Spiritual Global Warming

Human connection: the most valuable resource on the planet. 

BY LEON FOX  |  PHOTO BY Elana Ratti

I’ve developed a concept I like to call “Spiritual Global Warming.” It refers to a time when one has suspended their inner life in pursuit of a perpetual Summer of Joy that leaves no room for the other seasons: such as the contemplative Autumn, the melancholic Winter, and the diligent Spring that primes our souls for rebirth. 

Spiritual Global Warming directly impacts Planetary Global Warming; for when we are ruthlessly positive, and willing to do anything to keep sadness at bay, we become highly consumptive and wasteful with our energy and with each other, mimicking the culture of consumerism that perpetuates empty prosperity. 

Over the past four articles I’ve written for THE FIGHT, I’ve covered matters of the heart, intimacy, relationships, and sex in its many hues. For this fifth—the completing point in our trans-expositional pentagram—I would like to share with you my deepest thoughts on the matters of human connection, which to me is the most valuable and powerful renewable resource on the planet. By cultivating human connection, I believe we can give both our inner worlds and Earth around us a chance at a brighter future.   

As an escort, I’m a practitioner of creating meaningful connections. Early on in my profession, I quickly came to understand how scarce connection is in modern culture. It’s so scarce that people are willing to pay people for it. This is because for some, connection comes easy, but for most, it’s a rarity consumed in scant measure.

As an escort, I’m a practitioner of creating meaningful connections. Early on in my profession, I quickly came to understand how scarce connection is in modern culture. It’s so scarce that people are willing to pay people for it. This is because for some, connection comes easy, but for most, it’s a rarity consumed in scant measure. 

We have been conditioned to substitute our connection deficiency with a surplus of material consumerism. We seek to possess products, which in turn, inclines us to possess each other. For evidence of this, consider the possessiveness that pervades most modern relationships. Possessiveness is so pervasive that we’ve come to accept it as commonplace. 

Possessions are disposable. Therefore, if we treat people like possessions, we’re likely to treat the connection they afford us as disposable as well. Take hookup apps like Grindr and Scruff, for example. On those platforms, we are brands, and the connection we offer is the commodity. 

Part of the reason communication breaks down so quickly on these apps is because we don’t realize that we’re treating people like products. Using a bit of creative license here, dudes talking each other into hooking up through the apps to me often reads like two clorox bottles trying to persuade each other into cleaning their respective toilets. The initial correspondence so often reads as lazy, standoffish verbiage, where both parties are waiting for each other to do the actual work of creating connection. 

Even when you experience great success on the apps (i.e. coordinating a hookup with relative ease) the experience thereafter is often had with narrow expectations rather than creative intention. I recently had sex with a gay elder who remarked to me that he didn’t start having bad sex until the mid 2000s—around the time hookup apps appeared in gay culture. 

Prior to that time, you had to meet men in person if you wanted sexual connection. Who you saw is what you got, and you had to be open to connecting with people you never thought you could before. You had to be open to being surprised, and if you wanted a curated experience of connection, you hired an escort! 

Ever since I started escorting my use of hookup apps has plummeted. This is because I became aware of the way in which those apps incline us to consume connection instead of creating it, and often I find myself feeling empty after those encounters. Sure, they felt good in the moment; but then I realized I was just settling for a disposable connection when I really wanted a generative one: something that gave me life, energy, confidence and the desire to give back. 

At the end of the day, all we want is connection. Speaking from personal experience, that takes time, effort, courage and patience. It means putting yourself out there with the knowledge that you might go wanting after trying. It means openly and vulnerably showing that you need connection, a gesture that frightens most people. While we’re all capable of creating connection, the resource will remain untapped if we don’t take that leap of faith. 

That first leap doesn’t need to be big or scary. You can start off small, and ease your way in. Remember that love is actually all around us—in the shallows of skin and depths of heart, waiting to be set free. 

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