Polestar wowed the auto world in 2019 with its limited-production Polestar 1, then settled into producing the all-electric Polestar 2 fastback in 2020. Freed from Volvo (and now largely controlled by the Chinese giant Geely Holdings), Sweden-based Polestar revealed the Polestar 3 in 2022 and started bringing the SUV to the American market just this year (2024). The 3 is poised to make or break the brand in the American market, though they’re not waiting for the verdict: Polestars 4 and 5 are already in the works.

To woo fans and prospective drivers to their new car, Polestar organized a track day— sorry, no, a “track experience”—to show off what the Polestar 3 can do. I signed up the moment I learned of it, eager to see what an EV could do on the track. I love track days, finding it very hard to resist the chance to flog someone else’s car within an inch of its life ALL DAY LONG. But to flog an EV … I knew it would be different; I just didn’t know how.

Rain

My expectations were dampened by rain, lots of it. The day before Sara and I flew down to San Francisco, a massive storm blew into the Bay Area, leading to a rare tornado touching down in the area. Monday dawned with more rain and little prospect of it letting up.

Probably a good thing, then, that we weren’t hopping into rear-drive sports cars—as I’d done at track days hosted by BMW and Porsche. Polestar’s Swedish-designed, all-wheel-drive SUVs were fully capable of handling anything that the weather threw at us, I consoled myself.

We got our first taste of the cars on a leisurely thirty-minute drive from the lodge to the track, swapping drivers mid-way through the trip. I was immediately impressed by a few things about the car—the tasteful interior, minimalist but not austere, all swathed in shades of grey; the responsive software, all black and orange, so easy to figure out; the stereo!—but let’s be honest: it was the seats that really won me, not least because Sara has established that comfy seats are non-negotiable. The Polestar’s seats are truly first class, swathed in supple leather, heated and cooled, with multiple massage options and the ability to adjust EVERYTHING you’d want to adjust. I’ll talk about handling soon enough, and the power was there too—like it is in every EV on our list. You push the gas pedal and it feels like a giant wave rises up behind you and pushes you inexorably forward. If you haven’t driven an EV yet, you really need to give it a shot. The power (ok, the torque) is irresistible.

But all the rain had me wondering how the cars would handle the wet. We soon found out. We kicked off our track experience just like you kick off most track days, by piling into the cars and driving out into the massive Sonoma Raceway parking lot, which had been marked off with orange cones for two different exercises: a slalom course, where you weave between cones at increasing speeds, and a braking exercise, where you drive straight at a set of cones until you hit a braking point, then slam the brakes and steer around the cones, trying not to hit them. Both drills are intended to get you familiar with how the car behaves under adverse conditions. Throughout the day, we alternated between the Polestar 3 and several different variants on the Polestar 2, including the souped-up BST version.

Any concerns I had about whether we’d get to flog these EVs like I’d flogged sports cars in the past quickly dissipated. The affable Swedish test driver Thed Björk (who had recently finished the TCR World Tour as runner-up) implored us to mash the brakes like we meant it. Mash them we did, and found that these 6,000-pound behemoths danced around the cones very nimbly, thank you very much. Chris Nunn, the other lead driver, urged us to push ever faster through the slalom.

By the time we finished the morning, I think all of us were building real confidence in how hard we could push these cars. But what would it be like to get them on a real racetrack?

Before we could find that out, we had the unique pleasure of sitting down for a virtual conversation with Polestar’s Senior Chassis Development Engineer Joakim Rydholm, who called in en-route to some testing in Iceland. Rydholm explained how the torque vectoring in the 3 helped the car stay so composed when turning and other such technical stuff, but it wasn’t his technical acumen that impressed me so much as his enthusiasm for the cars Polestar is making. You got the impression that he was having the time of his life.

Out on the Track

I was tickled as hell to be at Sonoma Raceway, a track I’d never driven on before, truly one of the classic American road courses. As we went out on our tentative first lap, I plotted how I would spend the afternoon unlocking this track: figuring out where to place my tires as I climbed the series of curves up the towering hill that takes you from Turn 1 through 3; calibrating how much speed I could carry as I unwound the carousel of Turn 6; and then testing the various lines through the ess-curves. Every track is a set of problems to be solved, and I was eager to solve them.

