Life should be an adventure. But it doesn’t feel that way. We live in an attention-economy, where every component of our life is specifically engineered to capture our attention and energy. There are two truly non-renewable resources in this world, and one of them is time (the other is land). There is no way that you can take back the twenty minutes of your day that you spent scrolling on your phone before you get out of bed, or the two hours you spend deciding what to watch on TV after work.
I live in this attention-economy, and I am fully aware that I am a cog in this machine. This does not stop me from noticing and working against the mindless doom-scrolling that modernity has turned into.
I went camping two weekends in a row, it was an excellent time. Two days of the week that I could spend truly away from my normal life. I spent hours playing a board game with one of my closest friends. Tak, for those that aren’t initiated, is a game from the Kingkiller Chronicles. I went with two friends the first time, N and W for discretion. W introduced me and N to Tak after somewhere between six and eight beers (God Bless America). I was significantly more intoxicated than N (whom is twice my size).
The game rules are simple. The game is played on a grid of squares, each player has a set of pieces, black or white. The pieces are rounded but can be stood up on a flat side. You can lay them flat or erected. A flat piece is a road, the erected piece is a wall. The goal of the game is to build roads out from one side of the board to the other. You can move the pieces, stack them on top of other pieces (roads cannot stack ontop of walls), and un-stack them.
It’s a novel game that has a staggering number of permutations to the board, and can take hours. The game I played with N did take hours. I beat him on a cheap move, but a win is a win.
We joked as we were playing that we were two Khans on the plains of China coming together to participate in a ritual game that would decide the fates of our territories.
It’s somewhat ridiculous when I say it outloud, but I really enjoyed the trip, and found myself not wanting to return back to the civilized world. The paved concrete world. The world where I live in an apartment with a bunch of college students that scream and fight in the middle of the night. I don’t think this is the way that I was meant to live. Something inside me rages against this. I’d like to go on more adventures like that. It’s funny to call that an adventure, when it’s more of a vacation, but to my civilized mind, this is an adventure. To be outside of cell-phone service, to live only on the food that we brought, and have to cook it ourselves.
Life doesn’t have to be gray. It can be beautiful.
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