This is how much he had to sacrifice. Leaving his only son when he was just five and not being able to watch him grow up like any other normal father. He also sacrificed a father/son relationship that may never be restored. “Out of everyone I knew in this world, I knew my son least of all.” Karl didn’t have any means of communication with his son for years but managed to reach him after contacting one of his friends on Facebook. While he was away, his son was suffering from depression and self abuse and had to use medication and therapy.
That's not sacrifice, that's abandonment. I have a young son not far from that age and trying to imagine how he'd feel if daddy just walked off nearly brings me to tears.
I no longer want to read about this person's journey or care to, because this is exactly the kind of person we need to stop hero worshipping. The irreparable damage to society from child abandonment is so large, that whatever he accomplished(?) by doing his stunt is negated.
I'm going to be unapologetic in saying that because this is irresponsible, immature behavior. He had a child, and then decided to leave for 20+ years to pursue his selfish interests while 100% abandoning his family and spouse to raise the child themselves. It's 100% trying to run away once he saw how difficult raising a family is and turned it into some BS stunt. That is also a relationship and pain and suffering that should never be forgiven, not during this immature person's lifetime.
Advice to others when you're thinking of doing this sort of thing where you abandon the people that love you to pursue some extreme interest. You may get exactly what you're looking for, with the cost of people never being close to you ever again.
As a point of interest, the English do have a sort of stiff upper lip thing going on since forever. It's normal in English upper class families to send kids to boarding school. This was partly enabled by empire, but seems to have persisted. I have English friends who think nothing of living on another continent to their children.
On the mental bearings of extreme travelers, I used to do some long distance (multi-week) cycle touring and offered accommodation to others through platforms for this purpose while living in China. They say you have to be half-mad to get in to cycle touring in the first place. Some of these people were very much in a weird mental place. After a bad experience with a German woman I stopped participating in these systems. Some of them would turn up broke with no shoes really in need of help. A subset of the people who finish go on to become motivational speakers. Most of them probably wind up happy, but grizzled and impoverished with more physical than mental health.
I have a 2 year old daughter and I'm about to have a son in February. Walking away from them is unfathomable. I can't imagine the regret I'd feel at my old age, having lost the few short years where I get to watch my children grow up, just so I can walk to some places.
There's far more depth and mystery to be explored in raising a human than there will ever be as a tourist. The deep stupidity it takes to think otherwise is depressing to behold.
Your comment makes no sense. I separated from my first wife when she was six months pregnant with my first daughter and divorced my second wife when we had two kids 3 y/o and 9 months old. Kids and pregnancy was very taxing and didn't fit my life goals so separation was definitely the right decision because after that I found my dream job and built a satisfying career at a successful tech company.
this post reads like a parody you'd find on linkedin lunatics. I mean, sure, how could the joys of raising a human being compare to a slight bump in relevant kpi's?
Yeah that is nuts, whenever I think about doing a huge hike/bike adventure I always stop becuase... I can't abandon my dog for 4 months haha. This dude abandoned his son forever?
I like to follow some adventures people take. Like cycling across continents for years. Especially since I have a small child so it is totally impossible for me to do. Even basic travelling for holidays is a challenge. Sad to see someone abandon their family to do that, seems like some kind of mental health issue.
When Karl was preparing to cross the ice from Alaska to Russia, I worked with him a bit on a kite-flown camera system to help him get a Birds Eye view of the flows to chart his course. I engineered a ruggedized wireless camera in an aluminum housing, I don’t remember much about it other than I was doubtful that the resolution would be able to give him the data he needed on on small low resolution screen. (This was before consumer drones were common or affordable). We built some devices, not sure if he ever used them or if they helped. I urged him to do a lot of testing to make sure they would be worth the weight.
We spent a lot of time at college coffee house in Fairbanks Alaska working over the ideas and overall design.
Nice fellow, strange aspirations, indomitable spirit. I’m glad to see his trek is nearing completion, and I wish him well on his further adventures. Good luck and Godspeed, Karl.
I bicycled around North America for a year in 1998-1999, and finished in Alaska. It was wild to live on a bike for a full year, and then meet people who had been living that way (on bikes and on foot) for years at a time. There were a lot of people just starting out on aspirational long trips, but there were also a handful of people who had already gone a long long way. Fairbanks was an interesting meeting point for many of those travelers.
I read a book called A Walk Across America in college, by Peter Jenkins. I liked the idea of traveling under my own power, but I didn't want to spend years walking. I kept when I got my driver's license, and I was bike commuting in NYC at the time, so biking was a natural fit.
I was teaching at the time, so the first summer without any obligations I rode across the northern US. Then I rode across the southern US the next summer. I loved it, and wanted to live outside for all the seasons. So the next year I quit my job and circled the continent: Seattle to Maine, down to Florida, across to California, then up to Alaska. I moved to Alaska a few years after the trip ended and spent 20 years there. We moved to North Carolina last year, because dark southeast Alaskan winters were getting old, and all our family is on the east coast.
I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to do that trip in the era of paper maps, and truly being out of touch for so much of that time. It pushes you to meet so many new people in all the places you visit, instead of staying in constant contact with people you already know. It was also nice to not see satellite imagery of the road ahead. Every day was a surprise. :)
One of my claims to fame is writing one of the best-selling Python books of all time (Python Crash Course), and one of the lowest-selling travel books of all time. :)
A Walk Across America was amazing reading when I was college aged. I've never forgotten the story about the accident when he and his (then-girlfriend?) were walking along a quiet highway, I think in Nevada, and they decided to walk on the wrong side of the road, against his usual rules, because it had a shoulder.
And, she landed in the hospital after a car hit them.
I think they got married in New Orleans, before they started the rest of the walk together.
Peter and Barbara didn't do so well after that trip. One of their kids took a road trip with his mom recently, retracing their route from New Orleans to Oregon. He wrote a book about their road trip, and it was a pretty interesting read: https://www.jedidiahjenkins.com
I rode a bicycle from Canada to Mexico (in about a month) with a close friend. We bought a book called Bicycling the Pacific Coast (before smart phones).
I had a cheap $150 univega bike and my friend had a $3000 cannondale. His broke mine didn't :)
We were amateurs. We hitchhiked to a bike shop near San Francisco to fix it. Had some saddle bags with our tent and sleeping bag, clothes and water.
It's very doable. Hardest part is just showing up.
Honestly, I don’t really remember. More than a decade ago, but I think maybe I was already working on my sailing adventures by then and working the summer in Fairbanks? Or maybe that was before, I’m not really sure. Too many relationships, kids, and big life changes between here and there to have a sense of the thing. I’m sure you can look it up? IIRC he was in Fairbanks for quite a while. Was a bit of a fixture at the coffee house.
I spent alot of time in Fairbanks throughout 2006 and 2008, doing aerial surveys from plane. Fairbanks was a good airport to get stuck at, and you do meet some interesting non-traditional travelers. I've never met the guy in the article, but I've met a few bike/hike travelers there who were either moving horizontally or vertically across Alaska (no small feat at all), and I always thought it sounded like an adventure.
Iirc he was there for more than a year, flew home for a while, came back? Not sure. I do remember him being there during a summer and also during winter. I think one year the ice was impassible and he was waiting. But I don’t really remember, such things might have been mere conversation crystallized into memories. He seemed a kind and pleasant man , though, of that I am sure.
Any tips or build plans for KAP (kite areal photography) using modern action cams? I build a clothing hanger setup but the imagery was unusable due to vibrations
“99.99 percent of the people I’ve met have been the very best in humanity,” he said. “The world is a much kinder, nicer place than it often seems.”
I wish everyone could experience this, internalize this. Sometime in my 20's or 30's I cast off any fears that I had about people and the world in general. And it was like a huge weight was left behind.
I started to believe that it was paying too much attention to the news (especially cable news when it became a thing) that had come to shackle me with fear. Getting out in the world, traveling, making yourself vulnerable even (and nixing cable) were all things that made me start to love the world and people more. (My kids know me as the Pollyanna of the family.)
I suppose I am armchair psychologizing now, but I often see fear behind a lot of people's behavior (and even some friend's) and I feel sorry for them: I see them missing out on a lot of life experiences.
I would, no thoughts, help/accompany/host him in whatever occasion I meet him in my small, distant hometown, if he happened to pass by. Of course, it plays a role that he is on foot and in the edge of survival, so he can cause no damage. I wouldn't have the same attitude with someone more luxurious. Poverty with philosophy/culture is guaranteed human.
Ah that sucks. I would also guess that an attractive 28 year on a global walking adventure might have left a few kids in his wake. He should probably avoid 23andMe.
Some of my favorite (or at least most durable) memories are from giving hitchhikers rides. I wouldn't recommend it for everyone, and the pandemic really put a damper on that, but I've given ~20 people rides over the years and never regretted it.
Although, you definitely hear some tough stories that way.
For those interested, National Geographic has the "Out of Eden Walk" [1], a journey along the path of historical human migration, led by Paul Salopek. He started in Ethiopia in January 2013 – nearly 13 years ago – and just recently made it to Alaska. The planned end of the trip is at the southern tip of South America.
It would be impossible to do without taking breaks, as explained in the article:
> Due to visa limits, Bushby has had to break up his walk. In Europe, he can stay for only 90 days before leaving for 90, so he flies to Mexico to rest and then returns to resume the route.
Given that he literally swam across the Caspian Sea in order to avoid Russia and Iran because of legal issues, nevermind bring imprisoned in Russia due to what sounded like bureaucratic BS, it's more impressive than I first thought.
> They were detained by Russian border troop officers while they were crossing the Russian border near the Chukotkan village of Uelen, for not entering Russia at a correct port of entry.
Illegal border crossing is absolutely not bureaucratic BS in any country.
I'm laughing at the lack of nuance in laws in general. Some guy crossed the Bering Straight on foot as part of a 27 year quest to walk around the world and the law makes no exception.
I remember as a teen being hauled into a police station because a friend and I had been exploring the storm drains ("sewers") with a home-made flame thrower (okay, so the movie "Alien" had recently come out… Yeah, we left the flamethrower behind in the sewer when we popped our heads out and saw police).
Someone in the neighborhood had called the police because she had seen us going down the manhole opening. (The police said the report came through that some kids had "fallen" into the sewers.)
So I'm sitting in the police station with good cop and bad cop sitting there musing over my case. "How about 'Failure to use a sidewalk when a sidewalk was available'," bad cop said as he read from a book he was paging through. That got a laugh all around…
To be completely fair, Russia did decide to make an exception in this case, although it took a couple of months (during which Bushby was detained) to get there.
I am a little bit torn in this case. From our vantage point it's obvious that Bushby wasn't running an elaborate long scam to get into Russia. In the moment... I don't know, former UK special forces guy? Long history of espionage between UK and Russia? Two months seems too long; it's also not as easy as your case of a teenager in the sewer.
Fair enough, but I interpreted "for not entering Russia at a correct port of entry" as he had a visa to enter the country, but he just didn't land at a recognized "port of entry", which given he walked/swam across the Being Strait, is unsurprising. But I don't know the full details of the situation.
This might be a little broad for most, but I find the whole concept of nationalism and border sovereignty kinda tired. Who cares? We were nomads before we settled in cities, and it's only the designs of the empowered few that ever made the idea compulsory.
I'm saying this as someone who enlisted in the defense of said nations once. Most of the structures that make up a country these days are for the birds - let a guy hike for chrissake. I also lived where I could see Tijuana from my back yard and all the pearl clutching and self-fanning over "illegal immigrants" is a giant crock of blustery nonsense. We have bigger problems than normal folks just trying to live their lives.
