A Place You Should Never Visit

This week, I went to Skid Row with my friend Ali to film a series of interviews- to see what life was really like on the ground in a place often called one of the worst in America.

I can confirm: it’s worse than I imagined.

Everywhere I looked, there was decay- not just physical, but spiritual. The air itself felt heavy with despair. I saw people freebasing cocaine in plain view, blocks lined with tents, streets littered with needles and broken glass. There was no family, no order, no hope.

The story that broke me most was told by a man named Kevin, who runs a local outreach group. He said that one afternoon, while serving food in line, a thirteen-year-old girl stepped forward nine months pregnant.
Her family had prostituted her out for drug money.

When I retold that story to my parents, I broke down in tears. It was the first time in a long time that I’d cried. The image of that girl- pregnant, lost, born into despair and doomed to repeat the cycle -wouldn’t leave me.

It made me think deeply about how fragile our sense of “progress” really is.

I’ve spent much of my adult life traveling the world- leaving home at nineteen, studying in Florida, then spending my summers across Central America. After graduation, I never stopped moving. I thought the answer to meaning was more: more countries, more experiences, more stories.

But movement became my addiction.
Stillness made me anxious.
I mistook novelty for growth.

And somewhere along the way, I traded something sacred for it.

I’ve gained a wide understanding of the world- more than most -but it came at the cost of permanence. I’ve had countless conversations but few lasting roots. I’ve built stories, but not a family.

What Skid Row reminded me is that meaning is born in community- not in isolation, not in constant motion, not even in success. Meaning is built in love, responsibility, and the willingness to care for others.

Those people on Skid Row were abandoned- by their families, their cities, and probably by themselves. But the deeper tragedy is that many of us live our own smaller version of that abandonment. We lose connection in subtler ways: trading presence for productivity, intimacy for ambition, faith for control.

There are places you should never go- not because they’re dangerous, but because they’ll show you what happens when love disappears from a society.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all this movement, it’s that your life will never make sense until it includes people you’d die for- people who remind you who you are when things go south.

Family.
Friends.
Community.

That’s the real work.

And that’s where freedom begins again.

With love,
Don Rob

This is another heavy topic, so here are some of my favorite pictures from this year: