I’ve been in a foul mood. My home port anchorage has been experiencing a catastrophic crime-wave of dinghy and outboard theft. I have been quite frustrated at the toll it is taking on my local sailing community. I am very sad at the condition of humanity at the moment and trying to find stable footing.
And as a result, before my coffee, I did something extreme this morning.
I filled a syringe with poison, pierced my vein, and killed the younger version of myself I had been trying so desperately to hold on to.
If my time on this earth has taught me anything, it is to accept the weather, understand the sea conditions, and balance the boat accordingly.
As I sit here writing from the settee aboard Eleanor, I look down at the cabin sole in the galley and see my younger self lying there. A needle in his arm, a smile on his face, and a youth well lived.
I like that guy, i really do. He lived a great life, with few regrets. But it’s time for a transition, and his time has passed.
Stick with me, i’m going to jump around between ideas but there is a point to all of this.
I’ve been following the Golden Globe Race lately with great interest. For those unfamiliar with the GGR, it is a nonstop, single-handed sailing race around the world, passing beneath all three great capes of the Southern Ocean. It is, in every sense of the word, the mount Everest of sailing.
The competitors sail under the technological limitations of 1968. No GPS navigation, electronic autopilots, internet, or social media while racing. Just a sailor, a boat, the elements, and the vastness of the southern ocean.
There is a trophy waiting for the winner some eight months later, but anyone worth their salt understands that the real competition is internal. It is a battle each sailor takes with him or herself. A journey inward, alone, through the harshest conditions this planet has to offer. And the real trophy? Every sailor who finishes carries something far more valuable than something shiny to place on a mantle, a deeper understanding of themselves. I have always dreamt of doing this myself one day.
I’ve spent long stretches of time alone at sea. I understand something of the stakes, the suffering, and the extraordinary gifts such voyages can bestow.
But before I explain why this race led me to euthanize my younger self this morning, I need to go back a few years.
We are all products of our childhoods, conditioned by the environments in which we were raised. Those formative years program how we respond to the world around us, and we carry that throughout our lives.
When I was young, my mother could never quite understand me.
I grew up impoverished in New York City, raised by a single mother working two jobs just to keep us afloat. How was it that a boy who had never even stepped aboard a sailboat became obsessed with clipping pictures of them from magazines and tacking them to his bedroom wall?
Where did this obsession come from?
Looking back, I don’t think it is any different from someone placing a photograph of a tropical island beside their computer screen in a cubicle.
Fuck everyone, I wanted to be free, even as a child.
Free from a system I watched slowly take everything from my mother. A system that demanded nearly everything she had and offered little in return. She died when I was twenty.
I remember her going to work sick, saying, “I don’t have time to be sick honey.”
Even as a child, I developed a deep distaste for the machinery of society that kept pushing her to the brink of exhaustion while leaving me to spend my childhood alone.
There was a name for children like me, we were called latchkey kids.
We wore the keys to our apartments around our necks and came home to empty rooms. Often, I wouldn’t see my mother until seven or eight in the evening, an hour or two before bedtime. That time was precious but she was so tired.
I was notoriously hard on babysitters. They never seemed to last very long. This in turn was hard on my mom and one of the regrets I still carry. I never got a chance to make it up to her.
So solitude became my natural environment, and I learned to thrive within it.
My closest companions were my imagination, books, and my dog Gina.
We didn’t have a television until later, and when we finally got one, it was an small black & white television gifted by my grandparents. I rarely watched it except for Saturday morning cartoons, and in black and white.
There is a point to all of this.
I want to contrast the environment that shaped me with the one shaping our youth today. Rich or poor, black or white, male or female, we are all institutionalized by our environments, and circumstances growing up.
Mine taught me to be fiercely independent, resourceful, hard-headed, introverted, and a bit antisocial. And unfortunately a man who will grow old alone as I have a thick skin and I do not bend easily.