The whole concept of nationalism and border sovereignty has been with us for essentially all of human history, and I don't see it petering out anytime soon. Plenty of people care, for all sorts of reasons, many of which I would say, are good!
Not really. Tribes generally lived in specific areas, and would go to war with other tribes if those tribes tried to expand into their turf. Or would go to war to expand their turf. That's basically the early version of nationalism and borders, with the tribe as the nation, and neighboring tribes understanding which area was whose. Even nomadic tribes would be nomadic within a certain area, and jealously protect the area they would go to at the start of every spring, for example.
Even modern primates establish territories for their groups, and warn off and fight other primates attempting to encroach. So this general behavior is quite natural. The concept of open borders where anyone can just waltz in and live somewhere where they're not from or didn't marry into and haven't been invited -- that's actually the relatively newer idea, historically speaking.
I'm not arguing for more closed borders today, but I don't think we're should pretend that the historical human condition has somehow been "open".
If you're talking about "the freedom to escape one's surroundings and move away", the book has been widely criticized for that assertion, as Graeber is extremely ideologically motivated.
If you left your tribe without being accepted into another (whether through marriage or some kinds of previous personal alliances you'd made), life would be pretty rough if you survived at all.
Sure tribes would split sometimes when they got too big or disagreements split them. But that's not about the individual level. That's akin to nation-state secession today.
There's no evidence that people were just regularly packing things up and going off and joining whatever neighboring tribe they wanted to, whenever they wanted to. And this is the type of thing where the book has come under such heavy criticism:
The US (where “open borders” are often characterized as national “suicide” by right-wing figures) had open borders well within living memory.
By ship? No. But you’re from Argentina and made it all the way up to the Rio and want to cross to work on US farms or whatever? Yeah whatever man, totally fine, just walk in. Anyone from the Americas was welcome, no waiting, no la migra hunting them, no nothin’
We didn’t change that until the ‘60s, and the only reason it didn’t cause a ton of problems immediately (farms at that time were already heavily dependent on migrant labor operating a bit under the table, and their lobbies were not quiet on the issue) was that enforcement was and has been, at times (and especially at first) mostly rather half-assed.
The most obvious one is that the modern welfare state relies for its legitimacy on social cohesion, i.e. a certain base of shared values and identity. You will not get people to consent to heavy taxation and redistribution if they feel that their society is full of foreigners. This observation is perhaps more relevant to Europe than the USA.
And that's before mentioning the economics of funding a welfare state with a relatively static/shrinking tax base and growing, imported, welfare recipient class - the latter being practically unbounded in the case of illegal immigration.
It's not just a human thing; people who study wolves find they maintain surprisingly strict borders between different packs, and this behavior continues though a lot of other mammals and even some smaller animals like certain birds and insects.
> The whole concept of nationalism and border sovereignty has been with us for essentially all of human history,
Quite the opposite. The modern concept of "border sovereignty" as intertwined with the nation-state is a Westphalian construction. (Students of world history will recognize why this timing is not a coincidence). And even then, they didn't exactly catch on immediately.
Sovereign nation-states are a tiny piece of human history. They're not even the majority of recorded human history.
That's partially true; the bit about borders and human history (so long as you sequester 'history' to 'recorded history') - but nationalism is actually newer than you'd think, and there were human societies for thousands of years before there were borders. More recent if you go by the current definition of border (formalized, surveyed borders are also relatively modern).
Is nationalism going to peter out? No, of course not. Do some people care for reasons that are important to them? Sure, I don't want to tell anyone how to feel. I am just another jerk with an opinion like the rest of us.
But if you were to ask me, it's take it or leave it. I'd be more than happy to see free movement in the world. Just another set of rules I'm not using.
Yes, hard borders are far more recent than people think. As late as the First World War you could travel the world without so much as a passport.
But: back then only a handful of very rich people had the means to do that, and taxation and social protection were much lower than today. Those things are related. They (IMO of course!) are what make borders a pragmatic necessity.
> We were nomads before we settled in cities, and it's only the designs of the empowered few that ever made the idea compulsory.
Reasoning from pre-agrarian living patterns is, quite frankly, hippy nonsense. And no, we didn't settle in cities because of "the designs of the empowered few", but because agriculture leads to more permanent, prosperous settlements, which attract raiders, and settling close together allowed for common defense. In other words, as soon as people earned a living by their own planning and sustained effort, (as opposed to merely collecting the bounty of the earth) they settled down and drew borders to protect what they had built from people who wanted to just show up and reap the rewards of their effort, at their expense!
> I also lived where I could see Tijuana from my back yard and all the pearl clutching and self-fanning over "illegal immigrants" is a giant crock of blustery nonsense.
We can't have borders because you could see Tijuana from your back yard?
> We have bigger problems than normal folks just trying to live their lives.
Defending borders is the most basic function of the state. It quite literally does not have anything better to do than to defend its borders.
That depends on your values. I think it's bureaucratic BS in every country. The world hasn't been like this forever, and still isn't like this for other animals.
If you enter a bear's den, especially if it has cubs, the bear will likely attack you.
If you enter the territory of a swan, especially during nesting season, the swan might attack you.
If a foreign object enters some animal's body, the immune system may attack that object.[0] Allergy might be related to the immune system misidentifying allergens.
Squirrels can be surprisingly territorial.
Ants have wars. [1]
This is not surprising, since the consequences of territory being compromised can be severe. For instance, in this case [2], the territory was compromised through deception, like pretending to be one of them, and it led to the severe weakening or death of the whole colony through the mass devouring of their offspring.
There are cases of pet dogs, having great relationships with their owners, eating the corpses of their owners after the owners died of some unrelated reasons. Possibly due to starvation in some cases.
In that video, was the ewe and lion cub pets or wild animals?
I agree, and one of their great concerns is keeping foreign spies from getting in. Even though Russia isn't in good graces with the world currently, I think it's I'll advised to go off-script with any nation's border checkpoints.
It was clearly a response to the grandparent's "... isn't like this for other animals". It's a fine thing to aspire to be better, but we just shouldn't be claiming that human behavior is any way less natural than that of all other animals.
One definition of "better" could be to seek to avoid the extinction of the human species and of civilization. With that definition, in the current situation, taking measures to help avoid nuclear weapon usage, could be considered in depth and genuinely "better".
You can also consider the subject in terms of IT. Firewalls can be argued to delimit territory, as can login systems. Sandboxes are probably the reverse, in terms of keeping something in instead of keeping it out.
Some cells have cell walls, and viruses as I understand it have to penetrate that wall.
Nuts and fruit sometimes have protective shells.
An argument could be made that borders and territory are fundamental.
For an agent that seeks to defeat border control mechanisms, it can potentially be effective to convince the target parties that border control mechanisms generally or specifically are harmful, are useless, or have drawbacks. This is not always completely false in all cases, for instance regarding immune systems misidentifying harmless allergens as harmful, causing potentially significant harm as allergy. However, if an agent uses such approaches, they have to be careful not to buy into that idea themselves, lest matters may become strange and weird. And, in the modern day, if an agent is especially successful and competent with defeating border control mechanisms, considering the extreme power that the human species holds these days, such as with nuclear weapons, it puts an extreme responsibility on such successful agents, at least in the current systems. Otherwise, the consequences might be extremely detrimental to the human species as a whole.
In English it's "have enforced their borders for millennia"; the phrase "since [length of time]" is almost always grammatically incorrect and a giveaway that someone's not a native English speaker.
"Borders didn't exist before the treaty of Westphalia" is a hell of a take. If you want to stretch the State Sovereignty / Non-Interference aspect of it to that definition you're going to have to make your case properly, because I don't see how such a position could be defensible.
I am not convinced that the idea is recent, or rather, related ideas are not recent, going back thousands of years. It can be extremely complex, to put it very mildly. How well people that put their trust in some of those ideas fare, can likewise be an extremely complex topic, and can also be political. In some cases in some ways some of them might have fared well, in some other cases in some ways, maybe less so.
A group of men crossing the border into another country was (usually) automatically considered invaders if its size exceeded a certain number.
Eg Iberian Peninsula (Reconquista and later): Foreign parties >10 armed men could not cross without permission between christians and muslims.
Chinese frontier zones, Scythians, Huns, Mongols, Turks etc all had similar rules. If you want to go back further, then Assyria, Egypt, Hittites, Greece had such limits.
You are correct that there are many examples of border control mechanisms, in different levels and ways. Maybe even usually the vast majority for many levels and ways.
Some nations, countries or groups, or other levels, did play with some of those mentioned ideas of less border control mechanisms in some ways or levels, also going back thousands of years.
Countries that were not successful with border control mechanisms, sometimes ceased to exist.
But there are many different levels and ways, and the whole topic is, to put it very mildly, extremely complex.
One must distinguish between "classical" communism (Stalinism, which is dead except in North Korea) and the modern variety, which is alive and well and I think is what you mean.
There are many that think themselves "cosmopolitan", when it is a delusion and coping mechanism about being a parochial hicklib. A chip on their shoulder that makes them especially fervent acolytes of liberalism (as in: Obama flavoured, not the other kind), hoping it offsets their humble origins after moving to the big city, so folks won't get the idea that they are flyover country chuds that vote the wrong way.
A cosmopolitan, as in one that truly knows the different cultures and people of the world because he has deep first hand experience, or has read so much that it allows to draw some independent form of conclusion, is either a strong proponent of borders or a fool.
The core tenet that makes this communism-adjacent is the denial of differences: everyone is equal, "no one is illegal" etc pp. Ignorance of history and the nature of man is a must to take this position.
> A cosmopolitan, as in one that truly knows the different cultures and people of the world because he has deep first hand experience, or has read so much that it allows to draw some independent form of conclusion, is either a strong proponent of borders or a fool.
This is the most incredible No-True-Scotsman fallacy I've ever read.
This is not "how I feel" or my actual opinion of liberals in general. It is a certain archetype that I unfortunately know all too well.
> This but unironically.
You can just say you're a communist, you know. The core tenet will always be some appeal to equality, no matter how you like to describe yourself ("socialist", "liberal", "a decent heckin' human being" in Reddit speech or what have you).
that doesn't make any sense for two reasons. first, he only entered the EU in september this year, so either the 90 days are not up yet or he should be in mexico now. is he? but why would he fly to mexico when he could just go to the UK?
but more importantly, he is a british citizen. getting a visa to walk through europe, especially now that he already has a track record of walking for so long should really not be an issue.
have you tried? I'm a South African living in Europe and visas are a nightmare.
Many europeans have never had to apply for a real visa in their life (I don't mean the online ones, or the apply on arrival ones, I mean the ones where you submit a 20 page form of personal details and hotel bookings and letters from friends you'll be staying with and bank statements and a full travel history) and they assume that I'm just making life difficult for myself by not doing some simpler option that they assume must exist.
I don't know about what visa options UK citizens have for the EU since brexit, but I'd be surprised it was as simple as "I feel like spending more than the 90 days I get".
I'd be surprised it was as simple as "I feel like spending more than the 90 days I get"
why? that's exactly what i think he should be able to do. it's not like he spent 27 years walking across the planet in order to then misrepresent what he wants to do in the EU.
