The Throwaway: Beware of the Free Spirit

Two weeks ago I wrote a piece entitled “The Throwaway”. In that piece I gave the free flow of thought I was having while on a plane with two glasses of wine in me. It was a short, almost poetic piece that allowed me to release some feelings. In that piece though, I never really explained what I wanted to do with “The Throwaway” or if I were to even turn it into a series.

Truth be told, I am quickly heading towards my series “The Conscious Traveler” catching up to where my current travels are. So in response to feeling the need to produce in this content driven society we live in, I decided to create The Throwaway, a newsletter where I plan to talk about all sorts of things, such as, cultural analyses, black issues on an American and global front, small stories highlighting specific people, places and things in my travels,etc. If I can think of it, it will probably eventually make it into the Throwaway newsletter. My thoughts on, social archetypes, genocides, white women breakdancing, all will be talked about here.

Now the same way the Conscious Traveler started out as my half of a correspondence with a friend of mine, so will this. Here we have an email sent to a friend of mine venting my frustrations with the expat community and self proclaimed “free spirited” people. I have added a great deal of analysis on top of the original email itself:

The issue is, you would think after all this time being away from the US I would have escaped hyper capitalism and racism. Well I know I can’t escape racism totally, but maybe I could have escaped it in the way you feel it in America, same goes for capitalism, it all goes together like peanut butter and jelly. At first I was stuck in the jungle with only the natives but late in October of last year I decided that it would be a good idea to go to a different region of the country. 

So here I am. While stuck here I decided to teach Muay Thai classes at the local gym. I teach the locals for free and charge the tourists about eight dollars a class. I also offer a weekly and monthly pass. I do at home training too. I constantly have the tourists and expats complaining about the price of the class but they have no issue spending 8 dollars at the Israeli owned hostel for a smoothie. I am starting to get those guys that say “I got you next time” and for me when I would tell a coach that, that means I was in fact going to pay them next time. Not only this, but I also faced a similar issue with at home training as well, where I walk up to an hour to someone's home to train them. I just went to someone's home today (white lady) and she told me “I'm not really interested in training today, my body is just not in the mood” after she herself asked me to come over that day to train. 

They are constantly trying to trade with me things of little value for the class. What’s most upsetting and the craziest thing about the whole issue is that they pay one hundred USD to take yoga classes, do bodywork and take breathing tutorials in person and online. They come here and constantly want to exploit the locals in their restaurants, bars, and hostels for lower prices, but will pay each other anything the other asks for. Such things go untalked about, but it is obvious to the bone. 

Which brings me to the free spirit. Free spirited people might be some of the most disconnected individuals from their fellow humans, unlike anyone else I have ever encountered. I truly think one should be cautious about interacting with the self proclaimed “free spirit”. In my own life I have seen free spirited people use others for their own gain and then not understand, or downplay what they have done wrong. I've met men who have used women for their finances to pay for trips to different countries pretending to “truly” love them, just to distance themselves romantically from the woman once they arrive in the new country. I have similarly met women who would make deep promises to do things — unprovoked — just to never do them and ghost their partner, because they wanted to go on a four day bender in the mountains and have sex parties. Now, these instances in themselves are not that of what one would call “free spirited”, but this comes into play when a free spirited person tries to rationalize their decision. After they have done what they have done, whatever it may be, they follow it up with “I just go with the wind”, or “my body was telling me to do it”, or “the universe was aligned for me to do it or for it to happen”. This completely takes away responsibility from them and puts it onto something else, making for a way of life and decision making that is completely agentic to the “cosmos” or “divine spirit”. If they are unable to do that, in their eyes a simple “I don’t see what the big deal is” will be sufficient enough to completely get away with whatever they did — and if nothing else works, they will disassociate from the relationship because you were not chill enough for them. I am tired of interacting with them, but this class is currently my only source of income and I have to do what I have to do.Just as if I were in the US.

The magnitude of it here is extreme though. This is without a doubt a colonized island in Nicaragua. There are so many white people here that dictate the way things go and will go. Besides working on a boat in Alaska this is the first time I felt at the whim of white people. Of course there is all the police shit, landlords and store owners etc. in the U.S., but in terms of a job, I was never afraid to leave a job or get fired. This is the first time I feel if I piss off a white person here I will fuck up my only source of income. I keep asking myself how I let it get to this point.

