Philosophy

Kicking the dust off

The more I write the more I write. When I slack off I lose the motivation, it’s almost like the tubes get clogged and it’s much harder for me get going again. I was on a really good streak there for a while with the 750 words thing but then the technical problems and self inflicted criticism conspired to work against me and I fell off that wagon never to return again. I have this fantastical idea that if I hadn’t missed that one day I would still be doing it and kicking so much ass but the thought of going back is like having to admit that I failed before and that is a shitty way to start something new so I just abandoned it. But I need to write, and I need to feel the need to write, and so this post is filler. It’s just me flowing whatever comes to my head to try and clear the tubes and get things moving again. If you think of a sink in an old house that hasn’t been used in 10 years or something – you turn it on and wait, you hear something gurgling but still nothing comes out, you keep waiting, and then finally there’s a little sputter of rusty brown shit water that is filled with bits of gunk and is really the last thing in the world you’d want to touch, that’s what starts flowing. But you keep waiting and the brown becomes tan becomes cloudy becomes clear and then all is right with the world and you can fill up your glass or take a shower or whatever you were intending to do. The next day when you do the same you still have that rusty shit but not for nearly as long.

That’s what this post is, it’s the rusty, cruddy shit that is clogging up my pipes that I need to clear out. Of course I could just write something privately but for whatever reason, call it masochism or exhibitionism or just plain egotism I need the audience. The audience of the 3 or 4 people who actually read my blog, but it’s the exposure that works for me. If I know ahead of time that no one is going to see what I’m writing then I just give up and feel like I’m wasting my time. Knowing that in a few minutes I’m going to hit publish means I do have to try and make real sentences and convey some kind of tangible idea. So if you are reading this I appreciate you being my muse, even if you weren’t planning on doing that today.

So I need to write because I have decided to take the plunge and full on really write a book for the purpose of writing it. Not just collecting shit I wrote before and calling that a book. But starting from zero with a final goal in mind and working towards it. I thought this trip would be a good venue for that since I’m writing what is basically a life philosophy manual pretending to be a book about travel, with traces of self help. Though the help may be one sided, I’ll benefit from writing it but who knows what kinds of take away you’ll get from it. I’m writing about the multibasing idea and how, in addition to that being a shitty name, it’s more than just travel and taking less luggage with you. It’s about a way of life. A perspective. And a suggestion or two about how the perspective you hold decides what you see. If you think the whole world is nothing but the single room you live in, then chances are you aren’t going to spend much time trying to get out of that room. However if you think the whole world is the house which is filled with many rooms that you bounce between without any real decision to do so, well then you have a bit of a bigger world view, but it’s still limited by the walls you built yourself. See where I’m going with this?

One of the things that set me off was a friend, actually several friends, hearing about the trip Tara and I were about to go on and calling it “the trip of a lifetime.” I thought about it and realized that most people would be excited to go on the trip of a lifetime, but hearing those people say that was very depressing for me. It made me feel like this trip is some big built up one off thing that could never be achieved again. And of course I didn’t want to think that because I see this as a continuing step in a direction I’ve been heading for a long time. And those people knew that, they know about other trips I’ve been on and they know about my penchant for being transient and mobile, so WTF? But then I realized they were projecting – if they were going on this trip it would be the trip of a lifetime because, some of them anyway, hadn’t left their own counties in many many years, if ever, and hadn’t left their cities in a pretty long time as well. So them looking at the itinerary we had laid out was overwhelming and impossible, where as to us, it’s cool for sure, but it’s just the trip we’re taking this year, and there will be more like it later, just like there were some like it before. For me, this isn’t the trip of a lifetime, it’s the trip of the moment.

Realizing this changed my thoughts from being bummed that the idea was I’d never do something like this again, to being bummed other people thought they could never do something like this on their own. And that’s why I decided to write the book, because seriously anyone can do this, and they only reason they don’t is because they have convinced themselves it would be too hard. They couldn’t get the time off work, couldn’t save up the cash, couldn’t just leave things behind. Fuck that. It’s not that they don’t take big trips because big trips are too hard to take, they don’t take big trips because they have convinced themselves big trips are too big to take.