I live in Norway, have residence and stuff. I can travel freely through most of europe without much hassle - but I can only travel 90 days out of 180 days - then you gotta go out of the area (or back to your home country if it is inside), stay out or home for 90 days, and then start anew. The closest border to me - one to Sweden - has no real security. A customs office because there is border shopping in the area and I know they very occasionally stop folks. A crossing an slightly inconvenient distance north just has signs.
He crossed the border illegally and was carrying a firearm with him. Maybe it's ok in the USA to cross the border illegally carrying a firearm with you, but I assure you it's not legal in all the other countries in the world and penalty would be very severe.
I don’t really think this would be possible given the nature of visas. Many countries require you to apply for a visa from your country of residence, not merely the nearest embassy. I guess with infinite funds he could fly back and forth to handle that, but doesn’t seem practical.
Big community of people who motorbike around the world non-stop. It’s definitely possible to prepare beforehand and actually more admin getting a vehicle through borders.
Biking is faster, you can arrange for all visas for 6 months in advance but not for years. Even for 6 months to have them all approved with no gaps requires either a lot of luck or a very strong passport or both.
I was gonna say the same, it sounds like he did 17k miles in his first 8 years. That sounds tremendously far but it works out to ~5 miles a day. So either he was only walking for 2-3 hours a day or he was only walking every couple days.
After that he really slows down to a crawl and has long periods away from the trail entirely. Whats crazy is that he doesn't like... go home to visit his son and family or try to somehow help the people in his life, he just goes to South America until he can continue.
The fact that when he was forced to take extended (3mo+) breaks he still refused to go home is a bit telling.
Totally valid if you are just doing like the PCT in sections for fun, but for a sponsored grand adventure that you write books about I don't think section hiking is valid.
A couple of Youtubers who are also round-the-world travelers whom I enjoy watching, one a Dutch motorcyclist and the other a German cyclist.
Noraly, the motorcyclist, has already traveled through South and North America, Africa, and Asia, some multiple times. Currently, I believe she is in Tajikistan about to enter Kyrgystan.
Max Roving, the cyclist, has already cycled through Afghanistan and he is currently trying to ride Africa north to south. He just completed Algeria and is about to enter Morroco.
There is nothing so wonderful that it cannot be ruined by turning it into a youtube channel... The really brilliant people I've met doing things like this always absolutely refused to mediafy their experience. Turning your adventure into a continuous TV show is great way to kill the adventure. We're now so used to everyone running their own shopping channel we don't even notice it. Read Thesiger's books for an account of real experience. The film I urge everyone to watch is Cronenberg's Videodrome - truly the film of our times.
I think the central message of that article is precisely that he is completing the adventure only because of community encouragement - but that that is the assistance of all the incredible people he met along the way, strangers on the ground who supported him and helped him on his way, and his friends and family at home. The community is the real people on the ground, and it is the real and living community of the humans who inhabit the entire world. The commercial transmissions with you as TV star are totally unnecessary, and actually only get in the way... Thesiger said that the greatest thing about his adventure across the Arabian Desert was his comradeship with the Bedouin. You just can't have that while waiving a selfie-stick and grinning into the camera...
There are incredible people along the way, there are also incredible people watching and cheering on people who vlog. Communities can — and very much should — be much larger than just who you happen to have found yourself physically near.
And yes, I can assure you, you can absolutely have both while engaging in blogging, vlogging, serialized writing, or any other form of serialized expression.
Not all of vlogging has any relationship to your straw man.
I can only say that, in my own experience, you can't. Traveling pre- and post-smartphone are two completely different realities. The thing tethering you to a gigantic global faceless 'community' has the cost of weakening or blocking your engagement with real immediate physical people, and chance events and immediate experience. There is definitely a trade-off, no matter where your preferences lie. The last time I stayed in a hostel it was in Lima, Peru. It was mostly young people traveling. On every bunk in the room, a guest staring silently into their glowing palms. The joy of traveling used to be having very intense and focused encounters with completely new people who you would probably never speak to again...
"There is definitely a trade-off, no matter where your preferences lie."
That's a much more reasonable position than the idea that sharing your journey on Youtube "ruins" it, or "kills the adventure". Different people prefer different things.
And they've been very safe, as far as I've heard. I think generally you can use common sense and be extremely safe all around the world.
Unfortunately there are some exceptions and I believe the highest risk area is India. A lady vlogger on motorcycle was recently gang raped there by 7 men.
I assume this is mitigated by delaying the uploads by a month (which you may need anyway due to sporadic internet access & not always having the time to edit videos).
Noraly/Itchy boots rubs me the wrong way far too often.
Her content always **ends up being top notch and respectful**, but starts off with a sour taste after the title is "I should have never come here." and the content is a lovely journey......
Idk. This whole genre is: western person is achieving a "dream" life as a function of their birth and wealth status. Has a good time, seemed to enjoy the journey. But then pretends the trips are hampered by 1-2 (expected) events not normal for a westerner, and reflects that in the title for views.
I also enjoy watching Charles, a French-Canadian cyclist currently cycling from Canada to Europe. As a geologist he regularly explains rock formations and rock types he encounters.
>The world is a much kinder, nicer place than it often seems.
I realize that a lot these days. People are not inherently so bad but greed is a nasty drug that has the potential to ruin the best.
When you have nothing to offer but kindness and compassion, it is very simple to see the humanity side of things in this world and it can feel really amazing.
There's a kind of stereotype we have of people that we have not met. The truth is that those groups of people that we think are nasty people are often kind and nice and full of empathy and compassion.
There is a kind of psychological pain of cognitive dissonance when we discover this "Wait, but they are meant to be ${group_member} why are they so nice and kind to me?". But one can only experience (e.g. via travelling) and learn from these experiences, it's hard to convey to others that the world really is __much__ more kinder and nicer than our preconceptions demand it should be.
It's easier and less painful to box away people into nice and not nice groups. And it's often most common to label people similar to ourselves in the nice group. It's a narrow view of the world. Travelling opens up our preconceptions of people, the opposite of a narrow view: travelling broadens the mind.
Idk, people are usually nice in my experience. News, forum opinions and youtube videos are not remotely representative of how things work in real life.
A group of very mentally ill, insecure people with a lot of material wealth control the internet and media.
They get to write the narrative.
We can analyze just one small tool in the belt of narrative control: censoring. If you've been warned or banned on Reddit, you can imagine how this works. If you've said something against the mold of what they allow, you will get censored. With so many people commenting, some subset of people will always say what you want to see. You censor or derank opinions you don't want, and boost opinions you want. This is a defensible form of writing a narrative without actually having to artificially write anything.
Of course with AI, you can now just write anything and seed ideas.
Give such sick people the reigns, and you get a false reality has little connection to what's really happening.
OK, but applying the idea from critical legal theory that "the purpose of the law is the protect status quo power" to mental health to infer that diagnoses must similarly reinforce archetypes with social/economic/political utility for the system - how does that gel with the idea that people capable of aquiring great wealth (a measure of 'system utility') are highly mentally ill?
Aside from that, I'm not saying you're wrong or right about that theory, I'm just wondering how it falls down around that idea.
On this topic of interenet behavior, maybe I'm not really sure or maybe I am, but my view is it's less about some sort of diempowering imposition of external/elite evil upon a innocent and good mass population, but rather about the medium itself enabling latent negativities in the populus to surface. Which doesn't mean the population is itself not good and innocent - it is also multifaceted. Thus, such dynamics might operate in a "Stanford Prison Experiment" kind of "cover and permission" way.
My view of many of these dynamics are its more about emergent self-regulating properties of a system than it is about top-down control. In a sense, that's a lot more liberating and empowering for people, because then they are not cast as victims of some evil from on high, they are the architects of their experience, for good or bad.
The view you espouse, while seeming to empower the downtrodden by taking aim at hidden sources of evil power, I feel in fact disempowers by playing up the fake victim narratives that disempower and confuse people. In other words, your idea, while seemingly edgy and incisive, may in fact be what any such extant "evil elites" would want you to think, if they hope to have control! Haha :)
Anyway, I'm not trying to cut down your idea here in this topic - personally I believe people are very much in charge of their experiences, that's what I've found in my life - but in this kind of mass topic, who knows? Anywa, thanks for responding. Just some food for thought and maybe discussion. Have a good one :)
> diagnoses must similarly reinforce archetypes with social/economic/political utility for the system
Unless extreme wealth is part of the diagnostic criteria, this model says the diagnostic criteria would be designed to reinforce archetypes in the general populace, and that the status quo powerful would simply not receive such diagnoses. That doesn't stop other people from reviewing the checklists and drawing their own conclusions. (I, myself, haven't done this, so I'm not sure whether the "powerful people are diagnosable as mentally ill" conclusion is valid.)
> Thus, such dynamics might operate in a "Stanford Prison Experiment" kind of "cover and permission" way.
The Stanford Prison Experiment is actually a good example: Philip Zimbardo had his thumb very firmly on the scales, and excluded that information from his write-up. The claim that "people are just like that" has been fabricated enough times that I'm deeply suspicious of it.
Highly functioning sociopaths. And this diagnosis never goes alone in otherwise perfectly balanced individuals, does it. Most of them have missing/broken father figure syndrome which manifests in various bad and rather unfixable personality traits.
The societies we humans build always allow such persons to rise to the top - it doesn't matter if market democracy or brutal communism, fascism etc. The last type that didn't work well was some sort of feudal kingdom style where power was shared among elite across generations, inherited and rarely claimed by more competent, ambitious and vicious folks from lower ranks. But this is also how we got most of the progress in past 150 years, so its a double-edged sword. I wish I had a solution, maybe some Deus Ex-style of neutral AGI, but who would build such an AGI when everybody competent wants more power and manipulate others to their favor.
Heck, we often celebrate them by looking at their achievements, conveniently ignoring what utter piece of shit they are as humans (Ford is a prime example - a great inspiration for Hitler among others, and musk doesn't go far and look how uncritically he was celebrated also here for a long time and often still is... but the list is very long, basically almost all billionaires and high power folks).
With great power comes great impact even if they don't try, and who doesn't like some ego boost. People imitate them, follow them, subconsciously accept their values more easily. They literally imprint their values on rest of the world and we allow it due to our laziness, convenience and inherent sheepish mentality of masses which we are part of whether we like it or not - just look at how most folks need some form of a role model.
Intresting. I'm not saying (to pick some well-known execs/founders/leaders at random) Jobs, Musk, Zuck, Bezos, Huang, Trump, Xi are "high functioning sociopaths" but Jobs and Bezos both had missing biological fathers. Musk had a violent one. Zuck, not sure - but something seems weird with the dad, it's never spoken of tho. Huang was raised without parents present (only communicating via casette tape shipped on boat - wow!), living overseas from age 9, in a violent type of environment. Trump's dad was a disciplinarian tough on his brother, but Trump found ways to stand up to him. Xi's father was purged/rehabilitated by the Communists and they had to live in caves, farming dust and being bitten by lice, etc for years. I don't know any of them personally and I'm not speaking to their actual stories, as I don't know.
All this tho -- can the mother have no impact? I don't think so. Children are raised by their mothers. Why put the blame on dads, if solely? Seems not fair. A bifurcation in blame in society that can only cause a fracture that leads to greater wrongs later.
Also, while such questions are intriguing -- much of this talk of what's wrong with the internet, points the blame at a few rich people. This seems misguided, and misses the point that the internet is largely "us" - all of us. If we are doing something "wrong" but deflect, we're never going to get better. Even if some bad people are trying to push buttons, we're the ones that have to take responsibility for how we act and to do good.
