Dear reader,

They say that to be radical is to grasp things by the root. But we’re digging deep, and all we see down here is dinosaur bones, rusty sewage pipes, and clumps of microplastics. We haven’t reached the bottom of things yet, but there’s still time to keep going.

We often analogize our efforts to find new knowledge or success with the metaphor of digging. The term gives us a convenient moral frame to our activities: through just a little more hard work, we can strike material success that will yield economic security, excavate buried truths to share with the world, or uncover new understandings of ourselves. The goals are attainable, we imagine, and the pathway clear; the effort required to dig allows us to feel deserving of the treasures we hope to find.

By rationalizing our labors as harbingers of and prerequisites to some future reward, we tie ourselves to our image of what that reward will look like. But when our images of future success are derived from a culture of unsatisfiable need, will they ever allow us to put down the shovel? What happens when we dig deeper into a hole with no plan of how to get out?

That’s all for now,

Alex Norbrook, co-EIC