introspection Archives - The Cracked Door

The Principle of the Five Why’s and How Can You Use It Better Listen to Others

The Five Why’s is a common technique among UX researchers and other qualitative researchers that has personally transformed my approach to conversations. UX researchers interview people all the time, and to understand what they think about something, they always make sure to ask five “why” questions about their opinion in order to get to the heart of their opinion on the matter. Humans often rush into assumptions and judgements about what the other person thinks, and this forces us to slow down and get to the heart of how they view the world.

Let’s consider a classic UX research example. Say you just developed a great new app, and you wanted to see whether people actually find it useful. So, you observe several people using the app and ask them what they think. The first person says, “I find it frustrating.” This is really useful information, but obviously, more details would help even more. So, a natural response would be, “Why do you find it frustrating?”

Say the person gives a quick answer like, “I find the interface confusing, so I can’t do what I want to do” or whatever their frustration might be. This gives you a better understanding of their frustrations, but you can dig even more. According to the Principle of the Five Why’s you should ask at least five follow-up questions about why (or in some cases, how) they feel the way they do.

This allows you to hone in exactly what their underlying needs and expectations are and how well your product meets those needs for them. Now, technically, not all follow-up questions have to be “why”. The idea is that like, “why” questions, ask questions that nonjudgmentally help uncover the underlying reasons for the opinions. For example, in this scenario, I may next ask, “What about the interface do you find confusing?” or “What are you trying to do, and how is it preventing you from doing it?” Both of these are not “why” questions, but they help orient me to understand why the person feels frustrated. Sometimes you have to learn some basic data about what their experience was before you uncover the next level of detail about why they had that experience.

I often use this principle in regular conversations as well. Too often people assume they know what the person is thinking and make assessments based on their initial judgements. Asking follow-up questions forces us to slow down and consider in-depth what that person is trying to communicate. After listening, one can still disagree with a person’s conclusions, but at least you will know why. In almost every situation, I have found at least some points of agreement even when I thought we had opposing, conflictual perspectives.

It also calms you down. In tense conversations, we often simply react. Maybe we presume they meant something hostile and respond in turn. This helps us survive threats but clouds our ability to empathize with others and reason through their ideas. Asking questions allows us to pause and reflect for a few more moments on what else might be influencing where they are coming from.

Feel free to try it in regular conversations, especially potential arguments or other tense conversations. Pause and ask a few “why” questions to understand the layers behind their thoughts before launching into your perspective on the matter. It will change the course of the conversation. Worst case scenario, by the end of it, you will still disagree with them just as much as you did initially, but often you will learn something and will discover a way to carry on nonconfrontationally in a way that involves both of you getting what you want. If you disagree, you have lost little by hearing them out and gained the ability to disagree productively since you now know exactly where the other person is coming from.

Now in every interaction, you don’t have to literally ask five questions. That exact number may not fit every interaction. The spirit of the rule is to ask follow-up questions that force you to engage with the reasons underneath someone’s impressions. For me, I often ask follow-up questions until it feels uncomfortable, until I feel my thoughts well up so strongly within me that I am eager to jump in. Then, I ask just two more follow-up questions. In the unlikely event that I still think they are totally wrong by the end of those two questions, I can jump in with my perspective. This slows me down and forces me to practice more constraint and helps me see a path to empathize and/or disagree in a positive and productive manner.

Haikus as a Three Line Story 3: Connections, Juxtapositions, and Non-Sequiturs

This is the third chapter in a four part series about my friend and my experience writing a haiku a day for six years. In each part, I outline a different type of haiku we often write. Other parts of the series: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 4.

Sometimes we combined several unconnected ideas. Maybe, we drew some kind of parallel or or juxtaposition like some traditional Japanese haikus. Other times, we intentionally merged unrelated ideas to create non-sequiturs. I often even took three phrases from books, articles, ads, or other poems and put them together to see what kind of poem would emerge.