When I'm chatting online, I'm sure as hell not talking with Bezos - he can't text that much, least of all in the hot-tub. I'm talking with some random. And we each have to take resopnsibility for our behavior. If the rando I'm talking with says, "Why am I bad? Because Jeff Bezos made me this way." It sounds totally ridiculous. And it is, of course. I think the hijacking of a question about "why is the internet negative sometimes" into a 2-minutes-hate on rich-elite is the wrong approach to solutions and understanding.
The internet is basically full of maladjusted people with sad lives. Strong chance that the post you read on HN, Reddit, X, etc is written by someone profoundly unhappy with their lot in life.
Yeah I think when you see that kind of unhinged negativity that's right, sure, it's a projection. But I believe the internet can be really good as well, it's just you have to ignore the stupidity that's visible and sort-of, idk, curate your experience (?) to be good. Seeing and responding to the best possibilities in any situation. :)
And it's not just that those people are more online, they also post a lot more, and don't stop a conversation when they should.
For many years the prevailing notion was that anonymity turns people into dickheads. But they did studies on this, and it turns out it's just that the real-life dickheads just dominate the discussion and the reasonable people post way less
Is that true? Can you post some studies you saw? That's fascinating if true. "The dickheads" post more - because they find an environment to take out their evil desires where they believe there are "no consequences", sounds like it makes sense. But I'd like to see the evidence.
It might have been "The Distorting Prism of Social Media: How Self-Selection and Exposure to Incivility Fuel Online Comment Toxicity" by Jin Woo Kim et al. [1][2]
Not OP and not an expert but seems the aim is outrage which leads to more engagement and more advertising clicks, more followers and so on. Distorting news and social media from reality. I must say I too have found that people are nicer than what news portrays. I had the pleasure of being able to visit New York a few years and the people were just people and pleasant.
That's a good point, that optimization thing. Sort of "algorithmically driven mad" or bad! Ha. Could be happening. It's why it's important to disengage right? From the loops of brain hijacking/hacking. A quieter internet, for a more civilized age.
That reminds me, I'm making a text-based terminal browser. It might achieve that! Haha :)
Most people have significantly less than what we are spoon fed by media and the internet at large.
Just as in history we learn of emperors and kings instead of the common person, most digital content is about the modern day lords, barons, emperors, and kings. They call them billionaires, presidents, CEOs, prime ministers, etc now, but they are the exact same as they always have been.
If you turn the screen off and take a walk, start talking with real people that actually provide value to society, the world is much kinder than we've all been made to believe.
The real people are a good people, as they long have been. Their stories may not be written, but the Earth itself carries their memories.
Quite a fascinating adventure, even if it's not continuous.
Good teaching moment for why estimates of big endeavours tend to be off, too. He appears to have slightly overestimated his average walking speed and greatly underestimated breaks (only some of which were by choice from what I gather).
The total journey appears to be 58,000 km (36,000 miles).
Expectation: 8 years, which translates to a daily average of almost 20 km (~12.5 miles). That's about 4-6 hours of walking time at my speed. Every. Single. Day. In sickness or in health, on country roads or through frozen wastelands. Seems optimistic even without anticipating any delays?
Reality: After 8 years, he had actually finished about half the distance, which I already find impressive. As of October, he has 2,213 km (1,375 miles) left. That means he traveled 55,787 km (34,664 miles) in around 27 years. That puts him at a daily average of almost 6 km (~3.7 miles), so probably 1-2 hours of daily walking time. That's actually not bad considering all the delays, but quite a bit less than anticipated.
New estimate: He expects to be home "by 2026", let's say January. Based on that premise, his new estimate is that he will walk 2,213 km in ~4 months. That's a bit more than 17 km (~10.5 miles) per day. Relatively close to his original, comparatively uninformed estimate, funnily enough.
All that said, I don't think I'd have the willpower to see this through, especially considering all the setbacks. Mighty impressive.
If he made it all the way he would beat the record set by by Plennie Wingo in 1931-1932 when he walked from Santa Monica, CA to Istanbul, Turkey backwards. [0]
Bardel's largest and most notable expeditions involve crossing oceans and traveling around the world without external assistance. On May 4, 2016, he and his traveling companion Gints Barkovskis set out to cross the Atlantic Ocean from Namibia to Brazil. After 142 days, they safely reached the coast of South America, becoming the first two-person crew to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a rowboat. [6] During the voyage, both men encountered serious health problems (vitamin deficiency, skin inflammation) and Barkovskis broke his ribs, but neither wanted to interrupt their journey, and the expedition ended successfully. [6]
After crossing the Atlantic, Bardelis continued his journey in South America and began a new stage in 2018. From Brazil, with the support of Gints Barkovskis, he traveled by tandem bicycle through South America to Lima, Peru, completing the approximately 5,400 km stage in 102 days. [7] Bardelis then set out alone in a rowboat to cross the Pacific Ocean in June 2018. He covered a distance of approximately 26,000 km from South America to Malaysia, spending a total of 715 days on the journey; with this achievement, he became the first person in the world to cross the Pacific Ocean from South America to Asia in a rowing boat. [7] During this sea expedition, he had to overcome several stormy periods and was forced to stop at islands, but in the end, Bardelis became known worldwide as the first ocean rower in this direction. [7]
> This reminds me of an adventured died just a few months ago at age of 40 after suffering insult.
I did not understand what was meant with "suffering insult", so with the help of DeepL and his wikipedia page I could determine that he passed away due to a brain tumour.
This is a cool story but I'm really confused by the details. Like he seems to fly around and do pieces of this at a time, but then there's the weird bit of him walking 3000 miles in the US to get to the embassy, though that wasn't part of his 'walk'?
I also got confused by the timeline of him getting deported from Russia. I think he's allowed to fly out as long as he returns and continues the journey on foot. You can see on the world map of the journey he makes steady progress from 1998-2006 but then he doesn't finish crossing Siberia until 2017.
Yeah thru hikers avoid roads like the plague. Judging by his route he could've walk a lot existing trails. Go southbound on Great Divide Trail and Continental Divide Trail, then somehow cross Mexico and central America into Andes, there you can follow Greater Patagonian Trail all the way to Tierra del Fuego. The European part can just reuse Trans European Alpine Route, then cross Black Sea and take the Transcaucasian Trail, afterwards maybe the work in progress Snow Leopard Track? It's gonna be a lot more difficult but definitely beats highway walking.
Yes, in fact if I have the opportunity to walk these trails I would take it in a heartbeat. I am sorry but you really have to thru hike to understand it. Being tired and hungry all the time is the least concern
My comment mention "before getting known". The article only mention "familly and friends" help. That's quite a light justification, just getting food every day for a year before getting sponsors is quite a big sum of money.
I don't think we can say "The article explains this" while there is literally only one sentence in the article about it.
https://archive.ph/2025.12.09-165741/https://www.washingtonp...
Ugh, I looked this up and it completely ruined it for me:
https://refuga.com/karl-bushby-the-man-who-chose-to-walk-aro...
This is how much he had to sacrifice. Leaving his only son when he was just five and not being able to watch him grow up like any other normal father. He also sacrificed a father/son relationship that may never be restored. “Out of everyone I knew in this world, I knew my son least of all.” Karl didn’t have any means of communication with his son for years but managed to reach him after contacting one of his friends on Facebook. While he was away, his son was suffering from depression and self abuse and had to use medication and therapy.
That's not sacrifice, that's abandonment. I have a young son not far from that age and trying to imagine how he'd feel if daddy just walked off nearly brings me to tears.
Thank you for posting this.
I no longer want to read about this person's journey or care to, because this is exactly the kind of person we need to stop hero worshipping. The irreparable damage to society from child abandonment is so large, that whatever he accomplished(?) by doing his stunt is negated.
I'm going to be unapologetic in saying that because this is irresponsible, immature behavior. He had a child, and then decided to leave for 20+ years to pursue his selfish interests while 100% abandoning his family and spouse to raise the child themselves. It's 100% trying to run away once he saw how difficult raising a family is and turned it into some BS stunt. That is also a relationship and pain and suffering that should never be forgiven, not during this immature person's lifetime.
Advice to others when you're thinking of doing this sort of thing where you abandon the people that love you to pursue some extreme interest. You may get exactly what you're looking for, with the cost of people never being close to you ever again.
Yes.
As a point of interest, the English do have a sort of stiff upper lip thing going on since forever. It's normal in English upper class families to send kids to boarding school. This was partly enabled by empire, but seems to have persisted. I have English friends who think nothing of living on another continent to their children.
On the mental bearings of extreme travelers, I used to do some long distance (multi-week) cycle touring and offered accommodation to others through platforms for this purpose while living in China. They say you have to be half-mad to get in to cycle touring in the first place. Some of these people were very much in a weird mental place. After a bad experience with a German woman I stopped participating in these systems. Some of them would turn up broke with no shoes really in need of help. A subset of the people who finish go on to become motivational speakers. Most of them probably wind up happy, but grizzled and impoverished with more physical than mental health.
I have a 2 year old daughter and I'm about to have a son in February. Walking away from them is unfathomable. I can't imagine the regret I'd feel at my old age, having lost the few short years where I get to watch my children grow up, just so I can walk to some places.
There's far more depth and mystery to be explored in raising a human than there will ever be as a tourist. The deep stupidity it takes to think otherwise is depressing to behold.
Your comment makes no sense. I separated from my first wife when she was six months pregnant with my first daughter and divorced my second wife when we had two kids 3 y/o and 9 months old. Kids and pregnancy was very taxing and didn't fit my life goals so separation was definitely the right decision because after that I found my dream job and built a satisfying career at a successful tech company.
this post reads like a parody you'd find on linkedin lunatics. I mean, sure, how could the joys of raising a human being compare to a slight bump in relevant kpi's?
Jesus Christ, dude.
It's really nuts when they don't even see the problem
They know. That's why it is a brand new throw away account.
Yeah that is nuts, whenever I think about doing a huge hike/bike adventure I always stop becuase... I can't abandon my dog for 4 months haha. This dude abandoned his son forever?
I like to follow some adventures people take. Like cycling across continents for years. Especially since I have a small child so it is totally impossible for me to do. Even basic travelling for holidays is a challenge. Sad to see someone abandon their family to do that, seems like some kind of mental health issue.
Talk about "my dad left to get milk"
At this point, the milk has become yoghurt, the yoghurt has become cheese, and the cheese has become a cow again. (Is that how it works?)
Yeah, ruins the whole story. He's a bum and a dead beat.
When Karl was preparing to cross the ice from Alaska to Russia, I worked with him a bit on a kite-flown camera system to help him get a Birds Eye view of the flows to chart his course. I engineered a ruggedized wireless camera in an aluminum housing, I don’t remember much about it other than I was doubtful that the resolution would be able to give him the data he needed on on small low resolution screen. (This was before consumer drones were common or affordable). We built some devices, not sure if he ever used them or if they helped. I urged him to do a lot of testing to make sure they would be worth the weight.
We spent a lot of time at college coffee house in Fairbanks Alaska working over the ideas and overall design.
Nice fellow, strange aspirations, indomitable spirit. I’m glad to see his trek is nearing completion, and I wish him well on his further adventures. Good luck and Godspeed, Karl.
When was he in Fairbanks?
I bicycled around North America for a year in 1998-1999, and finished in Alaska. It was wild to live on a bike for a full year, and then meet people who had been living that way (on bikes and on foot) for years at a time. There were a lot of people just starting out on aspirational long trips, but there were also a handful of people who had already gone a long long way. Fairbanks was an interesting meeting point for many of those travelers.
