Why On Earth Are We Doing This Again?
Here is what is swirling in our brains as we make this momentous decision
“Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away."
— Ben Hecht
Everything is fleeting. Live long enough, and you come to understand this aphorism to be true. But the changes we’re seeing happening now and have been happening for the last couple of decades feel faster than fleeting. The world as we know it, culture, what it means to be human, and the very planet we inherited are all vanishing before our eyes. We unwittingly accept the new norms, adopt the new technologies, and pretend like this is all par for the course. We convince ourselves that we’re living through an ordinary generational change. But it’s a deception. A sleight of hand from the craftiest magician that is too fast to observe. Soon, the rabbit will disappear. And only then will we look around and wonder when and why the things that mattered became dispensable.
Like how to build a better social safety net for arguably the most critical players in the future of the world, for the brave and crazy ones who have decided to take the hardest job that ever existed. We’re talking about parents. Here’s a confession: We are blessed in countless ways, but the truth is we’ve been feeling somewhat tired and uninspired in our day-to-day lives. This is probably the case for most parents of small kids throughout history. But the rapid pace of life (with so much of it spent in a car stuck in traffic) and the skyrocketing cost of living, especially high here in Miami, has left us feeling like we’re in the spin cycle of an expensive, fast-spinning washing machine.
And we know we’re not alone in this sentiment. The time and money parents put into raising children fit for the modern world is higher than ever, yet it never seems to be quite enough. Despite, and perhaps because of, our sacrifices, parents are feeling more stressed than ever before to the point that the United States Surgeon General has elevated “parenting” to be a public health crisis like cigarette addiction and AIDS. And if we didn’t have enough to worry about, anti-Semitic incidents, Islamophobic incidents, and hate crimes in general have skyrocketed in recent years. Tragically, school shootings are also on the rise. They are so commonplace that they are not even front-page news anymore.
This is all not OK.
And then most of us send our kids off to school or camp, where they spend most of their waking hours in the care and influence of others. This is so we, as their parents, the adults, can work, be productive, and try to hoard enough cash to retire and get their free time back. By the time we are ready to spend quality time with our kids, those kids have grown up, and they no longer want to hang out with their parents. Nothing about this formula makes any sense to us.
At the same time, how we grew up, which included things like boredom and exploring the physical world, has just about totally disappeared. Every generation says that the next generation grows up differently, but the way kids are growing up now is more than just “different.” This is a seismic, 180-degree shift.
In one short generation, in the blink of an eye in cosmic time, outdoor time has been nearly completely usurped by a concept that never existed in human history: screen time. We were the last generation who experienced a play-based childhood, which, according to NYU social scientist Jonathan Haidt, has been replaced by the first experiments in a phone-based childhood, in which technologies like AI, social media, and video games are shaping the brains of a child in its most critical stage of development. Studies have found that typical American kids ages 8-18 now spend more than 7 hours a day in front of screens, compared to only 10 minutes playing outdoors.
Not surprisingly, this experiment is not going well. There has been a radical deterioration in the mental well-being of most age groups, but in particular, Gen Z, which Haidt has labeled the “Anxious Generation” because rates of mental illness, including anxiety, depression, and ADHD, in this group, have doubled since 2010. Children in the United States now spend less time outside than maximum-security prisoners in jail.
This is crazy.
There’s actually a name for this bucket of issues stemming from a lack of outdoor activity. It was coined “nature deficit disorder” by Richard Louv. It’s not thrown around as much as “attention deficit disorder,” but maybe it should be. There’s a mounting body of evidence supporting the claim that spending time in nature can actually help cure ADHD. Studies have linked a nature deficit with diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, conditions of obesity, and higher rates of emotional and physical illnesses. Could spending more time in nature be a remedy for so many of the negative mental and physical issues plaguing modern society?
We believe the answer to this question is a resounding yes.
The challenge is that the natural world is vanishing at lightning speed. As we wrote in our last post, 73% of vertebrate populations have been wiped out in the last 50 years. The animals and plants are canaries in the coal mine on a disappearing act that is irreversible, immense in scale, and largely caused by us. Just as virtual time is replacing physical time in terms of where humans spend their time, human development is replacing nature, which is affecting the space for all of life, including us, to flourish. The difference is that we can re-prioritize our time, but once destroyed, we can no longer rebuild the habitats that once existed on Earth. This last magic act is a permanent one.
