PLaud

07:39. I’m in my lounge chair drinking black coffee, the morning still soft around the edges.

For my morning read today, I’ve been revisiting Hunter S. Thompson, starting with the book that began my literary love affair with his work: Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie.

There’s something about Hunter that still gets under my skin in the best possible way. He doesn’t simply report the story. He enters it. He becomes part of the event he’s describing. He’s not pretending to stand outside the madness with clean hands and a neutral expression. He is in the room, at the bar, in the campaign bus, and in the hotel lobby at 3 a.m., feeling the paranoia, the electricity, the absurdity, the rot, the strange comedy of American public life.

That’s what has always drawn me to first-person nonfiction. I like writing where the writer is in the story. Not as some inflated main character, but as a lens. A body. A nervous system. A witness with fingerprints.

It’s why I admire Hunter. It’s why I’ve always loved literary travel writing, diaries, notebooks, memoirs, and blogs. I like seeing the world through other people’s eyes, especially when those eyes are alert, damaged, amused, haunted, hungry, and alive.

Maybe that’s the deeper pull. I don’t just want information about the world. I want contact. I want the felt sense of being there. I want to know what the dust smelled like, what the coffee tasted like, what the light was doing on the wall, and what strange little thought passed through the writer’s mind while everyone else was looking at the obvious thing.

And beneath that, if I’m honest, is my own old desire: to be a participant in life, not merely a watcher from the sidelines.

I have to confess, I’ve been on the bench for a while (probably since Covid).

Not completely. I still walk. I still notice things. I still make my little field reports when I’m out and about. But I’m certainly not out in the world in the way I was when I was younger. Back then, being outside was not a lifestyle choice or some wellness prescription. It was the default condition of being alive. Nature was not a retreat from life. It was life. I went further afield. I climbed new mountains. I wandered through new bits of countryside. I chased the map outward.

I blame the internet.

Of course, they say a poor craftsman blames his tools, and they’re probably right. The internet didn’t chain me to the chair. I walked willingly into the glowing cave.

But as someone who gets intoxicated by knowledge-seeking, the internet is a particularly dangerous drug. It gives me exactly the thing I have always craved: endless corridors of thought, endless doors, endless shelves.

As a teenager, I used to wander the library stacks for hours. No subject was off limits. Philosophy, science, art, mythology, psychology, history, music, strange technical manuals, books with titles I barely understood. I loved the sheer possibility of it all. I’d leave with stacks of books, as if I were smuggling worlds under my arm.

So of course the internet became both a blessing and a curse.

Now I can explore the world without leaving my chair. I can roam through archives, maps, lectures, essays, documentaries, old interviews, obscure forums, digital museums, scanned manuscripts, and now, with AI, I have something like a portable Library of Alexandria sitting at my fingertips, awake whenever I call.

It’s astonishing.

It’s also a trap.

Because if you’re wired the way I’m wired, the search itself becomes the journey. You can spend the whole morning reading about mountains and never feel wind on your face. You can watch ten videos about someone else walking through a forest and never put on your boots. You can collect knowledge about aliveness while slowly becoming less alive.

That’s the part I’m trying to reckon with.

My Wisdom Walks are one way I force myself away from the screens. They get me out of the chair and back outside, mud, birdsong, breath, distance, and bodily time. But even there, I notice the limits I’ve allowed to creep in. Most of these walks are local. Useful, yes. Grounding, yes. But not quite the same as the old impulse to go further, to find a new ridge, a new stretch of river, a new patch of countryside where the map opens.

Back in the day, I tried to live by the North Face ethos: never stop exploring.

And there was another war cry too, one I picked up from outdoor culture and carried like a small personal commandment:

Get outside. Stay outside.

That phrase still has charge for me. It feels less like advice and more like a spell I forgot I knew.

Lately, I’ve been trying to rebuild my life around that old rhythm. I’ve created a mobile workflow: smaller cameras, a portable podcast setup, the iPad, or sometimes just the phone. The theory is simple enough: everything I can do at a desk, I can do outside.

In theory, this is beautiful. The barefoot philosopher’s office is wherever he can sit, walk, speak, photograph, think, and write. A bench. A woodland edge. The back of the car with the boot open. A picnic table. A patch of grass. A café after a long walk.

But then comes the catch.

WiFi.

So much of my life and work depends on having a decent internet connection. Uploading, sharing, checking, filing, syncing, posting, researching, responding, confirming. The whole apparatus of modern work hums invisibly behind the scenes, and I’ve let that hum dictate how far and how often I roam.

