Lately I have been having small, delightful little epiphanies when I revisit things I thought I knew back to front; an album, my home ski hill, friendships, some of my favorite books. It keeps cropping up, it’s a pattern. A rush of discovery from something I was foolish enough to think I knew completely. Apparently, the only thing I really know back to front is hubris. In hindsight, these dynamic epiphany machines were always wiser than me. That they continue to reveal secrets when I sit and spend meaningful time with them is easy proof. Ever reread your favorite novel and experience a new revelation? Listen to your favorite album and suddenly appreciate an unheard drum fill or lyric or bass line? Have a stop the presses conversation with a close friend that makes you appreciate all the reasons you love them in the first place?
The moments where you can really feel the magic and ludicrousness and irony of life, all at once. Where it gets deep. Where all of a sudden you know more, feel more, and maybe even love more than you used to.
Someone close and important to me introduced the term “Season of Life” to me a while back, and it has stuck with me like a splinter in my head. I’ve been giving those moments of depth a lot of thought lately as I have tried to slow my life down, limit the distracting inputs, and just see what's right in front of me with a little more clarity. As it happens, there is quite a lot when I am not too blind to see it.
I think I am in the Deep Season right now.
Maybe Less is Actually More
A few years ago I logged off of social media for the last time. Wiped and deactivated my profiles. Went dark. For a while I missed it too. Worried that I wouldn’t catch updates and conversations with friends. Wondered what else was happening that I couldn’t scroll to see. If nothing else, social media alleviated some boredom at times too, and suddenly it wasn’t there.
But then, imperceptibly at first, it just didn’t matter much anymore. I still spoke to the important people in my life. I still got the updates from the friend group, I still found ways to waste time too. I just spent less time on the phone. That’s it. And now I can’t say I miss it. Not at all. I get that it works for some folks, and I have no problem at all with it. I just also know that it doesn’t quite work for me.
I won’t pretend to be some moralist (please, do not take moral advice from an instrument as blunt as myself) raging against the well documented ills of social media, though they do give me significant pause. I just found it to be empty calories for me. It was just consuming time for no real reason. Just as I am no moralist, I am no stranger to finding ways to waste time either. But if I am going to spend hours looking at a screen, I might as well be playing a video game, or watching something new, or writing this shitty essay. Or something.
Social media just seemed to be shallow, all breadth and no real depth. Flat and fake and false in too many aspects to outweigh any of the positive attributes. Authenticity seemed almost entirely lacking. The exact opposite of the Deep Season ethos. I had to let it go.
And that distinction, depth vs. breadth, got me thinking about other aspects of my life. I found myself more easily lost at the surface level in a variety of areas. I read less books than I used to, replaced by the never ending horizon of shitty, shallow content the internet can provide. I skied more resorts in the last few years than ever before, but all I really wanted to do was ski at my home mountain again. I visited new places and cities in my year on the road living and working nomadically, and I am actually happier living up in the woods in a cabin outside of Salt Lake City.
What else needs a good reevaluation? Are there any other ideas, projects, books, people, whathaveyou out there that I can revisit and spend some time with? Are there things that have been spread so thin so as to not be valuable to me anymore? Where can I get more intentional with the good, compelling, and unique things in front of me instead of consistently looking outward and elsewhere? It’s been a dichotomy I haven’t been able to let go of, and a helpful barometer. These days it’s depth over breadth. It’s Deep Season.
Therapy (Rob’s Version)
First of all, therapy is great. Everyone should go. It’s cathartic, painful, mind bending, and exhausting work. It’s also absolutely, unequivocally worth it. I should know, I have been fully committed to it for the past 5+ years now. If anyone is qualified to talk about the ups and downs, the benefits, and, if I am honest, the sheer amount of effort it can take, it would be me. I am a poster child for its effectiveness (if not so much it’s efficiency, which has more to do with me than therapy).
2018 Journal entry - I knew the words, I just didn’t quite believe them yet. I started therapy a year later
I was resistant at first too. Call it stoicism, terror, stubbornness, or just garden variety male emotional stupidity. It was all of those things at one point or another. I was scared enough of the depths of my depression that I knew I needed to go to therapy, but I didn’t want to have to open up either. So for a long time, the majority of 2019, I was attending the sessions, but only with a certain kind of defiance, which of course was and is self defeating. As I look back on it now, I can see the ludicrousness of this position, but at the time my depressed self was, for lack of a better term, mentally ill.
