There’s not much to say that can capture how incredible the videos of YouTube dude Primitive Technology are. The fact that this guy, by all accounts just some regular desk jockey from Australia, heads off into the woods, solo, with only a camera, presumably a mic, and his trusty cargo shorts (the only way I’d be more captivated is if he for some reason wore jorts) and spends days building things with stones and sticks and earth and water; whose apparently inexhaustible supply of both primitive survival and home-building knowledge is rivaled only by what has to be an incredible amount of patience. Not to mention calloused feet (homeboy doesn’t even wear shoes). And he does it for fun. I mean…

Guy is amazing. A true original. His videos are like the fever dreams of every kid who’s ever spent time alone in the woods, envisioning fortresses of solitude surrounding warming fires, before the ongoing search for abandoned trashbagsful of porno mags (the earliest form of the internet, for the record) or a suitable spot to pound pre-dance beers overtook the focus of such excursions. Far be it from me ever to have been like “Hey, I have an idea…” re: something like this. I mean the guy plants a potato field next to his hand-built hut, then returns months later to ash-roast them and enjoybhis feast. Unreal.

The only thing I can really add is how oddly cathartic these videos are. When I am feeling stressed and meditation is not quite working, I turn to these videos. And their noises of nature, along with the unmistakable sound of a human being crafting usable objects, edible foodstuffs, and livable fucking dwellings, literally out of little more than knowledge and toil, somehow calm my nerves without making me feel like a complete softy nancy-boy, who’d last about 7 minutes trying to hack down my first sapling before throwing up my hands in utter disgust.

I’m on my couch lazily pulling up the Seamless App because I don’t feel like preparing a meal for myself. This guy’s creating an earthen kiln in which he’ll fire clay roof tiles for a mud hut that would draw about $2000 a month in rent were it located in Bushwick instead of the woods in the middle of Australia. Never has feeling like a complete loser felt so soothing. Somehow.