20. Sebastian Junger on stoicism, the Democrats' man problem, and what happens when we die

**Ken Ilgunas** (0:05)
This is the Out of the Wild Podcast with Ken Ilgunas.
Sebastian Junger is the author of The Perfect Storm, War, Tribe, Freedom, and most recently, In My Time of Dying, How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. He's reported from conflict zones across the world, embedded with US troops in Afghanistan, and spent decades thinking deeply about courage, community, masculinity, and what gives life meaning. Sebastian, hello.

**Sebastian Junger** (0:48)
Thank you for having me.

**Ken Ilgunas** (0:49)
Oh, my pleasure, Sebastian. So yeah, like I told you earlier, I've done a deep dive on your stuff. And everything, I just think, is just fantastically written. And I'm wondering, to start off, where did you learn the art of writing and who are some of your literary heroes?

**Sebastian Junger** (1:13)
You know, I never took an English class in college or a journalism class. I really am sort of self-taught.
And I sort of learned by mimicry, right? I mean, I read just all the great writers of the generation when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s. Joan Didion, Ernest Hemingway, barely smart enough to read Faulkner, but I got through a couple of books. Peter Matheson and then a little later Cormac McCarthy and many others, right? And I just read and tried to figure out why I liked what I was reading or didn't like what I was reading. And I wrote a lot. And I did that through my 20s while I did other kinds of work to make money. And eventually it sort of clicked.

**Ken Ilgunas** (2:07)
And you're a gifted storyteller. You know better than anyone how to structure a story. But your prose is also very clean and punchy and non-flashy. How would you describe your own prose?

**Sebastian Junger** (2:25)
Well, I mean, I feel like everything should be sort of efficient and essential and have some, like, internal rhythm in it. And I would say that's true of designing a building or designing a sentence, you know? I mean, there's a sort of like structural harmony in things that's very, very apparent. If it's there, it's very, very apparent. And it's certainly true with language and with writing. And but mostly I just, I try to not do right in a way that readers have ever seen before, right? Like I, I mean, I really search for words that haven't been used in the same way. So, you know, my classic example is, example is sort of rain drumming on the roof. Like no one ever needs to write that again. The first 10 times someone wrote that, it was a pretty good use of language. And then after that, like, just, just like you can't describe rain that way, it's boring, you know? And I worked very, very hard to use the minimum, I mean, the minimum number of words possible to convey, fully convey what I'm trying to depict or explain. And I work really, really hard at that.

**Ken Ilgunas** (3:40)
Gotcha. So, so kind of minimalistic, but also you're kind of sweeping through scanning your own stuff to see, is there a cliche here? Is there a phrase that's just overused? And then it's just reworking that?

**Sebastian Junger** (3:54)
Yeah. Yeah. And you can always take words out. And the more words you take out, the more velocity the pros have, and the more people are like, oh my God, I can't stop. Like I got in the raft and I'm going down the river, and I'm just going all the way to the ends. And that's what pro should feel like, a really powerful river.

**Ken Ilgunas** (4:20)
So you're bringing your pros to Substack now, you're slumming with all of us now. And I've heard you say in other places that for your books, it's become harder to sell books, advances are getting a little bit not what they used to be. And given those conditions, you know, some authors, it's just maybe it's time to hang the gloves up, maybe I'm just going to teach, maybe I'm not going to do anything, but you're still writing and hustling with the rest of us. And I'm wondering what's behind that? Why are you writing? Is it for financial reasons or is it for creativity, intellectual stimulation?

**Sebastian Junger** (5:05)
I mean, I love writing. I love the act of writing. And like I was an athlete in college and afterwards, I love using my body in an athletic way. Like I just, it gives me real pleasure. And I need to earn a living. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm not done yet. Like I got, I mean, I got a nine-year-old and a six-year-old, two little girls. And you know, I can't just like decide to coast at this point. It's not going to work financially and it won't work. It wouldn't work psychologically for me either.