What I'm paying attention to

The Camino de Santiago is a network of trails across Europe walked by tens of thousands of people each year. Some are just going for a walk, but many are on a pilgrimage: they’re looking for inspiration, wisdom, guidance, or clarity in a moment of life transition. The Camino functions as a kind of developmental container. People arrive carrying questions about relationships, careers, purpose, identity, or what comes next. The journey incubates the new version of themselves that is trying to emerge.

It’s been 4 months since we arrived at Casa Tilo. Time to give an account of the story so far. I need to get this onto the page, at least for my own mental digestion, and hopefully this documentation will be useful for other community organisers too. First, a quick recap: in 2024 we rented El Almendrillo, a villa in the south of Spain. Hosted workshops and community events there for 3 months. Had a blast, turned a profit. It went unexpectedly well. Then in April 2025 we got a new place, Casa Tilo.

Have you heard? There’s a vibe shift. We’re at a fork in the road, two roads marked “anti-woke” and “post-woke”. I’m hoping we can avoid the reactionary trap and find the integrated post-woke synthesis. Last week I was interviewed for the Doomer Optimism podcast, where we started exploring what it might look like to embrace old-school leftist values while rejecting the misguided cultural norms that have taken over leftist organising in the past 5-10 years.

It’s Friday afternoon. The winter sun has me scrunching up half my face. I’m caffeinated, drum and bass in my headphones, sitting at my laptop writing an update for my newsletter. It’s a tricky post to write. I want to simultaneously give a personal update on my life, and I also have to make a sales pitch. I wrote the first draft and got stuck on the ending: how do I tell a personal story, and weave in a sales pitch without making my friends feel like customers? I asked ChatGPT.

You live in a bubble of trust. There’s a small group of people in your life that have a special status in your mental rolodex: you can count on them when you’re in distress, you would lend them money without hesitation, and you would happily look after their kids or water their houseplants when they need a favour.

Yesterday we left the Borderland, the Swedish regional Burning Man event. I found the event surprisingly unenjoyable. As we drove away, I composed this blog post in my head to make sense of the experience, reviewing the list of my disappointments and translating them into positive desires. So for future reference, here’s How To Have A Great Time With Richard D. Bartlett.

I just woke up from one of those dreams that are so completely literal, utterly lacking in any symbolism, just a straightforward display of my subconscious fears & preoccupations. We were at a really excellent gathering. I had that exquisite feeling of being “in my tribe”. I was hosting a workshop. It was going well: people were having a good time, they were happy to follow along with the process I had designed. At some point, I felt the group drift off the rails a bit.