Dirtbag or Die

Dirtbag culture is a conscientious objection to the so-called American Dream of “Work your ass off, pay taxes, and then die.”

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For those of you who aren’t familiar, the type of “dirtbag” that I’m referring to can be categorized as a person who devotes their entire existence to a specific outdoor pursuit and therefore skimps on almost every other necessity. Buying clothes, food, and beer (separate category than food for actual dirtbags) comes second to buying necessary gear or extending a trip as long as possible. Jobs are only a means to accrue more funds for the next stint of sleeping in your car just so you can wake up and start doing the thing you love right away (climbing, skiing, mountain biking, what have you).

The dirtbag occupy a unique spot in the race/gender/class nexus due to the fact that they are often relatively destitute, fairly evenly split population-wise between men and women (although sexism still exists in the pop culture of outdoor junkies what with men garnering the most attention in outdoor magazines and news coverage), and majorly disinterested in popular culture and politics.

That being said, there are not an overwhelming amount of Congolese refugees strapping on their harnesses or waxing their skis. The racially homogenous side of this lifestyle is without question one of my main points of contention with it (and one of my main reasons for writing this article), but what I’ve tried to consider in an attempt to be more mindful about the whole lifestyle (or maybe just assuage my guilt) is the amount of violence being done by the average rock head or ski bum.

I will be the first to admit that the average person that comes to mind when considering outdoor pursuits is a white, well-groomed, middle class, potentially yuppie-looking man or woman. And that definitely makes up a certain amount of the demographic in this subset population, no question. But I’m talking about the real Dirtbags here. The folks who operate in a realm beyond even the granola-French-press-sandals set in Boulder or Denver. I’m talking about the folks who eat cat food so they can afford new carabineers, or sleep in their car for a semester at college so they can afford a road trip to Red River Gorge. It is these folks who are inadvertently screwing up the otherwise sterling cultural critique of outdoor pursuits as essentially a selfish function of white privilege.

Why do I have this opinion? These types I have described are arguably worse than the Bushwick-bound, hip contingent I wrote about earlier, right? They are, after all, pursuing something that is essentially selfish: an outdoor pursuit which gives their bodies and minds pleasure. It’s leisure, it’s relaxing, it is the bum lifestyle, right?

I say, hell no.

Yvon Chouinard, original dirtbag/naturalist/entrepreneur and founder of Patagonia says in his book, Let My People Go Surfing,

“If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, ‘This sucks. I’m going to do my own thing.’”

And that is the essential tenet of those seeking an alternative lifestyle of any kind. It’s not for a trend or an aesthetic; it comes from a genuine dissatisfaction with the modern way of life. It is the subset population that the majority of millennial-generation critiques forget about: the twenty-somethings that don’t quite understand what Facebook is actually for, that break out in hives when they think about a lease longer than three months, that shop at Goodwill not because it’s cool but because they covet new equipment that makes them safer on the mountain or the slopes than they do the latest fashion.

For those of you who are thinking,

“If these kids are so dissatisfied with the modern world why don’t they put some hard work in and actually change it?”

I would argue that this defeats the point. As Chouinard says, the dirtbag is the same as the entrepreneur or the delinquent because, regardless of categorization, the decisions all three archetypes make are decisions of deviation.

In one of his shorter books of socio-cultural criticism, merely entitled Violence, social philosopher and Marxist, Slavoj Zizek concludes that indeed the most violent behavior one can conduct in the modern world is that of inaction. He suggests that any action, even the most brazen and horrific act of protest or political attack, is not as inherently violent as total inaction. This is due to the fact that by protesting (even through terrorism or fanaticism) against a structure you are in some way admitting that that structure has some legitimacy, some type of power, over you and is therefore, in some way, legitimate. This argument is akin to that of the atheist who, in his vehement diatribes against the existence of God is in his own way professing a type of religious belief.

The remedy to the paradox of unbelief is thus inaction, which to Zizek is the most violent form of behavior, because instead of protesting against the inequality of the society’s cogs, it quietly refuses the legitimacy of the machine itself. This is thus the true effect of the dirtbag as well. It is a delinquency, a deviation, a conscientious objection to the ideological pillars of global modernity and, in that, it is a pure counter culture.

I would argue as well that it is a positive objection not because it helps people in the typical sense of Christian charity or humanitarian aid that dominate the discourse on the subject, but because it quite literally (and excuse my grammar here) grows people better.

The lessons in asceticism, renunciation, and self-ability that occur in Nature are unparalleled and are only viewed as exclusive because they have painted as elitist when, in truth, they are simply nothing short of extremist.

Yvon Chouinard suggests that

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”

In Buddhism this mind-body oneness is critical in the path to enlightenment because it suggests a move beyond the rational mind that inherently makes us suffer. It is a lack of suffering that one will find in this outdoor lifestyle as well that of the American work ethic has taught us to regard as slothful or juvenile. For, in all honesty, what is more heroic and laudatory in the American socio-economic construct than suffering?

The American Dream after all, as a civics teacher in high school once told me, is truly about “working your ass off, paying taxes, and dying.” And I have come to the rather emancipating conclusion that we, the millennial generation, are genuinely not interested in dying; at least not the type of slow death of spirit that comes with the aforementioned ethic.

Photo: Adam Kubalica/Flickr

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