The Routed Manifesto

what we're doing here

The right path through life . . . we’re all trying to find it. But how to measure right? Money, status, power? Friends, family, relationships? Or is it simply the freedom to choose which of these actually matter? If the answer were simple, it’s a good bet we’d have neither a thing called God nor influencers.

From the day we’re born, our path heads straight into a tangle of desire, expectation, and circumstance. By the time we realize the choice is ours, how much of our path has already been defined by parents, friends, hometowns, and those forces of society we can’t see? This all comes, by the way, well before we even get online.

These days it’s fair to say the internet can’t be trusted: perfect photos, witty commentary, a barrage of advertisements for new scents to make you irresistible . . . these things are half-truths at best, usually grifts for your money / your time / your attention to boot. But when the brightest minds of our generation are shilling for the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg, is it any surprise we buy in?

Somehow they’ve made the endless scroll seem like a reasonable place to find that right path (if nothing else, it’s a readymade escape from the wrong one). Which leads to the real problem: distraction, pulling us from the hard work of figuring out what we care about, what might actually make us happy, because the algorithm knows FOMO isn’t just some cute buzzword but something to be exploited for its gain and our loss.

The problem of distraction starts because for the most part we don’t know what we want. That’s fertile ground for others to make us surrogate for their own desires—so let’s agree right now to keep that from happening.

As they say, if you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything. If I’m falling down a trendy new rabbit hole every five minutes, how can I find the right path through life? My take: it comes down to believing in something with enough conviction to swat away the distraction pulling us off course.

I’m not saying I have the right path figured out—but I believe in a few things that seem to help:

1. Don’t be conventional

Society feels like a runaway freight train, maybe now more than ever, and to be conventional is to lay down another six feet of track, with your back as the rail, for that train to keep going a little while longer. To be conventional is to ignore the motives behind the screens in our hands that want us to do their bidding. To be conventional is to believe that the right path will appear with a glowing neon sign that says RIGHT THIS WAY without any effort at all.

You know the famous last lines of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

But all of the poem before that is about figuring out which path to take. So why is it so much easier to focus on the final decision, while ignoring the consideration required in making it? The answer is convention. Convention creates a well-trodden path for our feet to mindlessly follow, freeing our eyes to search the horizon, glazed over from the illusion of choice.

I don’t mean we ought to throw out convention wholesale, just that we should see it for what it is. That we must deliberately choose the conventional pieces of life we want and actively discard the rest. What you and I decide to keep will be different, of course. And that’s the beauty of it! Convention asks us to homogenize, blending our individual colors until they’re indecipherable from one another, but we need all the colors shining on their own. So let them fly. Celebrating someone else’s differences might be the most unconventional thing a person could do.

Because our differences are exactly what the powers that be—the real arbiters of convention—want to exploit. The conventional sources of news and entertainment and media, even the government, have an agenda. Not some nefarious desire to instate a new world order, but something more menacing: the pursuit of corporate profit. Their bottom line prefers we fall in line, as well.

When we question convention in pursuit of another path, a better path, one less traveled by, the powerful begin sowing doubt in our minds. And on our own, as individuals, we’d never make it through. We need each other. We need those who also believe in another way. To escape convention, we need to find our people.

2. Find your people

Let’s stick with the digital. If you go back to Facebook in the very beginning, it was actually a tool for people to connect: stay in touch with friends, find long-lost acquaintances, maybe even meet someone new. It feels innocent to imagine the place without the newsfeed, the division, the algorithm. Despite the platforms’ newest darling metric of time-on-app, the original intent of social media—real connection—cannot be buried beneath even the headiest stream of viral video content.

When people connect, big things happen. Social progress, evolution, revolution. Take the Arab Spring, the George Floyd protests, the horrific images from Gaza/Israel shared in real time—no wonder the brass is scared. People have the means to organize, evading censorship and control like never before. And to think banning TikTok is only about foreign security concerns? Right. If you conveniently ignore what’s also happening from within.

That’s the big picture, yet I think it’s even more interesting to look at this on a smaller, human-to-human scale. Journalists no longer need newspapers to publish their reportage—they go direct to readers right here on Substack. Filmmakers put their work on YouTube and Vimeo. Artists, thinkers, organizers, and agents of change from all sectors can bypass the regulatory forces of the government, of corporations, of conventional society and speak directly to their people. The cultural gatekeepers—legacy media, Hollywood, traditional publishers—remain at their posts, but the masses are outside and already scaling the fence.

If all these alternatives abound, then why are we still here wondering about how to find the right path?

Because a constant diet of rapid-fire content slaps plaque onto our neural pathways. We won’t survive for long with distraction shunting blood from our brains. And as far as I can tell, the only solution is to slow down.

3. Slow down (appreciate art)

Life isn’t about the new new new! That’s some bullshit concocted by profiteers to keep us glued to the screen with our fingers gripped on the credit card. Speed is their ally. The antidote is art.

There’s nothing better than when a piece of art lingers in your head. Read poetry. Read it again. Revisit old posts, old videos, old stories. Sometimes when you go back the effect is completely different. When you return to a piece of art, you feel how far you’ve come. This is about personal growth. I first watched Sean Penn’s adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s INTO THE WILD when I was in college. Inspired, I went and free-soloed a cliff outside of town; ten years later I saw it again and thought, what a foolish kid: regarding both Chris McCandless and myself.

What is art but a mirror? A reflection of who we are in that very moment. Maybe a better analogy is a prism: art takes whatever light we’re shining from within and beams it back to us, revealing the true colors inside. Isn’t this why we seek out music to suit our mood? (I certainly didn’t listen to metal in seventh grade because I was happy.) And sometimes art shakes things loose that we didn’t even know were in there, revealing new parts of ourselves—parts that might pull us out of ruts and onto new paths. This cannot happen in the time it takes to flick your thumb across the screen. So take your time with art, with life, let this settle in.

I learned the word philistine the other day, referring to a person who is hostile to the arts, to culture, to a life of the mind. I also learned that 46% of Americans read zero books last year. A friend of mine was recently at a book convention and overheard a couple of joes at the hotel bar. “I haven’t read a book since like high school,” one of them bragged. Like William Burroughs said: intellectuals are considered deviant in the United States of America.

If you’ve come this far, I’m guessing being a deviant doesn’t bother you. Maybe that’s the whole point of this “manifesto.”

To find the right path through life, you’ve got to think; to think, you’ve got to question convention; to question convention, you need to find your people; and to find your people, you need to slow down. But all of that simply comes down to paying attention.

That’s what Routed is about. That’s what I’m trying to do here. We’ll figure out the right path, by one route or another . . . let’s see where we end up on the other side.

Alright. Diatribe over.

-Martin