Thoughts on Lifestyle Design

In the dwindling days of my 23rd year, I am adventuring. I am seeing all the great changes I have gone through in the past year, all the goals I have accomplished, and most importantly, all the new ones I have made.

Increasingly, I have found myself drawn towards the concepts involved in location independence, nomadic lifestyles, lifestyle design, etc. I read many many blogs by people who are living this lifestyle and who pertain to teach you how to do it themselves. Interestingly enough, most of them have read The Four Hour Work Week, and maintain the same principles behind their progress: create a blog, save money, travel, earn money off blog.

But I have several thoughts on this: The first is more or less summed by this article: http://www.dropofchange.com/why-lifestyle-design-is-self-indulgent/. Traveling and seeing the world is all great and good, and even necessary I believe for the utmost education of a person (as at least fifty percent of philosophers would agree, the others maintaining that we can derive all we need from home. They, I believe, were just highly introverted. And sex starved. But I digress…) and there are many other virtues that I agree with, as I am burning with the desire to do it myself. However, we cannot all do it, and we cannot all do it forever. There has to be some end to it, some other purpose, such as learning about one topic, or language, or about yourself, or finding your roots or discovering life principles, etc. Even adventure is enough of an end. But endlessly wandering off earned money from a passive site about your endless wanderings is, more or less, pretty selfish. I know, you are not using up commodities as other more sedentary lives do, and I know, you are contributing to the world through experience and positive juju and relationships etc. But there are jobs that need to get done, and good deeds to do and people to help and crises that need to be solved and living every day towards enriching your own life without further thought to what it is going towards is, I am sorry, selfish. I could go on forever.

Another thought is Hell, I could do this! I hate the idea of coming up with yet another travel blog because as many of them as I peruse, I cannot imagine that I could come up with some angle that has not already been taken. I can, however, probably come up with something else, that does not involve 35 Ways to Become a Better Minimalist or 47 Things to See in the Phillipines or 72 Reasons You Should Give Up On Regular Society, Avoid Real Work, Leave Your Family and Friends, and Selfishly Travel Forever And Ever Just Like Me. However, I can write. And I can write about things. And I can publish them to the internet to try to earn a few cents on it and I can keep up with friends, learn a language, research water management, learn to cook, meet people, see beautiful things, and develop values that will last a lifetime all in the process. I think. I hope.

This is a long process. A process of fully immersing myself in the values I have discovered in the past year in order to move forward. Such as minimalism and trying to sell my car and not buy new clothes, such as health and eating well and not drinking every night and a no-excuses training plan. But it is also about acceptance and, as this article says, real growth: http://www.illuminatedmind.net/. It doesn’t, in the end, matter if I am accomplishing anything unless I am passionate about it, as it is passion that fuels the world towards a better place. If I don’t ever get to travel the world or write a book, or whatever, it will be okay. Because there are other equally beautiful things I can experience right here. Even here, at my desk, with my great orange happy Buddha smiling at me from my cubicle wall, and the pekoe tea I can smell and the comfort of quiet productivity and endless possibility that resides in every turn around me.

Oh, also here are some more thoughts: http://www.freepursuits.com/theres-a-long-road-ahead-so-choose-a-beautiful-one#more-3097