The Internet is an amazing tool. It has single-handedly changed the way we interact with the world and jump started a second Industrial Revolution. It connects communities, streamlines commerce, and helps to save countless lives every day. It is more prolific than planes, trains, and automobiles, and it’s only 25 years old.

An anonymous, unregulated internet is the greatest social experiment of our time (of all time?), and the ways in which we use it are a reflection of our real beliefs and values. Some people exemplify our collective capacity for Good, while others are probably evil. Most people simply articulate the absurdity of our current approach to work or play jokes on people who are just trying to do their best.

That that internet is a quirky, creative, amazing place is probably best summed up by the fact that when you Google “picture of the internet” you get various iterations of this more or less helpful and well-intentioned diagram:

And this not-at-all helpful but certainly amusing picture of, well, I’m not really sure what I’m looking at:

We all use the web, and we all use it for slightly different things. It has changed the way we do pretty much everything we do, not the least of which is get our news.

The twice daily newspaper gave way to the daily, and for years weekly news magazines offered a distillation of what was going on in the world. The weekly magazine was, without knowing it, foreshadowing its own demise by providing what the people really wanted: a curated meta-analysis of current events.

But the world was made smaller by the internet. The news cycle shrank from a week to the more or less continuous barrage of Breaking Headlines and Not-Quite-Journalism that we have today, and consumers needed a more effective way to make sense of it all. On the one hand, we have Buzzfeed. On the other, we have the comments section.

These pithy tetes-a-tete offer glimpses at Our Collective Id as denizens of the internet lurk behind their keyboards and spew whatever detritus that comes to mind as the gospel truth. The comments section on news stories is essentially the Cliff’s Notes to the internet. It’s a symphony of ideological clashes, xenophobic rage, and honest misinformation, seasoned with a handful of trolls just trying to get your goat.

It’s a beautiful thing, the comments section, and I frequently skip the story all together just to see what We The People think about it. I encourage you to give it a look, if you haven’t before. But because it can be a bit overwhelming, I’d like to guide your efforts with a brief scavenger hunt. If you can find a news story with a comments section that contains everything here, please share it!

Online Comment Section Scavenger Hunt

• Commenter who clearly only read the headline
• Someone blaming Obama for something
• Someone blaming Bush for 9/11
• Someone copying and pasting long excerpts from the Constitution without context
• The ambiguous troll
• The unambiguous troll that nonetheless confuses half the room
• THE ALL CAPS GUY
• BONUS POINTS FOR EXCESSIVE PUNCTUATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Allusion to Hitler or the Nazis

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From my vantage point of twenty feet off the ground, it was clear that the animals had gained a strategic advantage.

In my left hand I gripped the frame of a cheap fiberglass ladder. In the other I clutched an orbital sander, and my feet were placed carefully so that they would optimize my balance and obscure the words “Not a Step” that were cast into the highest aluminum rung. I was trying very hard to remain composed as a dozen wasps crawled from behind the rotted fascia board and hovered around my head.

This dance with the insects was only the most recent skirmish in an effort to reclaim our home from the resident wildlife.

See, I’m one of those few Millennials to whom home ownership seemed like a good idea. Before I’d spent much time on the market, though, it became clear that houses within my means tended not to be houses at all. Most of the addresses in my price range were either decrepit trailers or condos that felt more like the dorms than a home. The occasional meth den made the list, and eventually fine print like “some smoke damage from grease fire” and “structurally questionable” stopped making our blood pressure rise.

Then we found a gem. It’s a little bungalow in an up-and-coming neighborhood, with a pleasant wooden facade and a yard for the dogs. “It has good bones,” my agent assured me, and collectively we chose to see the rotted soffets, unlivable decor, and eyewatering odor of cat urine that greeted us at the door as low hanging fruit to build sweat equity. The price was right and I pulled the trigger.

I’m not particularly gifted with my hands, but came into the project convinced that with confidence and enough YouTube videos, anything is possible. We built a fence. We tore out the carpet and refinished the floors and stripped the floral wallpaper that reminded me somehow of Nurse Ratched and Mr. Rogers at the same time. After a month of work the house was livable, and only once we started sleeping there did we realize that the place was overrun by animals.

A few days before prepping the gables for painting I engaged in close quarters combat with a family of squirrels who’d made themselves quite at home. It was sunny out, and warm, and I ran a garden hose into their den while I had my coffee. I was delighted to see them run across the fence to seek refuge in the neighbor’s peeling fascia.

