Good morning, beloved -
An atypical Saturday dispatch for you, as it’s the first Saturday in quite awhile I haven’t had anything particular to do. Consider this, then, a grab bag of odds and ends — and maybe you’ll find something tasty if you reach a hand in and cast about.
§ You may well have heard it from me in person by now, as in audibly and from a great distance, but just on the off chance you haven’t: I successfully completed the Lea Valley 50K two Saturdays ago, my very first ultra (and, in fact, very first run of any distance longer than 20 miles or so).
Hoooo boy was it not pretty! Whatever the opposite of pretty is, it was that. I staggered into the Hackney Wick finish area some seven hours and fifty minutes after things kicked off 31.5 miles upstream, in Welwyn Garden City, and that performance put me 245th of 257 finishers. I have never been so proud of anything in my entire life. (In fact, seeing N beaming at me as I closed the final few meters to the finish line instantly sealed the moment as one of my top-five memories of all time.)
All in all, it was an incredibly gratifying experience, to the degree that at this moment I (cough) cannot necessarily promise you that I wouldn’t consider doing it again. My heartfelt thanks to organizers Camino, to all the aid-station volunteers, and to the cats at Precision Fuel & Hydration, whose carb chews and electrolyte tablets made all the difference between me lumbering in as Finisher 245 and a sorrowful, sad-trombone DNF.
I do think there’s a point to endurance sports beyond the pleasure of accomplishment, though, which is pretty much what it says on the tin: training the body to endure. Not uncomplainingly, exactly. But at least so it comes to know the difference between the kind of discomfort it’s fun to bellyache about, precisely because you can and in fact need to put up with it as the price of continued forward motion, and actual pain of the immediately and non-negotiably mission-scrubbing variety.
These times have made us all endurance athletes of a sort, willy-nilly, and what I have found is that the skill I developed in training for the ultra is more or less directly transferable to the rest of life. It’s to give yourself a sieve, with which you can sift the things that suck but must be tolerated from those affects that signal serious and imminent damage to your being.
I really do commend the practice to everyone, in whatever way is appropriate to your level of ability. I can’t guarantee that you, too, will wrest a proudest-ever life moment from the experience. But I do feel comfortable in promising that you will feel like a highly capable, highly competent, objectively hardcore badass on the other side of whatever endurance challenge you successfully undertake. And who couldn’t use a little bit of that?
§ I’m thrilled to have finally gotten Lifepod up and running, after almost a year of putting the various pieces in motion! Our first five episodes are live now, featuring conversations with Valeria and Tom from Pirate Care, small-farm advocate Chris Smaje, artist Dianna Settles and Hologram creator Cassie Thornton, in addition to an introduction and overview from ys tly.
I really hope you enjoy Lifepod. I confess to not having the foggiest idea what I’m doing as a host, never having listened to a podcast myself, but, y’know, we live in a society — it’s hard not to pick up at least a rudimentary sense of the genre’s conventions by osmosis. Eventually I’ll figure this thing out, and with any luck you’ll bear with me until I do.
One of the things Lifepod has already left me with, though, is a greatly deepened respect for people who do this well. From recent experience, I can tell you that it is Not Easy to have a conversation that feels like a conversation, that at the same time elicits information, challenges your interlocutors to describe their work, accounts for their natural rhythms of thought and expression, and keeps listeners in the loop by defining unfamiliar terms or concepts. So really, my hat is off to those who manage to do this artfully, consistently and at a high level — notably Ezra Klein, who may be infuriatingly milquetoast politically, but whose interviews I’ve now taken to studying, in the hope that I can glean some insight into the way he practices his craft.
The analytics, by the way, bear out the logic of all of you who’ve been telling me “you ought to do a podcast” for the past ten years, or have argued otherwise that this form is where the grandeur now lives where the production of culture around ideas is concerned. I try not to get hung up in the numbers — but, yeah, when the audience for even the least listened-to Lifepod episode is already a full order of magnitude greater than the readership for my most widely-shared written piece, it’s hard to avoid concluding that anyone who wants to participate in the broader conversation now needs to be operating in this medium.
