Exile Lifestyle

Happiness is good—I like feeling happy. But much of the time my internal state is more complex than one word can contain. Maybe I’m happy with a hint of malaise or whiff of chagrin or the subtle tang of disquiet.…

It’s that time of year again—Please Buy Literally Everything season—and as such I’ve been thinking about consumption and marketing and all the other ingredients that when whisked together, make this an especially frantic, expensive couple of months for many of…

Sometimes creation is like riding an air current: your arms are spread but you’re coasting along with relative ease, tapping into a natural (if invisible) force and using it to get where you need to be, even if sometimes your…

I’ve spent most of the past 12 years reassessing and realigning. In essence, I’ve been trying to better understand myself and what I want out of life: what I think is important, how I want to spend my time, who…

I started a new podcast called I Will Read To You not long ago, which is exactly what it sounds like: just me reading a variety of things and then publishing that audio. There were several ambitions underpinning this project,…

I’ve been thinking about opportunity a lot as I’ve revisited some old opportunities—those pursued and those set aside—and started in on the process of shuffling and assessing and selecting from some contemporary ones. Important to recognize in any discussion about…

What aspects of what I’m doing today will be meaningful ten years from now? Or rather, which components of what aspects of the many things making up our lives at any point are worth noting in some external fashion, and…

I have several mental models I use to generally keep moving in a desirable direction, despite (and sometimes fueled by) the vicissitudes of reality. One such model is imagining myself as a spring that coils and uncoils, compresses slowly before…

If you live to be 77-years-old (the average lifespan in the wealthy world), you will have lived about 4,000 weeks. That’s…intimidating, isn’t it? It’s not a small number, but it also seems impossibly minuscule to encompass everything we’ll ever do—no…

The word “productivity” has its origins in the 19th century, back when industrialization and scaling-up everything was becoming the dominant approach to, and philosophy of labor. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that the word literally refers to the rate of…