I wonder what a furry Freud or Jung would have to say about people like Zeke: the urbanized "tech bro"—a man of concrete and glass campuses and air conditioned server rooms—and his seemingly restless drive to "return to nature", his self-conscious identification with signifiers of wildness.

Is it a hyperactive superego chiding him for his contributions towards building the Desert of the Real, the steady replacement of the natural with the virtual? As the member of a new priesthood, does he furtively duck away from his temples to pay homage to the Magna Mater? Does he imagine himself cavorting with satyrs and wood nymphs in secret bacchanalias?

Is his tendency to "seek adventure" among these signifiers a mere continuation of his masculine drive to succeed? Is he Alexander the Great, running out of worlds to conquer?

Or is it a rebellion against the false self and the relentless demands of capitalism, a replacing of fetishized consumer symbols with the vital and the organic and, through those associations, a transmutation of libidinal energies?

Perhaps I'm overthinking it. It might be easier to just ask him.

Floral portrait by  Krysiilys