I would be interested in learning about the logistical details. Calorie requirements? Sleeping? Costs? etc.
A blog or a book format would make for killer reading!
I read a book called A Walk Across America in college, by Peter Jenkins. I liked the idea of traveling under my own power, but I didn't want to spend years walking. I kept when I got my driver's license, and I was bike commuting in NYC at the time, so biking was a natural fit.
I was teaching at the time, so the first summer without any obligations I rode across the northern US. Then I rode across the southern US the next summer. I loved it, and wanted to live outside for all the seasons. So the next year I quit my job and circled the continent: Seattle to Maine, down to Florida, across to California, then up to Alaska. I moved to Alaska a few years after the trip ended and spent 20 years there. We moved to North Carolina last year, because dark southeast Alaskan winters were getting old, and all our family is on the east coast.
I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to do that trip in the era of paper maps, and truly being out of touch for so much of that time. It pushes you to meet so many new people in all the places you visit, instead of staying in constant contact with people you already know. It was also nice to not see satellite imagery of the road ahead. Every day was a surprise. :)
I did write a book, The Road to Alaska: https://www.amazon.com/Road-Alaska-Eric-Matthes-ebook/dp/B07...
One of my claims to fame is writing one of the best-selling Python books of all time (Python Crash Course), and one of the lowest-selling travel books of all time. :)
A Walk Across America was amazing reading when I was college aged. I've never forgotten the story about the accident when he and his (then-girlfriend?) were walking along a quiet highway, I think in Nevada, and they decided to walk on the wrong side of the road, against his usual rules, because it had a shoulder.
And, she landed in the hospital after a car hit them.
I think they got married in New Orleans, before they started the rest of the walk together.
Peter and Barbara didn't do so well after that trip. One of their kids took a road trip with his mom recently, retracing their route from New Orleans to Oregon. He wrote a book about their road trip, and it was a pretty interesting read: https://www.jedidiahjenkins.com
I rode a bicycle from Canada to Mexico (in about a month) with a close friend. We bought a book called Bicycling the Pacific Coast (before smart phones).
I had a cheap $150 univega bike and my friend had a $3000 cannondale. His broke mine didn't :)
We were amateurs. We hitchhiked to a bike shop near San Francisco to fix it. Had some saddle bags with our tent and sleeping bag, clothes and water.
It's very doable. Hardest part is just showing up.
Honestly, I don’t really remember. More than a decade ago, but I think maybe I was already working on my sailing adventures by then and working the summer in Fairbanks? Or maybe that was before, I’m not really sure. Too many relationships, kids, and big life changes between here and there to have a sense of the thing. I’m sure you can look it up? IIRC he was in Fairbanks for quite a while. Was a bit of a fixture at the coffee house.
I spent alot of time in Fairbanks throughout 2006 and 2008, doing aerial surveys from plane. Fairbanks was a good airport to get stuck at, and you do meet some interesting non-traditional travelers. I've never met the guy in the article, but I've met a few bike/hike travelers there who were either moving horizontally or vertically across Alaska (no small feat at all), and I always thought it sounded like an adventure.
Interesting. I hitchhiked through Fairbanks four decades ago… Kind of the gateway to the Arctic Circle for a lot of travelers I suppose.
Perhaps this guy was waiting out the weather—for it to turn favorable to continuing his travels.
Iirc he was there for more than a year, flew home for a while, came back? Not sure. I do remember him being there during a summer and also during winter. I think one year the ice was impassible and he was waiting. But I don’t really remember, such things might have been mere conversation crystallized into memories. He seemed a kind and pleasant man , though, of that I am sure.
Any tips or build plans for KAP (kite areal photography) using modern action cams? I build a clothing hanger setup but the imagery was unusable due to vibrations
Superstable "Picavet" with heavy video-8 camera, before digital cameras was even invented.
Note propellor and gears making slow 360 degree pans.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/SFP9Rf1w9Xs93sfu7
“99.99 percent of the people I’ve met have been the very best in humanity,” he said. “The world is a much kinder, nicer place than it often seems.”
I wish everyone could experience this, internalize this. Sometime in my 20's or 30's I cast off any fears that I had about people and the world in general. And it was like a huge weight was left behind.
I started to believe that it was paying too much attention to the news (especially cable news when it became a thing) that had come to shackle me with fear. Getting out in the world, traveling, making yourself vulnerable even (and nixing cable) were all things that made me start to love the world and people more. (My kids know me as the Pollyanna of the family.)
I suppose I am armchair psychologizing now, but I often see fear behind a lot of people's behavior (and even some friend's) and I feel sorry for them: I see them missing out on a lot of life experiences.
I would, no thoughts, help/accompany/host him in whatever occasion I meet him in my small, distant hometown, if he happened to pass by. Of course, it plays a role that he is on foot and in the edge of survival, so he can cause no damage. I wouldn't have the same attitude with someone more luxurious. Poverty with philosophy/culture is guaranteed human.
Ironic coming from him being a dead beat dad whose son hates him
Ah that sucks. I would also guess that an attractive 28 year on a global walking adventure might have left a few kids in his wake. He should probably avoid 23andMe.
He had a son before he started.
I had not heard that.
Some of my favorite (or at least most durable) memories are from giving hitchhikers rides. I wouldn't recommend it for everyone, and the pandemic really put a damper on that, but I've given ~20 people rides over the years and never regretted it.
Although, you definitely hear some tough stories that way.
I wrote about the ones I can remember here: https://opposite-lock.com/topic/45077/hitchhikers-over-the-y...
Considering this mans character of child abandonment. I don't think we should take his assessments of moral character seriously.
100% agreed, it’s been my experience traveling for the past ten years as well.
The most uplifting part of the article. Great to read it.
For those interested, National Geographic has the "Out of Eden Walk" [1], a journey along the path of historical human migration, led by Paul Salopek. He started in Ethiopia in January 2013 – nearly 13 years ago – and just recently made it to Alaska. The planned end of the trip is at the southern tip of South America.
[1] https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/
It was not one continuous hike. He takes frequent breaks. But travels back to where he last stopped and continues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Bushby
Still very impressive, but a little less impressive than I first thought.
It would be impossible to do without taking breaks, as explained in the article:
> Due to visa limits, Bushby has had to break up his walk. In Europe, he can stay for only 90 days before leaving for 90, so he flies to Mexico to rest and then returns to resume the route.
Given that he literally swam across the Caspian Sea in order to avoid Russia and Iran because of legal issues, nevermind bring imprisoned in Russia due to what sounded like bureaucratic BS, it's more impressive than I first thought.
From Wiki:
> They were detained by Russian border troop officers while they were crossing the Russian border near the Chukotkan village of Uelen, for not entering Russia at a correct port of entry.
Illegal border crossing is absolutely not bureaucratic BS in any country.
"not entering Russia at a correct port of entry"
I'm laughing at the lack of nuance in laws in general. Some guy crossed the Bering Straight on foot as part of a 27 year quest to walk around the world and the law makes no exception.
I remember as a teen being hauled into a police station because a friend and I had been exploring the storm drains ("sewers") with a home-made flame thrower (okay, so the movie "Alien" had recently come out… Yeah, we left the flamethrower behind in the sewer when we popped our heads out and saw police).
Someone in the neighborhood had called the police because she had seen us going down the manhole opening. (The police said the report came through that some kids had "fallen" into the sewers.)
So I'm sitting in the police station with good cop and bad cop sitting there musing over my case. "How about 'Failure to use a sidewalk when a sidewalk was available'," bad cop said as he read from a book he was paging through. That got a laugh all around…
They let me off after an hour or so of this.
To be completely fair, Russia did decide to make an exception in this case, although it took a couple of months (during which Bushby was detained) to get there.
I am a little bit torn in this case. From our vantage point it's obvious that Bushby wasn't running an elaborate long scam to get into Russia. In the moment... I don't know, former UK special forces guy? Long history of espionage between UK and Russia? Two months seems too long; it's also not as easy as your case of a teenager in the sewer.
I saw that. Six months (if I recall) is kind of a long time…
Fair enough, but I interpreted "for not entering Russia at a correct port of entry" as he had a visa to enter the country, but he just didn't land at a recognized "port of entry", which given he walked/swam across the Being Strait, is unsurprising. But I don't know the full details of the situation.
This might be a little broad for most, but I find the whole concept of nationalism and border sovereignty kinda tired. Who cares? We were nomads before we settled in cities, and it's only the designs of the empowered few that ever made the idea compulsory.
I'm saying this as someone who enlisted in the defense of said nations once. Most of the structures that make up a country these days are for the birds - let a guy hike for chrissake. I also lived where I could see Tijuana from my back yard and all the pearl clutching and self-fanning over "illegal immigrants" is a giant crock of blustery nonsense. We have bigger problems than normal folks just trying to live their lives.
The whole concept of nationalism and border sovereignty has been with us for essentially all of human history, and I don't see it petering out anytime soon. Plenty of people care, for all sorts of reasons, many of which I would say, are good!
What, your ancestors between 600k years ago up to 150 years ago are a joke to you? Human history began with European Great Powers?
Göbekli tepe easily refutes your isolationism, as does stone- and bronze-age globalism.
Not really. Tribes generally lived in specific areas, and would go to war with other tribes if those tribes tried to expand into their turf. Or would go to war to expand their turf. That's basically the early version of nationalism and borders, with the tribe as the nation, and neighboring tribes understanding which area was whose. Even nomadic tribes would be nomadic within a certain area, and jealously protect the area they would go to at the start of every spring, for example.
Even modern primates establish territories for their groups, and warn off and fight other primates attempting to encroach. So this general behavior is quite natural. The concept of open borders where anyone can just waltz in and live somewhere where they're not from or didn't marry into and haven't been invited -- that's actually the relatively newer idea, historically speaking.
I'm not arguing for more closed borders today, but I don't think we're should pretend that the historical human condition has somehow been "open".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything Disagrees with you, and has several examples of tribal fluidity and more freedom of movement than you imply here.
If you're talking about "the freedom to escape one's surroundings and move away", the book has been widely criticized for that assertion, as Graeber is extremely ideologically motivated.
If you left your tribe without being accepted into another (whether through marriage or some kinds of previous personal alliances you'd made), life would be pretty rough if you survived at all.
Sure tribes would split sometimes when they got too big or disagreements split them. But that's not about the individual level. That's akin to nation-state secession today.
There's no evidence that people were just regularly packing things up and going off and joining whatever neighboring tribe they wanted to, whenever they wanted to. And this is the type of thing where the book has come under such heavy criticism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything#Methodo...
The US (where “open borders” are often characterized as national “suicide” by right-wing figures) had open borders well within living memory.
By ship? No. But you’re from Argentina and made it all the way up to the Rio and want to cross to work on US farms or whatever? Yeah whatever man, totally fine, just walk in. Anyone from the Americas was welcome, no waiting, no la migra hunting them, no nothin’
We didn’t change that until the ‘60s, and the only reason it didn’t cause a ton of problems immediately (farms at that time were already heavily dependent on migrant labor operating a bit under the table, and their lobbies were not quiet on the issue) was that enforcement was and has been, at times (and especially at first) mostly rather half-assed.
What are those reasons?
The most obvious one is that the modern welfare state relies for its legitimacy on social cohesion, i.e. a certain base of shared values and identity. You will not get people to consent to heavy taxation and redistribution if they feel that their society is full of foreigners. This observation is perhaps more relevant to Europe than the USA.