And then we picked it up, the lead driver quickening the pace, the other drivers testing whether they could keep up. Hell yes! I was chomping at the bit for more.

But no! After just one “hot” lap, Chris came on the radio: “Okay, now let’s do a cool-down lap and get ready to exit to the pits.”

“Cool-down lap?,” I groused to my co-driver, John. “Why the hell are we on a cool-down lap? We’ve barely warmed up?”

I wanted more, dammit: I wanted to keep pushing the car round and round the circuit, kissing the curbing, pushing myself to go faster and faster with each passing lap. I wasn’t worried about the rain. I knew how to drive in the rain and it wouldn’t diminish my fun.

But turning in after just three laps? Now THAT could diminish my fun.

Luckily I’m a grown man, not a petulant child, and I had a word with myself. This was an EV track day, it was always going to be different. It had to be different. It’s just that up until now, it hadn’t been. I just needed to think about why.

Managing Electric Cars on the Track

From the moment I had signed up, I wondered how Polestar was going to manage battery life during a day at the track. Would they find time to recharge the batteries while we ate lunch? Would they swap in a second set of cars? Something had to give ... but what?

I’d seen EVs on the track before, at Laguna Seca and again at Pacific Raceways. They were fast on the straightways, not quite as fast on the corners, but when it came to using power, they were greedy pigs. After 15 or 20 minutes of hard driving they were slinking off in search of the nearest fast charger. At best, your typical EV could only manage half the driving time of a gas-powered car.

When they sent us out for just three laps at a time, the Polestar team was managing battery performance. By preventing us from going too fast for too long, they kept us from overheating and draining the batteries. In this way, we were able to enjoy multiple 3-lap sessions, all afternoon long.

And the cars did great. I never sensed any falloff in performance through the full afternoon of lapping, though to tell the truth, we simply hadn’t been allowed to push the cars as hard or for as long as I really wanted. In the end, they got a full track day out of a single charge and I got about 85% of what I had hoped for—and maybe 120% of what I deserved.

I’m such a speed junkie that I really wished I’d been able to push the cars harder on the track. But once I learned more about the battery management constraints, I understood. Honestly, if they’d told us right at the start that the staging of events was to manage battery, I might have whined a little bit less. Maybe.

I had to remind myself, this was a “track experience,” not a balls-out track day. Asking an EV to perform just like an ICE car is really missing the point.

I had to give Polestar this: they’d staged the best test drive I’ve had since the BMW track day that convinced me to buy the M2. And it wasn’t just a test drive of the cars but also of the experience of being in the Polestar ecosystem, surrounded by Polestar owners, employees, and drivers. This day wasn’t about convincing us that the Polestars were legitimate track performers, after all. It was about showing us that the Polestar 3 was a highly capable and comfortable luxury SUV that acquitted itself surprisingly well under hard driving. To that end, mission accomplished. I was persuaded.

The question remains: was I ready to buy one?

What About the Romance?

In my ideal world, I’d make a car buying decision based solely on rational considerations: the way it drives, the way the software functions, the way the seats feel, how efficient it is. (And sure, what it costs!)

But if I’m honest, my relationship with cars isn’t just pragmatic or rational. It’s also romantic, emotional. I identify with the cars I drive, and when I choose well, my cars provide me with deep emotional satisfaction and also say something about who I am.2 The aesthetics of any car look backward and forward across time. There have been cars that have satisfied me very deeply—my 1981 VW Rabbit, our 2017 Volvo V90 Cross Country—and cars that have come so very close—my 2015 Subaru WRX and my 2020 BMW M2 Competition—and yet were somehow incomplete. Every successive car I own clarifies further my ideals, and not just my ideals but those of my wife, who shares the car with me. Does it sound like I’m romantically entangled with cars? Well yeah, I guess I am.