Here are a few examples of each:

Connections and Juxtapositions

Tick tock of the clock

With the faint trickle underneath

Of a gushing stream

(Originally published here. This juxtaposes the noises from the clock and the stream. It was a reference to the noises I heard when visiting a clock store next to a stream in Kyoto, Japan.)

The Hermit

To stand here alone

In the desert that’s my life

In search of a path

(This one establishes a connection between the hermit’s life and the narrator’s life.)

I’m like a glacier:

Slow-moving til you get to

My ice-cracking tip.

(Originally published here.)

The cold wind howls

Blowing leaves off the trees, that

Are my inner soul.

(These use a direct simile, metaphor, or analogy to make its comparison.)

Setting up a Premise

The first line of these haikus establish a premise that the final two lines then define or in some way comment on, another strategy to connect thoughts together:

Joys of sleeplessness:

You get to marinate in

Every useless thought

Shores of Babylon:

While the just weep for Zion

I’m finally home.

Conjure the devil:

You better know what you want

He certainly won’t

Tragedy of life:

Everyone is fighting for

What they think is right.

Non-Sequiturs

I frequently cobbled together interesting five and seven syllable phrases from newspaper articles, billboard ads, books, etc. to see what kind of narratives or meanings would emerge by putting them together into a poem. Normally, when writing a haiku, we have a feeling, idea, or narrative that we are trying to convey, and we figure out how to mold that into the haiku’s stringent “requirements.”

But sometimes, I enjoyed turning that process inside out. I would start with words themselves and see what kinds of meanings could emerge from putting them together in different and interesting ways.

Do more than see. Seek.

The assent to the finite.

Desire to create.

The hustle is real

You will need experience

Ride for free after

(This second one is originally published here. I pulled each line of these haikus from ads I saw on billboards around town. To me, they represent the artificial, consumerist language common in the ads that bombard our daily lives.)

Desire to create

Nothing mattered except life

Self-interest undermines

The forgotten fire

Took almost nothing along

The road not taken

Hello to radiant

You could be solowaving

Get your FYP

(This final one is originally published here. These next two are compilations of phrases from articles and books to see what new narratives emerge when taken out of their original context and put together in this order as a haiku like this.)

Ineffableness

Immeasurability

Deification

(Another form of non-sequitur: three words, two five syllables long and one seven syllables long. I put them together into a haiku poem to see what kinds of narratives emerged in that process.)

Haikus as a Three Line Story Part 2: Twists

This is the second chapter in a four part series about my friend and my experience writing a haiku a day for six years. In each part, I outline a different type of haiku we often write. Other parts of the series: Part 1, Part 3, and Part 4.

The first two lines of these haikus set up an initial pattern and the final line breaks this pattern. This follows the broad Rule of Threes, a common technique used for jokes among many other forms of writing.”My three favorite things are breakfast burritos, listening to vinyl records, and getting a call from a number you don’t recognize.” This last one completely breaks the pattern established by the first two. The twist at the end could be funny, ironic, express the depth of an emotion, or have all sorts of other effects.

Here are a few examples of the types of effects we have used twists for:

For Humor

Cherry blossoms bloom.

Pink pedals cover the ground,

And sneeze out my nose

(In this one, the two lines establish the beautiful cherry blossoms, recalling traditional Japanese haikus, but the final line breaks that poetic pattern completely. On the block in Brooklyn where I lived, people planted cherry blossoms. When they bloomed in the spring they were gorgeous, but they also caused me horrible allergies. This poem describes the contrast of loving to see the flowers but at the same time, being made sick by them.)

Let us venture forth.

Hoist the anchor. Sail into

Abysmal failure.

(The first two lines invite the reader to join the narrator on an adventure with an implied hopeful energy, but the twist at the end negates that. Is the narrator pessimistic about the trip or just prefers to head straight into failure? That’s up to interpretation.)

Rugged pointillism

Imprinted onto my feet.

I must sweep my floor

(In this one, each line adds new meaning to the poem significantly building its meaning. The first line establishes that the poem is about abstract art. The second line puzzlingly indicates that it’s on my feet, and the third line explains what happened: I must sweep my floor because it’s so dirty that it’s caused dirty impressions on the soles of my feet.

