I had this clock hanging on my wall next to an abstract painting of mountains. It was 11:59 pm. I’d focus on the arrow-shaped hour hand clicking away the seconds until my 18th birthday.
5…4…3…2…1
Happy birthday to me! My family rushed through the door to congratulate me, rub my hair, and tell me to get the fuck out their house. Which I did the very next day. I drove away to study and become a very mediocre mathematician.
That’s how life works. We leave our hometown, our names carved on a bench being the only reminder we ever existed.
For the next 8 years, I lived in big metropolises and medium-sized cities, meeting new people but most importantly, meeting myself.
The old hometown of a dozen thousand people was my holiday resort. Three or four times a year, I’d visit briefly to regress to my high-school self and let my family rejoice at my presence.
The high school gang would get together for a couple of nights, telling war stories from the trenches of “real life”. And the next morning, I was back on the bus.
Then, COVID hit.
I knew this fucker was going to cause a ruckus since early January. By February, I was preparing to leave my big fancy city, fearing things would get ugly — and they did.
I packed my bags, shut the lights off, gave away the keys, and returned to my holiday resort lodged in between two mountains. The very next day, nationwide lockdowns ensued, and I was glad I was away from the big metropolitan centers.
After the initial societal shock and the novelty of being collectively stuck in limbo, I emerged from my slumber and looked around. I saw that same clock clicking away next to the painting. This time, there was no countdown; I was back home.
R e t V r n
There’s a violent disruption in your sense of self when you leave behind a familiar environment. You feel untangled by memories and stale emotions, novelty hits you like a drug, intoxicating the deepest parts of your psyche.
During first few months at my new place, I didn’t really sleep. I was always dreaming of potential. There wasn’t a single night I stayed in. “Let’s hang out” was constantly slipping from my lips.
You learn to become yourself. You learn awareness, without relying on the crutches that are your family. When you do return, you’re a different person. But if you stay long enough, old psychological furrows are dug up.
Many of my friends found shelter from world events in the microcosm of this town. After a few months, it was like living in the past. Same group of friends, old flings, same table in that corner with the flickering light emitting an orange hue, drinking 2-euro beer and cracking jokes about school.
I’d never considered moving back for good. Not until I was 50 or 60. In late 2019, I prepared a 6-month trip around Europe, hitting France, Ireland, Finland, and Germany. Staying in the very same room I jerked off for the first time wasn’t on the timetable. Alas, I had to make due.
To be frank, the pampering felt nice. There was a safety net. I didn’t even need to grab my keys on the way out, someone would be waiting for me anyway. The last 8 years started to retreat, giving way to the oh-so warm and fuzzy childhood memories. What the fuck was happening?
An emotional cocoon wrapped around me, eliciting a lethargic daydream from the barrows of my mind. This is great during Christmas but not when you’re used to walking around naked in the house.
Snapping out of it is the correct term — reality is great because it pulls you out from whatever allegorical cave you’re hiding. Eventually, I knew I had to escape from this paradigm. Something the culture needs to do as well.
The Village by the Sea
The village by the sea is the allegorical retirement home of the geriatric population, only today you can see many youngsters expressing the desire to move in with the old cats — spiritually.
It represents an oasis, a conceptual shelter from the influence of modern life… and life in general, if we’re being honest. You cover your nut and then some, buy land in a God-forsaken barren field, have some chickens and a stupid cow to suckle raw milk from its tits, and phone it in.
Sounds like the dream life, right? Being sucked dry of energy by the time you’re 30, fixing up your coop, working a cushy digital job, and Tweeting aphorisms.
Oh, wait! That’s me.
See, most people who talk about the village by the sea have never actually lived in a village. They don’t understand how small communities are actually like. Their view of the VBTS is a postcard impression rather than reality.
I have the resources to live the dream most (I assume) middle-class Americans have when they’re stuck in traffic. And I’m here to tell you, it ain’t what you think it is buddy. Keep driving.
I could go on and live in a hobbit hole, be completely independent, have fresh eggs and orange juice every morning, read books, and become even more eccentric. And, I have the personality predisposition for it.
But it’s a sheltered life. A quiet, simple life. Cope for being unable to navigate the complexity of reality and the high emotional demands of being a social creature. To isolate yourself from the world in a village by the sea is to give up.
I get that you have certain “trad” values that are being challenged in the modern world. Well, that’s why courage is a virtue, ain’t it?
What good are these trad values when all you do is tend to your homestead?
Trad vs Tradition
If you’re reading this, it means that I’ve successfully finished an article that has been brewing in the background of this Substack for months. In fact, this is my third attempt.
