A Photo... and Pure Happiness

"But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a person and the life they lead?"

Albert Camus

I took the photo in Alaska, at 3,500 m, at ten at night. And it was still daylight.

Or rather, one of our watches said it was ten at night.

The sun said something else. The landscape said something else. And probably the body too.

That's the interesting part of traveling, of walking, of climbing mountains, of being part of different environments.

For a moment you step outside the familiar place, where almost everything seems normal, and discover that many of the things you considered natural were only habits.

The altitude changes. The air changes. The cold changes. The length of the day changes. The way you walk, sleep, eat, and manage your energy changes.

The body can no longer run on autopilot; it has to pay attention again.

That's why this isn't just a photograph of Alaska.

It's a photograph of a moment when the clock said one thing and the world showed another.

We've grown so used to looking at a screen to know what moment we're in that we've ended up confusing the time with time itself.

But the digital hour is just one of the possible ways of measuring it. It's a convention we invented to coordinate with each other, not a complete description of what's actually happening.

For most of human history, time wasn't read off a number alone. It was read in the position of the sun, the phases of the moon, the tides, the temperature, the movement of animals, the appearance of certain plants, the snow, the ice, and the water.

Time was recognized by events.

Going back to Alaska, for example: its Indigenous peoples aren't a single culture. There are Iñupiat, Yup'ik, Dena'ina, Unangax̂, Alutiiq, Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian peoples, among others, each with its own history, language, and territory. Yet in many of those communities, traditional life was organized through cycles directly tied to the environment.

It wasn't enough for an almanac to announce a season. You had to observe whether the ice had actually formed, whether the river could be crossed, whether the thaw had begun, whether the fish had arrived, whether the caribou were approaching, whether migratory birds had appeared, or whether certain plants were ready to be gathered.

The activity began when the conditions were present.

Northern peoples called that way of organizing the year a seasonal round: a flexible sequence of movements and activities tied to the actual state of the land and the availability of its resources. Even today, changes in how the ice forms and breaks up affect travel, fishing, hunting, and access to food in communities across northern Alaska. Frozen rivers can become roads; when conditions change, behavior has to change too.

Then there are ecological calendars. They don't just say "it's May 15th." They say that when the ice breaks, a certain bird arrives, a certain plant blooms, or a certain fish species appears, the moment for a given activity is near.

An almanac can announce spring. But it's the environment that confirms whether spring has actually arrived.

The science that studies those moments — when animals migrate, when a plant blooms, when the thaw or the first frosts arrive — is phenology. And the knowledge accumulated over generations through the observation of animals, plants, waters, climate, snow, and land is Indigenous knowledge, or traditional ecological knowledge.

It isn't just about remembering data. It's about observing relationships, recognizing signals, and anticipating what might happen.

In a sense, the environment was the clock.

Later we needed to coordinate with each other. Shared schedules appeared for working, traveling, studying, trading, and meeting. The clock let different people share the same reference point.

But little by little, that shared reference started to present itself as if it described a shared reality.

The historian E. P. Thompson gave that shift a name: time-discipline, the process by which work stopped being organized around tasks and increasingly submitted to uniform, measurable, controllable hours. The clock stopped simply marking the passage of time — it also started ordering productivity.

Today we try to live the same way in every corner of the planet. Working similar hours. Eating at set times. Sleeping a standardized amount. Training with identical programs. Organizing the year with the same almanac and measuring every activity with a clock or a timer.

As if an hour meant the same thing for everyone, everywhere, at every moment.

And yet equality isn't nature's rule. Difference is. But a pile of equals adds up to a mass. And a mass is easy to manage: it consumes more, without thinking, and obeys.

No two organisms are identical. Genetics, age, personal history, metabolism, recovery capacity, emotional state, accumulated stress, lived experience, and the response to a given effort all vary.

No two places are completely identical either. Altitude, temperature, humidity, wind, seasons, and the length of daylight all vary.

As we travel, the moment when it dawns and grows dark shifts, even if barely perceptibly. And when we go far enough, an hour that means night for some can pass, as in Alaska, in broad daylight.

The number is the same. The moment isn't.

Despite that, we stretch a single time model over all that diversity.

Today we work because it's time to. We sleep when the workday ends. We wake up because an alarm went off. We rest when the schedule opens a gap. We eat because it's half past twelve, because we have twenty free minutes, or because food appeared in front of us.

We almost never ask first what's happening in our surroundings, or what's happening inside our own body. We ask what time it is.

This uniform time didn't appear only to help us live together. It also became functional to a society that needs to produce, transport, sell, and consume continuously and predictably. A body that works, eats, shops, entertains itself, and rests on a fixed schedule is easier to manage than an organism that responds to its own cycles… and its own ideas.

The problem isn't that the clock exists. The problem starts when a tool created to coordinate our differences ends up forcing us to live as if those differences didn't exist.

