Thursday, September 23
6:15 a.m. Green Guest House
Mae Sot, Thailand
I got some sad news yesterday. I don’t know this guy personally, but there is a Canadian cyclist/YouTuber that I’ve been following for years. He’s a well known figure in the cycling community and on social media. His name is Iohan Gueorguiev. That’s the name of his YouTube channel as well. For the last six or seven years, he has been taking video of his long cycling journeys. And he’s a total wild man when it comes to cycling. He goes on these crazy adventures into deep wilderness where no bicycle should ever go. He’s only 33 years old, but I got the news yesterday that he killed himself. There were no details in the stories other than that he apparently suffered terribly from insomnia due to sleep apnea. He was basically tired all the time because he couldn’t sleep. I’m sure there were other contributing factors, but as people talked about him and why he killed himself, the only specific thing they mentioned was how much he struggled with ongoing fatigue. And the assumption is that he just couldn’t take it anymore and decided to end his life early.
His case is one of those that just leaves you kind of pondering people and their lives. What I mean is that his videos are all about the beauty of the world. And people all over took inspiration from his videos. Because of his crazy lifestyle and his passion for exploring the world on his bicycle, people admired him and even were inspired by him to do the same thing. He just seemed like the kind of guy that had it all figured out. And then seemingly out of nowhere, he kills himself. It just leaves you puzzled to an extent. I guess it makes you look at all people in a new light as you wonder what personal and internal struggles they have that you don’t know about.
Iohan’s style of travel and cycling never appealed to me very much. He liked isolated wilderness, whereas I like to visit populated areas. Still, there was much to admire. The dude was unstoppable and tough. I can’t even imagine doing the things that he did. He was a true adventurer. I wouldn’t want to do the things he did, but I couldn’t do them anyway. I know I’m not nearly tough enough. I’d be miserable enduring the conditions that he put himself through, not to mention the uncertainty. And I wonder if covid had anything to do with his decision to end his life. I’ve been following the lives of all kinds of travellers around the world, and all of them have had to make major adjustments. They just can’t do the things they used to take for granted. Maybe Iohan just didn’t know what to do with himself now that he could no longer just wander the world somewhat aimlessly. He might have been forced to stay in one place with no dreams of the next journey to give him inspiration and hope for the future, and he just gave up.
This next sad story doesn’t affect me even indirectly, but yesterday I was listening to an interview with one of my favorite MMA fighters, Carlos Condit. Carlos just retired from the sport, and he was being interviewed on one of my regular podcasts. And he mentioned that his best friend had very recently died from covid. He’s known this guy since the 5th grade, and they’re both young, but his friend got covid and died. It’s one thing to look at the charts online and see that X number of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people died in this or that country. But it’s quite another to hear a specific story about an individual person. It made me appreciate even more that I was able to get at least the first dose of a vaccine and that the second dose is scheduled. I don’t think of myself as being in an at-risk group, but lots of people on social media keep telling me that I’m old and at risk. And I’m actually living in a high-risk area. As I walk around and chat with people here, they sometimes tell me about someone they know that died, or they point to a house across the street and say someone died here or there. That’s not to say that I walk around in fear of death and dying. I don’t think I have any fear of death at all. I’m far too logical for that. But I’d much rather not fall seriously ill right now if I can help it. That would be a very large problem for me and my life. That is a problem that I don’t need.
Switching gears for a moment, when I woke up this morning, I found myself thinking about a recent documentary I watched called Fantastic Fungi. I’ve long been fascinated by the world of fungi, mushrooms, and mycelium. They come up often when you listen to a lot of science-based podcasts and pay attention to those kinds of topics when they pop up in Ted Talks and YouTube videos etc.
It even shows up in pop culture lately. A large part of the latest season of Legends of Tomorrow was all about fungi. Apparently, a massive mushroom organism on Earth was actually an alien power that protected Earth from aggressive invading species in the universe. The topic just seems to be out there in the zeitgeist right now. A large part of the plot of the show Star Trek Discovery was even based on the concept of using a type of interstellar mycelium network to travel instantly across vast distances of space.
And after watching Fantastic Fungi, I have some thoughts. I was very impressed and very surprised by the time-lapse photography in it. It looked amazing. I love time-lapse photography. I’ve always found it fascinating, and the time-lapses in that documentary were incredible. I loved those. I wasn’t a big fan of the rest of the documentary, though. I wasn’t quite sure what it was trying to do. At times, it seemed like a biography of the life of Paul Stamets. Other times, it seemed like a commercial for his company. And then it felt a bit cultish to me, with people seeming to worship at mushroom altars and cheering ecstatically as Stamets raised a mushroom above his head during a TED Talk. And there was a lot of anthropomorphizing going on with the talk of trees worrying about their babies. They even had long periods of narration with them pretending that this was the voice of mushrooms themselves telling their long life story. And at times it seemed to veer into the territory of New Age mysticism and hyperbole about the power of fungi. It was a bit of a mixed bag of stuff that didn’t really speak to me. I guess I was expecting more of a scientific or biological approach rather than the mystical. And they made a lot of sweeping claims without having a whole lot of fact or logic behind them.
It was still interesting, though. As I said, I was particularly impressed with the photography. In a way, it seemed almost too good. It felt like that time-lapse content could have formed the heart of a major IMAX release. I’d love to sit in a big theater and watch an hour and a half of that. And some of the stories they told in that photography were mind blowing. I’m thinking of the story of the termites and the termite guards that prevented infected termites from returning to the colonies and then took them away to kill them and then allowed themselves to die. The story was amazing, but how they showed it in the photography was even more amazing.
I kept wondering about what felt like an imbalance in terms of quality and expense. It just seemed like that time-lapse photography would have been extremely expensive and require a major investment of time. As I said, it felt like something a major corporation or James Cameron would make for an IMAX movie. But then the Stamets biography content felt comparatively cheap and a bit flimsy, like it was part of a much less costly and far less professional production. That imbalance just felt weird to me. But I really enjoyed it. And there were lots of new ideas and information to ponder.
It’s raining this morning, by the way. That’s depressing.