I learned to solve problems because there was often nobody around to solve them for me. I learned to entertain myself because there was nobody there to entertain me. I learned to be alone without being lonely.
And those lessons eventually carried me across oceans as a solo sailor who materialized the dreams a child once tacked to his bedroom wall.
As difficult as my childhood sometimes was, I fear that young people today, regardless of their financial circumstances or family situations, face something far worse than being a latchkey kid.
We have become so obsessed with protecting children from discomfort that we have deprived them of the very experiences that build resilience, independence, and integrity.
When I was young, bullies were a fact of life. Those shitty fuckheads could make your day miserable. I collected my share of black eyes, bruises, scrapes, and cuts. But each confrontation taught me something about fear, courage, and standing my ground.
I’m not suggesting that cruelty is a virtue or that every child emerges stronger from being bullied. Some don’t. But adversity itself is not the enemy. Learning to confront it is an essential part of growing up and as important as a mathematics or history class, if not more.
And today, I worry that we are replacing adversity with something much more destructive. An endless hunger for validation, a desperate need for social acceptance, vanity masquerading as self worth, and fragile identities built around the approval of strangers. I’m not saying this is the case for all kids, but from what I see it is by far the norm.
Entire generations increasingly encouraged to look outward to youtube for the answers that can only be found within.
I know that sounds harsh, it is intentional.
But the toll that antisocial media, dis-influencers, and now artificial intelligence is taking on young minds frightens me more than any schoolyard bully ever did. At least the bully had a face, and the bruises healed.
Now, back to the Golden Globe Race.
One of its competitors, Mara, was the unlikely catalyst for my decision to murder my younger self this morning, along with the anger of local pirates.
I found myself increasingly frustrated by everything she represented about modern influencer culture and something I pioneered when I started blogging in 2003. The cameras, the self-promotion, the emphasis on appearance, and the seemingly endless need to turn every experience into content. I never did that. I always to0k time for myself and was honest about my failures and things that embarrassed me. I was trying to do something positive and not just indulge in masturbation of my own vanity. And now we drown in a “look at me” culture and the horizon is littered with it.
But something bothered me even more about Mara. Why did I keep watching her videos, why did I care? And then it struck me. I was rooting for her, really rooting for her, at my vey core.
With all my heart, I wanted to see her put down the camera, stop finding reasons to show her skin, to be popular, and to discover the extraordinary opportunity lying before her.
I desperately wanted her to take the journey inward, and I still do even though she quit the race. She wants to keep sailing and hope she puts the camera down and does just that.
If you watch my films you will notice I stopped v-logging in 2006 on the island of Hiva Oa in the Marquises islands of French Polynesia. And the height of where everyone wanted to watch. I just couldn’t do it any more. I had to put the camera down and protect the moments ahead for myself. To experience the solitude, humility, fear, and revelation that can come from being alone at sea on an internal journey. To discover something that couldn’t be photographed, packaged, sponsored, or sold. Nobody can experience that without actually doing it.
I wanted Mara to find something more valuable than followers, I still do.
I was impressed by what I perceived as the patience of the race committee and their efforts to help her understand the nature of the challenge before her. They really gave her a shot and so many breaks despite a terrible attitude. But from what I witnessed, she never seemed to embrace the opportunity in the way I had hoped.
And I was heartbroken. Not because I dislike young people, not because I believe my generation was inherently superior. We made a spectacular mess of plenty of things ourselves, quite the opposite. But because I want to help her.
I want young people to discover the independence, resilience, and freedom that have given my own life meaning. She had that responsibility, and she failed, and there is no way to sugar-coat that. Perhaps that’s harsh and If she were to read this I would only ask he to grow from the situation and turn it into a positive. God only knows I have a mountain of my own failures behind me.
And perhaps that is what I finally understood this morning.
The young man lying on Eleanor’s cabin sole has had his turn. Now perhaps it’s time for him to make room for the older man.
I’ve always admired Indigenous societies in which elders play an important role in preserving knowledge, guiding younger generations, and passing down the lessons of experience.