You know I resist the logic of KPIs in my very marrow, alongside all considerations for popularity, numeric influence or anything else of that nature, so this plodding linear medium-determinism is kind of depressing. But objectively, the number of messages I’ve gotten about the most recent Lifepod episode alone is greater than the total amount of feedback I’ve received on anything I’ve written here in the past year...and that episode dropped two days ago. I’d be lying to you if I said I didn’t enjoy seeing actual overt engagement with what I put so much energy into realizing.
All of this is to say: I’m really getting a kick out of doing Lifepod, and my sense from attending to that feedback is that you are, too, for values of “you” that are important to me. So I’ll keep doing it, so long as it seems to be connecting, and the resources to pay for production remain available. (As I’m learning to be explicit about saying, you can help defray those costs by supporting this dispatch. In fact, I’ll go you one better: kick in a few bucks this week, and I’ll send you some stickers. Win-win!)
§ Speaking of actual engagement, there’s something I need to make explicit about some of the things that people are doing with Lifehouse, sufficiently difficult to get into the right shape that I’ve been putting it off for awhile.
I want to preface these comments by emphasizing how moved and flattered I am that there’s been any real-world response to the book at all. It has far more usually been my experience of writing that you spend a few years crafting an argument until it’s just so, you ship it, and at very best a few echoes eventually make their way back to you from the far canyon wall. It’s not nothing, or anything like it: some of those echoes have led to life-sustaining friendships and life-changing opportunities, to the extent that the word “gratitude” feels inadequate to describe my feelings about them. But the ordinary lot of the writer is, I think, not merely to work in some isolation, but to persist in that isolation thereafter. You write because you need to, not because you necessarily have any expectation that there’s someone attending on the other side of the screen. It is, notoriously, a lonely occupation.
Lifehouse has always, and wonderfully, been different in this respect. It’s never sold all that well, by the standards of my previous books. But where it has wildly outperformed those other books is in reliably generating some kind of feeling in people who’ve encountered it, with the result that often enough that feeling has led them to make moves in the real world of one sort or another. Again, my experience has been that this kind of thing — where people I hadn’t known previously, and have a considerable amount of respect for, use some aspect of the book’s language or animating propositions as a touchstone for their own commitments of time, thought, energy and action — never happens, so seeing it take place has been more than a little mindblowing.
Alongside that joy, though, comes the burden of seeing people take up the book and make uses of it I can’t fully affirm. In particular, there’s a group here in the UK that is organizing (with my knowledge and, to the extent that it makes any difference, my blessing) under the banner of “Lifehouses - Collapse Preparing Communities.” I am, of course, delighted that the “Lifehouse” framing resonates with the folks who’ve found themselves drawn to this group. What I’m dismayed by, though, is seeing all the specifically political, in fact specifically counterhegemonic content in what I wrote — which is, so far as I’m concerned, the whole book, tout court — stripped out in this effort’s account of itself, and replaced with language and concepts drawn from professional “participatory”-practice consultants, pop-history influencers and therapy-culture entrepreneurs. In other words, exactly the kind of people who have nothing to do with anything I’m talking about, and who given my druthers I wouldn’t want getting within a country mile of it.
Look: I’m fully onboard with the death of the author. I think, sure, you take care with what you put into the world, so that to the maximum extent achievable the work says what you mean for it to say, and neither more nor less. But you don’t get to determine how people interpret that work thereafter. And on top of that, I try to observe a Buddhist practice of non-attachment, on the theory that remaining attached to desired outcomes, or the avoidance of undesired outcomes, is the root cause of suffering. So I hope you believe me when I say have no wish to claim ownership over the ideas expressed in Lifehouse, none whatsoever. Those ideas are there for readers to make such use of as they will, and so mote it be.
But I do think I get to say when someone’s gotten my whole fallacy wrong.
