Depth: The Great Novelty.
On the Titans and Tartarus.
“I’ve been feeling something brisk on the air lately,
It smells oddly like depth.
At first I thought I was crazy,
Then I noticed strangers breathing deeper as well.”
~ Evan Bourcier
As the tales of hauntings have oft reminded us, it’s a strange thing to feel the presence of absence. I am very grateful to have had many incredible experiences with connection in life, but for the last few years I had felt something was wrong. It wasn’t obvious or explicit, but it was still leaving an ache deep in my marrow.
Thankfully I’ve found something we can actually do about this absence - but first we need to admit what’s missing. My gut says connection and vitalization.
Let’s briefly considering the opposites. Disconnection and Devitalization. Two. Harsh. Words.
I can’t think of anyone who needs more of those things in their life. But still, somehow we keep ending up here, disconnected and devitalized, lonely and exhausted, lost and confused. Many will say that “they” did it to us, but after watching closely for a long time… I’m pretty confident we’re doing it to ourselves.
Think back for a moment to a time in your life when you felt connected, loved, appreciated, welcome, and fully alive around other people. No seriously, close your eyes and think about it. I’ll wait.
When you’ve got a memory, let me know what it is in the comments.
If nothing is coming up for you - I’m sorry. Let’s take a moment to acknowledge that pain before moving on. Breathe into that emptiness. Accept it fully. Let out a tear, hurl out a scream, put your hand on your heart, whatever feels appropriate to acknowledge that pain. I’ve been there many times. It fucking sucks. The important part is acknowledging that it’s real.
“You cannot heal what you cannot acknowledge.”
- Richard Rohr
On Connection:
When I think of the moments I’ve felt most connected, I find myself brought back to game nights, band practices, gym competitions, improv lessons, watching the stars on the beach, movie nights where I fell asleep holding someone I love, and my greatest underdog victories.
Beyond that, I’m reminded of the moments surrounding those moments. The tradition of Wednesday night happy hour at Chicago Sam’s with the Romeo Athletics family after we all doubled up on Crossfit Workouts. That time we all walked to the park and spontaneously decided to play HORSE, and ended up carrying Leighton like a king. Carpooling to a commercial shoot in Boston - at 4 am in total silence.
What do these things have in common? I’d say other people, vulnerability, safety, and play.
Oddly enough, those often feel exactly like what we’re actively erasing from our lives… Replaced by artificial intelligence, social media highlight reels, a constant searching for “the right way”, and consequently, a large degree of existential unsafety.
There is another form of vital connection, which comes from time spent creating great experiences for others.
For me, this has looked like mornings spent setting up Creative workshops for aspiring artists, afternoons spent coming up with with music set-lists for a high school Summer Camp, and late nights editing documentaries like On Choosing Violence or In the Arena to shed light on the realities of living the challenges in your life.
I’m feeling a bit of that connection right now - because I know you’re reading this. Not right now as I’m hitting the keys… but some day you’ll be reading, and for you it’ll be right now. That’s magic.
On Instrumentalization:
We’re going to go back for Vitalization, but first I want to address something quite important about the role of connection in creation - it requires a certain kind of selfishness.
“The audience comes last. I believe that. I'm not making it for them. I'm making it for me. And it turns out that when you make something truly for yourself, you're doing the best thing you possibly can for the audience.”
- Rick Rubin
This confuses many people, and honestly I’m not sure if you can get out of that confusion without experiencing this dynamic first hand - but I’m gonna give it a rip anyway.
Imagine you’re on your deathbed when you receive a love letter from someone you care deeply about.
Would you prefer them to write what they think you want to hear, or what they actually deeply feel about you?
I’ve personally learned to write what I really feel. Because much like my odds of guessing your connected memories, my odds of guessing what you want to hear are incredibly low. You might hate gym competitions and Call of Duty. Somehow though, when I share honestly and earnestly we’re still able to connect.
I just spent a week with my 5 younger siblings for the first time in two years. It was so special, and saying goodbye was so very sad. Yesterday my wife and dog and moved out of the home we’ve lived in for 7+ years.
These are very specific circumstances which I doubt you have personally experienced, but we’re able to connect through them because the most personal things in life are the most universal. Success, loss, surprise, confusion, excitement, affection…
The specifics don’t matter, but at the same time they do. If I start to get too wishy-washy and speak non-specifically, the connection fades into another ChatGPT word-salad.
