Predicting Rain Is Irrelevant. Building the Ark Is Everything

The Great Day of His Wrath. John Martin. 1849.

I did a short written interview here: Primal Hardship. I covered my favorite dog breed (Shih Tzu), Stoicism, visualization, my favorite exercise (hill sprints), the exercise I despise the most (the burpee), diet, recovery, and more. Thanks Chris DeMuth Jr.

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A defining feature of our automated age is a lament for civilization’s fate: loss of jobs, loss of purpose, and loss of a sense of usefulness.

But this mindset ignores an ancient axiom: predicting rain is irrelevant—we must also build an ark.

There are slivers of space and time where a GPS, if it exists at all, is a nice-to-have rather than a must-have. I knew one of these slivers as I watched a white and dented Toyota Tacoma speeding on a sunbaked desert road. A plume of sand rose in its wake, visible from my view several thousand feet above it. The man pushing his Tacoma to the limit was our target. My legs dangled off the side of the Blackhawk as it banked so far into its spiral descent the centrifugal force kept me seated even as my chest was pointed directly at the roof of the truck beneath me. The high-pitched whine of the engine and the wind hammering my face merged my senses with every beat of the rotors above me and detail of the earth below me. I had never seen these mountains, rivers, towns, or streets. And yet I could see the topographical map I memorized in my mind’s eye and navigate this place as well as the small Pennsylvania town I grew up in.

I knew exactly where I was.

And so it is with acute irony, not long ago, I missed my turn on a highway. The same highway I had driven hundreds of times. I looked at my GPS to show me an alternate route and it froze before my eyes. I did not know where to go. I had to muscularly yank myself out of my brain and its abstract musings into the world of speeding metal cars and labyrinthine highways.

I felt the faintest spark of the alertness I once knew. It felt good. I realized how far I had fallen and had to laugh at myself, which also felt good. But not good enough to forget the feeling of dependence—of uselessness—when I turned my eyes to the frozen screen of my phone mocking me from my cupholder.

I fell into a prophetic mood. The clash of analog and automatic worlds became good thinking material for the rest of the drive.

The world of maps and terrain is more about the process and less about the outcome, for if we are not devoted to the process, we will probably not live to see the outcome. Let us imagine the GPS no longer exists. When we look at a map or the deadly planet beyond the pixels, it is as if the mind is catapulted into the ancient past. We are more likely to prepare for not reaching our destination on account of worst case scenarios; to study alternate routes, and ask “What if…” to all sorts of crazy situations: What if we get a flat tire? What if we have to carry fifty pounds of offspring and dogs to a gas station or shelter in the rain and sleet and hail?

Reading a map, a city, or a gorge is like writing fiction on the fly. There is a primal satisfaction in training the memory to recall physical features all around us and the significance they might play on our lives: a boulder that looks like a gnarled and wise woman’s face, elegant fluorescent purple graffiti on the side of an overpass, a faintly demonic looking patch of evergreen trees, a rivulet with effervescent water that sounds like the taste of kombucha. Our minds weave tales of what came before and what might yet come to pass—of likely failures, of proactive solutions, of clever and epic overcoming.

The world of automation and pixels allows us to become something else entirely. It is possible to float peacefully within the walls of our skull. A map can appear needlessly complex, faintly archaic, and may even cause an interesting twinge a guilt as if we are betraying some antediluvian responsibility. The mind becomes awkward with gridlines, hypsometric tints, and scales of distance. Nature, too, can become foreign. It can be difficult to remember we are the stuff of star matter when we do not go hungry if we fail to track hooves in the mud; when muscles atrophy and reflexes deteriorate; when we feel we are not of this world and foreign to it—that reality is beneath us and we float above it.

It can feel like a sense of uselessness.

Nature finds us all too unready when the service glitches and the turn is missed. She does not mind. It is a paradox that the culture most in love with stories of apocalypse is the culture least prepared for real apocalypse.

What, then, is automation? If automation is a tool of evil techno-billionaires, then why not skip the slow drift into numbness and exterminate us or clap us in irons? If it is a momentous gift to humanity and freedom from a low-IQ way of life, then why do we hear so many complaints about humanity devolving to something less enlightened than our preliterate forebears?

The significant point is automation is neither of these things—it is merely a choice.

Not knowing where we are each and every second of our lives because we rely on glitchy bits of plastic in our palms is a choice. Outsourcing our autonomy to aspiring god-emperors and apps eager to do our thinking for us—a choice. Ignoring the sun and the moon and the mountains and our blood-tie with them—a choice.

For the first time in history we can always choose the easy life, but it is certain the easy life will not always choose us. Uselessness, too, is a choice.

Why not study a topographical map of our earth, our state, our town, with its contours, V-shaped ravines, and serpentine rivers? Why not lean into the secrets and cryptic hints of peaks encased in ice, legs firing like pistons, and bits of tactically significant high ground safe from flood and foe? It is grounding to look for sun and moon the moment we step outdoors and orient ourselves on the map within our skulls. It is a test to navigate on memory and landmarks alone every now and then. Not as a luddite but as a craftsman.

To build an ark is to reclaim agency; to become attuned to the cosmos around us and our exact position on the surface of the earth; to own our slab of hull or sand or grass or stone on which we stand so we may be there for kith and kin when it matters most.

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