You Are The Deer In The Subway.

Housekeeping: after close to twenty years, my novel is finished. The prologue and chapter one are already up at passnovel.com, and the rest is being released one chapter per week for the next ~20 weeks. By the end, there’ll be an EPUB and an audiobook and maybe even physical copies for sale; there’s currently space for leaving comments at the end of each section and a donate button for people who decide that the text is worth paying for.

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Okay, back to the topic at hand.

I’ve had a spate of short/offhand essays lately, but this is one of the more serious longish ones—the sort of essay where I’m like “please actually bear with me, something different will happen in your brain if you sit with these thoughts for a while than if you scarf down the thesis statement and then pop back over to Twitter.”

(The thesis is very simple, but as I approached this piece, I kept finding myself writing defensively. When I try to talk about this thing, I often encounter what feels like an immune response—my interlocutors making a mental motion that goes something like “if what Duncan is saying were true, then I would have to do things differently/make changes I do not want to make, and therefore it isn’t true.” And trying to head that whole dynamic off at the pass sometimes makes my words go all twisty. I’ll try not to let that happen below, and instead just say the thing plainly.)

This essay makes a triptych with You Are Awash In Superstimuli and Hubris & Control. CW: PG-13 nudity.

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I.

A deer got into the subway.

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II.

People memed about it.

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III.

The memers were on to something. You are the deer in the subway.

You probably think that the realm you move through was made for you—that it was made for humans—but it wasn’t. Not really. The quickest way to demonstrate is to just swap out the deer:

“He moves through a realm not made for him…”

Now, you could scoff and object “Come on, Duncan—you’re not supposed to be in the subway naked, you’re supposed to be armored up with shoes and clothes and stuff. Nobody thinks direct exposure to the modern urban landscape is pleasant, or healthy, or safe.”

There’s a sort of old-lady-who-swallowed-the-fly kind of thing going on, where we have all sorts of tech to help us cope with the hostility of the environment we’ve constructed for ourselves. If you had to navigate the modern world as you actually are, a soft pink-or-brown creature, you would immediately see that it is not optimized for your thriving.

(I have walked barefoot on the streets of San Francisco.)

But instead we have clothes, and shoes, and noise-canceling headphones—layers of artificiality to shield us from the effects of the other artificialities we’ve surrounded ourselves with, drugs for the problems caused by the drugs we took for the problems caused by the drugs we took for the problems caused by the drugs we took for the problems, etc.

Unlike the deer, you probably do not wonder where you are, because you were born in the backrooms, and have always lived in the backrooms. Their strangeness is difficult to perceive, because they are so familiar to you.

(Probably. If you’re the kind of person who reads my essays, anyway.)

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IV.

In the sci-fi classic Ender’s Game, a five-year-old boy is taken from his family, put on a space shuttle, and sent to a space station. The walls are cold metal. The air is recycled. The lighting is harsh and artificial. The gravity is simulated, via centrifugal effects—he spends his entire childhood in a world where the ground slopes upward and you can almost never see more than a few dozen paces in front of you. He goes almost five years in which he is only ever touched a handful of times, and most of those by other children trying to hurt him. When he is finally returned to earth, he can hardly bear it—has to spend most of his time alone on a raft in the middle of a lake at the bottom of a bowl of hills. He’s been environmentally Stockholm Syndrome’d.

(Note: Stockholm Syndrome itself isn’t real; the concept as it exists in our societal consciousness is a psy-op. But I want to reference the archetype of Stockholm Syndrome, in which people cozy up to and ally with the thing that is tormenting them. That is a thing that humans do.)

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Harlow’s studies with rhesus monkeys demonstrated that maternal separation causes deep psychological disturbance; he isolated infant monkeys from their mothers and gave them only surrogates of wire and cloth (to which they clung, anyway, desperate).