“I had a tough childhood” is something most of us can relate to on some level, but it leads to a different level of connection than a shared experience with the spanking culture of the 90s. I remember friends going into the back yard to pick the switch they got hit with. I remember pulling my pants down for the wooden spoon. I remember being told this was somehow for my own good - a part of God’s plan.
Best case scenario, we now have a shared connection point to explore.
Worst case scenario, you still get a deeper sense of me.
If I desire connection, I need to take the risk of exposing myself.
If I desire deep connection, I need to expose the deepest parts of myself.
This begins with exposing them to myself. Acknowledging them, as we mentioned above. After that comes the question of whether we want to share this with others, which is where it gets tricky.
At the end of the day, connection requires others.
That doesn’t exactly mean that you’re sharing it FOR THEM, or to get anything OUT OF them. But without them, there’s nothing to share. There’s no connection to be made.
The connection is dependent upon the risk I took by putting myself out there, not knowing 100% if it was going to land or not.
The minute I’m certain of the outcome, we’re back in the realm of platitudes, small talk, and hallmark cards. It looks like love, but it tastes like plastic.
That gets us back to instrumentalization.
“Instrumentalization generally refers to the act of using something as a tool or means to achieve a desired outcome, often at the expense of its intrinsic value or inherent purpose.”
I’m going to abstain from the deep urge to dive into the philosophy of inherent purpose and stick to the practical human level here.
When everything is a means to an end, you create the illusion of continual motion without going anywhere meaningful at all. Your job becomes an annoyance used to generate money. Your money becomes a tool used to generate attention. Attention becomes a tool used to generate a new job… Your friends become tools, your family becomes burdens, your time becomes a waste unless it’s driving statistically relevant outcomes… until all of life slowly becomes a dead husk - a purposeless perpetual motion machine.
But there is another way.
“We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”
- Richard Rohr
On Vitalization:
Living beings have vitality. Said simply, the less vitality you possess, the less alive you are.
Vitality enters us through the breath, and it is essential for our time on this planet. The minute we stop breathing, our souls fly north for the winter.
Vitality invokes expression, motion, their shared manifestation e-motion, and all of the other wonderful aspects of embodied being.
Vitality is the opposite of a cold mechanistic world - or a cold stiff body. Nature is vital in its essence. It is a a beautiful manifestation of dynamic inter-dependent organisms all experiencing life concurrently, all living and breathing and interacting at various levels. Every organism is unique, has its own personality and expression, and nature has no intentions of making things the same.
I look at our businesses - carbon copy cloned minimalist brands.
I look at the way we treat our employees - like carbon copy cloned robots.
I look at the way we talk about social media - like an an abstract attention flywheel, not the home of billions of real human beings with real lives.
I look at the way we do everything… and I feel the life getting squeezed right out.
This is problematic because life feeds off of life - just look at our bodies. Without vitalized (actually alive) food, our bodies atrophy. We run from this fact with our latest lab-grown alternatives, and in the process have created one of the most disease ridden countries in the world… For what? The illusion of safety and progress?
Our instrumentalization has lead to devitalization, and it’s hard to be connected when you’re not even viewed as a real person - you’re just a stat.
“We must look at ourselves differently. We are freer than we think. We haven't begun to live yet. The man whose light has come on in his head, in his dormant sun, can never be kept down or defeated. We can redream this world and make the dream real. Human beings are gods hidden from ourselves.”
― Ben Okri, The Famished Road
On the Road Home:
This newsletter is much less of a scientific study and much more of a napkin sketch pointing you back to the treasure you’ve forgotten.
I’m not here to tell you what to do, I’m just here to remind us that there is another way. When you get on the wrong train, the trick is to get off swiftly, otherwise the journey back takes twice as long. If there are things from this great experiment which are serving you, take them forward. If they are not, have no fear in burning them to the ground. I for one see no future in an automated mechanistic work, and will continue to pursue connection and vitality.
This is the path of depth. The path of presence. The path of facing the titans we’ve locked up in tartarus for the sake of making things “simple”. It’s a brave path, and not an easy one… but I believe it’s a challenge worth facing.
Depth Over Dopamine,
Long Live the Dream.