I decided to cap off my first week back to the land of working (I’m both simultaneously grateful for this new opportunity and once again find myself cursing my parents for not grinding hard enough to grant me a trust fund) with a Friday night sunset hike at Sam’s Knob—I”m really going to try my best to make Friday-night sunset hikes a thing this summer.
While Black Balsam is my favorite sunset hike due to its true 360-degree views and the fact that you get those views for almost a full 2.5 miles, Sam’s Knob—they’re neighbors and share the same parking area—is fast becoming one of my go-tos, just because there’s a high chance you get the summit—and thus, sunset—to yourself (when leaving Sam’s Knob on the night in question, I saw two wedding parties descending Black Balsam).
It’s a short hike, around 2 miles round-trip, so it’s kind of perfect for a long work week. I planned to try to get up to the summit by 6:00, and then do some writing for two hours while the sun set (something I probably wouldn’t do at Black Balsam due to the crowds—I wouldn’t want to come across like, say, the girl I once saw reading “Into the Wild” perched on a rock where people usually line up to take photos). This new job I took is in an actual office, with 8:30-5:30 hours, so the time I would typically use to work on writing projects will be affected, and one thing I told myself upon starting was that I’ll need to allocate my free time more intentionally.
But then, I got up to the summit, sat down, and couldn’t concentrate. I bounced between 3 different projects, unable to commit to any, before I remembered an Instagram meme a friend of mine had posted a couple of days ago, which I’d screenshotted because I thought it was something I could maybe benefit from.
“We’re normalizing overconsumption,” the meme starts, “Podcasts while walking, Doomscrolling on the toilet, Netflix while eating, Something is always filling the silence. We’re becoming scared of our own thoughts. Our minds have no breathing space. We’re feeling groggy and mentally exhausted. Of course we are. Our brains never get a break. Boredom is the cure.”
It’s not wholly original, but is something I’ve been thinking about more and more. As much as I enjoy poking fun at grind culture, and think I’ve done a good job not optimizing every hour of my life—and I’m someone who’ll spend hours sitting and bullshitting with friends, so at least partially doing something right—I am guilty of always listening something while doing chores or watching tv whilst folding clothes or…writng while also attempting to take in a sunset.
So I stopped. I put my notebooks and pens away, didn’t take the book I’d brought out of my backpack, and just lay back to spend the next 1.5 hours convening with nature and letting my mind run wild…or just think of nothing.
And for an hour, it worked. I just lay there and watched the sky start to color, and didn’t try to think about things I needed to do the next day or ideas I could turn into projects. I just existed. And it felt good. It was necessary. It was, and I hate to use this word, but it works: restorative.
Until—because of course there’s a wrench in this tale—my tranquility was wrenched by the antithesis of my attempts at mental underconsumption: a troop of highly optimized, perfectly algorithmized, loud as fuck, Tik-Tok teens.
“Yo bro, this view is FIREEEEEE,” was the sentence that destroyed my peace. “No, you don’t understand, bro, this view is so FIRE.”
“Whoa, man, this view IS fire,” a second voice added. “So fucking fire.”
“This view is like, the most fire,” a third voice, or maybe just the first voice or even the second voice, added to this chorus of banality (it’s a scientific fact that TikTok teens sound the same). They kept talking, loudly, and it was a testament to just how loud it was by how long it took before I heard their conversation, and they actually reached where I was perched.
Altogether, there were 6 of them. They all had early-aughts Abercrombie hair (an observation, not a diss, as someone who sported this style from 2001-2008), all were clutching comically large phones, actual cameras, or in one case a camcorder, and all were wearing a kind of tracksuit I’m assuming is the Gen-Z, male version of Juicy Couture. One of them had a hatchet. One of them had a walking stick that seemed to have been specifically purchased for this venture, and another had no clue where he was. At one point, he took a phone call and said to the person on the other end, “Yo, I’m down in Tennessee, and the views are so sick here.” I want to say here that I’m not being the slightest bit hyperbolic. Oftentimes, stereotypes are based in truths.
When they first arrived, the TikTok teens stayed at an overlook about 20 feet away, chattering incessantly and blasting Gen Z music (Billie Eilish? K-pop?—I’ve recently transitioned into someone who doesn’t understand what the kids are listening to, which isn’t to say I’m one of those people who completely ignore any popular music as a personality trait, but also, like Taylor Swift is a peer), but after a couple of minutes—and of course, just when the sunset was peaking—they moved over to my little overlook to participate in what appeared to be six simultaneous but separate photo shoots. The one with the hatchet did a spin around video, and possibly some hatchet tai chi? They were respectful, though. When they addressed me—naturally, to ask if I’d both take a group picture and move so that they could optimize the viewpoint I had—they were respectful of their elders, using “Excuse me, sir,” and “thank you, sir.”
They left before the sun fully set, having collected the content they needed, and once again, I was in solitude with nature. But I had my notebook out then. If I didn’t write down my thoughts and ideas, I wouldn’t have been able to remember what they’d said. Plus, I wanted to outline the idea for this blog before I lost it.
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