Mining.
Like most city dwellers I have blatant disregard for and indifference to how the fluctuating fortunes of Western Australia are driven by what mining giants rip from the earth.
I even had contempt for the handful of people who amassed obscene levels of wealth and profits, while I paid more for crappy coffee and a pint of beer.
But it is impossible to ignore how important a healthy resources sector is to stopping the WA economy from falling off the cliff.
Mining in WA pours almost $30 billion into the Australian economy each year, while the rest of the country contributes a tick over $21 billion.
Mining is money.
So any unscheduled downtime in mining operations is bad for business: for both the companies and the state.
When I staggered into a BHP Billiton mine on the outskirts of Newman with violent diarrhea and vomiting on a two-day Pilbara site visit this week and had to be whisked away by medics and quickly quarantined in a donga, I feared I was going to single-handedly derail the WA economy.
The mining executives would accept me sauntering around the mines looking like I just graduated from clown school, with my cowboy shirt and man bun comically jutting out of my ill-fitting hard hat.
But I have no doubt I would have been buried in a shallow grave "beyond the black stump" if I infected an army of workers with the "runs".
When I wasn't acquainting myself with every toilet in the North West I looked on with genuine awe and wonderment at the modern-day engineering marvels constructed for the mining industry in the Pilbara.
I have never been to a mine site.
The closest I've come to a "mine" was when my booze-loving Irish father would lay down the bottle for a few days and pick up a shovel and dig a massive pit to bury all the rubbish he collected.
The mining structures in the North West are monuments to the wonders of engineering.
The kilometres of twisted and distorted metal and steel at the Roy Hill mine looked like they were spawned from the mind of gothic artist HR Giger (Think Alien movies).
It is evocative, powerful and alluring.
The towering, cathedral-like structures at the Woodside-operated North West Shelf project and the Yara Pilbara fertilising plant are architectural and engineering triumphs.
Who would have thought underneath the layers of red dirt, there could be such breathtaking beauty?
Flying over the Pilbara in an aging twin-propeller plane (that I had the sneaking suspicion fought in the Battle of Britain), you get to witness the phenomenal contrasting colours of the region.
The ranges have been carved with intricate and exquisite arteries and veins after thousands of years of rain and wind.
And the rich vibrant earth looks like an ocean of Neapolitan ice cream. (Well, the chocolate parts because, let's be honest,you only eat the chocolate).
As the plane violently wobbled across the emptiness I was confronted with the prospect of never being found, even if I survived a crash.
While I wasn't chuffed about the idea of drinking my urine to stay alive, I embraced the thought of slowly eating my way through a dozen verbose fellow journalists to get some peace and quiet.
Sadly though, when you get to the towns of the North West, the economic havoc caused by the mining boom bust is evident for all to see.
As you drive into Karratha the housing developments have just stopped. It's as if a child got half-way through a drawing and simply wandered off bored.
And the half-empty high-rise Pelago apartments in the middle of the town jut up like an odd monument to the Barnett government's failed investment in the area.
The WA government bought 50 apartments in late 2012 at the cost of $30 million to cope with the swelling population in the town and to combat the sky-rocketing rents.
But the plans to house health workers in the units fell through and now the government struggles to rent them out.
This is a scene from ET - not Brendan Foster's Pilbara trip. But at times it felt like this...
In the end our bus driver summed up the flagging fortunes of Karratha better than any economic analysts could.
He said a mate bought a house at the height of the boom for almost $1 million, but flogged it off recently for less than half of that.
When people were flooding into the town in 2012 looking for work, rents were a whopping $2500 a week.
Now you would be lucky to get $500 for a home.
While once-thriving mining communities are slowly withering and dying, they are still "home" to thousands of fly-in, fly-out workers.
And while being trapped in a donga for one night wasn't exactly reminiscent of Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's harrowing time in a gulag, I got a momentary glimpse into the challengers faced by FIFO workers.
Unfortunately the media tour never made it to the Goldfields as our chartered plane sprung a fuel leak.
But I'm told the Chamber of Minerals and Energy is planning a day trip to Kalgoorlie further down the track.
If I get the chance to see one of the world's biggest open mines in Kal, I'll embrace the trip with gusto and giddy joy.
I just might have to invest in some adult nappies first.
The trip to the Pilbara was courtesy of the Chamber of Minerals and Energy WA.