For Contemplation

After finally

Catching you here in my trap,

Why do I feel bad?

(The first two lines establish a kind of glee in the victory of catching someone in their trap, but the final line twists this, showing that the narrator finally caught the reader, they feel guilty instead of victorious.)

To have faith is to

Live in the constant fear

That you will lose it.

(Originally published here. The twist at the end establishes a key characteristic of faith: that it is built on its opposite fear that one would lose that faith.)

Healing emulates

Even from what might be the

Most painful venom

(Originally published here. The twist at the end is that venom of all things is the source from which the healing emulates from.)

Haikus as a Three Line Story: One Way to Write a Haiku (Part 1 of a New Series)

This is the first chapter in a four part series about my friend and my experience writing a haiku a day for six years. In each part, I outline a different type of haiku we often write. Other parts of the series: Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

As I have already discussed in a previous article [], my friend and I have written a haiku a day for the last six years. This has been an incredibly transformative experience, and here I will focus on how we use the haiku format to tell stories.

At the end of the day, haikus are a way to use three lines to tell a story. Each new line provides an opportunity to transform the previous line, whether that be a twist or punchline breaking an already established pattern, continuation or intensification of the theme in the previous line, or something else entirely. At the same time, different haikus emphasize the first, second, or third line as the most important line in that story. The opportunities are truly endless.

Over the next few articles, I will discuss different forms of stories we might tell. This article will start with telling a story through the continued revelation of a theme.

Haiku Type 1: Continued Revelation of a Theme

The most obvious style or narrative to tell in a three-line haiku is one of continuation: introduce the theme in the first line and in each subsequent line reveal further details to make the theme clearer. This forms the most basic or bedrock version of a haiku that you compare the other styles against.

Sometimes, the new lines can further reveal the details of the theme or topic being explored. For example, the later lines could abstract the tangible observation in the first line. If the first line is itself abstract, later lines might instead provide specific examples or imagery of that theme. Or, it could provide the context in which the writer (or at least the narrator) was thinking of the items established in the first two lines. Here are a few examples of each:

Going from detailed to Abstract

The lone seagull fades

Into the vast thundercloud’s

Forceful harmony

(Originally published here. These first two lines provide specific imagery, and the final line connects the seagull’s moment with the concept of harmony.)

This winding dirt road

What wonders I must go see

To explore the world

(Originally published here. The first line starts with a vivid image of being on a road, and the second two lines connect it to a theme of exploration.)

All this background noise

Droning all around to sell

Yet another myth

(The second line provides more context for the scene, establishing that the noise is caused by sellers, and the third line connects the theme to the abstract idea advertisement as a form of mythmaking.)

New job, new projects

New toolkits, new people with

New idols they serve

(As a list poem, the final line is a continuation of items on the list, but it also establishes and summarizes the poem’s theme of work as a form of idolatry.)

Drop the heavy box

Shards of glass fly everywhere

Hope is laid to rest.

(The first two lines describe a moment, and the final line connects that imagery to broken hope. This summarizes the key theme of the poem.)

From Abstract to Specific Examples

In this type of poem, the final lines that provide specific examples or imagery of an already abstract initial lines:

I lie in the shade

Of your blistering haiku

No rest from the heat

(Originally published here. This haiku’s final line concludes with a new piece of imagery; this time about the feeling of heat.)

Always bursting through

The cracks of your perspective,

The light will shine through

(Originally published here. The second two lines add visual imagery of what is bursting through from the first line.)

My thoughts could kill me:

The sea of despair tugs me;

They hold me under…

(This final line concludes with the vivid image of despairing thoughts drowning the narrator.)

Emotional case

But I can’t talk about it

A weight inside me

(Originally published here. This final line also concludes with what it feels like to have such intense emotions that one cannot talk about.)

Reflecting on the Experience

In these poems, the later lines that provides the context in which the narrator or author is thinking about the earlier lines:

The half moon window

Betrays the glow of night sky

Comforting my thoughts.