Car makers know this about car buyers, and they want car buyers to fall in love with them. All their marketing, all those glossy ads, that slick branding: it’s a bid for love, for acceptance. Sometimes it goes terribly, disastrously wrong: see the recent re-branding video from Jaguar. It had next to nothing to say about the cars, but everything to say about who they imagined as their consumer. In my book, they got it terribly, disastrously wrong. Once, I could see myself in a Jaguar ... but not now.

In its public presentation and at this event, Polestar is courting me, seeking my love. A lot of it is working. Their heritage as the performance division of Volvo—the ultimate yoking of performance and functionality—really speaks to me (it helps that I’ve owned three Volvos over the years). I really dig Polestar’s minimalist design; the emphasis on innovation, engineering, and technology; the effort to make a comfortable luxury car that also performs well.

Beyond just the cars, there is the visual identity: the logo, the font (Unica 77, in case you wondered), the design language that appears on all their gear, from water bottles to jackets to duffel bags. When I picture myself in a new car, I can easily place myself in the milieu of the Polestar aesthetic.

And yet I’m wary, cynical. When they lean in so hard on sustainability and recyclable materials, when they introduce a car in a cube on a rocky island, it can feel like they’re trying too hard. Branding and marketing efforts can feel so manipulative. So when I arrived at my hotel to find Polestar branded cookies, a lovely orange water bottle, and a lavish coffee-table book about the brand, I was simultaneously impressed that they’d gone all out ... and wary of the marketing-team press. It’s tricky to love a brand that is trying so hard to be loved.

The branding continued throughout the experience: the hotel was gussied up with Polestar signage, and they styled the hospitality suite at Sonoma Raceway so well that it felt like Polestar’s home base. Everywhere you looked, the brand language was consistent and tasteful. And that continued right to the very end. When we left the closing dinner and returned to our room, there was a surprise parting gift: a beautiful, waterproof duffel bag, done up in Polestar’s beautiful design language.

If it had just been the swag and the utter consistency of the branding, I might have resisted. But it was the people that really did it....

From Kassie, who greeted us at the airport; to Cambria and Laura, who managed the show; to the lead drivers, Chris and Thed, who guided us around the track and laughed with us over dinner; to Joakim, who nerded out on the technology—their entire team was utterly committed to making this a great experience. They were warm, helpful, and genuinely enthusiastic about their cars.

If people this decent, this authentic, wanted to be associated with the brand, well maybe my cynicism was misplaced. Maybe this really was a car I could love.

Will the Polestar 3 be my next car? It’s too early to tell, since I’m not likely to buy until summer 2026 and I’m prolonging the evaluation process to the point of utter absurdity. It’s not lost on me that getting this absorbed in planning a future car purchase is a bit … oh, you supply the adjective. All I can tell you is I love cars.

Note: The majority of the pictures were provided to all attendees by Polestar.

Purpose

There’ve been stretches in my life when I’ve been driven by a real sense of Purpose1. Capital P purpose, the kind that carries you forward on a wave of motivation and also acts as a North Star when you’re a little lost. When I was pursuing a Ph.D. years ago, I had a Purpose. Later, when I was part of a team shaping our company into a major player in our domain, I was similarly motivated.

My greatest Purpose—and truly, my greatest achievement as a human—was raising two independent children … and they have exceeded my expectations in so many ways. This Purpose was the most complex, and the one for which I can claim the least “credit.” It was shared wholly with Sara, and it required and was utterly dependent on the participation of Conrad and Louisa, who were always going to be who they are. I call it my greatest Purpose, but in many ways I was along for the ride. Still, parenting well, parenting with intent, filled my life with meaning. I can’t take credit for the outcome, but I’m mostly pleased with how I acquitted myself along the way.

I’ve been without such a Purpose since retiring. While there’s no single passion project that I’m pursuing, I’m not sitting around watching The Price Is Right. Instead, I have what I think of as multiple purposes ... all Little P purposes. Making good food. Exercising as much as my body allows. Writing this Substack. Trying my hand at various “odd jobs” and volunteer opportunities, testing whether these might offer some lasting fuel for my yet-to-be-quenched desire for meaning (I’ll get to that).