And that's before mentioning the economics of funding a welfare state with a relatively static/shrinking tax base and growing, imported, welfare recipient class - the latter being practically unbounded in the case of illegal immigration.
It's not just a human thing; people who study wolves find they maintain surprisingly strict borders between different packs, and this behavior continues though a lot of other mammals and even some smaller animals like certain birds and insects.
> The whole concept of nationalism and border sovereignty has been with us for essentially all of human history,
Quite the opposite. The modern concept of "border sovereignty" as intertwined with the nation-state is a Westphalian construction. (Students of world history will recognize why this timing is not a coincidence). And even then, they didn't exactly catch on immediately.
Sovereign nation-states are a tiny piece of human history. They're not even the majority of recorded human history.
That's partially true; the bit about borders and human history (so long as you sequester 'history' to 'recorded history') - but nationalism is actually newer than you'd think, and there were human societies for thousands of years before there were borders. More recent if you go by the current definition of border (formalized, surveyed borders are also relatively modern).
Is nationalism going to peter out? No, of course not. Do some people care for reasons that are important to them? Sure, I don't want to tell anyone how to feel. I am just another jerk with an opinion like the rest of us.
But if you were to ask me, it's take it or leave it. I'd be more than happy to see free movement in the world. Just another set of rules I'm not using.
Yes, hard borders are far more recent than people think. As late as the First World War you could travel the world without so much as a passport.
But: back then only a handful of very rich people had the means to do that, and taxation and social protection were much lower than today. Those things are related. They (IMO of course!) are what make borders a pragmatic necessity.
You could travel across the North American countries without a passport until quite recently. That only stopped being a thing after 9/11.
Passport equivalents go back to 1350BC
> Who cares?
The vast majority of people care.
> We were nomads before we settled in cities, and it's only the designs of the empowered few that ever made the idea compulsory.
Reasoning from pre-agrarian living patterns is, quite frankly, hippy nonsense. And no, we didn't settle in cities because of "the designs of the empowered few", but because agriculture leads to more permanent, prosperous settlements, which attract raiders, and settling close together allowed for common defense. In other words, as soon as people earned a living by their own planning and sustained effort, (as opposed to merely collecting the bounty of the earth) they settled down and drew borders to protect what they had built from people who wanted to just show up and reap the rewards of their effort, at their expense!
> I also lived where I could see Tijuana from my back yard and all the pearl clutching and self-fanning over "illegal immigrants" is a giant crock of blustery nonsense.
We can't have borders because you could see Tijuana from your back yard?
> We have bigger problems than normal folks just trying to live their lives.
Defending borders is the most basic function of the state. It quite literally does not have anything better to do than to defend its borders.
That depends on your values. I think it's bureaucratic BS in every country. The world hasn't been like this forever, and still isn't like this for other animals.
If you enter a bear's den, especially if it has cubs, the bear will likely attack you.
If you enter the territory of a swan, especially during nesting season, the swan might attack you.
If a foreign object enters some animal's body, the immune system may attack that object.[0] Allergy might be related to the immune system misidentifying allergens.
Squirrels can be surprisingly territorial.
Ants have wars. [1]
This is not surprising, since the consequences of territory being compromised can be severe. For instance, in this case [2], the territory was compromised through deception, like pretending to be one of them, and it led to the severe weakening or death of the whole colony through the mass devouring of their offspring.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_body_reaction
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_ants
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/123ke...
Just this morning I watched a video someone shared on LinkedIn. A lion cub was being nursed by a ewe!
There are cases of pet dogs, having great relationships with their owners, eating the corpses of their owners after the owners died of some unrelated reasons. Possibly due to starvation in some cases.
In that video, was the ewe and lion cub pets or wild animals?
I agree, and one of their great concerns is keeping foreign spies from getting in. Even though Russia isn't in good graces with the world currently, I think it's I'll advised to go off-script with any nation's border checkpoints.
So you’re saying we are no better than animals, and shouldn’t aspire to be?
It was clearly a response to the grandparent's "... isn't like this for other animals". It's a fine thing to aspire to be better, but we just shouldn't be claiming that human behavior is any way less natural than that of all other animals.
Please define "better" in this context.
One definition of "better" could be to seek to avoid the extinction of the human species and of civilization. With that definition, in the current situation, taking measures to help avoid nuclear weapon usage, could be considered in depth and genuinely "better".
You can also consider the subject in terms of IT. Firewalls can be argued to delimit territory, as can login systems. Sandboxes are probably the reverse, in terms of keeping something in instead of keeping it out.
Some cells have cell walls, and viruses as I understand it have to penetrate that wall.
Nuts and fruit sometimes have protective shells.
An argument could be made that borders and territory are fundamental.
For an agent that seeks to defeat border control mechanisms, it can potentially be effective to convince the target parties that border control mechanisms generally or specifically are harmful, are useless, or have drawbacks. This is not always completely false in all cases, for instance regarding immune systems misidentifying harmless allergens as harmful, causing potentially significant harm as allergy. However, if an agent uses such approaches, they have to be careful not to buy into that idea themselves, lest matters may become strange and weird. And, in the modern day, if an agent is especially successful and competent with defeating border control mechanisms, considering the extreme power that the human species holds these days, such as with nuclear weapons, it puts an extreme responsibility on such successful agents, at least in the current systems. Otherwise, the consequences might be extremely detrimental to the human species as a whole.
We are animals, we shouldn't try to avoid that as if its a bad thing.
That would be amazing if some country tried to enforce visa rules on animals.
They do actually, for example with swine in Denmark. They've built fences for that purpose specifically.
Humans and animals enforce their borders since millennia.
The idea that borders are unimportant is very very recent. That is to say, its commie gobbledygook.
> enforce their borders since millennia.
In English it's "have enforced their borders for millennia"; the phrase "since [length of time]" is almost always grammatically incorrect and a giveaway that someone's not a native English speaker.
It is not my native language, and I wouldn't have made this mistake if I wasn't in a hurry and on my phone. Unfortunately I cannot edit it anymore.
Borders of Westphalian nation-states being relevant is recent, unlike personal and tribal territories.
"Borders didn't exist before the treaty of Westphalia" is a hell of a take. If you want to stretch the State Sovereignty / Non-Interference aspect of it to that definition you're going to have to make your case properly, because I don't see how such a position could be defensible.
I am not convinced that the idea is recent, or rather, related ideas are not recent, going back thousands of years. It can be extremely complex, to put it very mildly. How well people that put their trust in some of those ideas fare, can likewise be an extremely complex topic, and can also be political. In some cases in some ways some of them might have fared well, in some other cases in some ways, maybe less so.
A group of men crossing the border into another country was (usually) automatically considered invaders if its size exceeded a certain number.
Eg Iberian Peninsula (Reconquista and later): Foreign parties >10 armed men could not cross without permission between christians and muslims.
Chinese frontier zones, Scythians, Huns, Mongols, Turks etc all had similar rules. If you want to go back further, then Assyria, Egypt, Hittites, Greece had such limits.
You are correct that there are many examples of border control mechanisms, in different levels and ways. Maybe even usually the vast majority for many levels and ways.
Some nations, countries or groups, or other levels, did play with some of those mentioned ideas of less border control mechanisms in some ways or levels, also going back thousands of years.
Countries that were not successful with border control mechanisms, sometimes ceased to exist.
But there are many different levels and ways, and the whole topic is, to put it very mildly, extremely complex.
Right, well we know which side of the enclosure of the commons you for some unaccountable reason assume you’d have born in.
In practice, communist countries have always put a lot of effort into keeping their citizens in.
Why do you think it's a communist thing? Communist countries (both historically and current) tend to protect their borders fervently.
I'd say no-border cosmopolitanism is more of a classic liberalism thing.
One must distinguish between "classical" communism (Stalinism, which is dead except in North Korea) and the modern variety, which is alive and well and I think is what you mean.
There are many that think themselves "cosmopolitan", when it is a delusion and coping mechanism about being a parochial hicklib. A chip on their shoulder that makes them especially fervent acolytes of liberalism (as in: Obama flavoured, not the other kind), hoping it offsets their humble origins after moving to the big city, so folks won't get the idea that they are flyover country chuds that vote the wrong way.
A cosmopolitan, as in one that truly knows the different cultures and people of the world because he has deep first hand experience, or has read so much that it allows to draw some independent form of conclusion, is either a strong proponent of borders or a fool.
The core tenet that makes this communism-adjacent is the denial of differences: everyone is equal, "no one is illegal" etc pp. Ignorance of history and the nature of man is a must to take this position.
> A cosmopolitan, as in one that truly knows the different cultures and people of the world because he has deep first hand experience, or has read so much that it allows to draw some independent form of conclusion, is either a strong proponent of borders or a fool.
This is the most incredible No-True-Scotsman fallacy I've ever read.
Thanks, I was thinking about alluding to it even more obviously.
> parochial hicklib [...] offsets their humble origins [...] flyover country chuds
Tell us how you really feel, good grief.
> everyone is equal, "no one is illegal" etc
This but unironically.
> Tell us how you really feel, good grief.
This is not "how I feel" or my actual opinion of liberals in general. It is a certain archetype that I unfortunately know all too well.
> This but unironically.
You can just say you're a communist, you know. The core tenet will always be some appeal to equality, no matter how you like to describe yourself ("socialist", "liberal", "a decent heckin' human being" in Reddit speech or what have you).
In Europe, he can stay for only 90 days
that doesn't make any sense for two reasons. first, he only entered the EU in september this year, so either the 90 days are not up yet or he should be in mexico now. is he? but why would he fly to mexico when he could just go to the UK?
but more importantly, he is a british citizen. getting a visa to walk through europe, especially now that he already has a track record of walking for so long should really not be an issue.
have you tried? I'm a South African living in Europe and visas are a nightmare.
Many europeans have never had to apply for a real visa in their life (I don't mean the online ones, or the apply on arrival ones, I mean the ones where you submit a 20 page form of personal details and hotel bookings and letters from friends you'll be staying with and bank statements and a full travel history) and they assume that I'm just making life difficult for myself by not doing some simpler option that they assume must exist.
I don't know about what visa options UK citizens have for the EU since brexit, but I'd be surprised it was as simple as "I feel like spending more than the 90 days I get".
I'd be surprised it was as simple as "I feel like spending more than the 90 days I get"
why? that's exactly what i think he should be able to do. it's not like he spent 27 years walking across the planet in order to then misrepresent what he wants to do in the EU.
That's not the way it works.
I live in Norway, have residence and stuff. I can travel freely through most of europe without much hassle - but I can only travel 90 days out of 180 days - then you gotta go out of the area (or back to your home country if it is inside), stay out or home for 90 days, and then start anew. The closest border to me - one to Sweden - has no real security. A customs office because there is border shopping in the area and I know they very occasionally stop folks. A crossing an slightly inconvenient distance north just has signs.
Anything outside of this requires paperwork.
the paperwork is exactly what i am talking about. with his track record getting a visa should not be an issue.
There is no Europe wide long stay non-working visa for UK citizens. 90 in 180 days is the Schengen visitor option, no?
90 days within any period of 180 days visa free. Everything else is bureaucracy …
https://uk.diplo.de/uk-en/02/visa-information-2441822
He crossed the border illegally and was carrying a firearm with him. Maybe it's ok in the USA to cross the border illegally carrying a firearm with you, but I assure you it's not legal in all the other countries in the world and penalty would be very severe.