This leads us back to the question of why we are packing up our lives and taking our show on the road. Why now?
We’d be disingenuous if we said it was solely because of any of the graphs above or any piece of data or anything super-rational. After all, there might be better ways to combat the above in order to make system-level changes. It will take all kinds of things to make a shift here, in the culture, at the policy level, and in the way our economy works.
We’re doing this, firstly, because we can. We are in our forties. Our kids still like hanging out with us. We can still shlep around heavy bags. And there are still so many wild places to explore. These things might not be true forever.
Secondly, because we’ve learned from experience that this is a fulfilling and fun way for us to live as a family. Our six months of living in our Airstream at national and state parks left an enormous imprint on our family culture. Each day felt like a new gift that we got to open for the first time. The moments felt richer, and the minutes passed by more slowly. We laughed together and shared nostalgic memories about our experiences. There were, of course, plenty of tough times and challenges, but those were dwarfed by this open feeling of wonder and bliss as we explored these pristine new environments together. It was as if our kids’ childhoods were being amplified and paused rather than zipping by at light speed. We felt like we were witnessing their growth firsthand rather than having it sneak up on us. It was a sacred time, and in many ways, it felt like a revelation. Since we’ve run this experiment before and it led to something wondrous, so why on earth would we not try to do it again on a larger scale?
Thirdly, we want to teach our children in our own unique way. We’re excited about our educational quest and think it will spark their curiosity and sense of wonder about the world. What is more inspirational and educational than a global, real-time, interactive, creative classroom with no walls? We can’t wait to see their excitement as we all see and experience the most special places on earth for the first time. This is a dream come true for us as parents.
That said, we do occasionally give them screen time and even let them watch what we deem to be truly crappy content. We are definitely not Luddites, and we use screens for education, creative purposes, and entertainment. We feel it’s our job as parents to help them strike the right balance between green time and screen time at this critical stage in their development.
When we were on the road the first time, we educated our kids, often with the help of the park rangers, in the national and state parks of the USA. The kids now hold an earnest reverence for animals and the natural world. We got them subscriptions to National Geographic Kids magazines, which we all read together. The kiddos soak up each and every natural history fact. They were practically raised on PBS’s Wild Krattz, whose theme song will forever be implanted in our psyches (“Cheetah speed and lizard glide, falcon flight, and lion pride…”). Every trip we take, we have an ongoing tally of the wild creatures we spot, along with accompanying drawings, journals, and what we call “nature boxes,” which are filled with feathers, bones, stones, and other natural artifacts we find. (Yes, we’ve been stopped at customs a couple of times)
Our kids love being outside and can spend hours climbing trees, catching lizards, and inventing imaginary games. Whenever we go deep into nature, our eldest son always tells us he is sad to come back to the city with all its concrete and lack of animals. The kiddos light up when we spend time living in or learning about wild places. And the truth is, so do we.
We also want to teach our children the most important educational lesson of all: that the future is not a foregone conclusion. It’s a script being written by all of us, including them. We believe that telling the stories of these creatures, some of whom have lived on the planet for millions of years, can only do good in the world. That said, we are teaching our young kids that the act of trying to make a difference is worthwhile in its own right. We want to celebrate life, learn as much as we can about our planet, and be of service to the community we care about. That’s why we created this newsletter. It will be our family’s collective creative outlet and a place to share our learnings, thoughts, and inspirations with anyone who has somehow stumbled upon our little corner of the Internet.
At this critical juncture in human history, we are trying to do something really hard as a family, which is to observe and attempt to disrupt those vanishing acts that risk disappearing the very things humans actually need to be happy. We want more quality time with our kids. More outdoor time. A different balance. We are doing so by walking our own path in life. A path that prioritizes growth over comfort. A path that moves us towards greater universal truths, towards the voiceless creatures, to try and learn about the world from their unique perspective. It’s a path that just feels right for us at this moment in time. We don’t know how long we’ll be on this path or where it’s going. And that’s what makes it thrilling. Instead of the circus always packing up on us and moving away, we’re trying to hitch a ride.