The Problem With Outdoor Content

You’re listening to Miles of Quiet. Episode Three. I watched a video the other night that I can’t stop thinking about, and not in a good way. It was a guy hiking a trail I’ve actually been on. A nice trail, nothing extreme, the kind of place a reasonably fit person can walk in an afternoon. But in the video it was a battle. There was dramatic music.

There were close-ups of his boots on rock, shot from below, like the rock was a thing he was conquering. There was a moment near the top where he stopped, looked out at the view, and the music swelled, and his face did the thing faces do in these videos, where they pretend to be overwhelmed by something they planned and filmed and will edit later. And I sat there thinking, I’ve been on that trail. It’s a walk. It’s a good walk. But it’s a walk.

That’s what I want to talk about today. So. I’m Henry Wilder. Last episode I talked about fly fishing, and how the fish was never really the reason I was standing in the river. I ended by saying that everything online has gotten epic, that everybody’s either summiting something or having a breakthrough, and nobody’s just walking. I want to actually get into that today, because it’s been bothering me for a while, and I think I’ve finally figured out why.

Here’s the thing about that. If you believed outdoor content, you’d think everyone out there is either summiting something or having a breakthrough. Nobody’s just walking. Nobody’s standing in a river not catching anything. Nobody’s sitting at a campsite at four in the afternoon with nothing to do, waiting for it to be late enough to start dinner. And I want to be clear about where I’m standing when I say this.

I’m not some guy yelling at the outdoors from the outside. I make this stuff. I point a camera at myself and talk for a living. I have a channel. I post videos of places I go. So this isn’t a takedown from somebody who’s above it.

It’s more like a confession from somebody who’s in it, and who notices the pull of it every time he hits record. Because the pull is real. The minute you turn a camera on, something in you wants to make the thing bigger than it was. You want to find the angle that makes the hill look like a mountain. You want the one ten-second clip where the light was perfect, and you want to cut out the other six hours where it wasn’t. I feel it too.

I just try not to give in to it, and I don’t always succeed. I’ll give you a concrete example, because I’d rather be specific than righteous. A while back I caught a fish on a morning that was otherwise completely unremarkable. Gray sky, cold hands, hadn’t seen anything moving for hours. And when I caught it, my first thought, before I even got it to hand, was about the shot. Where’s the light, where’s the camera, how do I frame this so it reads.

I caught myself doing it. I’d spent four hours genuinely at peace, not thinking about the channel at all, and the second something good happened my brain switched into produce-the-content mode. And I didn’t like that about myself. So I put the camera down and just let the fish go, and didn’t film it, and the day was better for it. I’m telling you that not to sound noble. I’m telling you because that instinct is in me too, the same one that’s in the guy battling the easy trail.

The difference, if there is one, is just that I’ve decided to fight it. Not always successfully. But I know it’s there now, and naming it helps. Let me back up and describe the problem the way I actually see it. Most outdoor content is a highlight reel. That’s not a criticism by itself.

A highlight reel is fine. The problem is that we’ve started mistaking the highlight reel for the thing itself. Think about what gets left out. A typical day outside, for me, is mostly logistics and waiting and small uneventful stretches. I wake up before light because I always do. I make coffee, badly, over a fire that’s barely going.

I drive somewhere, sometimes for two hours. I walk for a while, and most of that walking is the boring kind I talked about in the first episode, the long middle where nothing happens. I fish, and mostly I don’t catch anything. I sit. I look at water. I drive back.

If I filmed all of that honestly and put it up, it would be the most boring video on the internet. So nobody films it. What gets filmed is the four good minutes. The fish that did bite. The one ridge where the clouds broke. The summit, if there was one.

And then those four minutes get stitched together with music, and that becomes the record of the day. The six hours of nothing get deleted, because nothing is what they look like. And over time, if that’s all you ever see, you start to believe the six hours don’t exist. You start to believe everybody else’s day outside is all four-good-minute moments, back to back, and yours is the only one full of waiting and boredom and not catching anything. Which is exactly backwards. The waiting is the normal part.

The four good minutes are the rare part. We’ve just built a whole genre that shows you only the rare part and hides the normal one. And I think that does something quietly damaging to people. Not in a dramatic way. In a slow, cumulative way, the way a small lie you tell yourself enough times eventually becomes the thing you believe. If every piece of outdoor content you see is the four-good-minute version, you build a picture of what being outside is supposed to feel like.

And that picture is wrong. It’s wrong in a specific direction. It says outside should be vivid, and constant, and full of moments worth keeping. And then you go outside, and most of it is none of those things, and instead of thinking the content lied to you, you think you’re doing it wrong. You think you must be missing something everybody else has figured out. I hear from people who feel that way.

They write to me and say they went on a trip and it was fine, but it wasn’t, you know, epic. It didn’t feel like the videos. And they ask what they’re doing wrong. And the answer is nothing. You’re doing nothing wrong. The videos are doing something wrong.