There is a saying about trying and not trying. If you don’t attempt something, there is a 100% chance you won’t pull it off. The only way to ensure you never go on a trip, is to tell your self going on a trip is too hard, expensive, time consuming, etc. I’ve never thought that way, I always assume if something is too hard I’ll fail somewhere in the process of trying. I can’t stomach the thought of not trying and then wondering what life would have been like if I did. I don’t want to think about the memories and experiences I could have had. Trying and failing is much more rewarding than playing it safe. So while the book is about traveling, and about traveling regularly to several places – maybe even “living” in some of them simultaneously, it’s also about how to use that same way of thinking in life in general. You’ll only ever pull off what you try, and if you think the world is only the one room you live in, then there is 100% change you’ll never walk out of the room and see the rest of the house, or the front door and see the outside.

So I’m writing this book while I’m on the road. Trying to write a little every day. It’s going, not as fast as I’d like, but it is going and if I just keep chipping away by the time I get to the end of it I know it’ll be something I’m proud to have done, even if only the 3 or 4 people who read this post read the book. Wish me luck.

International Introspectical

I’ve been out of the US for a little over a week now and just now finally letting the dust settle. Tara and I got to singapore a day or so before Joi which means I didn’t have much time to put things in order before jumping into full time GSD mode as we only had a few days to take care of things in town together before he headed out again. So while we were settled in our apartment here in Singapore I was leaving at 7am and getting home at 11pm and didn’t even get around to unpacking until a few days in. Of course the fact that my super indestructible suitcase suffered fatal damage on the way here means I wasn’t really *packed* that first few days either. Anyway, those bits are behind me and the next 3 weeks here should be a little easier to manage.

Well, after I buy a new suitcase it will be anyway, and I think I’m going to go for something a little smaller because as I suspected (and predicted) being out in the world facing an extended trip has me thinking a lot about the stuff I have with me vs the stuff I need with me vs the stuff I left back at home. It’s even more on my mind because the stuff I left back at home isn’t so much “at home” as it is “in a box in a storage unit” which I’ve always thought of as the purgatory on the way to the landfill. I thought I was being extremely minimal on what I brought with me and I already know a few things I brought that I won’t need, though most of that is weather related. I can only think of a few things that are packed away in Los Angeles that I wouldn’t mind having with me, and honestly those aren’t really that big a deal – things like it would be nice to have 4 short sleeve shirts rather than 3. Nothing crucial.

The other night I was talking to a guy at the hackerspace who was in town for Echelon2010 from Bangkok. He’d left New York City 6 months ago after subletting his apartment and clearing out a storage facility. We talked about the stuff he had been and I currently am paying to keep locked up in an off site box. He had stored large (yet empty) suitcase that probably cost under $500 for over 10 years in a storage space that cost over $100 a month. This is something with zero sentimental value and easily replaceable. It’s also something that goes out of date because as I’m finding out in my current luggage replacement search, luggage tech has improved greatly since I last looked. A $500 suitcase from 10 years ago is crap next to one available right now. Yet just do the math on how much this guy had spent to keep something that was both easily replaceable and essentually worthless in storage all those years.

This has me thinking long and hard about the stuff I opted not to sell at our garage sale, and to box up instead, as well as the stuff I did try to sell but that no one bought. I’d planned to donate a lot of the unsold stuff but I ended up boxing it and storing it with the stuff I wanted to keep. Right now I’m having a hard time justifying a lot of that stuff and I find myself wishing it was all just gone. Obviously I don’t really want it all just gone, but in a way I kind of do. Between Singapore and Paris we have a few days in LA which will certainly involve a trip to the storage space to trade out some items, but I’m dreading both that I’ll have to dig through and extremely packed unit and that I won’t have more time to get rid of some of it. I should have been more ruthless when packing, but I had other things on my mind.

