Thank you for sharing about the beauty of going to the beach. It is currently the only place my mind fully becomes freed of the mind-pollution that we all (?) allow ourselves to wade through every day. I took up shelling. My husband too. Now we drag home bags of shells and dream of finding the elusive Junonia one day. The sound of the sea erases all worries. I sometimes think about the factoid I once picked up about how our tears and the amniotic fluid have the same salt concentration as the sea. Like a Conor refuses to look up Namaste, I also won't look it up. I just know that I belong by the seaside.
Arrived back home from a day surfing at the beach on Sunday to find this sitting in my inbox. Wonderful.
It might be a meme at this point (isn't everything?), but there is a fundamentally spiritual nature to going surfing. There's something immensely refreshing to your soul about going to beach and spending an hour or two in the water. Refreshing enough to make the idea of 9-10 hours in front of a laptop tolerable anyway.
Because I prefer to believe I'm favoured by the Gods, a quick story about how fate guided me to surfing. I bought my first board from a guy randomly offf of a listing site (DoneDeal), and rocked up to his house with a hatchback that I ambitiously expected to handle a 9ft board.
We hit it off immediately, he was in his 50's but looked 20 years younger, which lends some credence to the hypothesis that fun hobbies keep you young (golf doesn't count folks), and his garage was full of surfboards, mountain bikes, windsurfing sails - he had it all. After about 30-40 minutes talking about surfing, business etc, I found out that he had been a patient of my mothers (doctor) for 30+ years, including 3, now adult kids.
Naturally, this meant the conversation extended another half an hour or so, before he told me he'd have to apologise to my mother the next time he saw her. I asked him why, and he told me "because the first time you stand up on the board and properly catch a wave you're going to end up selling everything and buying a van". After that he sent me on my way with a sizeable discount and a 9 ft board crammed into my car, with roughly 3 cm to spare.
Thankfully for my mothers sake, I'm terrible at surfing so I'm typing this from my desk, sadly vanless. But if I do disappear off the face of the known Earth, now you know why.
The piece you've written here is fantastic Tom. Too many great lines to point out, but this paragraph in particular stood out to me:
"See, the beach is about freedom from all of the nonsense and expectation and hope and worry that occurs during non-beach hours. It’s a sanctuary from all of that. The things we do while at the seaside- surfing and sandcastle build and sunbathing- are all ultimately pointless activities, which is precisely *why* they are so great and so important. The guru with the laptop finds them boring because they are ends in themselves rather than a mere means to some (usually financial) end game. They exist beyond his instrumental Type A world of having and getting.
Perhaps he will come to realise the importance of such things post midlife crisis. Perhaps not."
I can't help but worry for the people that will never realise that. Make money, ideally by building something or helping people in some meaningful way (Twitter gurus don't seem to get that this is the core of all business - yes, I am a filthy capitalist), work hard, fast, intensely and all the rest of it, but head to the beach to get in touch with your soul again when you're done.
I've used the word soul twice already in this comment, which strikes me as a step in a worryingly esoteric direction, so I'll leave it here. Always great to read these pieces on a Sunday, even if it's Wednesday before I get around to commenting. Cheers for writing them Tom.
Namaste. (Not sure what it means, and I refuse to look it up.)
There is something about large bodies of water that brings out the ‘soul’ talk. I’m completely the same way.
Also this talk of surfing and spirituality reminded me just how good and fun Point Break is. Like Swayze’s hippy/surfer/bank robber character says (and I’m butchering it as I refuse to look it up): ‘These guys don’t understand the spiritual side, all they want to do is get radical’
And as much as I dislike the ultra-optimised, metric driven Tim Ferriss life as it is often preached by the gurus I think he was onto something in the first place when he talked about the 4 hour work week. Just get the work done and have surfing (or whatever) as the *real* activity that gives you pleasure and meaning, even if (or especially if) it brings in zero money.
Now that seems a pretty obvious point to me but from my vantage point people seem to have their priorities backwards. Which I hope these essays can possibly help people to fix, although that implies that I have a mission and a plan.
But I’m glad people seem to be enjoying them and I’m glad you took the time to leave this fantastic comment and story.
That movie is an absolute classic. "Vaya con dios". So many quotable lines from it. I'm a big fan of 'Roadhouse' with Swayze too, which could well be the greatest 'B' movie ever made.
Exactly, it's all about intensity > volume. Get 10 hours of half-assed work done in 3-4. Ferriss has taken the optimisation to the point of becoming a meme though.
I realised after a while that the reason I didn't really vibe with him is because he just strikes me as desperately uncool? His "day in the life" on Youtube includes a 2 hour morning and evening routine, which no one who has a real life has time for (in my opinion).
