Sampras represented precision and perfection. Tall, fit, graceful, reserved, classy. Agassi was punk rock, a bricklayer with a racquet. Brash. It was country club versus strip mall, and I always rooted for Agassi.

But Agassi’s game and style were the antithesis of how I carried myself. Sampras was quiet and respectful and always poised. I tried to play like Sampras and act like him, too. Agassi’s neon headbands and acid-washed kit were a bad idea then and are a bad idea now. I had no interest in looking like him or acting like him. But there was something about his game. He played every point like he was trying to overcome something. Something deep inside. You could feel it though the TV.

I was a heavy kid. Not really fat, but fat relative to the other boys playing sports. I dreaded shirts and skins, and teammates called me Jelly Belly. In third grade I remember my parents telling me—with some confusion—that I had been selected for the all-star soccer team. I had no idea what an all-star was. Neither did my folks. I turned up to practice feeling like an outsider and the other boys seemed equally confused. But I stuck with it and over time I learned that the super athletic guys weren’t so tough. When things didn’t go their way, they would often give up. I sensed an opportunity and learned I could compete by being consistent—by always showing up.

Consistency became a part of my identity. I prided myself on being predictable and reliable. I never wanted to be another problem the coach had to solve. My best performances I don’t really remember, probably because they were somewhat boring. Things went according to plan. How you practice is how you play. Or as one coach used to say, “Potential is something you lose with.”

In almost every sport I tried, I was good, but not great. The excess weight I carried eventually fell away, but the internal narrative as an outsider persisted. To quote my teenage daughter, I was, “on the outside of the inside.” Close enough to the top dogs to know that I would never be one of them, at least that’s what I told myself. Years later, when I began to compete as a runner, I finished second place in a bunch of races and adopted the self-deprecating moniker of “fastest-loser.”

The irony I’m trying to grasp is that my own version of Agassi’s fury became my motivation to be like Sampras. I was maniacal in my pursuit of consistency. And it pains me to admit that after nearly 52 years with this body, I still struggle to make peace with it.

There was—there is—a rivalry inside of me that might never be settled.

I felt clumsy descending and a little bit afraid of falling. This often means a fall is imminent, but I worked through it and soon found some flow. Down the trail a bit—marching toward me—came a cadre of folks clad in yellow shirts, olive drab pants, and white hard hats. Wildland firefighters, most likely Hot Shots, getting in some training on a drizzly morning.

Seeing this crew also filled me with gratitude—gratitude for their very existence, their commitment to keeping wild spaces and communities safe, their willingness to work under the harshest of conditions with extreme risk. I felt grateful for the rainy June morning and what it might mean for the coming fire season, and I wondered how the Hot Shots felt about it.

Midlife is challenging. We arrive at a stage we knew would come, yet never expected. Just a few short years ago, life felt like a bit of a treadmill, albeit one with twists and turns. But the grade was steady and I was ascending within what I thought were pretty fixed guardrails. Then covid came and my marriage ended. That forced changes I didn’t think I was capable of, and on the other side of it all, I’m living a life I didn’t know existed.

And it took work to get here, not just a tincture of time. Meditation, journaling, a cycle of anti-anxiety meds, therapy, a complete reorientation of my relationship to work, and several other identity shifts. I became a single-parent, developed new skills, let go of old habits, and developed a new framework for life. Through it all, I somehow chose to build rather than destroy.

I glossed over a lot of detail here, but the thread tying together the rainy run and life-altering stuff is gratitude. When I feel gratitude I feel good. And I’m thankful that connection comes somewhat easily for me.

My last bit of gratitude today is for Mark Twain, who said, “It’s easier to stay out than get out.” And to myself, for my ability to trust that if I keep lacing up the shoes, especially when it’s raining, good things will likely happen.

I get why. Sort of. Much of our social, political, and economic systems are premised on growth. Growth is assumed to fuel increases in standards of living and drive economic prosperity and power in a competitive global economy. Growth is often the rising tide that makes various social policies affordable and successful.

