Life on the island has taught me much about simplicity, authenticity, and the contrast between calm community living and the noise of the modern world. As I prepare to leave, even if only for a while, I reflect on what quality of life truly means — and the choices each of us must make to live in alignment with our deepest values.
. . .
I’ve had to venture off the island quite a bit this past week. I’ve given my notice and have to move this month, which meant I needed to fix my car to make it roadworthy. Leaving this peaceful place has stirred up many mixed feelings. Still, I know it won’t go anywhere — and if I’m able, I would likely return, perhaps under different circumstances.
Being off-island was a stark reminder of what it’s like elsewhere, even in a small town such as Powell River. I hadn’t driven in months, and it had been nearly a year and a half since I’d navigated any kind of traffic. That alone made the experience surreal. It was interesting to notice how car designs have shifted in just a couple of years. We don’t see many new models here, though there are the occasional Teslas. In fact, I saw my first Tesla truck the other day — what an eyesore. They look like Lego blocks on wheels, and even Lego would show more imagination.
Walking around town with my backpack, and later hauling brake parts in it, became a unique kind of exercise. Yet the contrast struck me more in the people. I had to sidestep several, zombies with their heads hanging down, scrolling mindlessly on their phones while walking beside traffic. Many others seemed to carry a heaviness, a glazed look in their eyes — perhaps an unspoken quiet desperation. The squeeze we’re all feeling from the system at large, the entropy and fatigue of daily exposure to news media and the endless polarity of politics, is evident everywhere.
It’s for these very reasons that I spend little to no time acknowledging the imaginations, fabrications, and manufactured crises that persist throughout the world. I check in from a peripheral point of view, through those who are well-read, well-versed, and who understand the nature of our realm — its constructs, its real history, and the like. It’s easy to dismiss it all as a fake world, but we are part of that fake world. We have to reconcile with these elements and discern for ourselves to what degree we wish to engage. We can’t simply drop our heads, stare at the screen, and hope to avoid life. We chose this. We dove into the deep end. We should assume full responsibility for that choice — though it’s not an easy one for many of us.
On the island, virtually everyone acknowledges you. They wave and smile as you walk or drive by. Most folks know one another, and there are even people in their eighties and nineties who have never once left the island. After living here for two years, I can understand why. There really is no reason. Some reverberation of the world’s larger scripts and stories eventually finds its way here, but it gets filtered through a different lens. In general, people go along to get along. Even here, I’d likely be considered a minority of sorts, a fringe thinker. That’s fine — it simply is what it is. Yet even for those who travel, this would be an ideal home base to return to — to recharge, to discharge the noise and nonsense of the world, to recalibrate and realign with the calm and serenity this place offers.
By comparison, stepping into even a very small city felt bemusing and a little unnerving. And this wasn’t Vancouver or Victoria — those would be far worse. This town is like many that once thrived on a central industrial or commercial enterprise, only to lose it. Now it’s a growing collection of big box stores and mini malls, many half-empty.
There’s a stark contrast between haves and have-nots. From one street to the next, you see a house falling to pieces while across the way modernized infill is going up — overpriced, of course, with all the “features” Western towns now expect. In the center of town sits a massive public library, yet I can hardly imagine even a small percentage of locals ever stepping inside. It seems more like government busywork than meaningful investment in the local economy or culture. Maybe I’m wrong.
Not even a few kilometers away, on the hill, you can see tightly packed modern buildings overlooking the city. They’re built “to code,” designed to last perhaps a generation, maybe longer — trendy, modern in look and feel — yet constructed from chemically treated, sterile, life-suppressing materials. These contribute to illness and disease, not simply because of their artificial nature, but because their angular designs are unnatural and anti-human at their core. Those who would build with nature in mind — with organic flow, with sacred geometry — would never get the permits or funding to do so. They must look elsewhere.
Humans were never meant to live in condensed, highly populated groups. It’s a recipe for distortion, corruption, confusion, and insanity — a breeding ground for psychopathy. But it’s extremely useful for those who aim to control populations, to guide and manipulate en masse.
I suppose we adapt to our surroundings. Months without driving shifted my perspective in ways I hadn’t expected. Here, I can walk for hours in any direction — quiet roads, winding trails — and I live across from the sea. The sights, sounds, and smells are restorative by default.
So while I feel ambivalence and some trepidation about leaving, I also know what this place offers. The home I found here checked many of the boxes that had long topped my priorities list. But it is true what they say: once you get what you want, everything else rises to the surface. No matter where you go — there you are. I wasn’t able to find solid footing here in practical or commercial terms, and I fell into the same comfortable patterns I’ve known elsewhere. That’s why I now have to leave, even if only for a time.
Still, the quality of life I’ve experienced here is undeniable. It isn’t perfect — no place is — but compared to urban or suburban living, it outshines them by a wide margin. We often lean into compromise and accommodation out of habit or cultural conditioning. It’s a slow-drip poison. Little accommodations and compromises over weeks, months, and years wear down our physical and emotional homeostasis. We normalize the abnormal. Before you know it, you’re unwell, angry, bitter — projecting your inequity onto the world, looking for someone to save you, or someone to blame.
Life already offers plenty of challenges. Why pile on with our own unconsciousness?
We’re here for only a short time. Why not seek out the highest quality of life we can? Why not shape our lives around what we truly value, so that we can pursue in earnest what fulfills us — regardless of the challenges that will inevitably come? Because they will come. This realm seems designed to confront us with pain, fear, and difficulty. If we go through the motions with a brave face but little awareness, we’re missing the point.
The real question is this: can we be honest with ourselves that we’re doing the best we can with what we have, and that this is truly how we want to live? Are we holding on to dreams, or clinging to fantasies? Are we taking daily steps toward what we truly value, or are we falling into the tricks and traps of our own making — or those of the system we live within? Are we leaning into victimhood or martyrdom?
It’s easy to forget who and what we really are. But that choice is ours alone.
Regardless of the nature of this realm or the shape of this world, there will always be places better aligned with our values and priorities — political, cultural, spiritual, commercial, or personal. There will be communities that fit us, and others that don’t. Our values will change, or they won’t. We will adapt, or we won’t. The only way to know is to live into them — to discern whether we’re fooling ourselves, borrowing someone else’s ideas, or wearing hand-me-down beliefs that were never truly ours.
So ask the fundamental questions. Be brutally honest. Shock yourself out of complacency — and out of complicity with rules, ideologies, structures, and systems that you know in your heart are anti-human, synthetic, divisive, and destructive to mind, body, and spirit. Stop playing along with manufactured realities. Remember the grand illusion. Decide for yourself where, and how, you want to live — whether on a quiet island in the Pacific Northwest, in the bustle of Manhattan, or under the weight of government overreach in Beijing or Delhi. There are countless options in between.
Choose to be authentic. Decide whether you’ve settled into quiet desperation by your own choice, or by someone else’s hand. Because in the end, no one tricked you into being here. You came here knowing what this life would entail. You are that powerful.
So choose.
Solvitur ambulando