Back to the free spirited people. I want to put an emphasis on white free spirited people and black free spirited folks that want to be in the sphere of whiteness. Free spirited people are just enough connected with society to see the societal constructs that hold them back. A white woman can see the things that hold women in general back, a free spirited black person can see what holds them back, but it ends at the intersection of their race and gender. Meaning — a free spirited white woman can’t see how patriarchy affects men as well, most people can’t for that matter, or how her pro-white woman rhetoric might not be as racially inclusive of women of color. The same can be said for a free spirited black man (this man may well be hotep too). He may know and acknowledge what holds him back, but will not do the same for black women and black women vice versa (divestors). They may well be free spirited coons too. America is filled with those self hating folks. I want to double down on saying these traits are not what makes them free spirited. Free spirited does not mean coon, hotep, or divest. These things are all different, but their rationalization of why or what they are doing puts them into that free spirited sphere. These people can often say things  like “I don’t let society dictate the way I think” or “ Black people are only told how hard we have it to keep us down, none of that is true and black people have it just as good as whites". 

Hold up if I'm losing you, I'm about to bring it all together, and if this sounds familiar we are on the same page. 

Now going to white free spirited men, you will often hear them say things like “ Yea man I had to get out of the country because of the vaccination”. From my encounters, free spirited people's identity revolves around the Covid vaccination still to this day, but I guess a lot of people still revolve around the pandemic in general as an identity. Another thing you will hear them say are things like they love the red states now more than the blue states. “It is so much more free there”. That last one is mostly directly connected to white men, but some white women and black men fit into that category also and maybe some black women. 

All this together if I were to tell you about a guy or woman who fit this description, where would your mind go. Anti-vax, red state loving, has no time to hear the problems of others, but is aware of the things that harm him or her and not how they harm others, how they think they operate outside of society and the status quo. It would probably go to a direct image of a conservative blue lives matter gun advocate from Nevada or any other depiction of a hyper conservative if it be a red pill white boy teenager on social media, or a church going apple pie eating red blooded southern republican. 

This is what I realized recently while teaching Muay Thai in Nicaragua. The free spirited travelers and the hyper conservative “I'm tired of what the US has become” expats are always best buddies. Their ideology is the same and the way they want the world to be is the same. The only thing that is different is the way of life they want. The expat wants this weird contradiction of order and people in control while they themselves get to roam free dipping in and out of conservatism when they see fit, but everyone else must be stuck in it. The free spirited person wants to be able to do whatever they want never dipping back into a structure but the world itself has to stay within a structure to facilitate his or her needs. In both instances there is a contradiction in what they say and what they do.

While traveling in Latin America, if you are in the right places, mostly beach or tropical areas, you will come across this certain type of traveler. The self proclaimed free spirited, psychedelic hippie, who for some reason can not remember anything you tell them and go from topic to topic centered around energies and crystals, but never actually saying anything.

These types of travelers can be found at many hostels in groups together, playing guitar, doing stick and poke tattoos and sniffing rapès. They claim to want to integrate and be one with the local native population, but they stay at the hostel that is foreign owned and underpays their native workers, only a second evil to the hostel down the road that caters to “digital nomads”. 

In these hostels if it is a party night you will know, because psytrance music will be playing so loud that you will be able to hear it from down the road, and the people will be participating in what they call ecstatic dance, that follows no rhythm and no beat. Psytrance is to not be confused with house, techno, DnB and jungle, these genres were created by black people and queer people whether in Detroit and Chicago or in Jamaica or in the U.K. And maybe psytrance comes from those same roots, but in these parties it will be a rarity to find anyone who is not European or Israeli and in the strangest way ,in a place where everyone talks about free love, anyone who considers themselves queer.

If you ever have a conversation with one of these folks, on the surface they hold zero thought or weight in their brain for any social political issues, any sort of ambitions or philosophy. They simply “want to have a good time”. Which makes sense in some ways. These places are filled with people who never wanted to grow up and assimilate into adulthood and in many ways I can see myself within that lane. College essentially for me was a way to stay a kid longer. There is also that rite of passage into adulthood the Israelis use Central America and South Asia travel for after “mandatory” service. So in many ways these places are used for that limbo into adulthood. I can’t critique them without critiquing myself and I too am using my travel as a segway into adulthood. Yet, there is a place or many places where we differ. For one I hold values in many social political beliefs and I do have ambitions on this journey besides having a good time and anyone that knows me knows I hold a certain philosophy.

I’m not telling a full story by saying these free spirited people don’t hold any beliefs though. As I said earlier for a group of people that are all about free love and relaxation their personal beliefs are more often than not extremely conservative. Sometimes homophobic and all of the time their personal beliefs sound similar to manifest destiny. In many areas of Central America the driving force that is colonizing the area is not the American expats, it’s not the Chinese businesses, it’s the European and Israeli psychedelic counter culture. I will say this though, there are remnants of American hippies in their fifties and sixties that hold the same ideologies. These are the ones that just never went back. Acid hole the size of a golf ball in their brain, “super chill” dude, that will spew some of the most racist, eugenics based rants about the native population and will top off one of the rants with “but dude, I’m not a racist, I had a black friend back in the day”. As an adult my favorite thing about meeting new white people is that within the first couple of minutes of talking with them they will mention that one black friend. It never fails. It’s interesting to see these older expats because you can tell they have been there longer than the young family or the retired divorcée whose sole purpose is to get drunk and try to lay the bartender. Every time I see them I think to myself, what are you still doing here?

