Spent a few days in the mountains.

Returned yesterday from the annual trip to stay in the mountains. Nothing special, just tent camping, sometimes in wilderness area, sometimes in Forest Service campgrounds. This year it was the latter. I know, in 2025 this is weirdly lower-middle class, as in anyone with any taste avoids an actual campground like the plague and instead ventures out on their own Kon-Tiki or climbs Everest or something else that’s Insta-ready (it increasingly seems to me that aging is also a way of falling like a rock down through the class strata, as the older tastes are the less likely they are to be in fashion, and the less they are in fashion, the more they mark you as gauche, but I digress)…

But no, I just take my kids and go into the forest and disconnect for a few days.

— § —

Here’s the thing: you have to be careful not to do this too long. Just a few days is already almost too much.

Because the more time you spend up there, at altitude, without mobile service and without co-workers to nurse along, the more you start to think that the whole world is backward and none of the things you spend so much of your time on mean anything at all, and also the more you start to ask yourself questions like “Was Kkaczynski right?” and “What would happen if I just disappeared one day and never came back?”

And these are the sorts of questions you can’t afford to ask yourself because your having a microwave oven and a mobile phone depends on not asking them, and because having custody of your kids and your own freedom of movement depends on your being able to prove you have a microwave oven and a mobile phone and some minimal level of debt that will last for at least years and that you nonetheless pay toward regularly, demonstrating both that you are a slave (citizen requirement one) and that you are a productive slave (citizen requirement two).

Listen to me.

This is why I say you can’t stay up there too long. Or at least I can’t stay up there too long.

Because you lose the ability to lie to yourself, and without that ability, you quickly find yourself in crisis.