Interestingly enough, the most meaningful activity in my life is supporting my wife Sara as she pursues her burning Capital P Purpose. When Sara and I retired, she set herself to a single goal: to become an artist capable of creating work that met her lofty standards. Not work that anyone else told her was good, but work that she thought was good. She’s been working toward that goal with a sense of commitment and an intensity that I deeply admire for three years. I don’t want to try to tell her story—I could never tell it in a way that would do justice to her efforts, and it’s her story after all. She wouldn’t tell it with words, in any case; she’d tell it with her art, viewable here. I’ve included just a couple recent drawings below to illustrate what she’s doing, but if you want to learn more, Rick Foerster just featured her in his series here:

The Way of Work

Waiting Decades to Finally Follow Your Dreams

If you’ve enjoyed The Way of Work, you can support the project by commenting, hitting the ❤️ or 🔄 below and/or sharing it with a friend…

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2 years ago · Rick Foerster

Many years ago, Sara and I faced a kind of crossroads. We both had high aspirations: we wanted more advanced education which we expected would lead us to challenging jobs. But we also wanted a family. For a time, we thought we could have both, and that’s what got us both to Purdue: I’d pursue my Ph.D., she’d get her M.B.A., and we’d find help watching the kid(s). But it only took a couple interviews with potential childcare providers to realize that we couldn’t entrust our baby to a stranger. So Sara did the most selfless thing I could imagine: she postponed her education so that she could take the lead on raising Conrad (and then Louisa) and so that I could focus my attention on the Ph.D. At some later point in our life, we promised each other, we’d prioritize her aspirations.

And then 30 years passed. Thirty really fruitful years, with Sara launching the book-packaging business that we both ran for years, then parlaying those skills into a career as an organizational change management consultant. She made it fine without the M.B.A., but she still had a burning desire to do something even more challenging. We just never knew when that chance might come up. Now we do.

For Sara to pursue the kind of Mastery she’s after now, it became obvious that she would need to step back from her share of the domestic duties that we had largely shared for most of our adult lives. Planning and shopping for meals, looking after the yard and garden, managing financial matters—all the stuff that required forethought and planning, stuff that we generally shared pretty evenly—would now fall to me.

Soon enough, the transformative power of this mutual decision became evident: she could focus all her thinking on her art, and I could approach my “domestic” duties in a spirit of service and appreciation for her that offered me a good bit of meaning. I really like taking care of the yard, and I dig thinking up, shopping for, and preparing delicious meals. I pop into her studio to tell her dinner’s ready and she has no idea that hours have passed. What I like most of all is that my actions enable Sara to pursue her dream, her Purpose. The next best thing to having a Purpose of one’s own is serving the Purpose of the love of your life.

This sounds awfully noble and self-effacing, doesn’t it? Especially coming from a selfish bastard like me. Well, before you call bullshit on me, just remember that I hate to bullshit myself, and I’ve pressure-tested my actions enough to tell you, it’s real. I’m honestly and legitimately enjoying being of service to this person I admire. It feels very purposeful, very meaningful, even if it is not quite my Purpose. Just don’t tell me I make a good wife.

Patience

If I can think of one thing I’ve learned this year, it’s patience. I didn’t seek patience out, mind you. It found me and bent me to its will. I may have made the choice to get my knee and then my hip replaced in the span of five months, but little did I know the recovery process would teach me some pretty profound lessons, lessons that are already paying dividends in other parts of my life.

It’s not like I wasn’t warned that these surgeries would be pretty traumatic. You can’t sugar coat slicing open your leg, sawing off the bottom of one leg bone and the top of another, hammering metal and plastic parts into place, and then sewing you back together. But I figured I’d handle my recovery like I handle everything: full speed ahead, do more than the doctor advises, and it will all work out fine.

My body had different ideas.