They sold you a version of the outdoors that only exists in four-minute increments, edited together, scored with music, with all the actual outdoors cut out of it. The real thing is slower and quieter and more boring than that, and it’s also better, but you have to unlearn the highlight reel first to even see it. Now I want to talk about the word epic, because I think it’s at the center of this. Somewhere along the way, epic became the default setting for outdoor storytelling. Every trip is epic. Every view is epic.

Every sandwich eaten on a rock is, apparently, epic. And here’s what bothers me about that. If everything is epic, then nothing is. The word used to mean something. It meant a thing that was genuinely huge, genuinely rare, the kind of experience you’d tell people about for years. Now it’s the baseline.

Now it’s the floor, not the ceiling. And once epic is the floor, you’ve got a problem, because an ordinary good day in the woods doesn’t clear the bar anymore. A quiet morning at a lake isn’t enough. A nice walk isn’t enough. You need a story. You need stakes.

You need to have almost not made it, or to have broken through something inside yourself, or to have stood on top of a thing with your arms out while the music told everyone how to feel. I think epic became the default for a simple reason, and it’s not a mysterious one. It’s that epic performs well. The video of the guy battling the easy trail gets more views than a video of a guy honestly saying it was a pleasant afternoon walk. Drama travels. Calm doesn’t.

So the people making this stuff, and I’m including myself, get nudged, a little more every year, toward the dramatic version. Not because anybody decided to lie. Just because the dramatic version gets rewarded and the honest version gets scrolled past. And you do that for long enough and you forget you’re doing it. You start to think the trail really was a battle. You start to believe your own edit.

Here’s what I think gets lost in all of it. When everything has to be meaningful, the actual meaning gets crowded out. I talked in the first episode about how the real thing usually happens in the boring stretch, the part where your brain finally goes quiet and you work something out you’d been avoiding. That part cannot be filmed. There’s nothing to point a camera at. It’s a person walking, looking like nothing’s happening.

So content skips it. Content goes straight to the summit, the catch, the swelling-music moment, because those are the parts that read on screen. And in skipping the boring part, it skips the only part that actually does anything to you. We’ve ended up with a record of the outdoors that contains all of the scenery and none of the substance. It’s all view and no walk. And then people watch enough of it and head outside expecting the view, expecting the breakthrough, expecting to feel the thing the music told them they’d feel.

And they get out there, and it’s quiet, and it’s a little boring, and the light isn’t doing anything special, and they think something’s gone wrong. When in fact that quiet, slightly boring, ordinary afternoon is the actual thing. It’s the thing the content was supposed to be about in the first place. I’ll give you a smaller example, because I keep coming back to fishing. There’s a whole style of fishing content built around the hero shot. The angler holds the fish up at arm’s length toward the camera, so it looks as big as possible, grinning like the fish lost a fight.

And I understand the impulse. But it bothers me, and not for some pure noble reason. It bothers me because it tells the wrong story about what happened. The fish didn’t lose a contest. I’m not a champion. I stood in a river for three hours, mostly missing, and one time out of many a trout made a decision that worked out badly for it, and I got to hold it for ten seconds before letting it go.

That’s the real story. It’s quieter than the hero shot, and it’s truer, and the hero shot actively crowds it out. So what do I think outdoor content should actually be doing. I’ve thought about this a lot, because it’s basically my job, and I don’t want to just complain. I think it should be honest about the proportions. If six hours of a day were quiet and four minutes were good, the content should feel a little like that, not like the whole day was a climax.

I think it should leave the boring parts in sometimes, on purpose, because the boring parts are where most of us actually live when we’re outside, and seeing someone else sit in them is strangely reassuring. I think it should stop pretending every trip changed somebody’s life. Most trips don’t. Most trips are just nice, and nice is plenty. A day outside doesn’t have to earn its place by being transformative. It can just be a good day.

I think outdoor content should make people want to go outside for the right reasons. Not because they’ll get a story out of it. Not because they’ll come back epic. But because there’s something genuinely good about a quiet ordinary day in a quiet ordinary place, and you don’t need it to be more than that. And honestly, the version of this work I respect most is the version that resists the easy drama. The person who shows you the long walk and the gray sky and the fish that didn’t bite, and trusts that it’s enough.

Because it is. That’s the bet I’m trying to make with this whole show. That the ordinary version is interesting enough to hold your attention without me cranking it up. I don’t always get it right. There are days I look at footage and feel the pull to find the angle that makes the hill a mountain. Sometimes I catch it.

Sometimes I don’t. But the goal is steady, even when I miss it. I’m not interested in making everything sound bigger than it is. The ordinary stuff is interesting enough. That’s it. That’s the whole episode.

Next time I’m going to do something I’ve been avoiding, which is tell you the actual story of why I left a steady career to go live in a van. Not the clean version. The honest one, where it wasn’t a brave leap so much as a slow-motion thing falling apart and me finally walking away from it. I’ll tell you what was wrong, how long it really took, and what I thought the plan was versus what actually happened. I’m Henry Wilder. This has been Miles of Quiet.

Go take an ordinary walk.