Of course this is an easy stance to take when I’m looking at living out of a suitcase for the next 8 months or so, but I don’t think that is really a bad voice to listen to. If I don’t need it for that length of time while traveling around the world, why do I really need it if I’m parked somewhere more permanently? I remember how free it felt when I lived in Florida knowing that everything I owned could be fit in a car and moved in one shot, and I know how tethering it feels to think of a 10×15 storage unit packed to the brim. I have 4 bikes in that unit. I love my bikes and can’t imagine being without one, but at the same time I don’t have one here with me and the ones there are gathering dust. If I had the option to trade all 4 of those for something like a freeman transport bike that I could more easily take with me I’d probably do it, and be happier because I had less physical clutter and thus less mental clutter. Boxing those up and mailing them around the world to places I stay frequently is an option, but requires a lot of time and effort to coordinate.

My head is swimming with a technomad minimalist manifesto of sorts. One thing you can use always trumps any number of things you can’t. Portable and compact trumps sizable and unpackable. Multifunction trumps single use. Durable and reliable trumps cheaper and breakable, price isn’t the issue to worry about. Buying once beats buying often, and at the same time the is no reason to save something that isn’t being used if it’s easily replaceable. These are things I need to think about and remember more often.

Where is “home”?

The idea of “home” is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. As a kid home was where I slept and spent most of my time when not at school, but because my family moved around a lot I didn’t have any real emotional connection to it. As an adult I often tell people that it wasn’t until I moved to Los Angeles that I actually felt like I was home. I’ve talked to a lot of friends about this over the years and I get the feeling for a lot of people the idea of home is much more romanticized than anything they’ve ever actually experienced. What with “home is where the heart is” and other such slogans beaten into our heads. But even that doesn’t point so much to a place as a feeling, right? If you can feel like you are home when you are around certain people just as much as when you are in certain places then maybe home itself needs to be better defined before you can try and figure out where it is.

According to Dictionary.com, home is:

“any place of residence or refuge”

Wikipedia adds to that saying:

“It is usually a place in which an individual or a family can rest and be able to store personal property.”

Neither of those really sound like anything too special to me. I can rest on a park bench, is that home? I can take refuge in a coffee shop, is that home? I can store personal property in a rented out storage space, is that home? You see where I’m going with this, there must be a better of not just what home is, but what we want home to be. Let’s take this one step further – with the exception of about one suitcase worth of clothing and a backpack with some assorted electronics, I just put everything I own into storage. We also gave up the lease on our apartment in Venice and plan to spent the rest of the year bouncing around the world staying with friends and at guest apartments. Does this make me homeless?

I think at one point when people were born and died in the same building home was much easier to define, but now, especially for a certain group heavily traveled people, home isn’t one place, it’s many places. By the end of the year I expect to have a few basic necessities like a change of clothes and some toothpaste stashed in a few major cities around the world. Not because I’m paranoid and trying to have a plan B, C and D in place (though I kind of will thanks to this) but rather because I travel to them on a regular basis and it’s pointless for me to always take the same things there and back in my luggage. (If money was no issue I’d duplicate a few other things like bikes and electronics but for now I’m sticking with clothes) While I’ll have a home somewhere in Los Angeles, I’ll also be “at home” in many other places.

I see this as a natural progression of things, and think more and more people will be doing something similar, or some parts of it anyway. This is the core of what I’ve been calling “Multibasing” for years, that is having multiple bases, but it’s something that would make sense to a much larger group of people I know who are always on the go, but often in one of a handful of places. Well, I guess they would never be at two of a handful of places, but you know what I’m getting at. People tell me they can’t keep track of all the places I go, but honestly I go to a few of the same places over and over again. If I’m not in Los Angeles and you had to just guess where I was, picking Singapore, Tokyo or New York wouldn’t be a bad choice. And with any luck I’ll make that list longer as time goes on.

There is a whole group of people, Global Nomads, Technomads and Permanent Travelers who don’t live anywhere, but at the same time live everywhere. In the same way that people are drawn to the idea of “home,” I think that the ability to call the whole world home is just as romantic, and equally if not more attractive.

So if you travel all the time and have many places you call home, then which one do you decide is the most important and where you should keep all your stuff? Maybe the real question is why do you think you need all that stuff? But that’s a topic for another post.