In each version, I struggled to find the beginning of the thread. Each time, I went further back until I started talking about Biblical cyphers and PIE religions — how typical!
Instead, let’s start from the end and end this with a bang. The gist of my position is this:
Space exploration is a bigger part of tradition than your homestead.
You're not really trad for having a home. You're just trying to emulate what happened naturally for the older generation. But they didn't necessarily think of it as tradition. They just lived their lives.
While this has nothing to do with Elon’s wet dream or your homemade sourdough bread, the sentence conveys the hierarchy of values my whole argument rests upon.
To reiterate the subtitle once again, and provide two useful definitions:
But to understand exactly where I’m coming from, you need to be familiar with the internet subcultures that started taking shape during the dawn of post-Trump America Twitter Internet, which arguably began long before the Orange Man was removed from office.
The timing is arbitrary, yet it suspiciously coincides with a burst in the kind of content I’m talking about, even though the conditions that made this possible were already there and perhaps they never stopped being there since humans had a past and a future.
Cottagecore
If an animal is hurt, it hides. It withdraws from plain view and tries to heal. Humans are no different.
The persistent illusion that we’re going through a cultural war necessitates losers and winners. Can you guess who’s the loser in this case?
I already gave you a hint. The people who withdrew from mainstream culture, seeking shelter and different living arrangements in buttfuck nowhere.
The psychology of the “trad” Right is clear in that they, at least unconsciously, feel like they lost. All they can do now is pack up their things and move somewhere else.
And that somewhere else is a feverish dream of fields of green, bare feet, and a tranquil life; the aforementioned village by the sea. To satisfy the capriccio of their ego, they elevate this hippie lifestyle into a superior spiritual path, bound to the intrinsically traditional value system.
But I’ll tell you something, dear reader. Tradition is conquering new lands. Tradition is shedding away old dogmas and law. Tradition is revolution and political uproar.
Tradition is technological advancement until we can call every single star home.
So, fuck your cottage and your wooden hut, your doughy sourdough bread and homemade jam, and fuck your aesthetic fetishization Twitter posting.
There you go, friend. Your “trad” values are, at best, a post-performative relic sophism stemming from the ultimate American product that is modernity. You’ve been sold another lifestyle that simulates “WINNING!!!”
Finding balance in an unbalanced world (Integration)
Regression is a misnomer. If you regress, you never fully -gressed. Alas, it’ll always happen to a certain degree. Call it an instinct or an automatic psychological mechanism. The sensation that you’re someone else when exposed to old contexts is never going to go away completely. Progress, in this case, is the awareness that it’s happening to you.
I was lucky enough to have that awareness and realize that, like a scared animal hiding from the world, I limped back to my hole to wait it out. Wait out COVID, the uncertainty of the future, wait out making big decisions.
I was luckier to realize I never left. I always tilted my mirror so I could watch my old room and my memories.
The separation wasn’t successful, it never is. I tried to create a barrier between the “old” and the “new, instead of meshing the two. I loved my family like a child, not like a person. So, I always came back to love them conditionally and codependently.
The snap-out happened gradually. Guilt and shame were the first emotions to be purified. Honesty emerged and took their place so I was able to rest into my life as is.
The conditions of my environment didn’t change, I also didn’t change. I became. And I loved my parents as a person. And I hated parts of my past purely, without grief.
Should I stay or should I go transformed from an existential question to a question of potential. I didn’t have to do anything unless I wanted to.
I didn’t have to run away to be myself anymore.
In this case, perfection isn’t the goal. Awareness is.
And this is the kind of awareness our culture needs. It’s a requirement to make the past and the future one. To keep our homesteads and live in the stars.
Tradition is the radical acceptance of reality. Our choices are free of the blockages that accumulate with time and trauma, they become timeless because they rest upon innate desires, not societal conditions.
Timelessness is the only traditional ideal we should strive for.
This post was [Written by Human], not a robot. Make sure to share or else...
I really enjoyed this piece. Your writing is excellent, and you provide a unique and interesting take on this current fad of returning to traditional lifestyles. This theme is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, and now you've given me more good food for thought.
I do think that one aspect of fully realizing our humanity it to explore and embrace new challenges and overcome them. That said, I also believe we've really lost something as a culture in the postmodern West, something that more traditional and even primitive cultures have managed to retain. While we don't want to become Luddites and hide in fear from the challenges of our times, it can also be worthwhile to retrace our historical steps to see where we went wrong in our societal development and how we can reclaim the good that has been lost, with an aim of getting back in the fight and moving forward again.