Since you’re trusting Hudson and me with your hard-earned money, I thought I should provide a little more detailed background on who we are and what we’re all about. As I said on the homepage, we’re just two people who love hiking and nature and have always lived a pretty simple life together.
We met in Washington, DC in 2011 and have been married for almost 9 years. In our life together we have lived in Seoul, South Korea; Whitney, Texas; Cape Town, South Africa; and now, Madrid, Spain.
Hudson teaches middle school history and social studies, and I am a freelancer writer, editor, and book designer. Not to toot my own horn, but we have what I consider to be one of the happiest marriages around. We love spending time with each other and time outdoors. We take an extended trip together every summer (perks of being a school teacher), and we generally just enjoy life. We spend long evenings on our terrace, sipping vermut and chatting about any- and everything. We care most about the things that matter, and try not to be bothered by the things that don’t.
We have always both been very politically minded–Hudson got his masters in political science, after all–and many of those long chats of ours have been deep political discussion, talking about the state of the world, the state of America, or whatever crazy headlines were in the news. Despite living abroad, we have always been involved with what’s happening in what will always be our home country. We’ve watched so much unfold over the past decade–from the hopeful election of the first black president, to our nation’s viscerally racist response (literally doubling down on xenophobia and electing a 70-year-old cheeto who promised to keep out the brown people). Through all of these things, we ran the gamut of emotion. We felt horror and hope and pain and excitement and disgust and everything in between.
But in the last two years, something felt different. I started feeling a deep malaise, a disconnection from these things about which I was so passionate and involved. I started musing on what capitalism would look like when it collapsed and if I would be here to see it. I started seeing the problems in our society and the systems we rely on as so much deeper than red and blue. I started realizing that there would never be a solution from within in the fray. But I still wasn’t sure exactly what this feeling was inside of me.
Until we started listening to the Great Simplification. And suddenly my feelings had a name, and a source. My feelings of languishing discontent weren’t just political–they were global. They were human. I realized that a part of me understood that everything we were doing had an end date. That the political divides in American culture were only a symptom of a much larger problem. Social media, sure, but more than that. They are the death rattles of an unsustainable economic system, of an unsustainable way of life.
Over the summer, Hudson and I talked more and more about what it would look like, how we thought society would respond, and what we wanted to do. And suddenly, I knew what I needed to do. I knew I needed to be part of a movement in the right direction. I knew I couldn’t just sit around waiting for things to get worse. And I believed that there was a cultural answer that would allow us to “bend not break” and avoid some of the worst-case scenarios that exist for our future.
So here we are. I’m currently writing a book called This Isn’t Fine: The Cultural Shift We Need to Save Humanity from the Dumpster Fire We Started. My first book, Authentic AF: Say what you mean, do what you want, and be whoever the f*ck you are was just published in September.
These are our ideas to be a part of the solution. It’s not much, but it’s something. And it’s all we got.
