The Adventures In Your Backyard
The crisis of my twenties:
The entire world is out there, waiting to be explored. Wild adventures in every direction, on every continent.
But life requires me to spend a large percentage of my time working and staying in one place.
And the clock is ticking - because the older I get, the less time I’ll have. Marriage and kids will only make this harder.
Which led to the essential underlying fear: what happens if the journey ends and I get locked into place?
Domesticated paradise.
Frank Ocean’s lyrics in The Sweet Life perfectly sum it up.
A corporate job I hated. A big house in a boring neighborhood. Locked into a sedentary life where nothing changes.
First world problems? So what, it still sounded terrible.
Domesticated paradise was the underlying dread and the existential angst of my twenties.
I spent most of the decade doing everything I could to prevent ending up there.
Because here’s the problem:
I am at my best when I chase the frontier.
If I don’t feel like I’m pushing the limit, I get restless and stir crazy.
Getting stuck would make me really, really unhappy.
Therefore, getting older felt like an unsolvable problem.
It felt like a life of interminable boredom was an…inevitably.
It took me forever to figure this problem out, but eventually I did.
Startup life means that every day of my career is a wild adventure.
Living in the right city - specifically the right neighborhood - means you don’t have go anywhere to stir up the pot.
The journey isn’t something that only happens two weeks out the year. It is a constant pursuit - a feature, not a bug.
When it comes to travel, less is more. I learned that I didn’t really need more than six weeks of traveling in a foreign country to feel satisfied. Two weeks in the Amazon can turn your world upside down.
Plant medicine.
Towards the end of my twenties, I realized that domesticated paradise was never going to happen in my life.
If I build my own business, if I choose the right relationship, if I pick the right neighborhood, if I reject the ideas of conventional parenting - or let’s be honest, convention in general -
I can make it work.
Life is a journey, and I take that point very seriously.
It is very hard for me to justify wasting time - or living a lifestyle that feels subpar.
For a long time, I was afraid that the crazy journey was going to end in suburban misery.
Weirdly enough, the problem became the solution:
If the wrong neighborhood would lead to unhappiness… the right neighborhood would solve everything.
Welcome To The Neighborhood is my theme for 2023.
And the point stands - if I pick the right neighborhood, the journey begins as soon as I step out my front door.
In California, I feel like I am already living on the frontier - meaning I don’t have to go very far to start exploring.
To conclude, I was always terrified of living life inside the box.
It is a complete relief - to realize that that the journey doesn’t end, and like this crazy adventure of my life is only in the early days.
We get to choose.
Whether we want our lives to be predictable, routine, or conventional.
Or if we want to Break The Model and GTFO out of the corporate job and domesticated paradise.