The gospel of FAIL

I’ve been preaching the gospel of fail pretty openly for the last year or so. It seems so obvious in hindsight but something that is incredibly hard to grasp from a nice safe landing point. What I mean is when you everything is working out OK for you, the idea of trying something that might not work out so well is pretty scary. I talk to people all the time who have an idea that they are “working on” but haven’t taken the plunge on it because they aren’t 100% sure of all the angles and they like their current job or whatever so don’t want to walk away from that until they are positive the next step they take will be successful. There might even be someone else out there working on their same idea but these folks are convinced their version of it is light years better.

These are the same people who 2 years from now will still be in the same job because they still aren’t 100% sure about their idea, and likely someone else or many someone elses will have had their same idea and run with it. I know this because that is the same situation they were in 2 years before.

These people, and I’ve been plenty guilty of this myself so don’t think I’m pointing fingers, are hesitant to try because they are afraid they might fail. There’s this little voice in our heads telling us that it’s irresponsible to take chances until you know all the ducks are in a row. That trying something and it not working is the worst thing that can happen because then everyone will think of you as a failure. This little voice stops us from trying so many things.

The gospel of fail is about telling that voice to shut the fuck up.

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I’ve given up using soap & shampoo forever

Towards the end of December I came across an article written by a guy who had given up on using soap and was now washing himself with water alone. My immediate thought was this must be some dirty hippy and I felt sorry for anyone who lived or worked in close proximity to him – however I was interested in why someone would make a choice like this so I sat down and read both the article and the extremely long comment thread which made much more sense than I expected it to. If you have some time I recommend reading it though the author, Richard Nikoley, is active in the paleo-scene so a lot of the comments reference those ideas. But this post isn’t about that article, it’s about my own experiences.

The thing that stuck out to me the most, and resonated with my own philosophy was that it seemed silly that we would have evolved into creatures that needed a bunch of corporately produced and marketed chemicals smeared all over our bodies everyday just to get by. For the most part I’m kind of a “this happens for a reason” person and I don’t think every single things needs to be messed with. I very rarely take any kind of pain killers for headaches or cold medicine for sicknesses. Of course I very rarely get headaches or sick which helps. Maybe those two are related, the people I know who are always sick and always having headaches and always taking things to suppress those symptoms.

Long time readers know I also have a oft cited personal manta about regularly examining my actions and making sure I am doing things for the right reasons, and I decided, rather publicly a few years back, that just because I did something yesterday is not a good enough reason to do it today. As I was reading this article I started thinking that the only reason I was using soap was because I’d always done it and had always been told I needed to. I’d never questioned it, but now that I was questioning it I wasn’t coming up with very convincing answers. Maybe these chemicals were messing whith my body’s own chemistry and creating the need for themselves?

I was reminded of my experiment with some of those acne face pads in high school. I didn’t really have zits, but I saw the commercials for the pads and how they made sure you didn’t get zits and like any other kid in high school I didn’t want zits so I bought some an put them to use. within a few days I had more zits than ever. If I’d believed the hype I would have doubled up on them to get rid of this nasty zit problem but instead my first thought was that the pads had fucked up some kind balance on my face and caused the zits they were supposed to be preventing. So I stopped using them and the zits went away and I never had the problem again.

I wondered why I never used that rationale with soap. The same math was there. I have dry skin on my arms that gets flaky and itchy and dandruff. I’ve spent likely thousands of dollars over my lifespan on special soaps and shampoo to solve those problems, which they do for a day or two, but if I don’t keep up with them things go crazy. But I’d never considered that these things might be just as much at fault.

The article said that it took the author about 2 weeks for things to stabilize, and that before that things were nuts, so if you were going to try this you should give it a month just to be safe. I figured, what the hell, I’ve done weirder things for a month at a time, so this was worth a shot just to see. So for the entire month of January I haven’t used any soap or shampoo while showering. The results are freaking me out on a daily basis, and I’m actually a bit annoyed I didn’t think to try this sometime in the last 35 years.