(Here the final line shows the narrator’s perspective on and relationship with the moon they have been looking at.)

A blink of an eye

Everything can change so fast

For the good or bad

(In the final line, the narrator evaluates their stance on the sudden change described in the first two lines.)

Joys of sleeplessness:

You get to marinate in

Every useless thought

(The final two lines demonstrate the narrator’s stance on sleeplessness.)

These are all different techniques where the final lines continue to reveal the theme of the first line or lines, whether that be by broadening or abstracting the theme, narrowing it, providing rich imagery, or providing a type of reflection.

What My Friend and I Have Learned Writing a Haiku a Day for the Last Six Years

Six years ago, my friend and I started writing a haiku a day. We wanted to practice the muscle of writing, and a short poem like a haiku was something we could feasibly do once a day: it really only takes a minute or two to write out a haiku. Little did we know how much this would transform our writing and become one of the most useful meditative habits we did in our lives. We would recommend anyone interested do the same.

We’ve done it for many years. I almost think of us as having different eras. Over the months and years, we each focused on different things or tried different styles. Looking back, it feels like looking through the photo album of different eras in our lives. Here are some the major lessons we learned writing a haiku a day:

How to Write Succinctly

Writing haikus forced us to write succinctly. Haikus are short. They forced us to compress complex points and stories into only a few words and syllables. In the classic form, you have three lines and 19 syllables to get all my thoughts down. An idea or impression that might normally take me one or two paragraphs to describe, we must whittle down into only a few words. So the crucial question becomes, what about our message is most important and how to get that across as succinctly as possible?

Notice the Simple Moments of Life

It also helped us see the world anew. It became a way to notice the little experiences in life that glide by during the day. We would have to pause to reflect on them long enough to form them into a coherent poem. Traditionally, Japanese haiku writers wrote about the subtleties of nature. We did not always do that, but writing haikus still forced us to reflect on the subtle, little moments in life that we normally regulate to the background. A quirky social moment that passed as quickly as it came, a short fleeting feeling that one has before getting up to do something else, etc. We both often live with our head in the clouds, so being in the moment had a meditative effect on us.

How to Be Disciplined about Writing

Writing is a discipline, and like any discipline, practice is the best way to get better. Practicing writing, even if only through a little haiku, we noticed our writing improving significantly over the years. We not only improved our ability to write haikus but also in other forms of poetry and in other forms of writing. Stories, essays, even emails at work, these all got easier and better.

How to Build Other Habits

We wrote a haiku every single day. Our fun days, our awful days when some crisis happens, a day we’re busy at work, it doesn’t matter. We wrote a haiku on that day. This took discipline to do and taught us how to build other habits. I found the best way to build habits personally is to do it a little every day, and the best way to do something every day is to set aside a consistent time in the rhythm of my day to do it. New jobs, the pandemic, traveling the world, and other major life changes might completely change my daily rhythm, but no matter what schedule I had, I would make sure I found time to write a haiku.

Creativity Is Contagious

I noticed that nothing inspired me to write haikus than writing haikus. Especially on a long walk or even a long flight, my mind would wander and think about a nice haiku. This would inspire me to think up even more haikus, sometimes on the same theme, sometimes completely different. This would spur me to write even more haikus, and in a few minutes, I might write several dozen haikus before my inspiration slowed back down. These led to some of my favorite pieces.

Creativity energy is contagious like this. Creating catalyzes more creativity. When I had ideas, I would come up with more, or when I heard my friend’s creative ideas, it would spur more. Being in spaces full of creative energy is most important to creating. This includes being around other creatives but also open spaces where my mind can wander like a long walk, drive, or bike ride through the city.

Helping Ensure People Have a Positive, Non-Judgmental Experience Is the Essential to Whether They Enjoy Creative Writing

I also introduced other haiku activities with many other friends, and I have learned how essential a positive, welcoming environment is to people’s relationship with writing haikus. How much someone enjoys writing a haiku is based pretty much entirely on how validated they feel that their haikus are.

