Good morning, Hank. It's Thursday. Pizzamas has almost come to an end. We've had a Song Wednesday, we've had lots of worrying about the internet, and now, it's almost over. I will miss Pizzamas desperately, but also I do need to go back to having a real life. All this Pizzamas stuff available only until this weekend.

Hank, your song yesterday didn't just give this video its title. It also reminded me that I like being alive, especially when I'm uh here outside. I used to be a confirmed inside cat, but that's changed in the last 20 years. These days, I like getting outside. I like feeling the air on my skin. So, here I am in my kids' treehouse that my friend Alex and I built together and that the kids never really used because by the time we built it, they were too old, but I still have a nice memory of building this treehouse. Alex is a really good carpenter, and it will surprise you to learn that I am a rank amateur, so I mostly just did what he instructed me to do. But still, over the course of one long weekend, we created something that had not existed before.

But Hank, I think your song is basically correct that we need some kind of slow internet movement or to make radical change in our online discourse such that we use the internet parts that are useful and reject the parts that are nuance-free and bad faith, which is of course a lot, and it's about to get weirder because a tremendous amount of content being generated now isn't actually, like, user-generated content, it's AI-generated content, and that's ho boy. I mean, I don't even know what that's going to mean, Hank, but I know it's gonna be a big deal. Still, I would submit that even though it feels like there's an entire universe inside of our phones, the actual universe is, uh, out here under trees.

I spent a lot of my time wondering about the meaning in my life. Like, is meaning in life to be derived from some higher source or constructed by me and my friends, like this treehouse? Is the meaning to try to do good in the world and ease suffering where I see it? Is the meaning to love and be loved by those close to me? Is the meaning to try to observe to understand myself and my universe in better context? Is the meaning to prepare for the life of the world to come? And these are not just like abstract questions. They affect my actual choices, like should I stay home with my family or should I go to a TV conference? Am I better off trying to raise the most money for PIH via Pizzamas, where you can only get these shirts for the next few days? Or am I better off trying to do good in other ways, by lobbying Congress or talking to people about the stuff I care about? And I think maybe the answer, or one answer anyway, that I first thought of yesterday is that I should do what makes me like being alive. Like alleviating suffering makes me like being alive; Being with the kids makes me like being alive; Writing makes me like being alive. But I don't do a lot of the stuff that I know makes me like being alive, like walking in the woods for instance. And you know what? Let's go for a walk in the woods right now.

I like being with trees because they outnumber us by a very wide margin, and also in many cases will dramatically outlive us. Like to be with trees is to be reminded that this is a plant planet. I mean there are individual trees in the United States that are 10 times older than the United States itself. There are trees older than the idea of Romulus and Remus. Trees that were here when the pyramids were built. I think about this a lot in the context of hope, like, the oldest known tree in the world is in the United States. It's a Bristlecone Pine, and the U.S Forest Service keeps its location a secret to prevent vandalism because, like, given enough time and enough people knowing where something is, they will cut it down. Like, the famous Broccoli Tree in Sweden was cut down; The Sycamore Gap Tree in Britain was cut down. But since being cut down, both those trees have sprouted new life out of their felled trunks, and if that's not a metaphor for hope, I don't know what is.

In the future, the Broccoli Tree won't look like a Broccoli Tree; The Sycamore Gap Tree won't look like it once did, and yet they survive. Hope springs in spite of it all, Hank. It sprouts different but undiminished from the rough-hewn wounds we visit upon each other, and it finds a way to survive the unsurvivable. I like being alive, Hank, at least today, and I am so grateful to all the mes who fought and scraped so that today I could like being alive. I like being under trees. I like being in their shade even when it's too cold for their shade, Hank. I like being alive. Thank you for reminding me of that so many times through the last 19 years. And I like being a land mammal. I like being reminded that I am an organism, which I didn't always like, but these days, I find myself drawn toward the biological properties of myself, attached to the idea that I am a temporary but important force in this world.

Hank and Nerdfighteria, thank you for being here with me on this exceptionally weird journey. I hope it continues for many years to come. But in the meantime Hank, I will see you tomorrow.