History’s Lesson On Risk And Awe Can Fix Our Mental Struggles Caused By Technology
What we can learn from explorers and wall builders
According to the Cleveland Clinic, a depersonalization-derealization disorder is a “mental health condition where you feel disconnected from your body, feelings, and environment. It tends to go over a long period and causes distress and anxiety.”
Humanity is suffering from this. But our disorder is driven by a power of our own making: technology.
Our positive collective effort to make our lives easier over countless years has made us so comfortable that we’ve disconnected from reality in a special kind of way. It’s affected our ability to see. You could say we’ve lost touch with the real world and how it truly functions.
Ironically, this realization hit me as I sat on my ass, watching a documentary from the comfort of my climate-controlled bedroom about a man dealing with a mental health issue.
In Hell or High Seas, former Navy rescue diver Taylor Grieger survives a suicide attempt brought on by post-traumatic stress disorder due to his inability to deal with the ordinary world outside of the military. His self-prescribed therapy is to go on an epic sea voyage, like Odysseus, after the years of the Trojan War.
He plans to sail from Florida to Cape Horn, which, in my ignorance, sounded like a lovely idea. After all, how hard could it be with modern tech, cruise liners, airplanes, and the internet? Plus, who wouldn’t want to see Cape Horn? By the way, I had no idea what a “Cape Horn” is or where it was.
But Grieger reveals this journey will take two hundred days and ten thousand nautical miles to get to the tip of South America (where Cape Horn is), even on a boat with a modern diesel engine and GPS. Moreover, the waters are some of the most dangerous on the planet.
Like any good documentary, things go awry.
The trip takes years, involving fist fights between the crew, them all almost dying several times, an attempted pirate attack, and a months-long GoFundMe campaign to pay for repairs for their boat, which was destroyed by the elements.
In a nutshell, this is a metaphor for the separation where we find ourselves now. The well-formulated documentary we watch in cozy chairs is our life edited by technology. At the same time, Grieger’s chaotic multi-year trip is the real world our ancestors knew well, with its danger, cold, risk, and the ever-present threat of death.
I know this has been a lot to hit you with quickly, so let’s backtrack a bit with some history.
Humanity Are Explorers And Wall Builders
“Southwest of Cape Horn, the ocean floor rises sharply from 4,020 meters (13,200 feet) to 100 meters (330 feet) within a few kilometers. This sharp difference, combined with the potent westerly winds that swirl around…pushes up massive waves with frightening regularity. Add in frigid water temperatures, rocky coastal shoals, and stray icebergs — which drift north from Antarctica across the Drake Passage — and it is easy to see why the area is known as a graveyard for ships.”
— Cape Horn: Mariner’s Nightmare, NASA Earth Observatory
You might call humans amphibians due to our abilities to be so many things. For instance, our ancestors were both wall builders and explorers. Cape Horn is a good example of the latter.
In fact, naturalist Charles Darwin’s famous 1833 exploration trip on the HMS Beagle passed through here. Although the purpose of the boat wasn’t to study wildlife. The documentary Darwin’s Secret reveals the naturalist was only on the ship to keep the captain company.
Other captains had committed suicide on the perilous journey. The voyage involved making charts around Cape Horn’s dangerous waters for England’s maritime trade. This meant lowering chains with weights, measuring the ocean depths, and physically charting the seas.
There was no Google Earth; someone had to go there. And talking about going places, Alexander the Great might have been one of the greatest explorers ever. In Soldier, Priest, and God, historian F.S. Naiden says the Macedonian did more than conquer.
Much of his army’s travels involved generals making maps and charting rivers — often to places they believed only gods had explored. Furthermore, Alexander toured temples and was instructed on local religions. These trips often took precedence over the military campaigns.
Exploration was in the Greek blood long before Alexander, though. They had colonies in North Africa, France, Spain, Italy, and Ukraine. But while you wanted to know what was beyond the sea or mountain, fear of that unknown also caused walls to be built.
In those times, it wasn’t completely unusual for unknown people or tribes to appear at your border. The ancient Mesopotamians referred to groups like this as Umman-manda, or the “horde from who knows where.”
Neolithic people built walled communities in Siberia eight thousand years ago, while the Romans built their three hundred forty-one mile Limes Germanicus across their German frontier. Not to mention Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall in their British and Scottish territories.
