I must insist you watch: Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching (free on YouTube)

About a month ago I declared that One Battle After Another was the best film of 2025 and it wasn't even close. I now know that assessment to be flawed. Because now I've watched Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching (free on YouTube).

I must insist you watch it too.

The reasons for this are as follows:

It's one of the two best films of last year. Don't you want to watch one of the two best films of last year?

It is a joyous experience from its first moments. The world is awful right now, we are all emotionally exhausted all of the time; give yourself two hours of joy. You will surely not regret giving yourself two hours of joy.

It's free! On YouTube!

It's so good that even though it's free on YouTube and even though I've already watched it, if they ever get a cinema release I will pay for a ticket to watch it in the cinema. And I'm not talking about a Monday night cheap ticket, I will pay those luxury weekend prices.

It's the most life-affirming thing I've seen in years.

Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching (free on YouTube) is a documentary by Owen Reiser, a filmmaker and nature photographer, about his brother Quentin Reiser, a guy with potentially a pretty serious weed habit. Quentin, stoned, had decided to dip his toe into birding, by which he meant spending one full calendar year driving around the contiguous United States, sleeping in a van, trying to see as many distinct species of bird as he could.

It's. So. Good.

And it made me feel so good. Genuinely joyful and optimistic. So much of the time right now I feel insane. So much of how we are forced to live right now feels counter to the whole point of being alive.

We make a lot of grim jokes about still having to pay rent in a world that's on fire – and we have to make those grim jokes because how else do you survive this?

We wake up and we contemplate genocides and concentration camps and it's unbearable. And then we go about our lives where we have to grind in five directions at once to get by.

So much of modern life is spent doing things that simply are not a good use of our time. We're all wasting our skills and our interests and our one wild and magical life because our society is built around providing value for shareholders.

There is something incredibly nourishing to the soul in watching people voluntarily spending a year in extreme discomfort so they can go to a particular bit of forest or field or coastline and say, look at that bird.

This is the point of being alive!

Along the way they talk to a lot of people in the birding community; mostly apparently just people they happened to run into on their journey.

Like an office worker who, as often as he can, heads to a bit of LA underpass because he can't afford much time off to go on long trips and there are loads of good birds right there, by the underpass in LA.

I saw Wings of Desire for the first time this week and (spoilers) there's a scene where Peter Falk is talking about how great it is to drink coffee, to smoke a cigarette, to draw a good line. To be outside in the cold and rub your hands together to warm them up.

It's important at all times, but particularly amid the horrors to sometimes be reminded of how good a thing it is to be alive, to be human in this world. A good way to be reminded of how good a thing it is to be alive is to watch people caring so much about something. About how many cool birds there are, for example.

I think we should all be able to do things like this, from time to time. When I'm in charge everyone will get a year's sabbatical every so often. Like a year off every decade or so to do with what you will, whether that's living out of a van to look at many cool birds, or try your hand at writing a rock opera.

I truly believe this would be profoundly positive for the whole species.

If we all had time to really care about something – something unrelated to productivity or income – I think the human race writ large would experience incredible emotional growth.

Most of us can't do that at this time. Most of us are pretty up against it. So in lieu of taking your own year to potter around this incredible planet and remember how good a thing it is to be alive, I must insist you watch Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching (free on YouTube) and take joy in someone else doing it instead.