This Hobby Can Change Your Life

My new book, Wisdom Takes Work , comes out in a few weeks. Get signed & numbered first editions here !

I have a hobby and it’s weird. 

It started in a pretty normal way. 

I’d always liked taking walks and then I had young kids. 

Because it was often the only way I could get them to sleep–or to keep them out of the house so my wife could sleep–I would spend hours and hours walking on the rural country road that we live on. 

It is unpaved and unmaintained by the county or the state, lined with trees, and more frequently crossed by deer and jack rabbits than people. We’d do miles and miles, first in the baby bjorn, then the single stroller and then the double stroller. We see the sun come up or the sun go down. We crunch the frost and the mud. We’d do it in the heat and the cold, on ordinary days, for the interminable months of the pandemic, weekdays and weekends, rain or shine.

It’s a throwback to an older, simpler way of life.

It’s also a throwback to a scene I’ve always remembered from Mad Men, where Don Draper and his family finish their roadside picnic and then nonchalantly throw all their trash into the grass below.

Only out here, because the police don’t seem to mind or our local government is non-existence, they dump tires and old mattresses. They dump debris from construction sites. They dump beer bottles and candy wrappers. They dump out of season deer kills and for some inexplicable and alarming reason, a lot of dead dogs.

At first, this just pissed me off—especially because the nails kept giving me flats. It would make whole segments of the road unwalkable with the kids because of the stench. I tried calling the police and animal control and my local politicians—of course, they did nothing. I put up fake cameras which did nothing to deter. I thought about moving.

But then one morning on my walk with my kids, a thought hit me that was both freeing and indicting. How many times do I have to walk past this litter, I thought, before I am complicit in its existence? Why do I keep expecting someone else to do something about it if I won’t? So I started cleaning it up…and I actually enjoyed it. We started cleaning it up. 

I have a bag, one of those sticks with a spike on it, and I go up and down the country roads where we live. I have a claw and gloves (I have gone through many many pairs of gloves). I go down in the gullies by the side of the road picking up soda bottles, plastic bags, food wrappers, nails, and screws. I have disposed of dumpsters worth of garbage over the years. I have loaded tires into the back of my truck and paid to have them properly recycled. (I’ve even paid a contractor to come out with a tractor for some particularly heavy stuff). I have put on face masks and scooped up dead goats,  dead calves  and dead dogs which I burned or took to the back of my ranch to decompose in a less disruptive place. I have paid my children an ungodly amount of bribes to get them to participate too.

I don’t just do it at home either. I do it when we go to the beach. I do it when we go on hikes. I do it when I’m pacing in a parking lot, taking a phone call. I think I’d want someone to grab this if they saw it, so I’ll do the same. 

Does it make a difference? In the big scheme of things, no. Does it create a moral hazard? Maybe. Perhaps word has gotten out—dump your stuff down here because it mysteriously disappears a few days later. 

I’m not sure my neighbors have noticed. In fact, one time, as I loaded up a mattress in my truck, someone who lives down the road accosted me, thinking I was the dumper. Honestly, the only time anyone has ever said thanks happened in another country. I was in Greece this summer and I passed a flattened water bottle in the street, which I reached down and grabbed and tossed in a nearby trash can. An old man sitting in a cafe stood up and began clapping and bowing and shouting in unintelligible Greek. I assume he was saying thanks, but maybe he was making fun of me. 

I’ll tell you it doesn’t earn you karma, not at least during this lifetime. Despite all the work my wife and I still get a flat tire every month or so. 

But that’s not why I do it.

I do it for me. 

In a world where everything seems to be falling apart and so much is beyond my control, there is something deeply empowering about this simple, weird act. I can see the difference every time I drive home—the road is cleaner, safer, more beautiful. I’m outside instead of stewing indoors. I’m moving instead of scrolling. I’m solving a problem instead of complaining about it.

There is a Mr. Rogers quote I love. “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news,” Rogers said, “my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

We decide what we look for in life—do we get mad at the people making the mess or do we look towards the people cleaning things up? We decide whether to despair or find hope and goodness.

But I actually think we can go further. Do we decide to BE one of the helpers? Do we decide to pick up the trash? Do we take ownership of the things within our control? 

That’s what makes the difference…and life better for everyone, but especially you.

***

For the past six years I’ve been lavishing all my working hours on the Stoic Virtues series and I can honestly say Wisdom Takes Work , the fourth and final book in the series, is the culmination of my life’s work.

Wisdom Takes Work is a book about the work of our lives: the work it takes to acquire wisdom. The book is filled with the example and insights of some of history’s wisest people, and how we can follow in their footsteps.

It comes out on October 21st, but is available for preorder over at dailystoic.com/wisdom . Each time I release a book, I like to do a run of preorder bonuses like signed and numbered first editions, early access to the introduction, bonus chapters, and even an invite to a philosophy dinner at my bookstore, The Painted Porch. 

Check out all the bonuses here !