I’m not suggesting that age automatically brings wisdom. I’ve met plenty of old fools, I am one myself. But I have learned a few things. And perhaps the responsibility that comes with those lessons is to share them?
Because I see a battle approaching, a very real war that our young people are dangerously ill-equipped to fight.
The artists of my generation, and those who came before us, tried to warn them.
George Orwell gave us 1984. Aldous Huxley gave us Brave New World. James Cameron gave us The Terminator, released, rather appropriately in 1984. The Wachowskis gave us The Matrix. And my dear old friend Max E. Youngstein produced Fail Safe in 1964, a chilling examination of technology, human judgment, and the catastrophic consequences of surrendering control to systems we no longer fully command.
Max was a remarkable man. Former senior executive VP at United Artists, he took an interest in me while I was in film school after watching my student film. He was one of the last great heavy-weights of old Hollywood. He passed when I was in my early thirties but brought much wisdom into my life.
These writers and filmmakers weren’t simply entertaining us, they were warning us about authoritarianism about conformity about technological systems growing beyond human control. About societies that surrender freedom in exchange for convenience, comfort, and the illusion of security. And now, decades later, those warnings are becoming increasingly relevant.
Artificial intelligence is advancing at a breathtaking pace. Surveillance is becoming ubiquitous. Algorithms influence what we read, what we believe, whom we trust, and even how we perceive ourselves.
The machinery of influence has become extraordinarily sophisticated. And the most troubling part? Much of it is welcomed into our lives voluntarily.
We carry it in our pockets. We install it in our homes. We place it in our children’s bedrooms. We willingly surrender our attention, our privacy, and increasingly, our capacity to think independently.
We are becoming the Borg!
All in exchange for convenience and entertainment.
Authoritarianism and artificial intelligence are not the same thing. But together, in the wrong hands, they represent an extraordinary threat to individual freedom. Humans have weaponized everything from a stick, a rock, a car, plane, helicopter, and now the internet and ai.
Never before have those seeking to control society possessed such powerful tools for influencing human behavior on such a personal and intimate scale. And never before has it been so easy to confuse the illusion of freedom with freedom itself.
During my time writing for Latitudes & Attitudes I ended an article once with a few words I still hold close today “Fear guards the gates of freedom”. Perhaps the best six words I have ever written.
We are raising young people in an environment where nearly every insecurity can be exploited, every desire monetized, and every moment of attention harvested.
And then we wonder why so many struggle with independence, self-worth, and the courage to stand apart from the crowd.
The battle ahead will not only be fought with guns, fists, and black eyes. It will be fought for the independence of the human mind.
For the ability to think critically, question authority, endure discomfort, and recognize manipulation. For the courage to be unpopular. For the willingness to stand alone.
These are precisely the qualities that solitude, adversity, and a little genuine hardship helped instill in me.
And these are the qualities I fear our modern environment is slowly eroding.
So here I sit aboard Eleanor, looking down at the younger version of myself sprawled across the cabin sole. I don’t regret his life. I admire him, and I want his death to matter.
And if that means offending a few people along the way, so be it. Because from where I sit, one thing has become painfully clear. Our youth doesn’t need more influencers. They need people willing to tell them the truth. And sometimes, that requires a little tough-love, and if you are offended, seriously, get over it, stand up, and roll up your sleeves!
So I lay down my hat as an influencer. Going forward in my writing I intend to offend, scrutinize, and make a mess f things. And hopefully inspire a few people along the way.
I now identify as a disrupter, can that be a thing?
“Peace, Love, and Coconuts” do not seem appropriate today, nor does “sail far and live slowly.”
Today I leave this blog with a book of matches and a can of gasoline in hand wanting to burn it all down so kids like Mara have a chance moving forward!
To put this in a film analogy, we need more Fight Club and less Truman Show.
Disrupt, I want to burn it all down for our youth!
Alex
