#16: The Speed of Life
time is a social construct lol
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Yesterday, I got back home after an action-packed week in NYC. In two days, I fly to Hawaii for a couple days before heading to Australia for a few weeks for work. I thought of this topic two weeks ago at 4:30am when I was in Jackson Hole, Wyoming struggling to fall back asleep. In the last two months, (in order) I have lived in Oahu, Kauai, Chicago, SF Bay Area, Lassen National Park, Shasta, Bend, Portland, Seattle, Glacier National Park, Jackson Hole, and now NYC. Originally when I was planning out my big road trip, I had purposely set the past week to rest and recover at home before traveling again. But sometimes opportunities come up and you need to seize them. Slight tangent - I was actually thinking about what does an opportunity look and feel like when it first presents itself to you. I came to the conclusion that they’re often not in your face screaming at you to take it. It’s more subtle than that and requires you to meet it (them?) in the middle. It makes me think about all the past opportunities that came up but were in the periphery and subtle. Two weeks ago, on Friday, I was exploring Jackson Hole and drove up to Yellowstone. The next day, we made a stop at Lake Tahoe for a quick hike and lunch and we were home to the Bay Area by the evening. On Sunday, I was in SF hanging out with friends before catching my red eye flight to NYC. That was all in the span of three days.
“What’d you do today?” is a pretty common question and I remember my typical response used to be “not much, just chilled.” Recently, it hasn’t felt that way at all. Well, I actually think that when I’m backpacking or camping, I’m in one of the deepest types of relaxation because I’m away from society and electronics, although it might not appear to be relaxing when you’re carrying heavy backpacks and moving for the majority of the day. The “not much” part is for sure not the case right now.
There’s one day in particular from the road trip that sticks out in memory because of how much I was able to squeeze in one day. On a Tuesday, we woke up at 6am to catch the sunrise from our campsite by Two Medicine Lake in Glacier National Park. We said our goodbyes and I started driving south. I drove 4 hours before stopping in Helena, Montana at a coffee shop. I cranked out two hours of highly caffeinated work before concocting this delightful salad from their salad bar:
After three days of nothing but dehydrated meals and bars, eating fresh produce was a real treat. I had a meeting coming up and I still needed to drive to Bozeman so I ate this salad while driving. The salad was sitting on my lap and I would blindly stab at lettuce and other things in the box without looking down because safety is #1. Once I got to Bozeman, I cranked out some work until the evening; got Chipotle after and scarfed it down before driving another 4 hours to Grand Teton National Park. I arrived at a campsite around 11pm and fortunately found a spot (it wasn’t guaranteed so I had no idea where I was going to sleep that night.) On this day, I drove for 9 hours and still got in a full day of work. This day was a rare exception and certainly not sustainable for me. I don’t consider myself a proponent of #hustle culture and I find the corporate culture of investment banking to make approximately zero sense. However, this feels a bit different since it’s a weaving combination of doing fun adventures that I want to do and making it work with a full-time job. Is it possible to chill too hard?
When I refer to the speed of life, I don’t mean to restrict this concept to just travel. Travel is just an easy, tangible way to grasp the concept because it’s clear that if you’re traveling then things are changing, but it’s not all-encompassing. You could stay put it in one place and have tons of things going on. I think about the prolific writers who would enter a cabin in the woods and just crank out writings for months on end. They wouldn’t even leave the cabin, but in their head, all sorts of ideas were swirling around and things were moving along.
We anchor to our expectations
Ultimately, how fast you think you think you’re living is based on what you anchor to. It’s easy to anchor to a life that revolves around 9 to 5s and repetitive-ness because for so long that’s what everyone did. I think of all the TV shows that featured an American family in the 80s living in the suburbs where the wife would hand her husband a mug of coffee in the morning as he rushed out of the house wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. Then the kids would come down the stairs for breakfast and then she would also pack their lunch with ham sandwiches and capri-sun before they ran to the school bus. I don’t even know what TV show I’m referring to and maybe because there’s probably so many that are like this.