I’m not saying my recoveries have gone badly. They haven’t. I’m hiking quite regularly and will be heading to Patagonia in January for a major bucket-list trip. But good lord, has it been slower and more painful and difficult than I imagined. More incremental. On most days, I’ve had to explain to myself that I am in fact better today than I was a week ago, and that the general trajectory is upward. The only answer to my incessant demand that I get better NOW is “patience.” Patiently, my body has forced me to allow healing to happen at its own pace. Slowly, I’ve learned to relax, not push so hard.

I find myself applying this simple quality, patience, to other parts of my life with good effect. I’ve started working with a group of six middle-school kids in something we call “Book Club.” It’s a volunteer thing, sponsored by the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization. It being “Book Club,” I assumed we’d read a bunch of books and spend each weekly session dissecting the books. Well slow down, Charlie. It’s not like these kids are just going to open up and start discussing books. They’re 13 years old! One day we just talked about the different languages they spoke at home. Last week we made braided bookmarks—Aryana taught me how to braid—and talked about books that had been made into movies. Little by little, I think they’re coming to trust that I am who I seem to be. I’m slowly coming to realize that it won’t matter how many books we read, as long as these kids build more confidence in talking to adults and in thinking about the kinds of problems they’ll have to solve in the years ahead. I like these kids a lot.

Now that I’ve gotten through the hardest part of my joint-replacement recoveries, I’ve got the mental space to focus on getting my weight into a more optimal range. I’m doing it the only way I know how: via the tracking of key data points (daily weight, protein, carbs), then studying the results over time. My new friend, Patience, helps me see that a single day doesn’t matter, it’s the trajectory, the direction of the arrow. What choice do I have, really, but to be patient? When I was a young man, I could drop 10 pounds in 2 weeks no problem ... but my body doesn’t work like that any more. And that’s okay. I’ve got time.

Problem-Solving

These big surgeries constrained my aspirations for experimenting with different kinds of work this year, so I stuck with my two “side gigs” from the previous year: running the booth for the Snohomish Bakery at the Issaquah Farmers Market every Saturday, May through September, and then working for Stocker Farms during the Fall Festival, six weeks ending at Halloween. The details of these gigs don’t matter much, but I’m trying to draw lessons from them as I tune my quest for more meaningful engagements in the future.

Here’s one thing I know for sure: It’s next to impossible to find something mentally challenging and interesting when you also require that it not ask too much of you in terms of time or commitment. Duh, right? I’m trying to have it both ways, and I can see that’s not going to work, at least not very easily. I know I don’t want the demands of a full-time job, a job where I could be wholly committed to making it a success. I don’t want work to ask so much of me, because I treasure the ability to fart around and do what I please. But I also know this: I want my work to ask more of me than following a recipe for making vast qualities of fudge, or driving a tractor that pulls kids round and round. If this last stint at Stocker Farms taught me anything, it’s that I need some kind of mental challenge, or some sense that what I’m doing involves skill or acumen, for me to find it worthwhile.

What I want is what I’ve always wanted: interesting problems to solve. It’s just so much harder to find these problems when I place these other constraints on them. Oddly enough, running the market stand is a fairly decent fit: it’s highly social, which I find very enjoyable, but the essential nut to crack is estimating how much “product” to bring on any given day. We track when different items sell out, the weather, the events in the surrounding area, and then try to be sure to bring the right product mix every time. Now that’s a fairly interesting problem.

Writing a Substack newsletter remains the most satisfying thing I’ve done so far. Expressing myself in writing has always been the most interesting problem I could solve, and the fact that it comes along with interactions with a fine group of readers is icing on the cake.

Planning

Sara and I were hiking up the La Luz trail in the Sandia mountains east of Albuquerque the other day when we came to a junction in the trail. Directly in front of us was a sign naming the trails that intersected … but the sign was without arrows! “How weird,” we mused. “How are we supposed to know which trail to follow?” We used our best judgment and our Gaia map and took the left fork; it was the correct one.