So I went and deflected and avoided and generally kept everything at the surface level. It was a purgatory of sorts, I wasn’t getting more depressed, but I wasn’t getting better either, which I think was by subconscious design. The depressed mind works in devilishly creative ways. At any rate, the time finally came when I was hurting enough, even in that purgatory, that a small voice in my head got just loud enough to hear over the roar of my self loathing and destructiveness: you don’t have to live like this. What do you have to lose? What is the best that could happen?
Over the course of the next 4 years I, slowly at first and then with gusto, gave myself over to therapy in earnest. First talk therapy — actual, vulnerable, open talk therapy — where I was able to give space to my greatest fears, my real feelings, my thoughts that had never seen the light of day before. Then it gave way to EMDR, a more focused and internal form of therapy that greatly sped up the process of understanding, accepting, and healing. Now I am even trying ketamine assisted therapy, a part of the newer trend toward psychedelics in mental health treatments.
That is not to say that there haven’t been hiccups. Life happens, whether we are depressed, happy, or somewhere in between. I left my job, was let go at the new one, went back to my old job. Then a pandemic hit. Multiple romantic relationships rife with red flags that I think I am better at recognizing now. A schism in my family that left me estranged from my mother (a topic for another time). A nomadic year — as much about running toward something as running away from Utah for a while, another new job. Moving back to Utah to live in a cabin in the woods. A potential romance with a friend that seems like it has the chance to be something really special.
Any progress I have made (and I have to remind myself sometimes that there has been a lot of progress here) is due to one over arching decision. It was one I didn’t even consciously make at the time, but the more I lived in it the clearer it’s rightness became: I had to make a space for myself to simply exist. I was all breadth and no personal depth. There wasn’t much to that version of Rob — just someone trying to exist for others always at the expense of himself. I had thousands of external inputs and almost no internal ones.
It was only when I made time and space for therapy, for myself, that I started making any progress. It was slow at first. Sometimes it still is, to be honest. But as soon as I allowed for the idea that I was as important as anyone else, as deep and complex and valid, it was impossible to let go of. And with that it became necessary, vital to engage with therapy as deeply and meaningfully as I could.
I am a slow learner, and it took time. A lot of fucking time. 5 years and counting, actually. It’s a spot entirely due to depth over breadth. To incremental changes, small victories, gut wrenching choices, and new boundaries erected and held. Now I get to occupy my own emotional real estate though, with roots planted deep, and a much more comfortable relationship with myself.
Home is Where the Gnar Is
There is a famous (and false) story about the philosopher Immanuel Kant never venturing further than 10 miles from his home town of Königsberg, Prussia (present day Kaliningrad, Russia). The truth, perhaps less interesting than the myth, is that he spent a few years working as a tutor in Judtschen (about 15 miles away) and a few years in Groß-Arnsdorf (about 90 miles away). But these detours are geographically close enough to understand why the myth that he never left Königsberg sounds better. Any good myth has an even better editor. The point, though, is that one of the most influential, towering, consequential thinkers in modern western philosophy apparently didn’t need to venture more than 100 miles into the world to make monumental determinations about it. One has to assume that a person of his intellectual stature lived a full, heavy, eventful life, even if it seems odd in relation to our jet setting, social media saturated, supposedly accessible world we inhabit today. There was enough in that small spot in the world to occupy the time, energy and enormous thoughts of one of modern history's greatest thinkers.
Me circa 1993.
This guy doesn’t care how many resorts you ski, just how much gnar you shred
I myself am no great thinker, but I do have a home that is rich and fascinating as well. I grew up at the base of the Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons, just south of Salt Lake City, Utah. I could sneak up to a world class ski resort in winter time or go on a mountain bike ride in the summer time within about 20 minutes and not see a soul if I wanted to. It was an awesome luxury and real highlight of my childhood. At the time I accepted this reality unthinkingly, as reliable and sturdy as gravity. I existed within one of the blessings of youth: a happy unawareness of perspective. The world was as big and deep and broad as the small portion that I could see right in front of me.
