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Hey errybody, This letter’s a bit late! I landed back in Phoenix last night after five days between Denver and the Rockies installing a sauna for the first client of my buddy and I’s soon-to-start sauna business. I’ve passed through such contrasting worlds lately. The simple, slow pace of a small beach town in tropical Ecuador this December sits in harsh juxtaposition to the techno-mechanized rush of Phoenix and Denver this January. Our frustrated freeways, material richness mixed with time poverty, and increasingly ear-budded citizenry have me wondering about where we’re going and what’s driving us there. Whenever I return to the USA, I’m struck by the might of our technology, wealth, and innovative culture — and how misguided these tectonic forces are. Dodge Chargers stuck in traffic rev huge hemi engines, lonely people swipe screens for love and connection on dating apps and social media, and IV clinic patrons pay $200 a week for vitamin IV drips while neglecting the basic tenets of health. Industry here generates so much financial wealth, and confusion and hypocrisy. Visiting “poor countries,” I often wonder why people generally seem a bit happier and more connected to each other and the world than people back home. One reason is that living in a “rich country” like the United States is simply more confusing. People in “poor countries” getting by on the bare necessities have less between them and the world, confounding their experience. In “rich countries” we have so many things, influences, and options. Industry provides these extras. And industry’s job is to convince us we need that Dodge Charger with a hemi, another scroll through an app, or that god damn $200 a week vitamin IV drip — regardless of its goodness for us. Every time I return to the United States, I see industry’s influence all over, the economic engine of our country (yes) building wealth, but also confounding, confusing, and causing all sorts of unnecessary suffering. It is a gift to live in a “rich country” and I am not here to fight industry, I just don’t buy into it. I don’t buy into it because the basics are better than what they’re trying to sell us. The basics aren’t hollow and don’t confound or confuse. The basics nourish, the basics ring true. Like a young Flea, my vision of an ideal life still involves running around outside half naked and shoeless. I once wrote this great little article entitled, I Strive to Be Cheap, Sensitive, and Naked to the World, and coming back from a month in a little Ecuadorian beach town to our techno-mechanized cities with everyone rushing about, ordering food and each other on apps, and feeling isolated wearing headphones, it feels more apt than ever. I have no plans of leaving or anything. I’m just gonna continue to be the weirdo walking home from the airport, drinking tea on the roof, and running around half naked breathing it all in deep. During that great Power of Myth PBS interview series, Joseph Campbell said: “This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it? It doesn’t help to try to change it [the system] to accord with your system of thought. The momentum of history behind it is too great for anything really significant to evolve from that kind of action. The thing to do is learn to live in your period of history as a human being.” Food for thought from your out-and-about brother! With love & stoke, Ethan P.S. Ben Howard is a musical genius and Days of Lantana is my favorite song by far right now. Give it a play, and may it grace your day or night.
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