When I read a story like this, I am so grateful to have been raised in the 60’s. I don’t know the addictive pull of technology but it sounds dreadful. I’ve read enough articles on Readup to believe it’s a real problem. It’s probably good to take breaks to realize the difference of not being tethered. The physical demand he chose may imprint his experience more fully. The 15 minute sound meditation that he created while walking is perhaps a great device for when this author returns to his normal life.

Wow. Inspiring. The writing and the adventure. Beautiful. 10.

Uncanny resemblance to my pre-COVID adventures.

I have configured servers, written code, built web pages, helped design products used by millions of people. I am firmly in the camp that believes technology is generally bending the world in a positive direction. Yet, for me, Twitter foments neurosis, Facebook sadness, Google News a sense of foreboding. Instagram turns me covetous. All of them make me want to do it—whatever “it” may be—for the likes, the comments. I can’t help but feel that I am the worst version of myself, being performative on a very short, very depressing timeline. A timeline of seconds.

Around 10 days in, after the skin had peeled off my pinkie toes and my shoulders started to heal and accept their fate, I found that my general musculature acclimated to the daily grind. Walking shifted from a laborious act of biomechanics, to something that simply happened. This sounds crazy, but it was as if walking became part of my autonomic nervous system, like breathing. With stronger leg and gluteus muscles, the world felt like an extremely high resolution simulation, and I was merely a floating consciousness, bobbing between rice paddies and up and down mountains saying hello to anything that moved. Everything still hurt at the end of the day, but the movement was effortless, and sometimes I found myself yelping with joy, alone in the woods, at the beauty and smoothness of it all. It was around this time that the information urge faded.