The Secret to a Happier Winter? Leave Your Computer and Go Skiing

You should stop reading this article. Now. Click the little ‘x’ in the upper right corner, swipe whichever direction you need to; whatever you have to do to get away from this wretched techno-apocalypse for but a brief moment, do it. 

Better yet, go a step further. Unsubscribe from the newsletter; delete your profiles. 

Then, if the mood really strikes, push your desktop machine from a high perch; throw your phone into a deep snowdrift out back. And go skiing.

Now. While you still have the chance. You know what to do with those two overpriced hunks of laminated wood you’d take from a burning building before your photo albums (if you still got ‘em): slam your beat up old boots into place, and point them down a snowy slope. Preferably corn, but powder will do. For the love of God. Go out and live.

I’m not the first to tell you that our modern way of living is destroying us from the inside. I didn’t come up with the term “echo chamber.” I wasn’t the first to realize that social media isn’t aspirational as much as it makes people feel like shit. It wasn’t me who told everyone that the internet is not only going to wreck long-form reading (and writing), it’s going to dismantle critical thinking en masse. I just live in that world. Just like you.

The thing is, we’re not just spending too much time fetishizing technology, wasting untold hours scrolling, all to mostly make ourselves more anxious. We’re starting to infect the very thing we hold most dear with that ilk. Skiing and its discourse now takes place as much in the virtual realm as the physical, where influencers hucking cliffs are now our content creators and thought leaders, and once important magazines–over-wrought with scoop-and-serve trending news–push listicles, gear guides, and ski celebrity worship. All of this, mind you, at the demise of story-telling and humanly relevant content. Thus we find ourselves not daydreaming about skiing, nor writing on the topic, or even chatting with someone at the bar about this most wonderful thing. We’re instead just scratching the surface of living, wafting only the scent of the experience via reel and story. Why are we doing this to ourselves? 

It’s time we take matters into our own hands. And the first step is to put the phone down, maybe with a single stomp of your heel, and go to the mountains. Let’s dismantle this thing and all the expectations that have come with it. No one’s ski experience has to match the homogenized conventionality that the internet tells us it should be. Let’s be weird, let’s be subversive, before it’s too late. 

My choice of sliding on snow over the last fifteen or so years has been using the telemark method–not that it matters. What does matter is that it lets me transcend the nihilistic, pliant online ski discourse and feel something. Like the quivering, perhaps unwise but thrill-inducing vulnerability of the lunging turn at high speed, and the complete physical depletion of trying to take a powder day past noon. And, by god, what a reality it is; what luck I have. This whole wild thing takes place Out There, where I actually feel the snow bite my face; where I can get stoked not on a twenty second reel of someone skiing but by the fluidity of an actual human’s turns from the chairlift as I sit next to an amicable stranger as we ride up for another lap. All of this, in real fucking life.

If you’ve both eschewed my initial advice and stuck it through this mediocre article, we’ll end it on these terms: the world is insane. Especially now. The absolute mire we find ourselves in–especially online–mirrors an unwell world, magnified–maybe created by–a suite of electronic technologies whose side effects we couldn’t have known in foresight. There’s also some evil, power-hungry shit going on. And we can’t just sit by and do nothing, idly watching the world devolve into the utter inhumanity the internet has pressed us into. What was once rude is now commonplace; blowing someone off by looking at your phone, jaywalking with your head down and scowling at the driver with the right of way is the norm now because the world has become a polarized battlefield. We have to stand up for the right thing. In ways large and small, we have to fight for humanity.

But we also have a salve–an antidote?–for this wicked world. It’s the beautifully real thing known as skiing. And no gear guide, no social media profile could ever come close to replicating it. So I implore us to not only say no to the authoritarian conventionality of today. Go skiing. Laugh on the chairlift with someone you’ll never see again. Share skiing.

What if everybody–from the everyday person struggling to survive to those in power–could put down the phone, be allowed to transcend the gatekeeping, forget for one second their power-hungry notions, and go make a few good turns together?

Can skiing save the world? You’re damn right it could. Just like all the good things in our world, there’s an eminently human power in skiing that brings people together and reminds us of the good things this short life harbors. 

And you sure as hell won’t find that online.