And that world, the youthful one, felt full and wondrous and expansive enough at the time, despite (or perhaps because of) its limited scope. There was a sense of discovery each day. No bike ride around the neighborhood was the same, no visit to the tree fort at the park repetitive. The depth of youthful discovery hadn’t been blunted by the flat breadth of adult reality just yet. It felt full and vivid. Like living in technicolor.
That is not to say that life as an adult doesn’t have its beautiful moments either. It’s just that it seems all too easy to get absorbed by the breadth of things, the surface level, and the pleasant banality of the doom scroll. Always another option trying to distract me from engaging in my immediate surroundings more deeply. There is so much to see and do and scroll and swipe and like and share and tweet and film and hashtag. If there is a way to keep up with, well, all of that and still remain sane, I have not yet found it.
No Place Like Home
I spent a good portion of 2022 and 2023 on the road, working and living nomadically, as the remote tech worker is wont to do in a post-pandemic world. It was a wonderful experience. I might even go back to it one day. I got to stop by places, get a feel for them, and try to avoid the frantic pace of a vacation. By my own admission, I was taking cities “for a test drive”, too. I wanted to explore the possibility of living somewhere else besides my hometown.
And along the way I also realized something: I missed mountains. I missed access to nature and my outdoor hobbies. I missed having all my books on shelves instead of boxed up. I missed some of the stability too. I wasn’t sick of traveling by the end of my year, but I was getting there.
Views from the cabin don’t disappoint, either
So, with a stroke of luck, I was able to plot a course back to Utah. More than that, I was invited to move into a cabin right next door to some of my best friends. It’s just outside of Salt Lake, but man is it a dream. You even have to snowmobile to it in the winter. Quiet, remote, tucked in the woods, but with all the access to a city you could need. It was impossible to say no to that. Not for nothing, also pretty cool that my buddy (and now neighbor) Sam built this cabin himself. I moved back to Utah in July of 2023 and into the same mountains that had been childhood neighbors when I was growing up in the suburbs. I was and still am in it.
The return to Utah, unthinkable when I left in 2022, has actually been nothing short of great. Yes, the problems I ran from still live in Utah, but the boundaries I established were firmer than ever. Yes, it was back to where I have spent my entire life, but now I knew I could also leave if I wanted. And now I live in a cabin in the woods, complete with sightings of bears, mountain lions, elk, moose, and all sorts of wild weather. It’s an experience I have always dreamed about. Now I can’t really dream of ever wanting to live any place else. Go figure.
Parking myself in a cabin, slowing things down, limiting the distractions. It’s all part of the Deep Season (and many a cliche about escaping to the woods, but whatever). The setting I am in now is more in line with my values and a healthier day to day. I can work remotely from the cabin, still be into Salt Lake for dinner or a beer, and live next to best friends. I still shake my head sometimes at how ideal this set up really is.
Shred Dead Redemption
In the summer of 2022 I left Salt Lake on an open ended mission to run away from things here that really troubled me,. I had also hoped run toward some sense of peace. Go figure that the winter I move away just so happened to be the deepest ski season ever recorded in The Wasatch. Endless powder days, consistent storms, truly epic stuff. It sometimes felt like there was too much snow. Like winter forgot to actually end. And I was on the road for a lot of it. Away from my beloved Wasatch Mountains and my home resorts in Little Cottonwood Canyon: Alta and Snowbird.
I was still skiing. A winter without skiing is unthinkable to me. I have been on skis since I was 3. It’s one of the things in life that brings me endless joy. But that season, for the first time since I was a kid and you could literally pay by the run, like my dad used to do when he was teaching me, I also didn’t have a season pass to any one resort. Instead I had the Ikon pass, one of the mega passes that have become staple monoliths of the industry in the past decade. You pay basically the same amount as a season pass to a specific resort and you get access to dozens. Some you resorts are unlimited, others capped at 7 days a piece. In theory, I had access to enough skiing to keep me occupied all winter.
