How Starlink Killed the Campfire (And Why We're All Complicit)

Let me paint you a picture of the exact moment I realized we'd completely lost the plot on this whole overlanding thing.

I'm sitting at a campsite in the Eastern Sierras—one of those spots where the stars are so thick they look Photoshopped and the silence is so profound it almost hurts. It's golden hour. The kind of light that makes even my beat-up camp chair look like it belongs in an REI catalog.

And across from me, bathed in that perfect amber glow, is a dude with a Starlink dish mounted to his $80k overland rig, frantically refreshing his email while his kid watches YouTube Kids on an iPad.

This is where we are now. We've officially brought the one thing we're supposedly escaping with us into the wilderness. And we're paying Elon Musk—one of the world's richest humans who definitely needs more of our money—a monthly subscription for the privilege.

But hey, good news! Amazon's launching Project Kuiper soon, so at least you'll get to choose which billionaire you'd like to enrich while you're "getting away from it all." Democracy in action, baby.

Look, I'm not some purist who thinks you need to rub sticks together and forage for dinner to have an authentic outdoor experience. I've got a rooftop tent that cost more than my first car, and I'm not about to pretend otherwise. But somewhere between "let's bring reasonable creature comforts" and "let's recreate our entire digital ecosystem in the backcountry," we took a hard left turn into absurdity.

A rare sighting in the wild: humans actually talking to each other instead of refreshing their feeds. This is what we drove all the way out here for—before we decided we needed to pay Elon Musk to ruin it.

The Death of Boredom (and Why That's Actually Tragic)

Here's what nobody wants to admit: boredom is where the good stuff happens.

When's the last time you were genuinely, profoundly bored? Not "scrolling through your phone because there's nothing good on" bored, but actually sitting with nothing to do and nowhere to be? For most of us, the answer is: we can't remember.

We've somehow convinced ourselves that boredom is a personal failing rather than the primordial soup from which actual human connection emerges. Those long, rambling conversations around a campfire? They don't happen when everyone's got a comedy special queued up on Netflix. The stories your buddy tells about that time in Baja that somehow get better and more embellished each year? Those require the complete absence of alternative entertainment options.

Boredom forces us to turn to each other. It makes us creative. It makes us present. And we've systematically engineered it out of our lives, even in the places it used to be unavoidable.

The Campfire Doesn't Stand a Chance

The campfire used to be sacred. It was the gravitational center of every camping trip—the place where strangers became friends, where kids learned to tell stories, where you'd find yourself talking about life's big questions because what else are you gonna do?

Now? The campfire is just mood lighting for our screen time.

I've watched it happen in real-time. Someone starts telling a story, and halfway through, three people have pulled out their phones to fact-check some irrelevant detail. "Wait, what year did that movie come out?" And boom—ten minutes later, everyone's down a Wikipedia rabbit hole and the story is dead in the water.

Or worse: someone says "Oh man, that reminds me of this hilarious video," and suddenly we're all huddled around a phone screen watching some TikTok instead of, you know, experiencing an actual moment together.

The campfire has become a backdrop for the same digital consumption we could be doing literally anywhere else. We've turned the wilderness into an aesthetic choice rather than an actual experience.

Remember when kids used to just... play? Before we convinced ourselves they'd spontaneously combust without constant screen time? Turns out they're shockingly good at entertaining themselves when we're not handing them an iPad every five seconds. Who knew.

We Told Ourselves It Was for the Kids

Here's where it gets really good. We started this whole satellite internet thing with the most noble of intentions: the kids needed something for the long drives. Can't have them getting bored in the backseat for eight hours, right?

Except now we're the ones who can't make it through a sunset without checking our notifications.

We became the thing we feared. We're the ones refreshing our feeds every thirty seconds, the ones who panic when we see "No Service" on our phones, the ones who—and I cannot stress this enough—are paying hundreds of dollars for equipment and monthly subscriptions to ensure we never have to experience the profound discomfort of being unreachable.

The kids were just the excuse. The truth is, we're the ones who can't handle disconnection.

The Anxiety of Being Offline

There's this low-grade panic that sets in when we lose service. You can feel it creeping up your spine: What if someone needs me? What if there's an emergency? What if something important happens and I miss it?

But here's the thing—nothing important is happening. Or more accurately, nothing that can't wait 48 hours is happening. Your boss's email can wait. That group chat drama will still be there when you get back. The world will continue spinning without your real-time input.

We've gaslit ourselves into believing we're indispensable, that our constant availability is somehow a virtue rather than a pathology. Spoiler alert: you're not that important. None of us are. And that's actually deeply liberating if we'd let it be.

The whole point of going into the wilderness used to be the enforced disconnection. The inability to check your phone was a feature, not a bug. Now we're spending thousands to eliminate the very thing that made these experiences valuable in the first place.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

I'm not suggesting we all throw our Starlink dishes into the nearest ravine (though I respect anyone who does). But maybe—just maybe—we could acknowledge that we've let this get out of hand.

Maybe your next trip could be the one where you leave the satellite internet at home. Where you let your phone battery die without anxiety. Where you sit around that campfire and bore each other with rambling stories that go nowhere because there's literally nothing else to do.

Trust me, it's uncomfortable at first. You'll feel twitchy. You'll think of seventeen things you "should" be checking on.

But then, somewhere around hour six of having nothing to do but exist in the moment, something magical happens: you remember what you came out here for in the first place.

And it definitely wasn't to make billionaires richer or to watch Netflix in the middle of nowhere.