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In Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, men who touch the tainted source of masculine magic eventually go insane and kill everyone around them. So when they are found, they are “gentled,” i.e. cut off from the source, i.e. they have the metaphysical organ that allows them to channel magic amputated, and the wound cauterized.

Men who have been gentled almost always lose the will to live, become depressed, and eventually wither away or die by suicide.

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The Irish potato famine of the 1840’s happened in part because Ireland of the time was dependent on a single crop, and when a blight struck at that crop there simply was no other food to be found. The ecosystem had been pared down to almost nothing, and what should have been a dense web of interconnected species was instead a single artery. When it was cut, hundreds of thousands died.

(Bear with me. I acknowledge that this probably feels like it’s skipping around at random. What’s actually happening is that there is an elephant, and I am touching and describing various parts of it, one after the other, as if to an audience of blind men. The tusk part may not seem like it could possibly have anything to do with the ear part, but they are all part of the same elephant.)

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V.

This essay has been under construction in the back of my mind for multiple years, but the thing that nudged it back to the top of the stack was when my spouse, Logan, said words that I will paraphrase as:

Maybe I don’t have seasonal affective disorder, actually. Maybe I don’t “get depressed” in the winter. Maybe I’m supposed to behave differently, when the sky goes dark and the world turns cold and the bears and squirrels hibernate and all the plants go dormant.

When you live in an environment where you’re actually subject to actual winter, you don’t behave as if it’s summer all year ‘round.

When you live in an environment where the houses are warm and bright regardless of what’s going on outside, you might think that you’ve conquered winter, and that you’re therefore supposed to find it easy and natural to maintain summerlike levels of activity. But winter is more than “just” light and temperature, and the patches we’ve put over the cold and the dark are thin, and they leak.

(There’s a thing here about the world constantly turning out to be more complex and interconnected than people think—I’m not actually positing the specific hypothesis that e.g. your gut bacteria respond to seasonal changes regardless of what the thermostat says, but I am positing that something like that is probably true. We know how to create a surface-level simulacrum of summer, but that’s not the same thing as actually escaping the winter. The bulbs in your house are not outputting anything remotely like true sunlight.)

(Also even if we could convincingly and completely simulate year-round summer, I’m not sure that would be good, either. It’s not healthy for humans to have daylight around the clock, after all.)

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Five years ago, I moved with Logan out into what-passes-for-the-country (it isn’t) (it’s still extremely civilization-y). A year or so after that, we stopped having bright white lights on at all, after dusk, and either letting things just be dark or using dim, warm string lights that are a little bit like fire.

And suddenly, I knew what the moon was doing. Suddenly, I couldn’t not know what the moon was doing.

(It was full a few days ago. It’s waning but it’s not yet down to half-lit.)

I walk back and forth between the main house and Logan’s cabin at night, and the difference between no moon and full moon is huge. For the first time in my life, I simply noticed that the moon rises before the sunset when waxing, and after sunset when waning.

In my previous life, the moon had to compete with ten thousand fiddly little lights, fluorescents and LEDs and digital displays, a whole constellation of charging indicators. If I noticed it at all, it was only in passing, a couple of times a year. Now, once the sun goes down, it’s the biggest game in town.

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VI.

In the sequels to Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card posited/worldbuilt a cosmology in which every Thing is its own ontological unit. So like, a quark is a Thing and so is an atom and so is a molecule and so is a cell, with the cell-Thing being sort of like a bag wrapped around and connected to all of the molecule-Things that comprise it.

And the idea was that everything is connected to and bound up with thousands and thousands of other things. You have the bonds between you and your family, and between you and your friends, and between you and your favorite objects, and between you and your favorite places, and meanwhile all of those things are also connected to each other, and so on and so forth, etc. etc. etc.

In this ontology, you’re supposed to be a dot connected by thousands and thousands of strings to all of the world around you, one soul in a sea of souls all snuggling together. You’re meant to commune constantly with the grass, and the mud, and the river, and the rain, and the bugs and the fish and the trees and the animals and the smoke of the campfire and the clouds that drift in front of the sun and the sand between your toes and on and on and on.