I throughly enjoy listening to things from your perspective. It's like looking through another, a very laidback, self-aware, perceptive pair of eyes.
The huge overarching unspoken truth is that the internet is fundamentally uncool and it can never be otherwise. In its infancy people understood this and the Internet was something that you looked at occasionally, in private and with the appropriate sense of shame.
Connection speed aside, imagine telling someone in 2005 (let alone 1995) that in the year 2021 it will not be considered strange to spend 10 hour in any given day looking at ‘content’ online.
And that this mainly consists of:
a) spurious self improvement pablum which used to be (correctly) relegated to late night informercial slots on television
b) Memes, which are essentially badly drawn single panel comic strips that people then suck all scraps of humour out of by dint of pure, constant, wearing-it-into-the-ground repetition
c) News and gossip but now even more vacuous, salacious and badly written than it was in the print days
d) soul scarring hardcore pornography
e) Homemade video monologues where people react to other home made video monologues and intersperse those with sponsored product placement
f) intentionally envy inducing, cherry picked, digitally altered videos and photographs of celebrities lives or worse the lives of non celebrities who through sheer ambition and narcissistic persistence have become a b-tier of celebritydom without even the justification of some acting or singing talent.
g) overly serious and deeply uncool discussions of mainstream movie franchises that in themselves are the last dregs of the running-on-fumes monoculture. (Imagine telling that same person from 2005 how seriously grown adults take films that were originally designed for children- Marvel, Disney, Star Wars.)
There are exceptions (I would like to think these essays are a part of it) but the above list covers 95+% of what the majority of people spend the majority of their days looking at.
And all of this while the ocean and books and nature still exists. I just don’t understand.
Dios mio Tom. Remind me never to get on your bad side.
Completely agree on all points, of course. If everyone were forced to audit every piece of content they consume and all of the time they've spent consuming each individual piece, I think everyone (myself included) would be horrified.
If you ever get bored of this whole writing thing you could have a career making one of those youtube rant channels, they're immensely popular these days.
I can see a situation like that film Network play out where I rant about how bad online content is and I get tonnes of likes and subscribers to my YouTube channel etc.
Maybe I’ll make this the topic of my next audio newsletter. Or a short story, maybe.
Beautiful! Thank you, Tom. It made my morning today. I was sure I'm reading a beginning of a novel, then it turned into a letter from a friend.
Now I desperately need to take a train to the sea and do nothing just for the sake of it. I was there a couple of times last year and I have the best memories associated with it, just like you described.
The beach is one of those things that you forget about, or don’t think about as a need until you actually get there and you realise: ‘*this* is what I have been missing’.
Yes! I agree. And it was actually a forgotten sensation until I read your essay today, it got me to the beach and now I miss it.
I was walking along the Thames quays yesterday and I felt a similar thing to what you described. You don't see the horizon, only building on the other side of the river, can't feel sand or stones, so the sensation isn't the same. But still, it's just walking and observing near the water, which calms and frees in a way.
I always found Regents Canal quite good for that even in spite of the super strength lager drinkers and the trolleys and crisp packets floating in the water
This is the perfect companion piece to your "Beyond Boredom" newsletter from last August. Realistically, what is a day at the beach if not participating in the act of being bored? What is there to do other than soak up the rays, take a splash in the water (or dip your toes as you described), read a book, people watch? As a child I spent my summers on the New Jersey shore, hated it when I got there, & threw a temper tantrum when it was time to return to the city Labor Day weekend. Now in retirement I have easy access to the Gulf of Mexico, & I love a day at the beach & being bored! Life is good.
You’ve inspired me to start writing and journaling. There’s something special about the way your prose paints a picture, it’s refreshing to say the least, from the commonplace writing styles seen everywhere nowadays
That’s very kind of you to say. And I believe (I maybe wrong) that this is your first time stopping by here to comment so thank you very much for that.
I think my prose is different (not necessarily better just different) because I have become increasingly bored with the idea of telling people what to do or what to think about a given thing. I would rather paint sense impressions of the trivial than offer up yet another ‘hot take’ on whatever the issue of the day is.
Ironically this not trying to make a point angle means that every now and again you do end up making an original point. But that could be wishful thinking.
Journalling is great. It feels like a waste of time for a long time but in the end it pays off like few other things in this life do. At least in my experience.
Thank you for sharing about the beauty of going to the beach. It is currently the only place my mind fully becomes freed of the mind-pollution that we all (?) allow ourselves to wade through every day. I took up shelling. My husband too. Now we drag home bags of shells and dream of finding the elusive Junonia one day. The sound of the sea erases all worries. I sometimes think about the factoid I once picked up about how our tears and the amniotic fluid have the same salt concentration as the sea. Like a Conor refuses to look up Namaste, I also won't look it up. I just know that I belong by the seaside.
