Books, Nature
I really wanted to like this book, but I just didn’t. I think it’s because I didn’t feel very emotionally invested in the writer and because the book was very surface-level in general.
The basic story is that a writer guy gets sober and decides to look into how doing hard things affects our minds and bodies. I agree with the general premise that something is very wrong with modern society and the level of comfort we all enjoy might be part of that problem.
The writer goes on this journey around the world talking to experts and gurus and interesting people who we barely get to meet or hear from, and then this is all woven around the story of him going to Alaska to hunt caribou, his own personal ‘misogi’—an undertaking that pushes his physical and mental limits.
I think the hunt story is the best part of the book. We get to step into his frozen, mud-covered shoes and experience something totally new and impossibly difficult. I found that remote world fascinating. I want a book just about that, with a little bit of philsophy woven in.
During the main parts of Easter’s book, he gently suggests, through the words of various international experts and gurus, that we should starve ourselves occasionally, do really hard physical things, get bored, be cold, spend more time moving ‘naturally’ and less time in comfortable chairs, among other suggestions. I think all these ideas are interesting to entertain and look into. But I wanted him to go deeper. When/how much should I starve myself? He offers several options, (24 hours once a month, 1000 calories eaten over a period of five days, etc.) but doesn’t go into which ones are beneficial for which people or which circumstance, or how one actually achieves this difficult feat and the mental game of it. Starving myself sounds really difficult (I write as I’m eating gushers on the couch) but I’m interested to know more. I don’t have enough information to even consider actually doing that and I don’t know where to look for answers. (He admits that nutrition is an incredibly convoluted subject and that you can’t really trust what anyone says.) Great.
Also he comes off very bro-y. This should have been a podcast with three guys talking over each other. I think the bro-y-ness comes from the impersonal nature of what should be a very personal book (overcoming addiction, going on this epic adventure) but I also just have no sense of who this guy is really, and no real sense of how his big trip changed him, aside from apparently being less able to be rattled. There’s a chapter missing at the end that ties it all together with actionable steps for easing into discomfort and talks about how the trip changed him as a human being. But I guess it didn’t. He’s still a bro, after all.