Hi, Jack here.
This site is where I’ll be posting extra bits and pieces related to my book, which follows my adventures in South Africa as a kid from farm country, USA, as I try (with varying degrees of success) to figure out what to make of the world.
Over the last century or so, things have become a lot more connected than ever before. Time and space and information have all been compressed; things like travel and communication that used to take months or years are now pretty much instant. We can share our experiences, ideas, and learn all sorts of things about other people and places we might never have done otherwise.
But this means our problems – climate change, wealth inequality, biodiversity loss, etc. – are interconnected, too. Gone are the days where we live in a vacuum unaffected or unaware of the outside world; our time and attention and habits are influenced by all sorts of vectors we’re not aware of.
The thing is, though, that our incentive structures; our systems of economics, politics and problem solving, were instated way before this exponential rise in connectivity and complexity, and their age (and ineptitude) is showing. We now know that the issues we face both as individuals and as a global society cannot be assessed – let alone resolved – in isolation.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and defeatist by all this. But nihilism and despair aren’t going to get the job done; they’ll just leave us more depressed and alienated from one another. We’ve got to remember that “Nobody cares until everyone does.” Paradigms can change quickly. Small actions, when coordinated, can make a difference. This makes connecting with each other and building awareness all the more important. If we want to have any hope of making progress, we’ll need a far better understanding of the bigger picture than the one we have now. We’ll also need to figure out how to think about these things and and also engage with each other in new ways. Meeting people where they are is the best place to start.
One of the ways to do this is to do it literally, by traveling – exposing ourselves to cultures and places we’re not used to.
Humor is another unifying force, as are sport, and art. Perhaps the most compelling of these, though, is narrative. We can have all the facts and figures we want, but we’ll always prefer a good story. Especially when it lets us feel part of a collective; working towards larger purpose. The systems of power we have now have known all this for centuries - unfortunately, these forces have been (and are being) leveraged against us. So we’ve got to reclaim them.
…Which is why I don’t feel like my book is just a travel memoir. Of course it’s a travelogue in part, insofar as I talk a lot about South Africa’s natural landscape. And there’s some memoir-y stuff: we follow my clumsy, unorthodox (at least for where I come from) journey from clueless teenager to a (slightly) older, but much more world-weary college graduate: As college (and the real world) approached, I started to panic. Nothing against my peers, but I had bigger, more important things to do. I also knew I was physically and mentally incapable of taking some soul-sucking desk job. Travel seemed like the best course of action to buy some time and figure out what I wanted to make of my life.
I happened to pick South Africa, a place that seemed very cool and exotic and interesting (at least from my living room back home in farm country): it was all the way down by Antarctica, almost 10,000 miles away. Google told me it had all sorts of wild animals – lions, elephants, rhinos, sharks – and all sorts of adventures.
…But it also had lots of poverty, strife, and suffering, which was the real reason I’d be paying it a visit. I signed up to be a volunteer teacher at an underfunded school outside of Cape Town. It seemed like a win-win: save the children, but go on some cool adventures and meet some lifelong friends along the way. Things didn’t really work out as planned. I soon realized that “philanthropy” and “activism” weren’t nearly as pure as I’d been led to believe. Nevertheless, I fell in love with this beautiful, complex country, and returned twice more (as a student), spending two years there in total by the time I turned 24.
I use my travels (and the interstitial periods between my three stints there) as a vehicle to broach some of these questions and the bigger issues we face (the “metacrisis,” as it’s been coined; nothing to do with the Zuckerberg-owned company) or at least with this all in mind.
Necessarily, this means the book is also an exploration of the middle-America, digital-age experience: the homogenization of culture, the neutering of our political/civil discourse. The petri dish of anxiety, fatigue, and helplessness that makes ordinary, working-class people vulnerable to populism, misinformation, echo chambers, and all the rest. How hyper-individualism, our need for instant gratification, and our “less than comprehensive” geopolitical/historical understanding combine to inspire naive kids from Nowhereville like me to go Liberate™ third world countries. The cognitive dissonance we must live with as citizens of an empire whose past isn’t exactly spotless; knowing there’s no such thing as ethical consumption, yet being given no choice but to participate, to be complicit. Having to come to terms with the fact that things aren’t binary; good or evil.
But, anyway, yeah – in the end, I did manage to finish school: I got a BA in international relations, and an MA in journalism/political communication (from the University of Cape Town). On paper, I guess this would mean I was qualified to write a book of this nature: Going over and spending a couple of years on the ground in some far-flung country and reporting back on its culture, government, etc., (perhaps throwing in a couple of feel-good parallels to our own lives for good measure).
And to an extent, I’m sure those degrees did help me write the book, insofar as they required a good bit of writing. But I don’t think it’s a clear “cause and effect.” I’m pretty sure I would have wanted to write this book regardless, even if I had pursued a degree in a more “respectable” field like, I don’t know, supply chain logistics.
If anything, I pursued those degrees because of the weird and scary and sometimes hilarious experiences I was having in South Africa. Academia was, as much as anything else, just an excuse for me to keep going back. (It helped that tuition was about 10% of the cost of schools back home).
From what I can tell (in my very limited experience as a book-writer), whether you’re qualified or capable of writing a book is less about your background, your academic bonafides, and way more about whether you’re curious, willing to bother people on occasion, and to be just a little bit brave. It helps to be pretty obsessive, too. Throw in a healthy dose of skepticism, humor, some stubbornness, and you’re pretty much ready to go. It doesn’t even really matter where you go/what you do exactly; the material will pile up. After that, it’s just a matter of strapping yourself in for several hundred hours and getting it all down on paper.
