Vagrant Journalists and the Pull of the Void
On a recent reread of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary, I pulled aside a few passages and tucked them into a growing Google Doc where I keep fragments of books that have left their mark on me. In one of them, he describes the “vagrant journalists” who drifted from one English-language paper to another, living on long chances and good contacts. They were neither fully tethered to the establishment nor fully unmoored; foreign correspondents, hustlers, ad copywriters, casino promoters, and occasional victims of police brutality. Their lives weren’t orderly, but they were rich with movement, risk, and experience.
The passage where he describes all this elicits a mix of admiration and fear from me. Admiration for the raw freedom, the restless idealism, the refusal to play by rules written by others. Fear because the thought of riding that edge is perilous, and I’m not yet sure whether doing so is necessary to create work as impactful as he did.
And yet, there are points in my life where I’ve skirted the line. Maybe not in the blatant, visceral way he did. But in walking away from the family business to carve my own path. Deciding to get a divorce and step away from a life that was making me increasingly unhappy and unfulfilled. Saying yes to work that barely paid but carried stories, people, and experiences I couldn’t have bought otherwise. Traveling light, chasing opportunities that felt like they might vanish if I hesitated.
But unlike Thompson and others like him, I never made the leap fully into the void. I never surrendered entirely to the chaos. Maybe it’s because I’m a father, or more honestly, because I’ve always carried a heavy dose of fear somewhere in the pit of my stomach that made me averse to sticking my neck out too far. Maybe it’s just temperament. I want the stories, the texture, the glimpses of that life, but not the fallout of living it every day.
Still, I can’t deny the pull. Thompson captures it perfectly: the tension between restless idealism and impending doom. On good days, I believe the road I’m on is an honest one, progress being made even if it’s slow. On bad days, I wonder if I’m kidding myself and if it’s all a performance, an odyssey without a destination.
What keeps me moving is the belief that both poles can be true. That life isn’t about resolving idealism and doom, but learning to walk the tightrope between them. Maybe that’s what being a seeker really is: not abandoning responsibility, but refusing to let stability dull your curiosity. Not falling headlong into the void, but not pretending it isn’t there and tempting either.
At this point in my life, I feel both forces more strongly than ever, the urge to leap and the pull to build something lasting. I may not be a vagrant journalist in Thompson’s sense, but I understand the restlessness. And I try to honor it by keeping my work honest, chasing projects that scare me, and refusing to sink into comfort and call it a life.
The void will always be there. The choice is whether to leap in, or to stand at its edge and use its tension as fuel to keep moving forward.