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If the history of life on Earth can teach us anything, it is this: as conditions change, species either adapt or become extinct. In our time of considerable environmental change, humanity should consider its options. No species, even the almighty Homo sapiens, can stop evolution completely. But we can choose to limit our capacity for ongoing biological adaptation in an effort to remain ever the same by keeping populations isolated. Of course, such decisions are not made by humanity as a whole but by individuals and governments. Nationalism and xenophobia, on the rise in the US and Europe, threaten to decrease genetic exchange between populations, stifling our ability to continue evolving and adapting.Alternatively, we can embrace immigration and globalisation in an effort to position ourselves for a brighter future.

The things that you don’t want to miss are found in your family, with your community and friends. It’s shared meals and laughter and hugs and a baby’s first word or first step. It’s real life. It’s being present for someone in the real world, to comfort them or help them in a moment of need.

And those things you don’t want to miss in real life are all rooted in Love.

Yes, it’s important to be informed. But at the end of your life, I suspect you won’t be glad for all the hours you spent scrolling through Twitter or the New York Times app. No one, on their deathbed, says, “I’m so glad for the time I wasted on Twitter scrolling through half-baked ideas, bad jokes, conspiracy, and hate speech.”

While the term “hustle porn” may not be well known, it’s easily understood:“It is this idea that unless you are suffering, unless you are grinding, unless you are working every hour of every day and posting about it on Instagram, you are not working hard enough,” he told the audience. “Do not let hustle porn win here. And do not let it infect your brain … It is such bullshit. Such utter bullshit. And the worst part about it is it has deleterious effects, not just on your business, but on your personal wellbeing.”

Now you know what modernity is. It’s the idea that poverty causes ruin, and so the primary job of a modern society is to eliminate poverty, of all kinds, to give people decent lives at a bare minimum — and a social contract which does all that. Hence, Europe became a place rich in public goods, like healthcare, media, finance, transport, safety nets, etcetera, things which all people enjoy, which secure the basics of a good life — all the very same things you intuitively think of when you think of a “modern society” — but America didn’t.

So in America, poverty wasn’t seen as a social bad or ill — it was seen as a necessary way to discipline, punish, and control those with a lack of virtue, a deficit of strength, to, by hitting them with its stick, to inculcate the virtues of hard work, temperance, industriousness, and above all, self-reliance. The problem, of course, was that the great lesson of history was that none of this was true — poverty didn’t lead to virtue. It only led to ruin.

So here America is. Modernity’s first failed state. The rich nation which never cared to join the modern world, too busy believing that poverty would lead to virtue, not ruin. Now life is a perpetual, crushing, bruising battle, in which the stakes are life or death — and so people take out their bitter despair and rage by putting infants on trial. History is teaching us the same lesson, all over again. Americans might not even learn it the second time around. But the world, laughing in horror, in astonishment, in bewilderment, should.

I think we already have enough of the quantifiable (although it is poorly distributed, a separate though deeply related issue). What we need more of are the things that are hard to quantify. The rising tide of suicide and depression in the developed world is not caused by shrinking residential floor space or lack of access to 4G cell service. It probably has something to do with the disintegration of community, the withering of connection, loss of purpose and meaning, chronic pain and unresolved trauma, unprocessed grief, ambient anxiety, and the other accoutrements of Separation. This point seems obvious here at my brother’s farm where I write this, because my life is rich here; rich in relationship to the natural world through my hands, my senses, my labor, and yes, my bare feet, and rich in relationship to the human world as well through shared labor, common purpose, and mutual reliance. And the point seems equally unobvious when I’m separated from all these things. In the busy world of cars and clocks and screens, faster and more of them seems like progress.

humans have a special capacity for perceiving and even anticipating natural phenomena and its patterns.

This innate sense has been largely forgotten, according to Gooley, because modern lifestyles demand we engage in mostly logical, deductive thinking, rather than using our intuition. Our ability to extract meaning from interrelated phenomena such as bird behavior, wind direction, plant growth, and sunlight has atrophied. By searching out these relationships and patterns in nature, Gooley writes, he has rediscovered a manner of experiencing the outdoors through intuition. With some practice, he assures us that we can, too.

Gooley describes the nature instinct as an awareness of the outdoors that allows him to observe and understand before conscious thought. He can sense direction from a tree or predict the behavior of animals, and only afterwards analyzes how he knew these things to be true. While he uses gut feeling or the sixth sense (a common but debunked theory of navigational aptitude in the 19th century and early 20th century), he settles instead on the term “fast thinking.”