Two different roads to the same quiet ground.
Dan Riley’s new book, Is He Dead Yet?, hits the shelf with a title that sounds like an exasperated shout from the front lines of American politics. It is provocative, edgy, and deliberately jarring. But anyone who picks it up expecting another partisan hatchet job or a cynical venting exercise is in for a genuine surprise.
"We're a people in need of a national mind cleanse. Our minds crave more history, science, literature, philosophy, art, and nature, less outrage, silliness, and narcissism."
When I read those words, I felt an immediate kinship with his conclusion, followed by a quiet sense of inverted recognition.
Riley arrived at this clearing by fleeing a storm. He was, by his own admission, an informed consumer who slowly realized he was being consumed, an observer who finally had to pull the plug to rescue his sanity and his spirit.
I came to that exact same clearing, but I walked in from the opposite direction.
I’ve never been a news junkie. I didn't step back because the headlines broke me; I arrived here as an educator who realized long ago that people cannot learn, reflect, or grow in an atmosphere of perpetual agitation.
When I started On the Fly back in 2012, the premise was simple: build a world within a world. Not an underground bunker to hide from reality, but an intentional space designed to challenge us to pay attention—to look closely at the natural world, to live deliberately, to read widely, and to flatly refuse to feed the cultural appetite for grievance and division.
For fourteen years, that has been the quiet mission: cultivating wonder over cynicism, observation over reaction, and substance over noise.
Riley’s book resonates so strongly with me because he fills the silence left behind when the television goes dark, and the phone is put away. He doesn't offer modern self-help clichés or retreat into numb apathy. He reaches for durable minds who wrestled with the upheavals and absurdities of their own fractured eras.
He leans on the ancient Stoics to rebuild an inner citadel, distinguishing what we can control from what we cannot. He examines Thomas Jefferson to weigh the fragile, ongoing experiment of self-governance. He walks alongside Henry David Thoreau, asking whether society's frenzied pace is worth the price of an unexamined life. Woven through it all is a healthy dose of Mark Twain’s clarifying wit—a vital reminder that human folly is nothing new and that humor remains one of our sharpest defenses against despair.
These thinkers aren't cited as academic ornaments. Riley treats them as practical life rafts. They are navigational instruments for anyone trying to stay anchored while the cultural tide pulls hard toward panic.
His larger argument is simple and vital: civic awareness does not require surrendering your inner life to the outrage machine. Staying informed is a civic virtue, but allowing a relentless news treadmill to addict your nervous system is quiet self-sabotage. Responsible citizenship should never cost you your peace, your curiosity, or your capacity to notice the world right in front of you.
Riley reached that truth by walking away from the noise. I’ve spent most of two decades trying to build an alternative. But whether you arrive at the quiet ground because you had to escape the tempest, or because you spent years paddling deliberately toward it, the destination is the same.
The machine will always demand our outrage, our silliness, and our narcissism. It pays handsomely for our distraction. But the world within a world is always there, waiting just beyond the screen—wide open, rooted in things that endure, and entirely ours to choose.
I’m Patrick Ball. Stay curious, ask better questions. See you next time.
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