You Can Prepare for Altitude

There is a certain kind of suffering you can train for. You can build your lungs for thin air. You can condition your legs for vertical miles. You can learn to eat when you're not hungry and sleep when you're not tired and keep moving when your body is sending urgent memos about stopping. Mountaineers have been doing this for a century. The preparation is imperfect, but it exists. The mountain is at least honest about what it wants from you.

People are a puzzle, however.

You cannot train for the specific way someone will fail to call back. There is no altitude camp for the dinner party where you knew no one and the hours passed like geological epochs. No one has developed a protocol for the colleague who looks through you in the hallway, or the friend who went quiet in the autumn and never quite came back. The mountain will kill you, but it will do so without malice. Indifference, when it comes from another human being, carries a different weight entirely.

This is what chickenlist is about, if it's about anything specifically. Not romance. Not networking. Not the optimized connection. Just the ancient, embarrassing, very human need to be seen by another person — to deposit yourself in another's proximity and have them actually, wholly show up for the conversation. The kind of contact that neither requires nor wants an algorithm to broker.

It turns out that's harder to find than oxygen at 20,000 feet.

Everest is a desolate place. The blue sheep tearing over the scree show off their butts and fancy footwork as they high tail it away from you as fast as feasible, the yaks plod head-down in humble loyalty and blind indifference to passers-by as they carry their appointed burdens, the lammergeiers circle aloof unafraid of humans and rather hoping you're their next dining experience - though each would do fine without our existence, they were among the most honest beings I've met. They had clear intentions and no agenda beyond them. I could respect that. What I couldn't prepare for, what I'd never thought to prepare for, was coming home to a city full of potentially fascinating people and finding it more desolate than that high altitude desert in Tibet. Animals are indifferent by nature, we are indifferent by nurture. They can exist without us, but we cannot exist without each other.

So I built this classifieds site. I'm still not convinced it'll work - there are too many fearful sheep, indifferent yaks and hungry vultures in Manhattan - but I know I'm not the only one who's stood somewhere high and desolate and thought: it shouldn't be this hard.

Go for it. Post your listing. Be among the first to show up honestly. You'll be a tiger, fearless and regally bold in color, form and spirit.