I’ve had lots of different dreams in my 28 years on this planet. When I was:
- 5, I wanted to be a professional soccer player
- 8, I wanted to be an astronomer and discover a new planet
- 9, I wanted to be a professional tennis player
- 16, I wanted to go to Stanford and go into tech so that I could be a cool startup founder
- 21, I wanted to work at a Big Tech company
- 26, I wanted to write a best-selling book (I blame F. Scott Fitzgerald and Charles Bukowski)
Now I’m at the start of my latest, grandest, and, hopefully final, goal: learning how to be happy.
There are two nice things about this goal:
- It has no fixed duration. I’ll be trying to get better at this until I die.
- There’s no way to lose. Regardless of how yesterday went, today I get to try again.
Philosophers, psychologists, and poets have spent thousands of years and millions of gallons of ink on the topic of happiness so I won’t write much here except some questions I’ve been wrestling with:
- What is happiness? Can I be happy even when I’m sad/anxious/angry?
- How come animals and children don’t seem to worry about this, much in the same way that the wind doesn’t worry about which way to blow or the tree about how many inches of rain it’ll receive this year?
Suffice it to say, I’m very much a beginner. This blog is an exploration about what it means to be human and how to make the most of our limited time. In short, how to live “better.”
I put better within quotes because better implies that something else is worse. But life isn’t a competition. Better is highly personal and relative. It goes without saying that these are only my opinions, rooted in my experiences, biases, and beliefs, and that I’ll often be wrong.
Along these lines, here are some of the thoughts currently living rent-free in my head:
- How can I reach financial independence?
- I’m aiming to “retire”—from my full-time job, at least—by 35. A lot of the posts here will touch on this.
- Self-reliant living
- This is my moonshot. I dream of having a close relationship with Nature. I’d love to build a house with my own hands, grow my own food, and live off the grid with zero waste.
- It’d be really interesting to turn this into an off the grid communal living project. We all depend on each other and communal living makes this fact clear.
If you’ve stuck around this far, here are some of the places you can go from here:
- Personal Finance Basics Series: Everything you need to know about managing your personal finances. By the end of this series you’ll be running down the road to financial independence.
- Contact: If you want to reach out.