Not Just Because It's There
If you look at my Peaks Project - Vertically Challenged, prima facie, this entire project looks like a classic high-effort ego trip. I won't lie and say ego isn't in the passenger seat.
But I barely linger at the summit.
So why subject myself to the unforgiving ascent (or the deep water)? Establishing limits? Overcoming fears? Finding a calendar date to look forward to?
The real drive is simpler and stranger: a desperate need for authentic friction, and the pursuit of liminality where time stops.
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The Death of the Casual Hangout
What we're experiencing now is a creeping curation that has bled from our screens into physical reality.
Stitching elements together to evoke a genuine emotion is art. Doing it to scream “look how cool I am” is not. The former isn't dead, but the asymmetry is getting hard to look at.
The rise in the "performative" lifestyle (which is rightfully being memed now in a meta way) is an exacerbation of this.
We are adopting extreme, trend-based personas that evolve faster than we can process them.
Playing a character to navigate a specific social situation is a useful tool. But when the character takes over the host - when the mask fuses to the face - the true identity gets buried so deep you start to feel hollow. And stripping the mask gets harder every day you successfully hide behind it.
Someone recently bemoaned to me that "the casual hangout is dead." You can't just have people over anymore. The apartment has to be perfectly staged, the vibe meticulously set. Zero room for the unpolished, the messy, the vulnerable.
(Admittedly, this entire website is a curated garden. But it's also my active rebellion against the sterile boxes of algorithmic social media. I am trying to carve out a space to be raw and earnest here. Paradoxical in a way, I know.)
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"Go see the world!"
Next time I snap a picture of something, I’ll make sure to actually see it first.
This has completely plagued modern travel. The sense of discovery has been strip-mined. Everything trends toward a sterile global homogenization dressed up as convenience. The modern tourist pipeline is a solved algorithm: arrive at viral spot → consume local aesthetic → verify presence via photograph → leave. No mystery. We have all become content machines, terrified of being caught off-guard.
To combat this, I've started going in blind. No content, no spoilers. It makes planning infinitely more challenging. Maybe that's exactly the point. The friction is the discovery.
This is why I gravitate toward the edges. Remote Sweden to reach Kebnekaise. A 4x4 through rough backcountry near the Albanian-Macedonian border for Maja e Korabit. Barely documented Grauspitz. There's a sense of scale there that hasn't been dressed up for you. It isn't a curated set piece built to satisfy a viral craving.
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Escaping Kronos
Here's the kicker: I have acrophobia. And thalassophobia. Heights unsettle me in a way that doesn't fully resolve with exposure. Deep water carries a specific, irrational dread that I can feel the moment the seabed drops out of sight beneath me.
I climb mountains anyway. I dive anyway.
I think the honest read is that the fear itself is the point. Fear is one of the last things that can't be performed. You can fake enthusiasm, fake serenity, fake contentment. You cannot fake the body's response to standing on a ridge at altitude or hanging in blue water above nothing. The fear is proof you've arrived somewhere real.
There's also genuine, immense, and unmatched awe being broadcasted in these environments. I enjoy my fear's dance with this ethereal bliss. I'm back in the ether. Floating.
Which brings me back to the liminal.
Why is the in-between so safe? Because you cannot be fully held accountable in a place you haven't fully arrived. There's something incredibly protective about being in transit - you can observe the world without being pinned down by it. I've spent a lot of my life in NYC and London, the ultimate transient cities. Massive waiting rooms where millions of people are perpetually suspended in the transition from adolescence to adulthood.
On a mountain, that same feeling of liminality takes over, but purified.
At sea level I am constantly questioning arbitrary benchmarks I’ve subjected myself to. Haunted by self-imposed, unreasonable deadlines that, under a microscope, carry absolutely zero seeds of fulfillment. Kronos - the devouring, chronological time-boogeyman - cripples me for missed past commitments to self, or for resting while a new one approaches.
But on the wall, I can finally drop anchor. The climb forces the clock to stop.
I've always felt that if I can just pause time, I can finally rest.
The summit isn't the destination. The ascent is. The moment you're neither here nor there, neither safe nor in danger, neither the person you were at the trailhead nor whoever you'll eventually become - that's what I keep going back for.
The peak is just proof it happened.