In summer, the land around Alresford, the rural market town in the south of England where I grew up, blooms in a way that seems almost terrible. My parents’ house stands in the middle of a 1980s housing development of suburban ugliness, all detached red-brick blocks and generously proportioned driveways. There is not supposed to be nature in the suburbs, but in Alresford (pronounced AWLS-fud) nature is still powerful — every year the grass at the top of the road will suddenly grow tall, and fill with wildflowers, hedgehogs, little birds of delirious and unusual colors. Every morning the birds wake you up at 4 with a chorus of hoots and trills.

Sometimes, in the summer, I walk up the hill and I look out over it, the housing development on one side and the Georgian town center at the bottom of the other, and I have this fantasy image of how it once was, before Alresford was founded in the Middle Ages, when all of this was untouched: just the wild, untamed nature that it keeps wanting to turn itself back into. And sometimes, I think: I wish that would happen. Because all that humans have ever done here is ruin things.

Alresford is my personal hell.

We are not used to thinking that a place like this — a pleasant town with a pretty center — might actually be hell. There is almost no poverty and only the occasional act of violence. There are good schools, a range of shops, a heritage railway. In fact, it’s somewhere that a lot of people, apparently, actively want to live … But dig below the surface, and you will find the demons crawling.

You can see them in the looks that residents give you when they pass; sneering snobs glaring down their noses with entitlement; small-minded townies, bullying you with eyes that you recognize from the primary school lunchroom; the old people, 80 and above, wearing blank stares. You can hear it in their bothered tutting at the bus stop (especially if they ever hear a visitor mispronouncing the name of the town), the shots that constantly ring out from across the countryside as they set about murdering as many of the local pheasants as they can.

As with any hell, the thing that really makes it so is that you can never leave.

Poor public transportation makes leaving impossible in a practical, everyday sense – at least if you can’t drive.

The town thwarts any ambitions that stretch beyond its borders. From what I can tell, a young person from Alresford, forced to move back in with his parents after college, will typically find himself unable to get work that is not based in Alresford.

And it is impossible to leave Alresford, because Alresford is not just a place: It is an ideology that infects your very soul. Let’s call it “Alresfordism.” It is an ideology of smallness, of contraction, of wanting to curl up in our own personal, financially secure hole and will everything amusing or interesting or exciting in the world away.

Since my late teens, every effort I have ever exerted has been with the intention of escaping Alresford. And yet, I am an early-career academic and so I am forced to move back, every summer, to live with my parents because I cannot …

Then, sometimes, I think: What if I’m actually secretly comfortable here? What if I have chosen the security of death in Alresford over the risks of life elsewhere? What if I am in fact fully in the clutches of Alresfordism?

It was for psychological reasons …

This referendum wasn’t really a referendum about whether or not we should remain in the European Union. It was a referendum on immigration and on race — on whether to have our borders open or closed. In short: Do we open ourselves up to new things, even if they might be unfamiliar, risky, unexpected, sometimes even undesirable?

I knew which way I had to vote. This was a referendum on Alresfordism.

Three hours on the train, through London, from Winchester to Wivenhoe, then back again, I thought. I was wrong. An electrical storm the night before had caused signal failures across southeast England. I managed to get to London, but when I tried to change for the train to Essex, I found that everything so far that day had been canceled. A convoluted series of changes on the Tube and on buses left me stranded in Romford, in outer London, where the train I had been told I could catch to Colchester had just been canceled. I tried my best, I thought, and I failed miserably. I went home.

As a result of this vote, Britain will withdraw rapidly. We will have fewer people coming here, enriching our culture and our lives. There will be fewer opportunities. We will have less of a chance to explore the world for ourselves.

Brexit is the result of a deep nihilism among the British public. This nihilism has not just emerged recently; I’ve lived alongside it my whole life. This is the nihilism of Alresfordism, a security-driven retraction toward death.

All I can do is look out at the nature from the window of my room in Alresford. I’m from here, so I can’t be sure whether or not this is just another type of nihilism, but I think: Well, if all this nature is bigger than us, then I want it be get even bigger. I want it to become so big that it will consume all of our smallnesses, invalidate them, smother them out. Not just Alresford. I want a demented, throbbing, fecund nature to overrun this whole country, to overturn the wretched consequences of the laws that we have, in our stupidity, set for ourselves.

To fully convey the horror of Britain’s EU independence, thepublishes the tortured thoughts of 27-year-old University of Essex philosophy lecturer Tom Whyman – who isn’t even independent of his parents:So it’s. Apart from the beautiful birds and flowers and wildlife.Centuries of human ruin, yet still the birds wake poor Tom at 4am.At least Tom’s hell has a nice pub Sure you’re not thinking of Rotherham , mate?I’m getting the feeling Tom wouldn’t be high on the list of applicants for Alresford’s next tourist bus announcer.This young woman managed it easily enough.Learn how to drive, then. Problem solved.That whole “learning how to drive” thing can be extremely helpful.For the love of God, is there nobody in Britain who can teach this idiot how to operate a steering wheel and a couple of pedals?… drive a car. Just say it, man.Anyone else sensing that Tom may have expressed these thoughts previously? Perhaps in a professional setting, to someone authorised to prescribe Thorazine?There we go. And now Tom moves on to last week’s Brexit vote:He’s still talking about driving.But Tom didn’t vote against Alresfordism in Alresford, because of his inexplicable dark mummy/daddy issues with the place. Instead, he lit out for Essex. Problems ensued:For the want of a driver’s licence, the EU was lost.That canceled Conchester train didn’t help.It’s as though someone loaded Elizabeth Farrelly into a particle accelerator, smashed her into a teething two-year-old, and transcribed everything the resulting monstrosity said as it expired.When he isn’t demanding nature’s consumption of humankind, Tom writes about cupcakes . UPDATE. Iowahawk readers have their say