Waking up in the middle of the woods, alone, is like waking up in a world that has not yet been ruined. No sirens, no hum of distant highways, no flickering blue screens spoon-feeding you the anxieties of the modern age. Just the air—sharp and clean—filling your lungs, thick with the scent of pine, damp earth, and last night’s dying embers. This is not the world as people have remade it, paved over it, stripped it down to numbers and profit margins. No, this is the world as it was, as it still is in the places they haven’t gotten to yet.
You open your eyes to a cathedral of trees, the morning light spilling through the branches in golden threads. The sky, a deep, unbroken blue, unscarred by power lines or billboards or the blinking eye of some satellite tracking your every move. The ground is cold beneath you, a firm reminder that you belong to this place—not the other way around.
There is no clock to check, no emails waiting, no news alerts screaming catastrophe and outrage. Time here is measured by the slow stretch of the sun over the ridgeline, the stirring of the wind through the branches, the rustle of unseen creatures going about their business. A jay calls out from the canopy—not for you, not for anyone in particular, but simply because it has something to say.
You sit up, stretch, roll your shoulders, feel the stiffness in your bones. Maybe you build a fire, maybe you don’t. Maybe you just sit, legs crossed, hands resting on your knees, listening. Really listening. To the breath of the forest, the rhythmic groan of trees swaying against one another, the unseen pulse of a world that does not need us, does not answer to us.
This is freedom—not the kind they sell you in advertisements, not the illusion packaged in tax brackets and fine print, but the real thing. The freedom to be unobserved, unbothered, unshackled from the invisible leashes that modern life loops around your throat. Out here, you are not a consumer, not a demographic, not an IP address in some algorithm’s spreadsheet. You are an animal among animals, another beating heart in the great, indifferent wilderness.
And in that silence, that space where no one is watching, no one is demanding, no one is selling or taking or convincing—you remember something. Something ancient. Something true.
You are alive.
Not just existing, not just passing the time between one paycheck and the next, but alive in the way the first humans were alive when they stepped out of their caves and felt the sun on their skin. Alive in the way that no amount of money, no high-speed connection, no gleaming skyscraper could ever replicate.
Maybe you sit there for an hour. Maybe for the rest of your life. Either way, you’re not in a hurry. Out here, nothing is.