But don’t most environmental challenges, including climate change, derive from overpopulation? More people means more pressure on limited natural resources. It’s not something folks like to talk about because the policy implications get dicey—who should be having kids, how many, and under what circumstances?

And if AI actually does eliminate jobs, might producing fewer workers actually be a good thing? It seems like something of a natural reset. There’s a lot of anti-capitalist talk out there right now—most of it critiquing wealth inequality, concentration of power, and unbridled growth. These are valid criticisms, though we’ve yet to see any viable alternatives. And certainly not ones that could function at the scale required.

Perhaps population decline is a chance for capitalism to figure out how to deal with de-growth. Fewer workers means more competition for those workers, implying higher wages and better working conditions. On the other hand, those workers are also customers and taxpayers. Reducing both of those will cause problems.

What role could technology play? So much of technological innovation is aimed at efficiency and eliminating jobs. The elimination part fuels profit margin, but the same force could be tuned as an adaptation to a declining population. How do we produce the same products and services with fewer people…for fewer customers?

Getting from here to there won’t be easy; we’re not set up for changes like this. But people built these systems and people can change them. Despite the challenges, a world with fewer people might just be the world we need.

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I’m not sure this has ever happened to me.

When I started teaching here at the University of Montana, I was excited at the prospect of a paperless course. I could put all the required materials on our LMS (learning management system), enabling easy access and near zero monetary cost for students. I could run my assignments and tests through that LMS and post grades there, too. Students could monitor their progress and stay on top of things.

The more I relied on this platform, the more I tried to optimize it. Gradually, the platform’s capabilities and limitations started to influence my course design, perhaps crowding out what I thought was best for the students. Students grew reliant on the LMS for instant feedback on their grades, eroding the need to refer to the grading schedule in the syllabus and use their own brains to calculate a simple weighted average.

This particular LMS has been vulnerable to outages at inopportune times—like during finals week. This puts major stress on just about everyone.

There are other examples like this. A technology gets adopted and then relied on and then entrenched. The effort and expense it requires becomes a tax. When some problem arises, the default is to find another technology to fix it. This leads to more subscription fees, more constraints, more vulnerabilities, more share of work allocated to managing the tech, and ultimately, more technology aimed at solving the problems created by technology.

I acknowledge that nothing is either all benefit or all cost, but my view of the balance has shifted.

What do you think?

Devin explains Cool Earth’s price-point and how it trends higher due to the company’s dedication to environmentally-friendly packing and using local products, like potatoes, in its dairy-free milk and gelato.

I’ve been binging the HBO series 100 Foot Wave. It follows Garrett McNamara and several other big wave surfers on their quest for the perfect wave. Trauma and fear are major characters in the show, and for good reason. At least one terrifying pounding and near drowning appear to be the price of admission to this elite cadre.

After a particularly rough experience at Nazare, one surfer confronts his fear of getting back into the ocean. Commenting on this struggle, McNamara says something interesting about fear - that fear is a focus on the past or the future, “two things that don’t exist.”

This is certainly not a new idea, but I’d never heard it expressed in quite this way. It’s a clever and sticky construction that helps motivate being present. I don’t surf but I do engage in activities that require absolute focus. All of us do, to a certain extent. At the very least, things we do regularly we can do better if we let go of the past and the future. We draw on the past to inform our actions and we of course consider the future when we do the thing. Otherwise, we might not do it. But whatever it is, it’ll likely go better and offer a richer experience if you can find a way to let the past and the future fade away.

Last week I skied one of my favorite lines - Eagle Chute - just north of Stuart Peak in the Rattlesnake Wilderness. The surface was awful - runnels, refrozen bed surface, with some sprinkles of blue ice. I was afraid to turn and afraid to fall. The past was relevant - I’d done this before. The future was salient because retreating wasn’t a great option and I was nervous about what the rest of the line would offer. But to proceed, I had to let go of all that in order to execute just a simple hop from one edge of my skis to the other. Then do it again, and again, and again…until it was over. A series of isolated moments, each requiring complete focus. That’s living…

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