Arrived back home from a day surfing at the beach on Sunday to find this sitting in my inbox. Wonderful.
It might be a meme at this point (isn't everything?), but there is a fundamentally spiritual nature to going surfing. There's something immensely refreshing to your soul about going to beach and spending an hour or two in the water. Refreshing enough to make the idea of 9-10 hours in front of a laptop tolerable anyway.
Because I prefer to believe I'm favoured by the Gods, a quick story about how fate guided me to surfing. I bought my first board from a guy randomly offf of a listing site (DoneDeal), and rocked up to his house with a hatchback that I ambitiously expected to handle a 9ft board.
We hit it off immediately, he was in his 50's but looked 20 years younger, which lends some credence to the hypothesis that fun hobbies keep you young (golf doesn't count folks), and his garage was full of surfboards, mountain bikes, windsurfing sails - he had it all. After about 30-40 minutes talking about surfing, business etc, I found out that he had been a patient of my mothers (doctor) for 30+ years, including 3, now adult kids.
Naturally, this meant the conversation extended another half an hour or so, before he told me he'd have to apologise to my mother the next time he saw her. I asked him why, and he told me "because the first time you stand up on the board and properly catch a wave you're going to end up selling everything and buying a van". After that he sent me on my way with a sizeable discount and a 9 ft board crammed into my car, with roughly 3 cm to spare.
Thankfully for my mothers sake, I'm terrible at surfing so I'm typing this from my desk, sadly vanless. But if I do disappear off the face of the known Earth, now you know why.
The piece you've written here is fantastic Tom. Too many great lines to point out, but this paragraph in particular stood out to me:
"See, the beach is about freedom from all of the nonsense and expectation and hope and worry that occurs during non-beach hours. It’s a sanctuary from all of that. The things we do while at the seaside- surfing and sandcastle build and sunbathing- are all ultimately pointless activities, which is precisely *why* they are so great and so important. The guru with the laptop finds them boring because they are ends in themselves rather than a mere means to some (usually financial) end game. They exist beyond his instrumental Type A world of having and getting.
Perhaps he will come to realise the importance of such things post midlife crisis. Perhaps not."
I can't help but worry for the people that will never realise that. Make money, ideally by building something or helping people in some meaningful way (Twitter gurus don't seem to get that this is the core of all business - yes, I am a filthy capitalist), work hard, fast, intensely and all the rest of it, but head to the beach to get in touch with your soul again when you're done.
I've used the word soul twice already in this comment, which strikes me as a step in a worryingly esoteric direction, so I'll leave it here. Always great to read these pieces on a Sunday, even if it's Wednesday before I get around to commenting. Cheers for writing them Tom.
Namaste. (Not sure what it means, and I refuse to look it up.)
There is something about large bodies of water that brings out the ‘soul’ talk. I’m completely the same way.
Also this talk of surfing and spirituality reminded me just how good and fun Point Break is. Like Swayze’s hippy/surfer/bank robber character says (and I’m butchering it as I refuse to look it up): ‘These guys don’t understand the spiritual side, all they want to do is get radical’
And as much as I dislike the ultra-optimised, metric driven Tim Ferriss life as it is often preached by the gurus I think he was onto something in the first place when he talked about the 4 hour work week. Just get the work done and have surfing (or whatever) as the *real* activity that gives you pleasure and meaning, even if (or especially if) it brings in zero money.
Now that seems a pretty obvious point to me but from my vantage point people seem to have their priorities backwards. Which I hope these essays can possibly help people to fix, although that implies that I have a mission and a plan.
But I’m glad people seem to be enjoying them and I’m glad you took the time to leave this fantastic comment and story.
Namaste to you to, whatever that means.
That movie is an absolute classic. "Vaya con dios". So many quotable lines from it. I'm a big fan of 'Roadhouse' with Swayze too, which could well be the greatest 'B' movie ever made.
Exactly, it's all about intensity > volume. Get 10 hours of half-assed work done in 3-4. Ferriss has taken the optimisation to the point of becoming a meme though.
I realised after a while that the reason I didn't really vibe with him is because he just strikes me as desperately uncool? His "day in the life" on Youtube includes a 2 hour morning and evening routine, which no one who has a real life has time for (in my opinion).
I throughly enjoy listening to things from your perspective. It's like looking through another, a very laidback, self-aware, perceptive pair of eyes.
The huge overarching unspoken truth is that the internet is fundamentally uncool and it can never be otherwise. In its infancy people understood this and the Internet was something that you looked at occasionally, in private and with the appropriate sense of shame.
