Aiming for Fullness

After completing another long solo walk, Craig Mod wrote about fullness:

This is why I always say: Aim for fullness if you want happiness. If the creator itself came down from the sky at the end of a big walking and photographing and writing day and asked: Did ya do all ya could today? I’d be able to answer, without hesitation, heck yes. I suspect we’re “programmed” to feel good about this, and this is, fundamentally, how we emerged from the muck, how we walked out of Africa, how we engineered the miraculous (and horrific) bits of modern humanity. Fullness feels good because DNA knows fullness pushes us ever “forward” (to better, more efficient, more fail-safe means of replication).

I’d go so far to say that “full days” is one of the wells from which we derive our humanity.

The modern smartphone, laden with the corporate ecosystem pulsing underneath its screen, robs us of this feeling, conspires to keep us from “true” fullness. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a bit of a day in the thralls of the algorithms.

The smartphone eradicates “space” in the mind. With that psychic loss of space, grace becomes impossible. You see the knock-on effects of this rippling out across the world politically.

I haven’t done anything as extreme as Craig over the past few weeks I’ve been in Japan, but I have been spending more time offline, out in the world, walking & biking around, exploring, being curious, and, yeah, I feel more full and less anxious/depressed/_______. It feels really good.

• Craig Mod