Ours is a world where we can never go fast enough: rife with generalized anxiety and burnout plaguing an overworked, over-connected population. When else in history were we able to learn a new language, answer an email, make dinner plans and walk a friend through an emotional crisis within the same 5 minutes?
We see the cowboy by Matt McCormick on this issue’s cover as the unofficial symbol of our desire to reconnect with nature: manifest in our obsessions with succulents, nature documentaries, buying hunting knives to open letters and embarking on 7-day hikes “for fun.” We want to slow down. We want to discover how we’d fare on our own, without being hurried along by external forces that don’t really matter; we want to know how it feels when our circadian rhythms weren’t dictated by the light from our phones. With The Rhythms Issue, we wanted to show what may happen, when we’re not siphoning every second of our time into serving a purpose.