For example, I created a game called “Apples to Haiku”, a variant of the “Apples to Apples” but with haikus. A judge comes up with a topic for a haiku. Everyone else writes a haiku based on that topic, and the judge determines their favorite one. This game can be fun, but something about the game mechanic seems to lead to a few players’ haikus getting routinely chosen and others’ almost never chosen. The former people love the game and often grow to really enjoy writing haikus; whereas, the latter usually hate it and grow to dislike haiku writing. They will almost always be the first to give up on the idea of writing a haiku, internalizing the idea that they are “bad” at it.

Overall, when writing haikus, the external validation of one’s work seems to be the most significant factor in whether they like or dislike the activity. People seem to look to others, especially in the early stages of starting to write haikus, to determine whether they are “any good at them” and use that to construct their self-image of the activity. Thus, I stopped playing competitive haiku games like Apples to Haiku but would focus on cooperative or affirming haiku activities where everyone wrote haikus together, building off each other’s ideas. My cooperative favorite haiku game of one where one person writes the first line of haiku, the next person creates the second line, and so on (hundreds of years ago, Japanese aristocrats may have played a much more specific version of this, but as far as I can tell, their version was competitive). This is positive and affirming, where “the game” is to figure out how to form an interesting haiku together. This leaves people feeling inspired rather than discouraged.

Seeing the Contours of Our Lives

Finally, looking back at our haikus makes me reminisce about our lives over the last several years, kind of like looking through a photo album. Different major life events came and went: the highs of starting a new relationship, then the lows of the breakup, or the promise of a new job slowly turning into the slog we hate, etc. All reflected in the tone of our haikus.

Our approach to writing haikus also fluctuated over time. We might have a few months where one of us really enjoyed a certain style of haiku. For example, my friend went through a phase where each day, he would pick a tarot card, look at the image drawn on it, and write a piece based on it. This gave him inspiration for a couple months.

I went through a phase where I would assemble interesting five and seven syllable phrases from articles, titles of books, or even advertisements I saw during my daily commute into a haiku. I went through another phase where I read poets from around the world (ranging from classical Chinese poets to Syrian modernists to traditional Japanese haikus) and took specific lines in these poems that stood out to me and wrote haikus based on them in my own perspective and style. I even had a programming phase where I wrote poems in a programming language like Python or Java.

Conclusion

Writing daily haikus has been transformative for both of us, and I would recommend any reader try it. It’s not that hard once you get the hang of it. Now, after doing it for many years, we have realized how what we got out of it changed over the years. We made it our own in surprisingly different ways during different times in our lives and strongly recommend anyone develop their own ways to do it. You’ll never know where it will take you.

(Interested in reading the haikus, many of them are here. In my next post, I also plan to go through a number of haiku examples over the years, so you can also stay on the lookout for that.)

How to Overcome the Nomad Nihilism

Traveling can encourage a certain type of nihilism. Often every few weeks (or sometimes every few days), you are in a new place. This can produce a constant sense of churn, kind of like a time loop movie, where you constantly reexperience new things and a new setting of people going about their lives. You don’t usually stay in a place long enough to experience the long-term consequences of your actions or to develop roots. Thus, like some of Phil’s benders in “Groundhog Day,” you could, in theory, live as hedonistically as you would like (as long as you do not break any laws) if you really wanted to. Pure hedonism was never really my thing, but I could understand its pull on many travelers.

Each new place starts to fit into the standard pattern of all other locations. You end up looking at people going about their lives, removed from the signals of meaning that ground most humans in their daily lives. You technically don’t need to wake up at a certain time (unless you choose to impose that on yourself), go to work at a certain time, or otherwise follow the rhythms that produce the structure for most people’s lives.

Likewise, you are not connected in the web of relationships that many encounter in their daily life. Instead, you witness an endless stream of new people you meet along the way. If you do not click with a certain person or even those in an entire community, you can simply move on to another place. This produces the advantages of flexibility. You are not stuck with the same people over and over again like how many people are forced to tolerate their neighbors for years on end. This allows you to be yourself. At the same time, though, you are presented with endless choices and often do not have to experience the social consequences of social sanctions for your actions.

