5:15 am

Man this city has grown. It is an odd place. There are limits on how tall you can build to preserve the views so it is nothing but sprawling neighborhoods. Growing up the population was around 280,000 which may seem like a lot but it didn’t feel that way. The town always felt small, or at least it felt like there was never anything to do.

This was before computers so entertainment was tough to come by. Once the sun went down, options for a restless teenager dwindled to near zero. It didn’t help that I was poor as fuck. The arcade cost money, bowling cost money, movies cost money, the diner cost money, and none of my friends were so flush with cash that they could pay for my broke ass.

What little money I had went into my car and buying music. My friends weren’t much different. Instead of paying for entertainment, my friends and I spent a lot of time just driving around wishing we could find something to do. Occasionally we could score some alcohol, but given there wasn’t anywhere to drink it we would wander off into the rock outcroppings and bluffs speckled through the town.

It was a throwback to my youth. I spent a good deal of time trying to explore the world out of the prying eyes of adults. There is something deeply human about it. It seems kids are prone to climbing things, trying to reach the top, trying to be the first one, the highest one, the fastest one. Not so much competition but bragging rights.

Most of those adventures were done on a whim. We would walk along stream banks and use deer trails. We would carve our way through to where we wanted to go in tennis shoes, and climb huge boulders in shorts and tank tops. We didn’t worry about sunscreen, or hydration, or even wildlife encounters. We just explored and talked and kept ourselves from doing anything obviously dangerous.

Eventually I moved away and my outdoor adventures waned. When I had kids I was once again broke and needing to entertain them, so nature hikes re-entered the fold. I found myself back at the streams edge, teaching toddlers how to find their footing and plan a path where one didn’t exist. The difference was, I was now carrying snacks and hydration.

At some point the general public wasn’t trusted to be in nature responsibly so the government stepped in. They created paths with signs telling folks to remain in their designated area. Nature was tamed, and exploration was limited. Fines were introduced, and the wilds were preserved and protected from assholes.

I don’t know when I first noticed it, but I began to see people on the trails who appeared to be taking themselves very serious. Here I was “hiking” the path in my flipflops with two rugrats in whatever gear they decided was their favorite that day. We were encountering people using poles and hydration bladders, wearing $200 hiking shoes and $100 breathable fashion jackets.

These people were walking on near pavement with $1000 of REI swag on, and I couldn’t get my head around it. Was this some sort of outdoorsman peacocking exercise, or did they really feel like it was necessary for survival? Did they not understand that humans had been crawling around the world for hundreds of thousands of years without some ultralight newfangled wicking technology with extra sprinkles?

If my kids can toddle their way through, I am sure an adult can manage without a mortgage payments worth of branded outdoor gear.

A sign of the times I suppose. Somewhere along the line humans went from needing food, water, and shelter to survive, to an entire hierarchy designed by Maslow. Survival grew from merely keeping this meat vehicle moving to finding things to caress our egos. People began to believe that it wasn’t just about surviving but thriving.

The problem is, with every new advancement, what is considered “need” shifts. Needing water to drink becomes needing water to wash your shiny SUV. Needing food becomes needing endless variety and enough provisions to withstand the apocalypse. Needing shelter becomes needing a storage unit to manage the metric tons of useless crap you don’t have the heart to get rid of.

Old Maslow had no idea. He couldn’t predict back in the 1940’s that needs would include wifi. Modern life is desperate for dopamine and if watching people in any waiting room anywhere is any indication, staring at a screen is part of the human condition. People NEED that shit. They may not cut off an appendage to get it, but if that was the choice they would consider it.

The pyramid is upside down. People are letting their minds and bodies degrade in favor of a nutritionless stream of digital heroin. Their analog relationships are suffering in favor of some false hope in the matrix of “what if”. The entire species is growing sicker both mentally and physically as the real needs are poisoned in favor of disposable convenience and the new shiny thing.

I am not above it. I like my indoor flushing toilet. I like not having to scour the land for a handful of berries. I like a hot shower and to forget about life through cinematic story telling with enhanced visuals. At the same time I am comforted knowing that if circumstance turned against me, I could walk out into the wilderness in my flipflops.

After the economic collapse of 2008, I started looking into the survival genre. I had two small kids, and I needed to know that if the end of civilization did happen, I could keep them alive. I wasn’t convinced that the end of the world was imminent but as a man, as a father, I couldn’t go into the future unprepared.

Nowadays I don’t think it would take a supervolcano eruption to cause severe disruption. Hell, I don’t even think you would need to cut the power. Any major hit to the cellular or internet infrastructure would do the trick. After about an hour of no internet people would start leaving their houses with panic in their eyes.

The looting of toilet paper would start immediately.

This is why governments are pushing for that AI weapon. Attacking the digital would destroy the populace worse than a nuclear bomb and leave all the nature and buildings in tact. All you need to do is pull the pin on the internet and everything collapses because we have created a need that touches upon every aspect of civilized living.

First to go is your ability to pay for anything and in turn most ability to accept payments. The value of hard cash skyrockets as people flood to the banks. The banks do not carry enough cash and they begin to collapse. All the fake money becomes inaccessible and the economy disappears.

Everyone reliant on doordash starves.

Communication across distances disappears. News outlets are sending signals no one can receive. Radio is the only wave that people can pick up. Systems delivering your power, water, and managing sewage collapse. People with guns start taking from those without guns and animalistic survival strategies take hold.

It will not be pretty.

I really don’t understand why humans do these things to one another.

This is the main reason I hate AI. We have created a world where this beast has become a need, but this need is for governments, not individuals. I don’t need it, but it is being shoved into my orifices constantly. The culture is ramming this digital dildo in my brain hole without my consent and I want it to stop.

Unfortunately in order for that to happen I have to find a way to escape. I have to go off-grid and return to the lifestyle of my very ancient ancestors. Even then I will be prodded to re-engage until the culture finally decides no one should escape. The free people will eventually be squeezed until they relent or die. It probably won’t happen in my lifetime, but that outcome seems inevitable.

Fuck it.

I need to stay in the moment. I have my coffee, I have my cigarettes and I have an amazing view in front of me. I am not Nostradamus. I have no idea what the future holds. Humanity seems to have done alright despite what we have done to each other in the past. Perhaps we will find a way to not continue to be atrocious in the future.

I don’t know though. I can’t help feeling like more people need to disconnect from that digital mainline which is force feeding narratives into their eyeballs. I think maybe we shouldn’t put all our hope eggs in the basket of super intelligence to solve simple problems like clean water and breathable air. I think maybe we should take a step back and focus on how to satisfy the real needs first before we stack on some new ones.

Or not.

I should concentrate on my needs before I try to save humanity from its own hubris.

Me? I need to take a piss.

Coffee be like that.