Our organism, meanwhile, keeps responding to other kinds of time.

Those temporal rhythms of living beings have their own science, chronobiology, and at its center are circadian rhythms: roughly twenty-four-hour processes involved in regulating sleep, body temperature, hormonal activity, appetite, digestion, energy, and alertness.

These rhythms don't sync just by looking at a clock. They pick up signals from light, darkness, temperature, food, movement, stress, and social activity. Light and darkness are among the most important. And we haven't evolved past that. Our organism still responds to it, the way it did thousands of years ago.

The Germans called those environmental signals that sync our rhythms zeitgebers — roughly, "time-givers." Sunlight is one of the main ones. And the photoperiod — the daily duration of light — changes with latitude and season.

In places like Alaska, that difference can be extreme. During certain moments of summer there's light well into the night, while in winter the hours of daylight shrink enormously.

The clock can read ten at night. But the light keeps sending the organism a daytime signal.

When the body's time and social time stop lining up, researchers call it social jet lag: the gap between the schedule our organism tends to follow and the one imposed by work, school, or other obligations.

It's a pattern that repeats. Even with food.

For those of us who live with permanent access to food, it can be hard to tell hunger, desire, habit, boredom, and stimulation apart.

We eat because it's time to. Because we saw food. Because we smelled it. Because we're anxious. Because we're hooked.

Physiology distinguishes, even though the two systems are related, between homeostatic regulation, tied to energy needs, and hedonic eating, driven by pleasure and reward even when there's no immediate energy deficit.

That doesn't mean enjoying food is wrong. It means not every urge to eat comes from the same place.

Many of us may no longer know what hunger feels like after a long absence of food.

I don't say this to romanticize involuntary hunger. Going days without eating because of poverty, war, abandonment, or lack of resources is suffering, and many people still live through it. That's not the point here.

The point is something else. For most of our history, the organism had to adapt to swings between availability, effort, waiting, abundance, and scarcity. Today, part of the population lives surrounded by permanent food and stimulation. We can eat before any clear physiological need appears, and little by little lose the ability to tell the difference between being hungry, wanting to eat, and believing we should eat because it's time to.

That capacity to sense and interpret internal signals — hunger, fullness, thirst, breathing, pain, temperature, fatigue — is interoception. Neuroscientist Bud Craig studied how the brain's representation of those bodily signals contributes to our subjective feelings and our sense of our own body's state.

We can measure every minute of the day and, at the same time, stop perceiving what's happening inside us.

But there's something more. Just as our organism needs rhythms and regularities to survive, it also needs to adapt to a world that never stays completely still.

Routine doesn't mean a digital calendar. Sleep and waking are rhythms. Effort and recovery are rhythms. Hunger, fullness, activity, and rest are rhythms too. They're biological regularities far older than our clocks.

But preserving life doesn't mean staying exactly the same.

Hans Selye gave the organism's general response to a demand for adaptation a name that later got twisted: stress. He defined it as the body's nonspecific response to any demand for change, and he insisted it isn't inherently bad — for that he coined a second word, eustress, from the Greek eu, "good," for the kind of stress that sustains, motivates, and helps us grow, as opposed to distress, the kind that overwhelms. His most quoted line sums it up: "complete freedom from stress is death" (Stress Without Distress, 1974). He wasn't talking about being nervous, tense, or anxious, the way we tend to use the word today.

Cold is a demand. Altitude is a demand. Exercise is a demand. Hunger, learning, effort, novelty, and uncertainty all force the organism to respond too.

Selye described a general adaptation syndrome with stages of alarm, resistance, and — when the demand goes on longer than the capacity to respond — exhaustion. And he insisted: stress and nervous tension weren't the same thing.

That's why we don't need to live anguished. We need to live responding to demands.

The total absence of challenges isn't necessarily balance. It's close to being dead.

But a demand that's constant, excessive, and never recovered from doesn't produce a favorable adaptation either. It produces wear. It, too, can lead to death.

Life happens between those two extremes.

Bruce McEwen thought about this through the idea of allostasis: the capacity to maintain stability through change. The organism doesn't survive by staying identical — it survives by changing how it functions, responding to circumstances, and, once the demand ends, recovering balance. The same responses that are protective over a short period can turn harmful when they stay switched on too long, and that accumulated wear is what McEwen called allostatic load.

We need stability. But we also need variation. We need habits that hold us up, and experiences that force us to look again.

We train inside that same tension too.

The timer says it's time for another set. The program says you need to hit five reps. The calendar says today's a heavy day.

And we obey. Even if our breathing still hasn't recovered. Even if our technique has broken down. Even if the body is sending signals of fatigue, pain, or a loss of coordination.

Sometimes we keep following the plan at the cost of an injury or months of a stall, as if the program knew more about us than our own organism does.