All of this can give the feel of endless cycles, leading to a type of nihilism. I can understand Phil’s “whatever” attitude in Groundhog Day much better after experiencing tons of new places in rapid succession. After a while of being in new places again and again, it can feel about the same after a while. What do you want to do today? Whatever you want. Some days that is a grand adventure, but others it’s sitting on the couch and doing nothing. It’s all been done before, and any grand adventure is probably similar to ones you have already done many times.

I call nomad nihilism. It’s the dark side of flexibility. After a while, you can start to feel meh about the specifics of where you are (the new people you meet, the new sites you see, and so on) since to you, it’s all been done before.

Unlike in Groundhog Day, you are in new places, which can produce new dynamics. This only goes so far and eventually these small novelties start to compress into a singular lull. Within this, though, lies the start of the solution.

You still take some things with you, however: your memories, photographs and any other physical or written artifacts, and most importantly, any relationships you made along the way. These grounded me against the meaningless lull of novelty. Notice these are mostly the positives of the places you have been to: the people you clicked with and maybe form a lasting friendship with, not those who never clicked with; the beautiful photographs of the places you found interesting, not the ugly places or tourist traps you wouldn’t go back to again, etc. Except for memories, which are always with us no matter how harmful, you have the choice, meaning you can focus exclusively on the positives.

This produces a significantly different dynamic than regular, settled life. On the one hand, you have significantly greater control to craft the experience that works best for you. You can decide where in the world to go, what to visit in each place, and when to interact with others in a locale with less “intrusions” into your time by others than in settled life. At the same time, this means your decisions do more to craft the experience you have. That day, you can choose to be hypersocial and speak with tons of people you can, or you can choose to be a hermit talking to no one (or anywhere in between).

Over time, your choices influence your overall experience over the long-run. If you choose to focus on yourself or your work in the short term, that is often fine, but if you do that all the time, you run the risk of never finding time for those around you and creating an overall less immersive, less vibrant experience for yourself. The freedom to craft your own experience comes with more responsibility as you are often what stands in the way of living your joy.

Constantly changing environments can also help you see the arbitrary constructions of human existence. Constantly witnessing new environments with new variations of the human experiences can make you notice the parameters that form normal human affairs, whether that be a conversation or seeing how a specific community celebrates a particular holiday. This removes some of the “magic” of normal life that someone may experience if they only lived within one community. The external world losing some of its muster can make retreating into your own world more appealing.

It seemingly hyperindividualizes you. Our society glorifies being completely able to choose when and how you interact with others, and traveling the world is an ultimate manifestation of that. You both learn much more about humanity from seeing the diversity of experiences around the world, and you have the freedom to construct the experiences that you want. It enables you to see the strings that hold communities together, but such a removed perspective can also feel distancing, reducing community to the assemblage of specific factors. To work through its cons, you must figure out how to take time to engage with the communities in which you are in.

You ultimately need a balance between solitude and external. You need to explore, learn new things, and meet new people. These relationships, in particular, help center us, both who we are and how we regulate our emotions. You also need to relax and rest. Finally, creativity is crucial too: I agree with the Youtuber Sisphysus55 that art or creativity is the ultimate solution to burnout. Producing whether for others, just ourselves, serious, or whimsical helps reorient ourselves as well. I found these three to be the pillars of overcoming nihilism: relationships, rest, and creativity.

A Letter from a Retiring Medium (A Piece of Complete Fiction)

I have been a median for many, many years, and as I sink into the relaxation of retirement, I want to explain medium-to-medium the secret annoyances of the job that we mediums don’t normally talk about.

Clients usually almost always want to talk to the recently deceased. These young dead with their constant problems and unresolved issues from their mortal lives are by far the most annoying: desire for revenge, love, unfinished business, or whatever. All of this makes them needy and moody. Of course, living people who remain caught in the thralls of life tend to gravitate towards them. Moody attracts moody.