> Maybe it's ok in the USA to cross the border illegally carrying a firearm
By definition anything illegal is illegal, and no, you cannot bring a firearm across the border into the USA without a paperwork process.
> Given that he literally swam across the Caspian Sea in order
Why didn't he take the ferry there?
> At the start of his quest, Bushby made two rules for himself, neither of which he has broken.
> “I can’t use transport to advance, and I can’t go home until I arrive on foot,” Bushby said. “If I get stuck somewhere, I have to figure it out.”
I guess it didn't fit with the goal of 'walking' around the world, probably wanted to avoid motorised transport
I don’t really think this would be possible given the nature of visas. Many countries require you to apply for a visa from your country of residence, not merely the nearest embassy. I guess with infinite funds he could fly back and forth to handle that, but doesn’t seem practical.
Big community of people who motorbike around the world non-stop. It’s definitely possible to prepare beforehand and actually more admin getting a vehicle through borders.
Biking is faster, you can arrange for all visas for 6 months in advance but not for years. Even for 6 months to have them all approved with no gaps requires either a lot of luck or a very strong passport or both.
I was gonna say the same, it sounds like he did 17k miles in his first 8 years. That sounds tremendously far but it works out to ~5 miles a day. So either he was only walking for 2-3 hours a day or he was only walking every couple days.
After that he really slows down to a crawl and has long periods away from the trail entirely. Whats crazy is that he doesn't like... go home to visit his son and family or try to somehow help the people in his life, he just goes to South America until he can continue.
The fact that when he was forced to take extended (3mo+) breaks he still refused to go home is a bit telling.
Very common hiking technique - section hiking
Totally valid if you are just doing like the PCT in sections for fun, but for a sponsored grand adventure that you write books about I don't think section hiking is valid.
A couple of Youtubers who are also round-the-world travelers whom I enjoy watching, one a Dutch motorcyclist and the other a German cyclist.
Noraly, the motorcyclist, has already traveled through South and North America, Africa, and Asia, some multiple times. Currently, I believe she is in Tajikistan about to enter Kyrgystan.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEIs9nkveW9WmYtsOcJBwTg
Max Roving, the cyclist, has already cycled through Afghanistan and he is currently trying to ride Africa north to south. He just completed Algeria and is about to enter Morroco.
https://www.youtube.com/@MaxRoving
There is nothing so wonderful that it cannot be ruined by turning it into a youtube channel... The really brilliant people I've met doing things like this always absolutely refused to mediafy their experience. Turning your adventure into a continuous TV show is great way to kill the adventure. We're now so used to everyone running their own shopping channel we don't even notice it. Read Thesiger's books for an account of real experience. The film I urge everyone to watch is Cronenberg's Videodrome - truly the film of our times.
It depends. I find those interesting to watch.
I’ve met some really brilliant people who only finished the challenges they gave themselves because they had a community’s encouragement.
Seems to me you might want to relax your filters a bit and meet some of the other brilliant people.
I think the central message of that article is precisely that he is completing the adventure only because of community encouragement - but that that is the assistance of all the incredible people he met along the way, strangers on the ground who supported him and helped him on his way, and his friends and family at home. The community is the real people on the ground, and it is the real and living community of the humans who inhabit the entire world. The commercial transmissions with you as TV star are totally unnecessary, and actually only get in the way... Thesiger said that the greatest thing about his adventure across the Arabian Desert was his comradeship with the Bedouin. You just can't have that while waiving a selfie-stick and grinning into the camera...
There are incredible people along the way, there are also incredible people watching and cheering on people who vlog. Communities can — and very much should — be much larger than just who you happen to have found yourself physically near.
And yes, I can assure you, you can absolutely have both while engaging in blogging, vlogging, serialized writing, or any other form of serialized expression.
Not all of vlogging has any relationship to your straw man.
I can only say that, in my own experience, you can't. Traveling pre- and post-smartphone are two completely different realities. The thing tethering you to a gigantic global faceless 'community' has the cost of weakening or blocking your engagement with real immediate physical people, and chance events and immediate experience. There is definitely a trade-off, no matter where your preferences lie. The last time I stayed in a hostel it was in Lima, Peru. It was mostly young people traveling. On every bunk in the room, a guest staring silently into their glowing palms. The joy of traveling used to be having very intense and focused encounters with completely new people who you would probably never speak to again...
"There is definitely a trade-off, no matter where your preferences lie."
That's a much more reasonable position than the idea that sharing your journey on Youtube "ruins" it, or "kills the adventure". Different people prefer different things.
And they've been very safe, as far as I've heard. I think generally you can use common sense and be extremely safe all around the world.
Unfortunately there are some exceptions and I believe the highest risk area is India. A lady vlogger on motorcycle was recently gang raped there by 7 men.
With extra danger due to sharing your location online all the time.
I assume this is mitigated by delaying the uploads by a month (which you may need anyway due to sporadic internet access & not always having the time to edit videos).
Off topic but related to your comment,
Noraly/Itchy boots rubs me the wrong way far too often. Her content always **ends up being top notch and respectful**, but starts off with a sour taste after the title is "I should have never come here." and the content is a lovely journey......
Idk. This whole genre is: western person is achieving a "dream" life as a function of their birth and wealth status. Has a good time, seemed to enjoy the journey. But then pretends the trips are hampered by 1-2 (expected) events not normal for a westerner, and reflects that in the title for views.
I think the effect is more negative than not.
There's also this couple, each has their own channel, who are filming their walk from England to Vietnam.
https://www.youtube.com/@chubbytrekka
https://www.youtube.com/@SophieTangTravels
I also enjoy watching Charles, a French-Canadian cyclist currently cycling from Canada to Europe. As a geologist he regularly explains rock formations and rock types he encounters.
https://www.youtube.com/c/Charlesenv%C3%A9lo
> currently cycling from Canada to Europe.
Isn't there, like, the ocean? Or does he go the Karl Bushby way over the Bering Strait?
There is also AussieEspañol, who is attempting to travel from Argentina to Alaska in a tuk-tuk (an auto rickshaw) - https://www.youtube.com/@aussieespanol/videos
Followed him a bit last year. A really sweet and enthusiastic person.
There's also Ed Pratt who does round-the-world expeditions by unicycle
https://www.youtube.com/@EdPratt
Isn't this the guy that abandoned his wife and kid to do this? This isn't heroics.
EDIT: Yeah same guy, this was posted to Reddit a while back. https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1pfdkfs/...
His wife took his kid to another country where he was denied entry. She’s the villain here, if there is one.
FWIW his son joined him and they walked together for a while when he was in his 20s, seems like they reconciled.
Is there a source for this that isn’t just a random Reddit comment?
I have no such thing, but a few comments later another redditor gives a bit different perspective:
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1pfdkfs/...
Had to go around the world to find milk
That would haunt me and totally fuck up any fun from travelling.
Do you have first hand knowledge of the situation? No? Then don’t fucking judge and shut the fuck up.
No. Lol . Do we need to follow such stupid rules of no first hand knowledge of his feats.... Should the article even be here? Lol
I kind of agree with your comment, but it can be written in a nicer way
That is messed up.
>The world is a much kinder, nicer place than it often seems.
I realize that a lot these days. People are not inherently so bad but greed is a nasty drug that has the potential to ruin the best.
When you have nothing to offer but kindness and compassion, it is very simple to see the humanity side of things in this world and it can feel really amazing.
There's a kind of stereotype we have of people that we have not met. The truth is that those groups of people that we think are nasty people are often kind and nice and full of empathy and compassion.
There is a kind of psychological pain of cognitive dissonance when we discover this "Wait, but they are meant to be ${group_member} why are they so nice and kind to me?". But one can only experience (e.g. via travelling) and learn from these experiences, it's hard to convey to others that the world really is __much__ more kinder and nicer than our preconceptions demand it should be.
It's easier and less painful to box away people into nice and not nice groups. And it's often most common to label people similar to ourselves in the nice group. It's a narrow view of the world. Travelling opens up our preconceptions of people, the opposite of a narrow view: travelling broadens the mind.
Idk, people are usually nice in my experience. News, forum opinions and youtube videos are not remotely representative of how things work in real life.
They're nice to you if the culture is such that they get social capital/status for being nice to you and negative reward for being mean.
If the social permissions change like Rwanda in 1994 then your nice neighbors would sooner chop you to pieces.
Why do you think that is? The reality distortion field of the internet I mean
A group of very mentally ill, insecure people with a lot of material wealth control the internet and media.
They get to write the narrative.
We can analyze just one small tool in the belt of narrative control: censoring. If you've been warned or banned on Reddit, you can imagine how this works. If you've said something against the mold of what they allow, you will get censored. With so many people commenting, some subset of people will always say what you want to see. You censor or derank opinions you don't want, and boost opinions you want. This is a defensible form of writing a narrative without actually having to artificially write anything.
Of course with AI, you can now just write anything and seed ideas.
Give such sick people the reigns, and you get a false reality has little connection to what's really happening.
OK, but applying the idea from critical legal theory that "the purpose of the law is the protect status quo power" to mental health to infer that diagnoses must similarly reinforce archetypes with social/economic/political utility for the system - how does that gel with the idea that people capable of aquiring great wealth (a measure of 'system utility') are highly mentally ill?
Aside from that, I'm not saying you're wrong or right about that theory, I'm just wondering how it falls down around that idea.
On this topic of interenet behavior, maybe I'm not really sure or maybe I am, but my view is it's less about some sort of diempowering imposition of external/elite evil upon a innocent and good mass population, but rather about the medium itself enabling latent negativities in the populus to surface. Which doesn't mean the population is itself not good and innocent - it is also multifaceted. Thus, such dynamics might operate in a "Stanford Prison Experiment" kind of "cover and permission" way.
My view of many of these dynamics are its more about emergent self-regulating properties of a system than it is about top-down control. In a sense, that's a lot more liberating and empowering for people, because then they are not cast as victims of some evil from on high, they are the architects of their experience, for good or bad.
The view you espouse, while seeming to empower the downtrodden by taking aim at hidden sources of evil power, I feel in fact disempowers by playing up the fake victim narratives that disempower and confuse people. In other words, your idea, while seemingly edgy and incisive, may in fact be what any such extant "evil elites" would want you to think, if they hope to have control! Haha :)
Anyway, I'm not trying to cut down your idea here in this topic - personally I believe people are very much in charge of their experiences, that's what I've found in my life - but in this kind of mass topic, who knows? Anywa, thanks for responding. Just some food for thought and maybe discussion. Have a good one :)
> diagnoses must similarly reinforce archetypes with social/economic/political utility for the system
Unless extreme wealth is part of the diagnostic criteria, this model says the diagnostic criteria would be designed to reinforce archetypes in the general populace, and that the status quo powerful would simply not receive such diagnoses. That doesn't stop other people from reviewing the checklists and drawing their own conclusions. (I, myself, haven't done this, so I'm not sure whether the "powerful people are diagnosable as mentally ill" conclusion is valid.)
> Thus, such dynamics might operate in a "Stanford Prison Experiment" kind of "cover and permission" way.
The Stanford Prison Experiment is actually a good example: Philip Zimbardo had his thumb very firmly on the scales, and excluded that information from his write-up. The claim that "people are just like that" has been fabricated enough times that I'm deeply suspicious of it.
Highly functioning sociopaths. And this diagnosis never goes alone in otherwise perfectly balanced individuals, does it. Most of them have missing/broken father figure syndrome which manifests in various bad and rather unfixable personality traits.
