People in Siberia Doomscroll Too
or, "We Have the North Pole at Home"
Sometimes, when I’m alone, I deep dive into researching and consuming lifestyle content about the arctic. It’s a quirk of my personality that only my closest friends know about. I’ve done it for several years now.
I follow a woman on Instagram who lives with her husband in a remote part of the Yukon, hours and hours from a grocery store. Another on the island of Svalbard who spends half her year in the complete darkness of polar night. At bedtime, I watch videos of families in the coldest regions of Siberia, the northernmost tundras of Finland. I close my eyes and dream of a silent, frozen world.
I don’t really like to be cold. Winter in New England already dries out my lips and hands plenty, and I spend lots of days in January and February dreading going outside to walk the dog in that frigid, misleading sunshine. And I certainly don’t want to live in darkness. Wintering in Seattle is the closest I can comfortably get to living in a world without sunlight, and even that would take its toll on me as the months went on. And even so, the videos of life in the remote arctic pull me back and back again, become a perfect brand of virtual escape and yearning.
I’ve been thinking about it, and I think that ultimately, the craving these videos feed for me is a craving for stillness. For true quiet. For a feeling of total aloneness that is not isolating but widely, wildly expansive.
I haven’t been letting myself hear silence very often anymore. I go out in the woods with my dog almost every day, but I practically always have something in my headphones, usually an audiobook or a podcast. I cherish that listening time, but it also means that my alone time is filled with other people’s words. And thanks to the internet, I haven’t felt truly alone in years. At the first touch of solitude or boredom (two of my childhood best friends, I should say), I pull out my phone, answer texts, and begin to scroll. In the early morning, before I’ve even blinked the world into focus, I’m often wondering about something on the internet.
And then I wonder why I constantly feel overwhelmed. I wonder why I feel like I have no time, why days whiz by before I can grab them with both hands. And I imagine that the only answer to all of my woes is to disappear into the tundra. Or, if that’s too chilly, to be like Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond: to stop talking to everyone, to disappear deep into the woods with nothing to do but survive and watch seasons change and think about the supreme importance of insects and soil. Only then, I tell myself with complete sincerity, will I finally find the time and space to live the life I want.
This is becoming a common dramatic fantasy among people my age. The trend of “slow living” pervades the internet; a simple search for the phrase will turn up hundreds of content creators in their twenties and thirties, living all over the world, promoting lives of less hurry, less spending, less distraction. And there are similar, smaller waves of 20 and 30-somethings giving up technology, becoming homesteaders, as if they are taking chunks of their lives back in time. Whether I align with all these people or not, they seem to be responding in different ways to the same things that I am. We’re feeling the same exhaustion, the same overwhelm, the same pining for quiet. Maybe all these years of hyper-connectedness have finally taken their toll.
I learned something interesting a few mornings ago: Henry David Thoreau, when he was at Walden Pond, wasn’t actually isolated at all. In fact, it would have taken him only half an hour to get back to his hometown. Walden Pond wasn’t unknown before Thoreau; it was a popular tourism and recreation spot even while Thoreau was there. And he entertained visitors frequently at his cabin, or went into town to attend parties and eat meals his friends and family cooked for him.
As someone who saw Thoreau as the truest form of New England hermit, this revelation left me feeling shocked, and perhaps a bit...catfished? But Cal Newport, whose book I learned this from, points out how monumental and ultimately liberating this is for the rest of us. The Walden experiment, it turns out, wasn’t about disappearing completely into the woods, eschewing human contact and speaking only to ice crystals and deer tracks. It was Thoreau pushing himself further towards a life in which both dinner parties and deer tracks had their place. He wasn’t replacing his life with another life, but reformatting his existing life to make quiet and solitude a priority.
This, really, is the ill-fitting truth of it all: some people in Greenland and the Yukon spend days inside stalking their exes’ Instagram feeds and wasting hours on Candy Crush. And some people in the heart of New York and LA (including celebrities - Rick Rubin comes to mind) successfully live lives where peace and quiet introspection are paramount. Because, in a devastating blow to my black and white thinking and escapist fantasies, it’s not about where you’re living but how you teach yourself to live. How you make room, inside the structure of your life, for your own human spirit.
This isn’t to say that location can’t help; a week in an unplugged mountain cabin, a slow train ride down the coast, or a move out of the city can work wonders. But it is to say this: a change of scenery won’t save your soul. Only you can do that. And where you do it - against what backdrop - is fundamentally up to you. It could happen in the dunes of Namibia or at the far reaches of Newfoundland. Or it could happen in your living room.
It’s getting colder and darker here in Massachusetts. At my home, 96 miles from Walden Pond, I delete all the games and social media apps from my phone. Not forever. Just for now. Instead of taking my long walks in the woods with a podcast or audiobook in my ears, I start taking them in silence. Not forever. Just for now.
Because let’s be real: I don’t have it in me to carry a rifle around everywhere in case I have to shoot a polar bear, and I probably don’t have it in me to make it through a freezing winter in total darkness. But I do have it in me to calm down the noise and work a little harder to make my own quiet woods, my own empty tundra.
I think it will do just fine.
What to Eat:
It’s almost Thanksgiving, so I’ll offer a humble Thanksgiving recipe for you: a cranberry sauce that’s good for the holiday and just as good as a sandwich condiment or seasonal chutney for any time. There are plenty of good cranberry sauce recipes out there. Here’s mine:
Cut the top and bottom off of a navel orange, then peel it with a knife, removing most of the pith. Slice the orange into pieces about the size of cranberries.
Put the orange pieces into a saucepan with about an inch of water (no need to be scientific). Bring to a boil. Once boiling, remove from the heat and strain, discarding the liquid.
Put your orange pieces back into the dry pot. Add in the following:
1lb cranberries
1 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons butter
1 cinnamon stick
1 pinch of kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon allspice
Heat over medium, stirring frequently, until the sugar and butter have melted and are boiling.
Cook, continuing to stir often and lowering heat as needed, for 15 minutes, or until it’s looking the way it should (cranberries have popped, sauce is syrupy and thick).
Remove cinnamon stick and serve or save your sauce
On Repeat:
This one has to go to Kendrick Lamar, a hero and idol of mine since high school, whose surprise album drop GNX has thrilled me and made my month. Kendrick is the type of artist who makes me want to be better at my own art, and having new work from him to digest while I am in a creative spell of my own is a gift.