I do think I get to say that my entire purpose, in Lifehouse, was to write about, think about, celebrate and with any luck contribute to a specifically anarchist tradition of caring for ourselves. That I have always taken pains to point out (for one example) the fundamentally problematic issues with describing what’s involved in that mode of care as “resilience.” And that a community resilience hub founded in liberal understandings of “participation” — whatever else it is and however valuable it may be — is not the Lifehouse.
It’s something else. It might be important to people, or meaningful, or valuable. It’s not my place to say otherwise, and it never will be. But don’t call it by the name I use to denote a place where people consciously operating in a particular tradition have organized a space outside the state and the market both, in which they can enact together a practice involving autonomous mutual care and the development of collective power. Do me just that one favor, huh?
An equally vital point I’d want people to take away, which is admittedly in some considerable tension with what I’ve just said, is that none of this activity should pivot on ideas offered by any one specific individual. Lifehouse, again, is a set of proposals about autonomous, collective action, drawn from the lived experience of communities under pressure. It’s about people committing themselves to the difficult work of making shelter together, at the local level first, and from their understanding of that work devising ways to coordinate their efforts with those of similarly-situated others elsewhere, should that prove necessary and desirable. It’s explicitly not about any one person, or whatever desire they might have to design ideal structures or processes for others to inhabit and animate thereafter.
As my partner often says, the proposition I offered in the book is not a model, or a template. It is rather, in the nature of an inquiry: can we do this? Can we do this together? What are the conditions of possibility of our survival with dignity, under the particular set of circumstances we now inhabit, and can we produce those conditions through our own collective action? And what I’m always, always careful to note is that these are questions whose answers can only be produced, if indeed they can be produced at all, not ahead of time, but in the mess and murk of situated, local engagement and communal struggle.
Or do what the book explicitly suggests, by way of accounting for the inevitability and necessity of differing local interpretations, and say: we’re a Lifehouse, yes, and understand ourselves to be operating in that tradition — but we have a pragma here of doing things a little differently. Maybe the tenets of nonviolent communication are of shared importance to the people who constitute your local Lifehouse. Maybe you do wish to incorporate snazzy networked decision-support systems in your way of running things, of a sort that fly in the face of my own belief that we only want to build mission-critical procedures atop technologies of permanent recourse. Fine! Mazel tov! But be explicit that you’re doing so as a local pragma, an agreement significant to you that you don’t expect or assume anyone else will abide by.
It’s interesting to me that folks in the States seem to be clear on these points, in ways that have evidently slipped by some of those who are using the book to inform their organizing here in the UK. (I don’t have any visibility on people who might be working with the book elsewhere, but if you do, I’d surely appreciate it if you’d let me know about it.) There’s probably something in that divergent interpretation that speaks to the differences in where these two cultures are at this moment in time, and it might well bear some future consideration, but for now I’ll just say that the way Lifehouse has been received and interpreted on the other side of the Atlantic, and by whom, bears a much stronger resemblance to what I had in mind than anything trading under that name hereabouts.
And with that said, I’ll let go again (or try to, anyway, until the next time I see something cropping up and calling itself a Lifehouse that doesn’t thrill me). Let a thousand flowers bloom, etc.
§ Right now I'm reading Miranda Mellis’s novel Crocosmia, the two volumes of Common Treasures, and Stewart Brand’s grandiosely-titled Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, all-but-disqualified out of the gate by his praise of the design genius of E. Musk; listening to Panopticon, who debuted their crushing new material from Det Hjemsøkte Hjertet at the Dome on Thursday night, as well as the new Neurosis and the new SUNN O))), neither of which — full disclosure — has yet to really put the hooks in me; and watching the Dune: Part Three trailer, and wondering why it’s similarly failed to grab me, when I as a Dune enjoyer of some forty-six years’ standing (!) generally dug both of Villeneuve’s first two outings in the canon.
That’s it for now. As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 160 of Saturday, 4 April 2026, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