The societies we humans build always allow such persons to rise to the top - it doesn't matter if market democracy or brutal communism, fascism etc. The last type that didn't work well was some sort of feudal kingdom style where power was shared among elite across generations, inherited and rarely claimed by more competent, ambitious and vicious folks from lower ranks. But this is also how we got most of the progress in past 150 years, so its a double-edged sword. I wish I had a solution, maybe some Deus Ex-style of neutral AGI, but who would build such an AGI when everybody competent wants more power and manipulate others to their favor.
Heck, we often celebrate them by looking at their achievements, conveniently ignoring what utter piece of shit they are as humans (Ford is a prime example - a great inspiration for Hitler among others, and musk doesn't go far and look how uncritically he was celebrated also here for a long time and often still is... but the list is very long, basically almost all billionaires and high power folks).
With great power comes great impact even if they don't try, and who doesn't like some ego boost. People imitate them, follow them, subconsciously accept their values more easily. They literally imprint their values on rest of the world and we allow it due to our laziness, convenience and inherent sheepish mentality of masses which we are part of whether we like it or not - just look at how most folks need some form of a role model.
Intresting. I'm not saying (to pick some well-known execs/founders/leaders at random) Jobs, Musk, Zuck, Bezos, Huang, Trump, Xi are "high functioning sociopaths" but Jobs and Bezos both had missing biological fathers. Musk had a violent one. Zuck, not sure - but something seems weird with the dad, it's never spoken of tho. Huang was raised without parents present (only communicating via casette tape shipped on boat - wow!), living overseas from age 9, in a violent type of environment. Trump's dad was a disciplinarian tough on his brother, but Trump found ways to stand up to him. Xi's father was purged/rehabilitated by the Communists and they had to live in caves, farming dust and being bitten by lice, etc for years. I don't know any of them personally and I'm not speaking to their actual stories, as I don't know.
All this tho -- can the mother have no impact? I don't think so. Children are raised by their mothers. Why put the blame on dads, if solely? Seems not fair. A bifurcation in blame in society that can only cause a fracture that leads to greater wrongs later.
Also, while such questions are intriguing -- much of this talk of what's wrong with the internet, points the blame at a few rich people. This seems misguided, and misses the point that the internet is largely "us" - all of us. If we are doing something "wrong" but deflect, we're never going to get better. Even if some bad people are trying to push buttons, we're the ones that have to take responsibility for how we act and to do good.
When I'm chatting online, I'm sure as hell not talking with Bezos - he can't text that much, least of all in the hot-tub. I'm talking with some random. And we each have to take resopnsibility for our behavior. If the rando I'm talking with says, "Why am I bad? Because Jeff Bezos made me this way." It sounds totally ridiculous. And it is, of course. I think the hijacking of a question about "why is the internet negative sometimes" into a 2-minutes-hate on rich-elite is the wrong approach to solutions and understanding.
The internet is basically full of maladjusted people with sad lives. Strong chance that the post you read on HN, Reddit, X, etc is written by someone profoundly unhappy with their lot in life.
Yeah I think when you see that kind of unhinged negativity that's right, sure, it's a projection. But I believe the internet can be really good as well, it's just you have to ignore the stupidity that's visible and sort-of, idk, curate your experience (?) to be good. Seeing and responding to the best possibilities in any situation. :)
And it's not just that those people are more online, they also post a lot more, and don't stop a conversation when they should.
For many years the prevailing notion was that anonymity turns people into dickheads. But they did studies on this, and it turns out it's just that the real-life dickheads just dominate the discussion and the reasonable people post way less
Is that true? Can you post some studies you saw? That's fascinating if true. "The dickheads" post more - because they find an environment to take out their evil desires where they believe there are "no consequences", sounds like it makes sense. But I'd like to see the evidence.
It might have been "The Distorting Prism of Social Media: How Self-Selection and Exposure to Incivility Fuel Online Comment Toxicity" by Jin Woo Kim et al. [1][2]
1: https://academic.oup.com/joc/article-abstract/71/6/922/63636...
2: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rJ20sca3fg6epXwVbGj7HdNfCH4...
Not OP and not an expert but seems the aim is outrage which leads to more engagement and more advertising clicks, more followers and so on. Distorting news and social media from reality. I must say I too have found that people are nicer than what news portrays. I had the pleasure of being able to visit New York a few years and the people were just people and pleasant.
That's a good point, that optimization thing. Sort of "algorithmically driven mad" or bad! Ha. Could be happening. It's why it's important to disengage right? From the loops of brain hijacking/hacking. A quieter internet, for a more civilized age.
That reminds me, I'm making a text-based terminal browser. It might achieve that! Haha :)
Absolutely. I have social media accounts primarily to view links people send me but I am not an active user. A quieter world works for me.
It's not the people it's the situations they find themselves in.
People are more likely to be kind to you and give you your time when they're not in a cut throat corporate hunger games situation themselves.
Most people have significantly less than what we are spoon fed by media and the internet at large.
Just as in history we learn of emperors and kings instead of the common person, most digital content is about the modern day lords, barons, emperors, and kings. They call them billionaires, presidents, CEOs, prime ministers, etc now, but they are the exact same as they always have been.
If you turn the screen off and take a walk, start talking with real people that actually provide value to society, the world is much kinder than we've all been made to believe.
The real people are a good people, as they long have been. Their stories may not be written, but the Earth itself carries their memories.
Reminds me of Mike Horn, who travelled around the globe trying to say on the equator as much as he can. That being the longest round-trip.
He walked a bit, but mostly sailed though.
The book (Equator) worths the read. Especially the part in Africa.
Thanks for sharing. Hadn't heard of it.
Quite a fascinating adventure, even if it's not continuous.
Good teaching moment for why estimates of big endeavours tend to be off, too. He appears to have slightly overestimated his average walking speed and greatly underestimated breaks (only some of which were by choice from what I gather).
The total journey appears to be 58,000 km (36,000 miles).
Expectation: 8 years, which translates to a daily average of almost 20 km (~12.5 miles). That's about 4-6 hours of walking time at my speed. Every. Single. Day. In sickness or in health, on country roads or through frozen wastelands. Seems optimistic even without anticipating any delays?
Reality: After 8 years, he had actually finished about half the distance, which I already find impressive. As of October, he has 2,213 km (1,375 miles) left. That means he traveled 55,787 km (34,664 miles) in around 27 years. That puts him at a daily average of almost 6 km (~3.7 miles), so probably 1-2 hours of daily walking time. That's actually not bad considering all the delays, but quite a bit less than anticipated.
New estimate: He expects to be home "by 2026", let's say January. Based on that premise, his new estimate is that he will walk 2,213 km in ~4 months. That's a bit more than 17 km (~10.5 miles) per day. Relatively close to his original, comparatively uninformed estimate, funnily enough.
All that said, I don't think I'd have the willpower to see this through, especially considering all the setbacks. Mighty impressive.
The rest of the journey is going to take him through the EU though, no major obstacles to expect here, so the 17km daily seem very much doable.
> ...take him through the EU though, no major obstacles to expect here...
But, but...stifling of innovation. Gdpr. Etc.
I'd be more impressive if he walked it backwards.
If he made it all the way he would beat the record set by by Plennie Wingo in 1931-1932 when he walked from Santa Monica, CA to Istanbul, Turkey backwards. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plennie_L._Wingo
It was a challenging walk.
Feels like the right thread to shamelessly plug my app that lets you do these types of walks/runs virtually: https://www.inthelongrun.app
Amazing
This reminds me of an adventured died just a few months ago at age of 40 after suffering insult. He has crossed ocean on a rowboat and more.
https://boredofborders.com/adventures/
DeepL Translation of wiki:
Bardel's largest and most notable expeditions involve crossing oceans and traveling around the world without external assistance. On May 4, 2016, he and his traveling companion Gints Barkovskis set out to cross the Atlantic Ocean from Namibia to Brazil. After 142 days, they safely reached the coast of South America, becoming the first two-person crew to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a rowboat. [6] During the voyage, both men encountered serious health problems (vitamin deficiency, skin inflammation) and Barkovskis broke his ribs, but neither wanted to interrupt their journey, and the expedition ended successfully. [6]
After crossing the Atlantic, Bardelis continued his journey in South America and began a new stage in 2018. From Brazil, with the support of Gints Barkovskis, he traveled by tandem bicycle through South America to Lima, Peru, completing the approximately 5,400 km stage in 102 days. [7] Bardelis then set out alone in a rowboat to cross the Pacific Ocean in June 2018. He covered a distance of approximately 26,000 km from South America to Malaysia, spending a total of 715 days on the journey; with this achievement, he became the first person in the world to cross the Pacific Ocean from South America to Asia in a rowing boat. [7] During this sea expedition, he had to overcome several stormy periods and was forced to stop at islands, but in the end, Bardelis became known worldwide as the first ocean rower in this direction. [7]
https://lv.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C4%81rlis_Bardelis
> This reminds me of an adventured died just a few months ago at age of 40 after suffering insult.
I did not understand what was meant with "suffering insult", so with the help of DeepL and his wikipedia page I could determine that he passed away due to a brain tumour.
An other link:
https://eng.lsm.lv/article/society/society/19.11.2025-farewe...
Not OC, but funny that in my native language "stroke" is "insult" - so I understood that and didn't catch it that in english it doesn't make sense. :)
Woops, translated it wrong. Insult I meant Stroke. But he had stroke earlier.
For such a brave and spirited fellow, it is surprising to learn that he was so sensitive that he passed away from having his character besmirched.
Sad to hear. Just watched his documentary 'Beyond the deep' on Prime this year. Trailer here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFlSp17rTjY
This is a cool story but I'm really confused by the details. Like he seems to fly around and do pieces of this at a time, but then there's the weird bit of him walking 3000 miles in the US to get to the embassy, though that wasn't part of his 'walk'?
Also next time don't skip Africa xD
I also got confused by the timeline of him getting deported from Russia. I think he's allowed to fly out as long as he returns and continues the journey on foot. You can see on the world map of the journey he makes steady progress from 1998-2006 but then he doesn't finish crossing Siberia until 2017.
It's always when sad when you complete a game you love.
I suppose he could do other challenges like walk the same route the other direction or whatever.
Or maybe, SpaceX will drop a new DLC expansion Mars so he can keep playing.
I admire his determination! From the photos it appears he mostly walks on busy roads... that doesn't look much fun?
Yeah thru hikers avoid roads like the plague. Judging by his route he could've walk a lot existing trails. Go southbound on Great Divide Trail and Continental Divide Trail, then somehow cross Mexico and central America into Andes, there you can follow Greater Patagonian Trail all the way to Tierra del Fuego. The European part can just reuse Trans European Alpine Route, then cross Black Sea and take the Transcaucasian Trail, afterwards maybe the work in progress Snow Leopard Track? It's gonna be a lot more difficult but definitely beats highway walking.
Doing it solo, do you really want to be in isolated places all the time?
If you're hungry or sick being by a road has advantages
Yes, in fact if I have the opportunity to walk these trails I would take it in a heartbeat. I am sorry but you really have to thru hike to understand it. Being tired and hungry all the time is the least concern
That's quite cool!
How does someone get the funds necessary to do something like this? I guess there are sponsors, but before getting known, is it just being wealthy?
The article explains this.
My comment mention "before getting known". The article only mention "familly and friends" help. That's quite a light justification, just getting food every day for a year before getting sponsors is quite a big sum of money.
I don't think we can say "The article explains this" while there is literally only one sentence in the article about it.
what a waste of a life, I can't help but feel disgust.