This image was made with AI, as you can probably tell. If you are an artist who is willing to make me a replacement, I will pay you to do so. Contact me.

But what you actually are, in the modern world, is a dot connected by a few dozen strings. Maybe a few hundred, if you’re lucky. You spend your life sealed off, armored up, prophylaxed—and meanwhile the world around you has been thinned, culled, simplified, boiled down to a bare minimum.

This is bad. This is impoverished.

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VII.

I wrote a poem once:

…it is really, really, really weird that we’ve settled on this:

…as the right, the proper, the obvious way to teach people about this:

It’s really fucking weird, you guys.

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VIII.

We return to the deer.

The deer is you. You are the deer.

The world is supposed to touch you.

I say “supposed to,” and acknowledge that I’m glossing over some important stuff. You could just as easily say that half of the children are “supposed to” die before the age of five, and I agree that this is a bad thing, and I’m glad we stopped, and I am aware that the children not dying before the age of five has something to do with the condom we have slipped between ourselves and the world.

But this:

…this is an acute emergency response. This is what we do to stave off disaster.

We all recognize that the boy in the bubble is missing something. That there’s something tragic in the fact that he’s stuck in the bubble, isolated and insulated. We know that the baby in the glass box is supposed to come out of it, eventually.

What I am trying to do here is draw your attention to the fact—

(The fact.)

—that we’ve made it impossible for most people to leave the glass box. That we’ve replaced large portions of the world with the glass box, and that you yourself rarely (if ever) get all the way outside of it.

That, all by itself, is just true. If you live in a modern city or town or suburb, you do not experience the world in the way your body and mind were evolved to experience it. You aren’t fuzzed in, blended, conjoined, the way that every living creature forever all the way back to the dawn of time was, up until very recently (a few thousand years ago, if you’re conservative with your definitions, and a few hundred even if you’re generous).

And as to whether or not that’s a good thing…

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IX.

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Look. I’m really not a naturalistic-fallacy guy. I’m well aware that Jews in medieval times had noticeably higher survival rates, due in part to the simple fact that their faith instructed them to wash themselves regularly.

What I am is a Chesterton’s Fence guy. I can’t help but note that those Jews were healthier in an environment that was already broken. The Gentiles were dying of dysentery and cholera because there were too many people packed together in too small a space, with poor sanitation.

I like having vaccines and antibiotics and air conditioning and the ability to turn on lights at night. I do not actually claim that things would be better if I were huddled by a campfire outside of a log cabin.

But what I do claim is that the human body is a delicate system made up of thousands of interconnected and counterbalancing forces, and that neither the average human nor society writ large has the proper respect for what happens when you disturb the equilibrium.

Last time I checked, we still don’t know exactly what broke in our diets over the last fifty years—whether it was tons of sugar or too many preservatives or what.

But we do know that something broke. We got a little bit too far away from the kinds of nutrition that worked with our metabolism, and suddenly everyone was getting fat.

(When the Europeans came over to the Americas, they were amazed that the indigenous people had healthy teeth. It had not occurred to the indigenous people that they needed to be worried about their teeth turning black and rotting out of their skulls. That was a problem the Europeans had caused for themselves.)

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An incomplete list of the things we have fucked with, over the past century or three:

• Diet, as previously mentioned

• We’ve practically eliminated nudity, except in extremely limited contexts

• We’re decimating casual touch:

• Related to both of the above, we’ve practically eliminated having the world touch you, via wrapping ourselves in clothes and shoes and also bulldozing and sanitizing the world around us.