Not to be outdone, the Sassanid Empire grew out of the roots of the Persian Empire and created the Great Wall of Gorgan out of two hundred million bricks. It required construction, and they needed to make canals through the desert to bake the bricks.
The people of the region thought it was so important and the dangers so great, the rival Byzantine Empire even helped fund and guard the structure.
While modern people may identify more with the explorers and think the wall builders are archaic, we don’t act like it. We’re creating humanity’s most complicated wall right now — it’s called technology.
It shields us from discomfort, the unknown, and, most of all, from risk. But this protective cocoon has drawbacks.
Great Risk And Doing Real Things
In a recent interview, Hudson Institute Fellow and journalist Walter Russel Mead was asked about the trouble young people are having today adjusting to leadership roles. He says part comes from living in an “artificial environment.”
Younger people today spend their first thirty years getting an education instead of doing things in the world. Mead says, “They’re consumers, not producers, subjects, not actors” and they want “to do real things.” In a Cleveland Clinic sense, they’re disconnected from their environment.
He explains Alexander Hamilton took part in a world-changing revolution in his twenties and organized the financial structure of the future United States in his thirties without ever taking advanced economics courses. Likewise, Neil Armstrong was in his thirties when he landed on the moon.
In our age of comfort and technology, we tend to forget how much of an achievement this was for the time. Moreover, it was outrageously risky. In Bill Whittle’s documentary, Apollo 11: What We Saw, he explains the lunar landing vehicle the Eagle was preposterously fragile.
Whittle says:
“The Eagle was essentially a silver and gold soap bubble just barely able to hold 5 PSI of pure oxygen in the 1/6 gravity of the moon.”
Also, during the landing, an error occurred, and the computer helping the astronauts land shut down. Armstrong piloted the Eagle himself by feel, avoiding rocks and craters. There are more terrifying elements too, namely, they’re hidden in the number eleven.
Whittle says every flight was numbered, and each Apollo mission tested an element necessary to fly and land on the moon. However, eleven had one that was never tried in a mission — the lift-off boosters on the Eagle.
So, no one knew for certain if the lander could successfully lift back off, and there was a plan for this. The live feed from the moon would be shut off, and the astronaut in the space capsule above the surface would travel home alone — likely the loneliest journey ever taken by man.
An advisor for President Nixon even had a speech penned in case this happened. It’s called “In Case of Moon Disaster,” and here’s part of it:
“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.”
You should read it; it’s beautiful and terrifying all at the same time. Something in it also reminds me of Taylor Grieger’s trip to Cape Horn.
Technology Can’t Reproduce Awe
The rock star, actor, and writer Nick Cave was once asked on his blog what he thought about AI writing songs. His answer was: it can’t. Cave replied:
“Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend.”
This explanation popped into my head as I watched Grieger complete his mission. Spoiler alert: he does eventually make it to Cape Horn. But near his endpoint, Grieger and his crew stop in Patagonia, and it’s one of the most picturesque places you can imagine.
Glaciers, blue water, and a lush natural land spread out before the three men. Honestly, it’s the closest thing I’ve seen resembling heaven. While this image reached me, something was lost. The eyes of Grieger and his crew burned with an unknown power as they took in the site.
It was awe. Not just the awe of the visual, but the pure illation brought on by accomplishment. The heaven they visited could only be truly appreciated by accomplishing the hell of their voyage. Like Cave says, technology can’t replicate this.
Grieger not only battled the seas but his affliction, doing it not only for himself but for his “brothers and sisters” in the armed forces who suffer from PTSD. Our wall of technology can’t remake this, causing us to disconnect from the environment we’re shielding ourselves from.
I’m no doctor or technologist, but our cure lies in history. The examples from our ancestors on how to live might be the only thing to save us from being encased in a tech wall of our own making.
It’s time to explore and take risks. Obviously, we don’t have to die or be injured in our personal quests, but it requires discomfort, cold, heat, and seeking out a worthwhile challenge to overcome.
Awe can be an antidote for the “artificial environment” Mead warns of that’s causing our break with reality. And technology can’t replicate awe. We must find it ourselves through our human struggles.
-Originally posted on Medium 12/26/23