Having said that, I do think having grown up on the front lines of post-Cold War, internet-age America is important when it comes to writing a book about what it means to travel; to be a participant/guinea pig on the front lines of the globalized, digital world. It’s become clear over the past few years that there’s a serious generational divide in terms of political ideology but also in terms of cultural reference points and fundamental worldview. I’d like to think that growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s gave me a pretty good feel for the “average” Middle-American experience for my generation. Frankly, it was kind of a rollercoaster:
Off the bat, we were told that the world was our oyster; “Shoot for the stars,” etc.
Slightly less positive news then began to trickle in: The ice caps were melting, the ozone layer was disappearing, the Amazon was burning. (Oh, and this all started over a century ago, and we knew about it the whole time. But it’s now got too much momentum to stop, probably.)
Luckily, we were easily distracted from all this doom and gloom – we were far too busy with all these phones and iPods and video games and social media networks that were popping up. We were thrown into the technological deep end before anyone had any real understanding as to what this meant for our psychology at both the individual and societal level; it was the Wild West. (Sure enough, this stuff quite literally shaped how we thought, behaved, and consumed.)
All the while, we were reminded that we were growing up in the best country on earth. “Be grateful. Don’t you know that kids in the Sahara are starving?” etc. So that pretty much covered all the bases as far as Global Affairs: our way of doing things was best (even if people from other places appeared happier or healthier or more educated). This was especially true after 9/11: They were so jealous of our freedoms that they had to lash out in the worst way possible. That was proof we were doing something right.
Anyway, by the time we were nearing the end of high school, we realized that the university degrees we’d been told our whole lives we needed to pursue cost tens – or, in some cases, hundreds – of thousands of dollars. A lifetime of debt. Increasingly, the prospect of owning a house, starting a family was out of the question.
And yet, nobody (when it came to regular folks at least) seemed to be concerned about any of this. You were far more likely to hear people arguing about Mexican immigrants or what color suit Obama was wearing or whether a cake shop could legally deny service to a gay couple. Real solutions – for the problems that actually impacted all of our lives – didn’t seem to be available. There was no suggestion that our institutions might not be operating with our best interests in mind, nor that the ways in which we were taught to think and interact with each other might need to be rethought if we wanted to avoid societal and environmental collapse.
Help wasn’t coming.
Our parents and grandparents had no incentive to rock the boat, or didn’t have the time; our teachers had a Cold War-era curriculum to stick to; our politicians were too old to know what was going on, blatantly disinterested, or both.
But the threats we face go far beyond traditional demographics, so it’s vital to figure out how we can begin to bridge these gaps of perspective and understanding. People are already alienated enough from each other; more resentment won’t help anything.
Travel (as mentioned above) is just one of the ways to build those bridges; I’m lucky to have been given the “bug” early on – pretty much in utero. This was thanks to a mother who was always keen to visit her family and friends back home in England; she’d always bring me and my sister along.
My Dad, who’s from even further into the Pennsylvanian hinterlands, played a part, too: as a pilot, he’d been all around the world (sadly, he quit flying commercial before we were born, meaning we missed out on unlimited free tickets).
Nice as it was to grow up in the middle of a clash of cultures, it also meant that I started to feel like I was never really at home. As a kid who was always on the outside looking in, I became fascinated by concepts like belonging and tribalism; how we use words and behaviors to signal certain things, and to enforce norms/hierarchies; how we include or alienate each other. This was compounded at school: despite technically being in the heart of [white/conservative] Amish country, the city of Lancaster is very multicultural, and not very affluent. Its underfunded public schools weren’t able to give any student - let alone oddballs like me - much individualized attention. Teachers were more worried about preparing their classes of 30+ students for statewide standardized tests.
As you can imagine, this made making friends, or forming a coherent worldview, pretty tricky. I always found that comedy (when done well) gave a more honest/accurate portrayal of how people actually thought; of how things actually worked: I loved shows like Arrested Development and the UK Office; comedians like Louis CK and Bo Burnham. (I’ve got a soft spot for Shane Gillis, since he’s from the county next door in PA.)
But the main escape for me was always sport - namely tennis, which my mom taught me as a kid. I still play as often as I can; the repetition combined with the exertion is very therapeutic and head-clearing. I love to watch it, too – especially in person – though I fear the sport won’t ever be the same without Roger Federer, my favorite athlete ever (and coincidentally the best player of all time). I also love football (i.e., soccer), though I’m nowhere near as good at playing it, which is disappointing. I’m a huge Liverpool fan, and have supported the England national team since I was a kid; my mom wouldn’t let me get up to watch our World Cup matches in 2002 because of the time difference, but I watched on in 2004 when we lost to Portugal on penalties. Not a great start, and it hasn’t been much better since: it’s always heartbreak, you just never know how it’s going to happen. So I guess that keeps things interesting.
After living in London for a few years, I’ve found that I’ve warmed up to a lot of American stuff that I used to want nothing to do with. Pop country music (Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs, etc.), for example. I’ve even got a couple of trucker hats. Maybe it’s just a form of anti-English rebellion, or maybe it was inside me all along: You can take the boy out of farm country…
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After that, feel free to check out some of my posts: the one below is a good place to start, as it has a little bit more info about me and the book. Enjoy!
Welcome!
Hi. Jack here. I’ve just spent most of the last couple of years writing a book about my time down in South Africa, a country in which I spent a good chunk of time between the ages of 19 and 25. The working title, as you can see, is This is Africa. Funnily enough, I really didn’t set out to write a book...