It’s ridiculous, really. I know it is.

Yesterday, while roaming Wappenbury Wood, I found myself running up against this exact absurdity. I had paid for two hours of parking. I wanted to extend my time in the woods, but I couldn’t get a connection, so I couldn’t extend my parking through the RingGo app. There I was, surrounded by trees, wanting to remain in the place, and being tugged back by a parking meter I couldn’t speak to because the little rectangle in my hand couldn’t find a signal.

First-world problems, I know.

But also a sign.

Some might say ‘good’. If you’re outside, be outside.

And part of me agrees. Deeply. There’s wisdom in not turning every walk into a production. There was a time when I lost my way with that too. I spent more time looking at the world through a device than experiencing the place through my own eyes. I’d be composing the post before I’d even received the moment. I’d be thinking about the share while the living thing was still happening in front of me.

Thankfully, I’ve mostly kicked that habit.

I don’t bother processing photos while I’m out. I don’t feel the need to livestream the experience. I’m learning to let the walk be the walk. The camera comes out when it needs to. The note gets captured via my Plaud voice-note device. But I’m no longer trying to turn every outing into a broadcast.

That feels like progress.

But there’s another habit underneath it, and maybe this one is harder to break: the 9-to-5 mindset. The productivity culture mindset. The idea that if I’m away from the desk, I’m somehow not working. The idea that roaming, wandering, reading under trees, following curiosity, and letting the body move through the landscape are somehow indulgences rather than part of the work itself.

And this is where I need to remember what I actually believe.

Being outside is my work.

Or at least it is part of the working condition I’ve spent years trying to build my life around.

I’m not trying to become more efficient at sitting under artificial light and moving tasks from one column to another. I’m trying to build a life where thinking, walking, writing, noticing, reading, photographing, speaking, and making are woven together. A life where work is not a cage I return to after being alive, but a form of aliveness itself.

That doesn’t mean abandoning responsibility. It doesn’t mean pretending money, deadlines, clients, admin, and logistics don’t exist. The parking app still wants paying. The email still needs answering. The file still needs sending.

But it does mean the old industrial rhythm cannot be the master rhythm.

There is another rhythm available.

Harold Jarche’s PKM model comes to mind here: seek, sense, share.

I’ve always liked the simplicity of that. It gives shape without becoming a cage.

Seek: go out, read, wander, notice, collect, and encounter.

Sense: sit with what has been gathered, make meaning, connect it to the living archive, let the pattern reveal itself.

Share: publish, speak, teach, post, make the field note public, and offer the insight back to the commons.

Maybe the trick is to stop trying to do all three at once.

When I’m outside, perhaps I’m mostly in seek mode. I’m gathering. Walking. Looking. Letting the place work on me. Letting the body become an instrument again. I don’t need to process everything on the spot. I don’t need to share immediately. I don’t need to prove the walk was productive by turning it into output before I’ve even left the woods.

Then, later, somewhere with coffee and a signal, I can sense and share.

This might be the rhythm I’m looking for.

Not desk versus outdoors.

Not internet versus nature.

Not productivity versus wandering.

But phases. Movements. Breath.

Inhale: go out.

Hold: notice what the world is saying.

Exhale: write, speak, share.

The internet then becomes part of the cycle rather than the whole ecosystem. AI becomes a thinking companion, not a substitute for experience. The archive becomes a living field, not a bunker. The phone becomes a tool, not the eye I see through.

And the walk becomes what it has always wanted to be: a method.

The barefoot philosopher does not need to reject the digital world. That would be too simple, and frankly, false. My life is tangled with the web. My work is made of language, links, fragments, feeds, archives, posts, and conversations across distance. I am a child of the library and the internet. I don’t want to give that up.

But I do need to renegotiate the terms.

The chair is good. The coffee is good. The screen is useful. The infinite library is a miracle.

But the world is not inside the machine.

The world is outside, being rained on. It’s in the mud underfoot, the old trees at Wappenbury, the cold air in the lungs, the hill not yet climbed, the lane not yet followed, the bird I can’t name calling from somewhere beyond the path.

Hunter got into the story.

That’s what I’m hearing this morning.

Not just read about the madness. Enter the room.

Not just study life. Participate.

Not just watch other people’s field reports from the glowing cave. Make my own.

Get outside. Stay outside.

Seek. Sense. Share.

Find the rhythm again. The barefoot philosopher’s rhythm.