Some of these expat families balance the psychedelic free spirited energy and crass conservative mentality like trapeze artists. There was this family I coached in Muay Thai. One evening I saw them in a restaurant and said hi. I had been interrupting a conversation about “Burning Man”, that festival in the desert. I butted in, saying “yea I heard that ended horribly and people were trying to escape”. This conversation was a few months after that disaster at last year’s festival, where it made the news and someone died. The mother replies to me telling me how great it actually was. Her wild child, probably the most hard headed kid I coached, interrupted her and said “yea and somebody died”. She, without a moment to pause replies“ yes sweetie, it's a festival in the desert — People die — It's no big deal.” She had been to that year's Burning Man, the festival notoriously gone to by some of the worst people you ever met and she brought her kids as well. See, on one hand going to Burning Man with her family is such a free spirited hippie thing to do, but to talk about someone losing their life at Burning Man as no big deal, especially to your own child, is a page out of the conservative playbook of individualism and manning-up.

This type of person is not only abroad, clearly, these expats come from somewhere else — here. We all know the sunflower girl in our apartment complex, our job, or maybe at the coffee shop, that preaches the free spirited narrative, but when she doesn’t have her way throws a complete Karen-like fit. Sunflower girl is the free spirit. Karen is a conservative. Two sides of the same coin.

This archetype is at its worst when they start to speak about medications and the health of the native people. While at this Zionist hostel for the first time (I bought one beer there and when I came to realize it was three times the price than at any local establishment I never bought anything again. Also sitting with genocide deniers and some proud perpetrators of genocide is not my cup of tea) I started to have this group conversation that ended up just being an argument between me and this Expat, because he believed it’s a travesty that pharmacies and medications are readily available now on the island for the natives. He believes that they shouldn’t exist and that they are a harm to the population. He would also have you believe that you could cure different cancers and diabetes with specialty teas, breath work and berries. He also tried to do that thing white people do when they try to tell you what it’s like to be black in America. I simply had to let him know he is a fool and talks about things as if he knows, but he doesn’t. Nevertheless these alt-medicine people exist all within this community and it is a danger to the natives because there are groups of natives that glorify these colonizers and hear these alt-medical practices as the colonizer helping them get back to their indigenous roots of natural medicine. Instead of getting the medicine they need or going to see a real doctor some of the natives are going and paying money to see these sham artists for “physical therapy” “fascia massages” and “breath work”. These free spirited psychedelic neo-colonizers actually believe in this stuff though. An expat was sitting next to me at one of these parties and he told me he has been having tremendous back pain for years and he said that doctors have told him he was going to need an operation. So I asked if he was going to do it. He tells me “no, the doctors don’t know what they are talking about.” He has been going to that guy who doesn’t believe in medicine for physical therapy. So I asked how it has been going? He said “ I’ve been doing it for years and it has never once worked”. My brother, so why do you keep going to this crack? 

Lastly, the irony of what is happening in Gaza and now the West Bank, and me getting to see enclaves of Zionists all talking about it as if they are the good guys in it all, are the lies they tell and being able to see that not even they believe all of it. They believe enough though. They may not be able to believe the lies they tell themselves, but they will double down on the lies their government tells, whether they believe it or not they will promote and live by it. This too, just like in San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala is an Israeli colony. Only this one has a nice sprinkle of Americans in it, Europeans and Canadians. I am so fascinated by the free spirited Israelis and expats getting along so well. I went to this birthday party here for this American girl and the entire party was Israeli. They sang music and danced and did the whole free love thing, but the whole time it just did not feel genuine to me. I felt bad because all these people were enjoying themselves, even a few locals, but something felt off. It wasn’t long till it hit me. You can not love the colonizer. Even if you try and get close there will be a knock on your head to bring you back to reality. Yet, some natives want to join them. They see this free spirited nature or this better than my own life, lifestyle and they want to join and assimilate into the collective. Would you believe me if I told you they turn around and not only work for the whites and Israelis, which I don’t  blame them for, they have to make money, but then go and organize institutions that hurt their own people. They are in cahoots and plan restaurants, bars and establishments their own people can not afford to go into by design. So in this way that free spirited nature is also an indoctrination process into colonization.