Do Something

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Comfort Crisis comes an 850-mile journey to find what’s missing from modern life.

“Have fun and don’t die.”

That was the send-off Michael Easter got from his wife at the trailhead of America’s most difficult hike. Beside him stood his friend Matt Sherman, one of the longest-serving Americans in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was an off-the-books diplomat who brokered deals with terrorists and warlords. Matt now owns no car or home. He hikes.

Ahead of them lay the Hayduke Trail: 850 unmarked miles through the deserts and canyons of the American Southwest. There are no signs, few established trails, brutal temperature swings, and vast stretches of wilderness where no one is coming to help. Roughly twenty people attempt the route each year and about 16 percent finish—worse odds than Everest.

Easter had never thru-hiked. He had, however, built a good life. He was financially stable, professionally successful, sober, and surrounded by people he loved. Nothing was obviously wrong.
And yet he felt off. Somewhere amid the routines, screens, convenience, and endless optimization of modern life, he felt increasingly removed from the world around him—and from his own life. And he wasn’t alone.

So Easter set out to understand why—and what might happen if he stopped analyzing and managing his way through life and went out and lived it.

In Do Something, he chronicles a journey of hitchhikes with madmen and river guides with federal problems, fundamentalist desert towns, thousand-foot cliffs, violent storms, hallucination-inducing exhaustion, transcendent natural beauty, way too much walking—and experiences that changed how he understood his life.

Along the way, he draws on psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology to uncover why an objectively good life can start to feel disastisfying—and how action can give us perspective, deepen our connection to the world around us, and bring us back to what matters.

He came back with an answer. It isn’t a pill, a hack, a habit, or another hour of thinking about yourself. When life goes flat, you don’t think your way out. You do something.