If you are anything like me this is probably bringing up a ton of questions so let me try to answer some of the ones I’d have myself.

Do I stink? No. I didn’t say I stopped bathing you dillweed! I just stopped using soap and shampoo when I do. I still shower daily but now a long shower lasts about 5 minutes tops. I also still use deodorant but on a whole I actually smell better. Some people can not smell their own BO, I’ve always been hyper sensitive of mine and I smell better after a month of not using soap then I would missing one day of showering with soap. Tara also keeps pointing out how good I smell, even before I tipped her off to the experiment. Which by the way was almost 3 weeks into it.

Dandruff? Pretty much gone. Seriously. I’m shocked but it’s true. This was definitely something that went crazy during the adjustment time though, I’d say about 2 weeks into it I had bigger flakes than I’d ever seen in my life. That shit was like an avalanche. But they went away, and my head has been less dandruffy than it’s been my whole life. I do find if I rinse my hair with water every day I see a few little flakes, where as if I rinse it every other day or so I don’t see anything.

But that isn’t the only hair-benefit I’ve seen. I have pretty thick semi-curly hair which has always been a nightmare to maintain. Since starting this it’s become softer and more controllable than ever. I actually find myself touching it a lot without realizing it because it feels so different.

Dry skin? Gone. In fact not only is my dry skin gone, my skin as a whole feels softer and healthier than I can ever remember it feeling. Again this is something Tara keeps noticing totally unprovoked.

Adjustment time. The first two weeks were definitely weird. My skin was super dry, super oily, then dry again. As I mentioned I had super dandruff and in general it was a little nuts. But I chalked that up to my body trying to correct itself and get back in to balance since it weren’t involved in daily chemical warfare anymore. Today is the month marking point and I’d say I think things are pretty much in order. If you are going to try this yourself definitely give yourself a month. If you try it for a week things will be super wacky and you’ll think it isn’t working, but trust me – stick it out for the month.

Hands – I still wash my hands, especially before cooking and after using the bathroom. And I use soap for that. For some reason that actually makes a lot of sense.

Personally I’m just blown away by this and like I said I can’t believe it’s something I didn’t question earlier. I’m psyched on how it’s played out and can’t imagine using soap or shampoo again. Extra benefit I just realized: less crap to worry about when traveling!

(Photo by Somewhat Frank used under CC. I tried to find a better image for this post, but doing a google image search for “soapy” with safe search off didn’t really produce the results I was expecting. Try it yourself. Just not at work.)

UPDATE: ONE YEAR LATER I just wrote a year later update for BoingBoing – check it out if you are curious how this has played out so far.

fail, fail, fail, WIN!

fail, fail, fail, WIN!I’ve blogged a bit before about talking myself out of things and the art of failing. It’s something I have to keep telling myself about because even when I believe it I second guess myself. The basic idea boils down to this: stop worrying about it and do it, you might fail, in fact you probably will, but that is good because then you get to try again. The bigger idea is that we all have a whole bunch of bad ideas and a few really good ones, and the more of the bad ones we get out of the way the sooner we get to the good ones. Some people never try any of them because they are afraid of failing. The point of this is to embrace the fails as a needed step towards the wins.

A good example of that is this shirt. Fail, fail, fail, WIN! It’s a slogan I’ve had in my head for a while and I thought I’d make a shirt with it. The other day I finally did, and then when I was done I scrapped the idea. I thought it wasn’t strong enough to stand on it’s own. I thought it wouldn’t make enough sense. I told myself it was stupid.

Then I mentioned it in passing to some friends on the Crash Space mailing list and people liked it. In fact one said it was epic. Epic! Then I read this great post on Wil’s site about getting excited and making things. And I realized what I’d done. I’d made something and then talked myself out of it. So I decided to correct that and put the shirts online. Actually, shirts, stickers, and even SIGG water bottles. You can order them from this Cafe Press shop or this Spreadshirt shop, though Cafe Press has more options.

I don’t know yet if this is a win or a fail, but it’s something at least. And that’s good enough for me.