Connection speed aside, imagine telling someone in 2005 (let alone 1995) that in the year 2021 it will not be considered strange to spend 10 hour in any given day looking at ‘content’ online.
And that this mainly consists of:
a) spurious self improvement pablum which used to be (correctly) relegated to late night informercial slots on television
b) Memes, which are essentially badly drawn single panel comic strips that people then suck all scraps of humour out of by dint of pure, constant, wearing-it-into-the-ground repetition
c) News and gossip but now even more vacuous, salacious and badly written than it was in the print days
d) soul scarring hardcore pornography
e) Homemade video monologues where people react to other home made video monologues and intersperse those with sponsored product placement
f) intentionally envy inducing, cherry picked, digitally altered videos and photographs of celebrities lives or worse the lives of non celebrities who through sheer ambition and narcissistic persistence have become a b-tier of celebritydom without even the justification of some acting or singing talent.
g) overly serious and deeply uncool discussions of mainstream movie franchises that in themselves are the last dregs of the running-on-fumes monoculture. (Imagine telling that same person from 2005 how seriously grown adults take films that were originally designed for children- Marvel, Disney, Star Wars.)
There are exceptions (I would like to think these essays are a part of it) but the above list covers 95+% of what the majority of people spend the majority of their days looking at.
And all of this while the ocean and books and nature still exists. I just don’t understand.
Dios mio Tom. Remind me never to get on your bad side.
Completely agree on all points, of course. If everyone were forced to audit every piece of content they consume and all of the time they've spent consuming each individual piece, I think everyone (myself included) would be horrified.
If you ever get bored of this whole writing thing you could have a career making one of those youtube rant channels, they're immensely popular these days.
I can see a situation like that film Network play out where I rant about how bad online content is and I get tonnes of likes and subscribers to my YouTube channel etc.
Maybe I’ll make this the topic of my next audio newsletter. Or a short story, maybe.
Beautiful! Thank you, Tom. It made my morning today. I was sure I'm reading a beginning of a novel, then it turned into a letter from a friend.
Now I desperately need to take a train to the sea and do nothing just for the sake of it. I was there a couple of times last year and I have the best memories associated with it, just like you described.
The beach is one of those things that you forget about, or don’t think about as a need until you actually get there and you realise: ‘*this* is what I have been missing’.
Yes! I agree. And it was actually a forgotten sensation until I read your essay today, it got me to the beach and now I miss it.
I was walking along the Thames quays yesterday and I felt a similar thing to what you described. You don't see the horizon, only building on the other side of the river, can't feel sand or stones, so the sensation isn't the same. But still, it's just walking and observing near the water, which calms and frees in a way.
I always found Regents Canal quite good for that even in spite of the super strength lager drinkers and the trolleys and crisp packets floating in the water
Trolleys add some charm though. Remember Banksy's Monet picture? :D
Laughing all the way to the Banksy.
This is the perfect companion piece to your "Beyond Boredom" newsletter from last August. Realistically, what is a day at the beach if not participating in the act of being bored? What is there to do other than soak up the rays, take a splash in the water (or dip your toes as you described), read a book, people watch? As a child I spent my summers on the New Jersey shore, hated it when I got there, & threw a temper tantrum when it was time to return to the city Labor Day weekend. Now in retirement I have easy access to the Gulf of Mexico, & I love a day at the beach & being bored! Life is good.
Life is good, especially from the way you describe it. The older I get the more I see that everything other than boredom is what is actually boring.
‘Do just do something, sit there.’ As I once read on a mug in a meditation centre gift shop. There is something to this.
Thank you for this. I‘m going to the beach today 🏝
Great! I’m not saying you should make a dramatic symbolic gesture and throw your phone into the ocean but you know...
Anyway. Thanks for stopping by Candice, enjoy your day at the beach.
You’ve inspired me to start writing and journaling. There’s something special about the way your prose paints a picture, it’s refreshing to say the least, from the commonplace writing styles seen everywhere nowadays
That’s very kind of you to say. And I believe (I maybe wrong) that this is your first time stopping by here to comment so thank you very much for that.
I think my prose is different (not necessarily better just different) because I have become increasingly bored with the idea of telling people what to do or what to think about a given thing. I would rather paint sense impressions of the trivial than offer up yet another ‘hot take’ on whatever the issue of the day is.
Ironically this not trying to make a point angle means that every now and again you do end up making an original point. But that could be wishful thinking.
Journalling is great. It feels like a waste of time for a long time but in the end it pays off like few other things in this life do. At least in my experience.
Thanks FVLCO REX
Beautifully written. It’s elegiac and wistful. Thank you for writing.
That’s very kind of you to say, George. I’m not sure if I could shake that wistfulness if I tried at this point, for better or worse.
Thank you for the kind words.
Tom.