If you compare your current lifestyle to what society has demanded of us from the past few decades, then doing things like living semi-nomadically without a lease or juggling work with travel with seem a bit out there. But if you reset and start from a blank canvas, then it’s less farfetched to structure your days in a way that allow you to get shit done and do what you want. Or at least that’s how I think about it. The further you step away from the default, routine way of doing things, the less entrenched you’ll feel and then the societal norms of following a set schedule or working a 9-5 in the office will start to dissolve. It’s inevitable that we deviate from the structure that society prescribes. I mean, just think about who you went to high school with and how different you all are now. It’s hard to figure out how you want to live and who you want to be when your entire schedule is dictated to you down to the exact subjects that you’re taking. In college, it’s less rigid, but you still end up following the herd in many situations simply because when we’re in college, we still care about being cool and think that being cool exists only in one format. All of that goes out the window once you enter the real world and have a lot more freedom (and control) of your life. More recently, with remote work, The Great Reshuffling, people working two full-time jobs at once, and quiet quitting (not actually a new thing), there’s never been a time where we’ve been presented with this much agency over our lives. In a nutshell, I’m really just trying to not be a lemming.
Expectations shape how we react to anything. I know I’ve been traveling a lot, but it doesn’t seem that crazy to me since I’ve been living this way for two years now. We’ve all heard of the placebo effect, but the adjacent power of expectations is just as mind-blowing. Check out this <10 min video that summarizes what I’m trying to say:
NYC is popping off rn
Being in New York this week was a huge reminder of how much our environment shapes us. I was working from 9am-9pm with breaks for lunch and dinner, but didn’t feel exhausted because I was excited to be back and the city also supports people who work a lot. It’s as subtle as feeling completely safe at night when walking home. On one night at 10:30, I was walking back to my friend’s place and I called my mom. She was worried about my safety walking the streets of New York and so I literally described what I was seeing as I walked from Soho to LES. There were people eating a late dinner outside in the fancy parklets that fortunately remain even as we exit the pandemic. There were plenty of people walking around and I was never on a street alone. On Saturday, I spent the morning doing a half day of work before getting lunch with my friend Teresa. Then I met up with my friend Nick who was also visiting and getting a late lunch with his friend. We almost didn’t meet up because of timing, but it worked out that I could join their lunch and just not eat. Then I walked two blocks and hung out with my friend Michelle at Kona Coffee which is quite fitting since we met in Hawai. Afterwards, I walked around Tompkins Park with my childhood friend Katharine and then got dinner with Sanil who was hosting me in his LES apartment. As an introvert, hanging out with five different friends back-to-back in one afternoon seems like a lot and it is, but I think being in the city for just a week enabled me to seek this type of day.
Different modes, different speeds
Have you ever heard of that icebreaker question that’s like “Would you rather live in the city or the suburbs?” or “Would you rather live in the mountains or the ocean?” After living in Hawaii and then experiencing NYC this past week, I’ve come to the conclusion that these types of questions are kinda dumb and create a false dichotomy. It’s possible to appreciate it all - big city, rural town, mountains, beach, all of it. It all comes down to what your goal is at the moment. If you want to rest and recover, then being in New York is probably not the best place. If you’re trying to grind, then somewhere like Hawaii is going to be tough in a different way.
I read this from one of the recent James Clear newsletters and it was timed well with what I’m thinking through right now. Without realizing it for a while and not consciously deciding, I’m on offense right now. It’s clear to me now that I’m more in the aggressive mode, but it wasn’t clear because I’m not sure how I would describe what mode I was a few months ago when I was living in Hawaii. Earlier this year when I was surfing, doing yoga, and in general living a loose and relaxed life, I didn’t think about the passive vs. active modes. Hindsight is 20/20 and now I know I was resting and getting ready for the next chapter. But it’s hard to know that you should be resting when you need it the most. At least for me, I think the last year+ has been spent resting and recovering. But then the next question is recovering from what? I don’t really know what I needed to rest from. It almost feels like admitting that I needed to rest from getting laid off in 2020 or feeling overwhelmed with COVID would trivialize the actual tough times that lots of people are going through. Perhaps it’s okay to admit that the two can coexist - I could use the time to rest, travel, explore and there are tons of people who are dealing with a lot less fortunate circumstances that me.
Anyways, I’m stoked to visit Australia for the first time. I have consumed Australian cultural exports for so long such as avocado toast and Rufus Du Sol and I’ll finally be able to set foot on where it all started. For the last year, I’ve been wandering and exploring. It’s starting to feel like some of the uncertainty is starting to evaporate and now it’s time to lean in and simply follow the bread crumbs of this semi-new path. More to come!