You don't see a lion, before chasing down prey, programming itself to use exactly eighty percent of its top speed. It doesn't calculate an intensity in advance, or wait for a timer to tell it when to accelerate.

It watches. It waits. It moves according to the distance, the terrain, the prey, its own energy, and what's happening in that moment.

It doesn't always run at full speed, or always the same way. It responds to the situation. The animal doesn't separate effort from environment.

We, on the other hand, often write down the number first and then try to force the body to hit it.

In training there's a word for the opposite: autoregulation. Adjusting load, reps, volume, or rest according to how performance and real capacity fluctuate on a given day. Tools like RPE, reps in reserve, or bar-speed tracking try to make the program adapt to the person, instead of just making the person submit to the program.

But even those tools are still measurements. They're useful as long as they don't replace observation.

The timer is still useful. So is the program. But neither one, by itself, knows how we slept, how much stress we've built up, what we ate, what pain we're carrying, how we feel, or how good the rep we're doing actually is.

The same weight doesn't represent the same effort for two different people. It doesn't even represent the same effort for the same person on two different days.

The clock, the almanac, and the timer are extraordinary tools. The point isn't to abandon them. It's to put them back in their proper order.

Peoples who depended directly on the land couldn't force a river to freeze just because a date had arrived. They couldn't order the fish to return, the animals to appear, or a plant to ripen. They had to open their eyes, recognize the signals, and adapt to the moment.

The same thing happens in the mountains. You can carry a schedule, a route, a plan, and a forecast. But the cold, the wind, the snow, the altitude, and the body have the final word.

The mountain forces you to look, to observe. It forces you to stop. It forces you to recognize that the plan was only ever a possibility, and that reality is happening now.

Maybe that's why traveling, walking through different landscapes, and climbing mountains are so much more than moving from one place to another. It's making contact with other kinds of time. It's discovering that the day doesn't last the same everywhere, that the body doesn't respond the same at every altitude, and that what seemed like a universal rule was just a habit of the place we came from.

Sometimes you need to get away in order to see again.

But getting out and living doesn't only change the way we think. It also changes how the brain and the body register the world.

A screen can show us Alaska. A VR headset can build a convincing image. An artificial floor can imitate a slope, snow, or rock. But no simulation fully reproduces the cold on your face, the weight of a pack, the shortness of breath, the balance needed on uneven ground, the tiredness in your legs, the uncertainty, or the emotion of actually being there.

A virtual experience can produce emotions and memories. But looking at a place and living it with your whole body aren't the same experience.

The organism doesn't register only what comes in through the eyes. It also registers movement, temperature, balance, breathing, effort, sounds, smells, and the internal sensations that came with that moment.

Eleanor Maguire's studies of London taxi drivers showed that years of intense spatial navigation were linked to structural differences in regions of the hippocampus associated with memory and orientation. That doesn't mean any trip automatically grows new neurons. It does show that sustained experience and real demands can relate to plasticity in the adult brain.

Learning, moving, exploring, and solving new situations can change the efficiency and organization of neural circuits. That's neuroplasticity.

And the reverse holds too: in front of our little screens, we turn into bipeds without memory, without recollections. Obedient to digital orders.

But not every difficulty makes us better. Not every kind of stress strengthens us. The intensity, the duration, the meaning of the experience, and the chance to recover determine whether a demand favors adaptation or just wears us down.

We need roots. But we also need movement. We need routines that hold us up and experiences that force us to wake up.

Traveling isn't just about seeing other places. Walking isn't just about moving from one spot to another. And climbing a mountain isn't just about reaching a given elevation.

It's letting the body meet a reality it doesn't control. It's being part of the world.

If we stop going out, walking, exploring, looking each other in the eye even among strangers, we risk loading up on other people's information, on noise, and ending up with less and less reality.

We can know what thousands of places look like without ever having felt a single one. We can fill our memory with images and build fewer and fewer actual memories.

Maybe that's why harmony with our surroundings isn't about living without stress, without effort, without limits or difficulties. Maybe it's about recognizing the real demands of the moment and being able to respond to them without getting trapped.

Knowing when to move forward. When to wait. When to push. When to rest. When to follow a plan. And when to drop it because the body and the world are saying something else.

Maybe we could call that capacity to consciously take part in our own adaptation: freedom.

And maybe that's why the happiness Camus talked about isn't a life without problems. Maybe it's this: living in harmony.

And harmony isn't calm. It's showing up, day after day, responding to what the moment asks of you. Because happiness isn't a burst of laughter. It isn't a euphoric shout. It isn't even a smile. It's something quieter than that.

It's being full of that moment.

That's why, in the end, a photo isn't just a photo. It isn't just a landscape.

It's a moment.

Being part of it, or not, is a decision.

Sebastián Satke