02

Editor's Notes

Chris Jeremia (@chrishavingtea)

Editor, VegOut Magazine

What We Rebuild

In Japan, there is a shrine that has stood for 1,300 years — and not a single original plank remains. Every twenty years, Ise Jingu is torn down and built again from scratch. New wood, new nails, the same sacred design. The empty plot where the next version will stand has always been there, waiting beside the current one. Not because it's a beautiful tradition (though it is), but because of the question it refuses to answer: what, exactly, is being preserved?

That question runs through this entire issue. Jordan Cooper taped AirTags inside his recycling and tracked them across Los Angeles — three signals went dead before reaching a sorting facility, and the fourth probably ended up in a landfill anyway. Nato Lagidze argues that burnout behaves less like a personal breakdown and more like topsoil loss — the slow depletion of a living system treated as though it were a machine. Different subjects, but the same underlying pattern: systems we've been told are working, quietly failing. And in each case, the more honest question isn't how to fix what's broken but what's worth building again.

This issue isn't about nostalgia for things that last forever. Nothing does — the shrine taught me that. It's about what happens when we stop asking "how do I make this permanent?" and start asking "what's worth rebuilding?" That shift changes everything. It's the difference between hoarding and tending, between clinging and caring. The shrine survives not because it resists change but because an entire community shows up, generation after generation, to do the work of renewal.

This is my first issue as editor of VegOut Magazine. I'm less interested in making a statement than in continuing a practice — one that started before me and will, I hope, outlast me too. If something here makes you pause or see a familiar problem differently, I'd love to hear about it. The empty plot is always waiting.