• We’ve practically eliminated cross-generational relationships, outside of rigidly defined roles like teacher or coach

• We’ve more or less abolished darkness (my spouse brings a roll of electrical tape with him when he travels and has to sleep in a hotel room or AirBnB; usually he has to cover at least a dozen different tiny lights)

• We’ve destroyed the multigenerational household (without changing the underlying need for connection and childcare and interpersonal support and the passing-down of wisdom)

• We’ve erased the Dunbar number group (without changing the underlying architecture that lets us sensibly handle at most a couple hundred human connections)

• As noted at the start, we’ve abolished seasons (in the sense that students and workers are expected to perform to basically the same standard in January as in June, and if you slow down in the winter you get diagnosed)

• We’ve erased the connection between the food we eat and its sources; most middle-class American children have never had to kill an animal or harvest a crop

• We’ve filled the environment with lead and carbon and microplastics

• We’re in the middle of causing a mass extinction (in terms of the total fraction of all species wiped out, the current human-caused catastrophe is not yet remotely comparable to the Big Five, but if you look at the rate at which biodiversity is being destroyed and the trajectory we’re on, it’s extremely plausible that this just is Number Six).

The claim here is not “every one of these things was bad” (although hopefully you agree that a lot of them pretty clearly are).

Rather, the claim is “every one of these things has lots of effects, many of which we would not have predicted and still do not understand, and at least some of which are going to be bad.”

(You can, in fact, grow many plants hydroponically, without soil. But those plants grow differently, as a result.)

It’s pretty clear that disruptions to our circadian rhythm are devastating, actually (but we did it anyway and don’t seem likely to stop). It’s pretty clear that we overshot with sanitization and sterilization (last time I checked this was the primary hypothesis for the rise in autoimmune disorders in children). We’ve changed a thousand things basically all at once in recent history, most of them in radical and completely unprecedented ways, and most of the ones we have studied in depth have turned out to have severely negative side effects.

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X.

In Hubris and Control, I argued that many stable equilibria are maintained by the combination of 1) a constant pushing force, and 2) a constraint that limits how far that force can push—like a cup dragged down by gravity but held up by a table. Evolution shaped us as a bundle of such pushing force—drives toward food, comfort, cleanliness, safety, and control—calibrated for an ancestral environment whose limitations did the stopping for us. As technology dissolved those constraints away, the drives kept pushing, leading us toward obesity, isolation, runaway demands for safety, etc.

In You Are Awash In Superstimuli, I argued that the world around you is substantially more intense than you are natively equipped to handle—that your nervous system is adapted for an environment that is tens or hundreds of times slower, duller, and quieter.

(Ah, fuck it—it’s a tetraptych instead of a triptych. In Encitification, I claimed that we keep making the choice to add more and more layers to the bubble because each individual layer pays off big, despite increasing the total damage we’re operating under. I often use the analogy of a mech suit that interfaces directly with your body, making you stronger and faster at the cost of constant pain and blood. At a certain point, even though further modification is still net beneficial, the overall downside crosses the threshold and becomes too great to handle.)

Here, I am arguing that this whole deer-in-the-subway thing is bad. But you don’t actually have to agree that it’s bad to notice and agree that it’s meaningful. That there are myriad impacts downstream of being in a place that is Not Where You Belong, and Not What You’re Adapted To.

(People will argue that it’s fine, because the subway is designed-for and adapted-to us, but they’re simply mistaken. It’s not designed for us; it’s the outcome of a hellish mishmash of incentives that don’t really have your back.)

Ultimately, while I do believe the more expansive claim, the core of my argument is the more modest, defensible one: that each of the ways in which we have drastically departed from our ancestral experience probably has an impact, and that those impacts are not limited to the specific bits we wanted and asked for.

(Intuition pump: smoking. Intuition pump: leaded gasoline. Intuition pump: microplastics. Intuition pump: carbon emissions. Intuition pump: fucking shoes.)

You are the deer in the subway, for both better and worse, and you’ll be better equipped to navigate the tradeoffs if you shake off the normalization, and let yourself be fully aware of this fact.

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