This is From 78, a podcast about people and their subjective experience of time. This is episode number 025. It’s coming out a little later than I would have liked. The last episode was released on November 9th, 2025, and I’m recording this one on November 19th, planning to release it on November 23rd.
I had to skip a week because every single weekend this month has involved traveling somewhere that isn’t my normal place. The only exception is the weekend after Thanksgiving — but even that one is going to be packed. So it’s been a very full month. And when things get this full, my routines get broken. That’s just what happens.
One of those routines is doing this podcast, which has become significant to me. When I sit down to record, what I’m doing is taking a bunch of unexpressed head noise and putting it into words. And that process gives me a much clearer sense of what I actually think. It gives me a lived, felt understanding of how ideas exist differently when they’re only in my head compared to when they’re spoken out loud.
Making this podcast has become one of the ways I slow myself down and actually contemplate my subjective experience of time. And when I don’t do it, like last week, I really feel that absence. I miss it. I long for it.
There are often moments during the week when something strikes me. I might be driving and listening to a podcast, or going for a walk, and I hear something that makes me stop and think. I’ll pause the audio and ask myself: Why did this resonate? What does this bring up? What thoughts does it provoke? What emotions does it spark?
The same thing happens when I’m reading. I’ll come across a sentence and think, there’s something in that. I use an app called Ulysses to jot these things down — little notes, observations, associations.
Then eventually, when there’s enough there, I sit down with this microphone and talk. Sometimes patterns emerge across all these notes. Sometimes one thing just stands out more than the rest, and I trust that.
Doing all this teaches me about myself. Sometimes it surprises me. Sometimes not. But it always clarifies something.
Today, what I want to talk about comes from a book that has been on my shelf for many years: Notebooks 1942–1951 by Albert Camus. Camus has been deeply significant to me for a long time. There are thinkers who resonate on a surface level, and then there are thinkers whose work resonates in your bones. For me, Camus is the latter.
I recently picked this book up again because I knew I’d be traveling a lot, and I wanted something I could read in small pieces, put down, and pick up again easily. The diary format makes that possible.
On page 8 of this edition, Camus writes about how he regularly frequented public places — concert halls, famous restaurants — creating bonds and a kind of solidarity with the people there. He describes this as a kind of defense in itself, this act of rubbing elbows with others.
When I read that, something clicked. Because in episode 023 of this podcast, I talked about the importance of place — about places in my own life where I regularly encountered people, like Borders Books & Music, or the Aurora Fox Valley Denny’s.
Those places weren’t structured. They weren’t organized around a big project. You just went. Maybe people you knew were there. Maybe they weren’t. You sat, you waited, you talked. And over time, bonds formed.
I don’t really have that in my life right now. I have my home, which I’m grateful for. But I long for a place outside my house where I can just be around other people — not in a rigid structure like church or organized volunteering, but something more informal and open-ended.
Part of why I don’t have that right now is simply that I have four small children. My time and energy are committed there, and I’m choosing that. But even though it’s a conscious choice, the longing is still there.
Shortly after reading Camus, I heard the writer Paul Kingsnorth on a podcast talking about his new book Against the Machine. Kingsnorth talks about what he calls the “four P’s”: people, place, prayer, and past.
His idea, as I understand it, is that modern life has eroded our connection to all four of these. Technology, mobility, and speed have made us less rooted in community, less rooted in place, less contemplative, and less connected to our histories.
But what I appreciate about Kingsnorth is that he doesn’t romanticize a return to some golden past. He recognizes that we’re not going to shut down the internet or undo modernity. He calls himself a “reactionary radical,” which is interesting — not reactionary in the sense of blind nostalgia, but in the sense of responding to real losses while staying lucid about the present.
Camus expresses something very similar on page 15 of his notebooks. He writes:
Modern intelligence is an utter confusion. Knowledge has become so diffuse that the world and the mind have lost all points of reference. It isn’t just a fact that we are suffering from nihilism, but also that people want to turn backwards — back to the Middle Ages, to religion, to the soil — to an arsenal of worn-out solutions.
That captures something perfectly. Yes, we’ve lost points of reference. And yes, we’re tempted to return to older forms of life. But that “return” is largely a fantasy.
So here’s the tension I find myself in:
I feel this loss of connection to people, place, prayer, and past.
I long for those points of reference.
But I don’t want to just romanticize the past.
And I don’t want to abandon the world I actually live in.
So the real question becomes: How do we strengthen these points of reference within the conditions of modern life, rather than fantasizing about escaping it?
People: my circle is smaller now, more family-centered.
Place: I’m trying to build something new in my current neighborhood.
Prayer/Contemplation: this podcast is part of that for me.
Past: I talk about my past here all the time — maybe this is one way I stay connected to it.
But I don’t yet have a clear answer. I only know the problem feels real, and the longing feels real.
And that’s where I’ll leave it.
Thanks for listening. I appreciate you for giving your time and your attention to my head noise as I try to make sense of it by putting it into words.
Until next time, I hope you’re doing things that are meaningful, interesting, and alive. I hope you have people, place, some form of prayer or contemplation, and a connection to your past.
Take care.