Issue 7 | Feb 23, 2025 | Sign up for this newsletter
At particularly stressful moments in college, I’d jump in my Honda Civic and tear down Highway 35 to Big Basin National Park and just run. Sometimes, overnight. Sometimes, from the spine of the Santa Cruz Mountains all the way down through the redwoods to the sea. One time, I grew certain I was being stalked by a mountain lion.
It’s difficult to place what felt off. But jogging with my overnight pack through the fern bramble, I got it into my head that I needed to turn around. Suddenly. Not sure why. But I felt fear. All my hair went up. I whipped around and strained at the darkening foliage.
There was nothing. Just a people-less trail with amber light falling through the pines. Flies dancing. Stillness. Somehow, the stillness was unsettling. No birds. No animals.
It took effort to turn back forward, but now I ran faster. Performatively fast. Fast enough to leave anything behind. The trail rose and fell and veered below a cabin on stilts with a dog on the porch. From above, the dog barked at me. I remember thinking, wouldn’t it be terrifying if the dog stopped barking after I’d passed, and then, shortly after, resumed? And it did. Now with a whine. I ran even faster.
I took up a stick and beat the trees as I passed, hollering to raise my spirit. Now panic. Then a bridge, then a straightaway on a hill with an old wreck of an ancient car, and then silence.
Just me on a long stretch where I could see plenty far. I panted and watched the last of the light go. Suddenly I was calm again. I laughed at myself and thumbed my pocket knife.
I still ran most of the way down, and when the woods ejected me where the creek meets the beach and several state park buildings, I collapsed. I spent the night in a crinkly space blanket behind a fence, ate power bars, shone my light on anything that moved, and wondered. It couldn’t have been. Could it?
The recent news brought this back to mind. San Francisco is a peninsula. It funnels young male mountain lions up in search of a territory of their own, sometimes into the city. It’s rare. But as my Guyanese guide Stefano says, sometimes strange things happen.
Sometimes a lion is captured a few blocks from my house.
Work application: Probably none. Maybe just a reminder that being humbled by the woods really turns the volume down on desk work.
Featured principle: Active Awareness
Self-awareness is paramount to the way we work. We can only make meaning in a place of honest inquiry. We cultivate this awareness in ourselves and seek it in others. And as Eve would add, trust your instincts. They're trying to tell you something.
Inside Fenwick
The next issue of Rewild Magazine launches early March. It's called "Nature Did it Better" and features stories about teaching AI to think like children, the natural wisdom of capillary action, leaving journalism behind for crabbing, and a philosophical tour of the Eames legacy.
Meanwhile, we’re doing a real fun campaign for Inverta, Sendoso, and Intentsify. If your marketing team still emails individuals, this is research you won’t want to miss.
Worth reading
What if our ancestors felt nothing like we do? A compelling idea: Emotions and sensations are entirely context-dependent.
Peter Lobozzo photography. We are fans.
Rebranding Grammarly. Look, I don’t mean to offend, but Grammarly's recent rebrand is emblematic of why brand agencies have such a bad name, and why people so misunderstand branding. This agency appears to have taken the client’s new proposed name "Superhuman" at face value without critique. Grammarly wants to equate its product to superhuman powers. Do users feel that? In having tried their product, it reaches over the precipice of untruth and amounts to gaslighting. This was true when Superhuman was just an email app. It's still true as a conglomerate.
Whereas real branding is starting with something true and working back.
Predictions are hard. This is what William Zinsser liked to call “vigorous” writing. Dense, clear, considered, and with a payoff.
The em dash appreciation society.
Making advertising human. A 2-min watch. Nothing groundbreaking, but a nice reminder.
Dystopia bait. There’s so much money to be made on outrage. We mustn’t.
Dock archives: 200+ pieces of sales collateral. Nice work, Dock team.
Smart marketers often kill their own work. My own.
Some nice animations. I want to see more movement in B2B.