An hour or so later, on our way down, we came to the same intersection and there to our right, plain as day, was a metal sign clearly pointing out which trail had led which way! We had stood right next to it and totally missed it. What the hell had we been thinking?, we asked ourselves.

This kind of thing happens to we humans all the time, of course. We’re so focused on doing or thinking or looking one way that we completely miss the signs in front of us. You’ve undoubtedly seen the video that asks you to pay attention to people passing a ball and find that you don’t notice that a man in a gorilla suit has run through the middle of their game. That’s what I’m talking about.

There was a period during my last year of retirement when I was convinced worried that I was missing the gorilla.

This “what if I missed something” attitude was all about money. “What if we didn’t account for something, something very expensive?,” I wondered. “What if we don’t really have enough money to make it for the long haul?” For a time, this made me really tight with money. I insisted we only go to cheaper restaurants. Instead of taking the kids out to dinner, I insisted on cooking at home. I determined to make my worn out shoes last a little longer.

I call it my miser period.

And all the while, I kept an eye on our financial plan and it always looked JUST FINE. So we’d get on a call with our financial advisor and we’d ask, “What are we missing? Is there something—health care, taxes, anything—that we haven’t accounted for?” And Naomi would assure us that we’d planned for everything she knew how to plan for, that we were in good shape.

Of course we were! If I think of one thing that made early retirement possible for Sara and I, it was our planning. For years before we pulled the trigger on retirement, we studied our finances carefully, weighing how long we expected to live against how much money we needed and how much money we wanted, and we also carefully weighed how we valued time versus money. Between the financial roadmap and our labyrinthine budgeting spreadsheets, we planned our escape meticulously.

Eventually, I’ve come to accept that we had planned well, and that I could relax and “live the plan”—which meant I didn’t need to worry so much about money. Still, looking past that sign in the mountains, I wonder if there’s something lurking in plain sight that I’ve not planned for? It seems to me that every year that our plan plays out as intended, I’ll be more comfortable. But I’m still looking out for the gorilla ...

Status

In the first year or so of my retirement, I was painfully aware of how my status in the world had changed. And then, in the last year, my awareness of status evaporated entirely. It was as if I had once believed in God and then suddenly ceased to hold that belief at all. How could I ever concern myself with a silly illusion like status?

How do I know that status no longer mattered to me? Well, I bought a Miata!

Once I had scoffed at Miatas: they were “lady cars,” vaguely effeminate, and I was a man’s man. A real man wouldn’t drive a Miata; he’d drive a high horsepower man’s car. Look, I’m not trying to defend this attitude, just report it. In fact, I find it kind of embarrassing, so much so that I probably shouldn’t even share it, but I’ve made a compact with myself and with you that I’m going to report the harsh truth, even if it makes me look like a … well, you supply the label.

I missed having fun in a car, and one day when we were heading to the gym in our Volvo EV I saw this cute little maroon Miata parked alongside the road and said to Sara, “I gotta look.” Two hours later, after contacting the owner and taking a test drive, I was leaving my bank with a wad of cash to buy my first convertible.

I told my friends and their reactions were as I’d expect. Scott calls it my “vagmobile” and my son asked how I can stand a car that wears such a daffy grin.

But Sara and I found a back way to the gym along some curvy country and we drive with the top down and feel the air cool as we dip into the valleys and smell the manure as we pass a horse farm. The world feels closer in the Miata, the sun warm on our shoulders. Sure, the car is small and it’s no fun to go top-down on a busy freeway, but what do we care? We take the back roads every chance we can. It didn’t take long for both of us to fall in love with the car, and honestly, I don’t give a damn what anybody else thinks about the car. I like it.

Status is only real if you care what other people think about you, if you need to show others that you’re a big deal because of the clothes you wear or the car you drive. But if you let go of those cares, you can truly get in touch what matters most to you.

I’m sure there are people who live their whole lives not caring about status, about what other people think of them. I’m coming to it late … but I’m sure glad to be here.

As always, I’d love to here the thoughts of those who are at different points on the path. And I’m always happy for you to share my writing with someone who might like it.

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