Comment by avenoir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avenoir | Hacker News Reader

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A few years ago, I did a solo hike around midnight to a spot in Bryce Canyon hoping to get a glimpse of the night skies. I had my camera situated on an outcropping taking pictures at set intervals while i was laying down staring at the night sky and the canyon below. I felt a strange and comforting sensation... Goosebumps and everything. I was in this vast wilderness in the middle of the night and yet i felt "cozy" like i'm in a small place. Like this is it, I'm home. I was miles away from civilization but felt i was still a part of something much bigger at that particular moment. I imagined that's what a lot of old explorers must have felt when being out on their journeys. I live in Colorado and play in the mountains quite a bit and while I don't want to sound like a crazy hippy but that experience and a few others like it have really showed me that people (maybe not all but some) are tethered to nature on some subconscious level. It's mysterious and almost magical. But these are the experiences i cherish when I'm out alone in the wilderness.

Another hypothesis might be that people know on some subconscious level that the real threat in the world is other people. I don't mean threat in the sense that you'll be killed but in society there is constantly a power struggle, as a man you try to climb the dominance hierarchy or if you don't try to climb it you feel weak because you know deep down that you're not top dog and there's a lot of consequences to that status etc.

Where as if you go somewhere where you're certain there's no other people around then you're free of all that, free to express yourself without worrying even a little about other people judging your every little movement, every behaviour.

In a somewhat different way, this is the same reason I prefer to work at night. I can get an 8-10 hour stretch with no distractions!

Thanks for sharing...you've also reminded me that's it's been a while since I've read Ed Abbey's Desert Solitaire [1]. I think I may have to pull it off the shelf this weekend and dive in for another read.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Desert-Solitaire-Edward-Abbey/dp/0671...

+1 for this book. Abbey argued strongly and persuasively for the wilderness and raged against it disappearing, not just from existence with paved roads and air conditioned cabins but from our imaginations.

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