The squirrels seemed to have maintained a tenuous peace with the nominally domesticated but actually feral cats that take their station beneath our parked cars as the sun sets and the shadows grow long. These feline bandits don’t seem to have desires beyond raiding our trash, and we’ve outsourced their harrying to the nominally domesticated but actually feral dog that sleeps on the couch while we’re at work.

Another sect of stinging (biting?) insects erected the flag of their people amid the old paint cans and used motor oil in the shed, and we made quick work of them with $40 worth of Raid. I trust that my descendants will sing songs of our heroics – we charged into the frey brandishing a can of aerosolized poison in each hand and with only a paper mask to keep ourselves safe.

Our home grown war against the wildlife was moving along well. We had technological superiority and advanced brains. Tool Using Man outflanked the insects and rodents at every step.

But then the momentum shifted. It came time to paint the upper reaches of the house, and from the top of the rickety ladder I feared this bestial insurgency was making up ground.

The sight of a man atop an extension ladder is banal. Tradesmen and window washers and homeowners use these crude tools every day. What’s less clear to a passerby is that the asphalt in our alley is uneven; the ladder was leveled with bits of scrap wood and tiles. It was extended to its longest span and I was standing on its top step, going to great lengths not to touch the large diameter power lines that entered the house. Hanging from my belt was an orbital sander, a hammer, a caulk gun, and my trusty can of Raid. The view from there felt much more precarious.

The sander shook these insects loose from their hive, and the Raid was quickly empty. It became clear that we humans could not enforce a no fly zone. Political influence over upper reaches of the house are much more capricious than down low. The chimney is in need of repair soon and the shingles need a cleaning. The gutters either leak or don’t exist, and the future of this conflict will take us off the ground.

The days are growing longer now. Warm weather and the smell of grilling meat herald the dawn of home improvement season. Winter gave a brief reprieve from combat, like Christmas on the western front, but soon we’ll take up arms again.

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It’s Tuesday. Your alarm goes off at 6:32 and you hit snooze three times. You get out of bed, start the coffee, and let the dog out. Your feet are cold on the kitchen floor.

Between the time the dog comes back in and the coffee is ready, you pull your phone from the charger and scroll through your routine: weather, avy report, Instagram, Facebook, email, in that order.

High of 51, 30% chance of rain. Snowline is 6,500 feet, looks like more of the same all week. Considerable danger, heavy new snow and wind on last week’s melt crust; looks like it needs some time. Next advisory on Thursday. Like a few photos. Leave an emoji comment.

You click the blue square and regret it immediately. You knew you would but you clicked it anyway. Wedding photo, engagement photo, album of baby photos, primary commentary. Scalia is trending. You get past the hot topics to the updates relegated below the fold, the detritus that for some reason you keep coming back to read.

Isn’t this why Twitter is dying? That people have figured out that they have better things to do than scroll through the streams of consciousness of idiots they’ve never met?

The coffee is ready. You pour a cup.

You flick through your newsfeed with your thumb, skimming the profile pictures and a few words at a time for something that might be interesting. It’s more of a tic now than anything, but one genre of post stands out.

“Help me raise awareness of Lou Gehrig’s disease by funding my half Ironman!”

Your blood boils. At least, if you’re anything like me, it makes your skin crawl.

The issue, of course, has nothing to do with fundraising for ALS research, in exactly the same way that your college roommate’s ex-girlfriend’s half Ironman has nothing to do with ALS. Fundraising for disease research is certainly a noble cause, apologizing for liking to be outside is not.

There’s a trend in sports and adventure to partner with philanthropic causes that doesn’t quite sit right with me. It’s as though we feel guilty for spending time doing something that we enjoy or vying for self improvement, and that dedicating our efforts to a charitable cause somehow veils the selfishness that comes with skiing across Antarctica, or pioneering new routes on Baffin Island, or finishing a first half marathon.

To me, partnering with a charity to justify or fund raise for what looks a lot like vacation is, at best, morally opaque, and at worst fraud.

Inherent in the trend of Racing for Charity, or Climbing for a Cure, is the implication that racing or climbing is not a worthwhile way to spend our time. A new ice route in Glacier Park or first descent in Chamonix calls for every ounce of passion and toil as a Grammy winning single. An expedition ski tour is as much an expression of creativity as a book of poems.

The implication is that adventure is somehow an idle pursuit, only as valuable as the attention that it brings to some more noble cause. But travel inspires. Each film, or trip report, or story over beers has the ability to light a spark in someone else and to get them to interact with the world in a new way.

Raising money for cancer research is a great thing to do. Here’s a link for a good place to do it. Events that exist primarily as fundraisers, like RATPOD, do a tremendous service as well. But let’s move away from the idea that we need to apologize for our passion with vapid associations with ineffective charities. The journey should be enough.

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