Learning how to shred the bunny hill with my dad at Solitude, circa 1993
The reality was more disappointing. I had to really pick my days to ski, as the Ikon only had 7 days total at Alta/Snowbird combined. Tough sledding when I used to average 40 or 50 days up there in a year. The deepest season in history and I was stuck with a mega pass that was more hype than reality. All I wanted to do was ski the hills I loved when I wanted to.
So this season I have been trying to actively simplify my life. Slow things down after a fun, frantic, fucking excellent year on the road. Trying to do that in my approach to skiing this year too. I have one season pass at Alta. Nothing too fancy, just access to the resort whenever I like. Sometimes for a full day, bell to bell, sometimes for a few runs and some fresh air. And when I am on the hill I am trying to keep the phone tucked away, focus on the turns, really put Alta through its paces in a way I haven’t before.
I missed skiing Snowbird and Alta in my year away. I missed knowing all the names of the runs that I have skied hundreds of times before, which lines to hit at which time of year, what conditions suited different types of terrain. I missed my hidden powder stashes. But mostly I missed the delightful, deep sense of surprise when the ski hill decides to show me something I haven't seen before. I’ve been skiing these places for 30 years and wouldn’t presume to think I much about them at all, really. There is beautiful depth to these spots. Knowledge handed down through generations of skiers, new spots being scoped out by ambitious hoodrats and pros. New twists on old stories, which is all new stories really are anyway. All chasing the same thrill: the perfect turn, a bluebird day with 12 inches of fresh snow, the “Alta Magic” (if you know, then you know).
I have a hard time not seeing these Mega passes and things like social media in the same light these days. They supposedly broaden the world, enrich lives, make things so much easier, but the reality seems decidedly underwhelming. There is a term in social media and technology called enshitification. It’s the idea that on a long enough timeline any social media platform will ultimately succumb to larger profit motives and become a warped, shitty version of the thing that used to be useful. Crude, but it seems to hold water. Targeted ads, echo chambers, more ads, and all of a sudden the thing that was supposed to “connect us” is just a silo to print and house cash in. Are these mega passes really all that different? At first the idea seems novel: access to even more resorts, more areas, more ski culture. And all for less! But go ahead and take a look at Park City, or Vail, or any number of these areas and you’ll see a lot less for a hell of a lot more cost. Longer lines, higher rents, locals priced out, ski patrollers going on strike just to get a living wage and fucking waterproof gear (that’s true, look up the Park City patrollers union demands), traffic backed up for fucking miles at a time, and a watered down product at the end of the day. And for what? What good is the pass that gets you everything if there is nothing left to enjoy anyway?
The old guy still teaching me how it’s done. Top of Alf’s High Rustler w/ my dad circa 2024
I am sure I sound curmudgeonly. I probably am! And let me assure you I don’t mean to say it should be locals only, or that no one should try new things either! I also loved exploring new ski resorts and hills. Just not as much as I love the Wasatch. Anyone who has skied Alta and Snowbird knows you can spend a lifetime there and never grow tired of it. Many actually do spend their entire lives here. It’s one reliable spot to sink back into the depths of blissful, ignorant youth again. The world shrinks, and suddenly nothing else really matters anymore. Just the next turn, next High Boy lap, next Alta Bomb at the GMD, the next party lap with your best friends. Not sure I would trade all the social media followers in the world for that.
What do I really think? These mega passes have flattened things out too much, and generally only benefit those who can afford it. How damn lucky are we to get to be more than just a tourist in these places? How lucky are the tourists (and I have been one of them too) to get to visit those places for a spell? But in the debate about breadth or depth, skimming vs deep reading, scrolling social media vs going out for a beer with an old friend, swiping right over and over vs. asking that cute bartender out, and mega passes vs a season pass at your home mountain, well, I think you can guess my answer.
Counter Point
I could be wrong about this whole damn thing. Maybe the only way to know these things is to give the opposite side a try. Maybe I only appreciate Alta because I was skiing inferior places? Maybe I only appreciate home because I was away for a while? Maybe I appreciate my friendships because I wasn’t as connected to them as I should have been? So, despite all my bluster, I think it’s also good to throw a curveball in, try for some breadth, find the next thing to dive into, and then do it full bore.