The older the dead the more interesting they get. After one has lived longer than one’s lifetime in the world of the dead, they start to get hit by the fact that their life here is a less significant portion of existence than their afterlife. It takes time, but even those most impacted by fame on earth will eventually seep into indifference about their mortal existence, engulfed by the eternal wave of their afterlife now in front of them. This gives them an insightful perspective about our world, which rash clients, caught up in whatever earthly need or desire they might have, never seem to appreciate.

My absolute favorite to talk to are those who have been dead for tens or even a hundred thousands years. They can be hard to find, but when you manage to summon them, their life on earth is a distant memory that they may not even recall from the piles of eternity that has already buried itself on top of it. Their voices, encapsulating all they once were, all they once sought, synthesizes into a singular, beautiful hum, a single note they beam with the melodious brightness of a distant star.

So good luck as you enter this deadly profession. Your customers will be annoying. Fulfill their desires; resurrect their lovers, their mortal enemies, their family and friends, or whoever they request. But before you get tired and burnout from the drama, make sure to take time to slip into the deeper wells of humanity and rest in the solace of the vast ocean of humans past. It’s your best break from the constant waves of the whims of those who still strive.

Now is finally my time to begin my retreat into this same vast expanse that is existence. I start with retirement from the world of production and sustaining before I, too, will eventually take the plunge into the great expense of eternity. May you take up this mantle well.

Sincerely,
Your fellow retiring medium

What Journeying throughout South America Taught Me about Find Meaning in Everyday Life

These are some of the lessons about life I learned during my trip in South America in 2024:

1) The Importance of Balance: I think I tried to do too much during the trip, hurting my mental health. Each day I gave myself too many items on my to-do list. This made me less in the moment, detracting from my ability to meet people and be open where I was. It also made me more stressed and irritable.

2) Always another adventure: No matter what happens, life goes on. There’s always another day, another struggle. When you travel, you don’t stay in a place long enough to really experience the benefits of community or the long-term consequences of your actions. You can keep certain positive things – like your memories, photos and most importantly, any good relationships you made along the way – but many negatives you can continue to leave behind. That person you accidentally offended because of a cross-cultural difference, you will never have to see again, for example.

This can create a type of Groundhog Day-like nihilistic feeling, if you allow it to. You are freed from certain types of consequences and can focus on those personal experiences, memories, and relationships that you do take with you. Navigating this can be very different from regular, settled life, and it took me many months to get used to that. You must create your own meaning as you go.

3) Finding Meaning: I think this trip made me think more about how I should find meaning and fulfillment in life. I learned how vacuous the typical “career life” can be, and how beautiful and fascinating other parts of the world are. At the same time, seeing more and more places took some of the novelty of adventure. It forced me to be more at peace with myself. I had to pause during the key moments and realize that I will be forever who I am and that I need to figure out how to find satisfaction in that.

Contentedness does not mean I do not have passions or strive to do new things: knowing myself, I would not feel fulfilled with stasis. Contentedness, for me at least, means that I feel fulfilled as I follow my passions: that’s how I find satisfaction each day of my life.

4) Every day of traveling won’t feel magical: Endless amazement only exists in one’s mind. Some days feel drab, tiring, or just plain annoying, and you need these days to make the wondrous ones feel magical. Happiness and satisfaction are really in your mindset. I can do an activity one day and love it, and do an activity another day and find it mediocre or even taxing, and the main difference is my attitude. Maybe the trick to finding satisfaction in life is to align one’s passions with what one is doing so that the winds feel at your sails as you do it.

5) The importance of communication: Traveling with my girlfriend, I learned that communicating your expectations is crucial. I think I overall did a bad job at this, and we had two different expectations for how we were traveling. In addition to getting on the same page at the beginning, communicating expectations is a constant, iterative process at almost every stage of travel. We constantly navigated between what I wanted and what she wanted while traveling. This was a constant dance that we had to work on together.

All this said, the most important lesson I learned is that traveling the world is amazing, and I would recommend it for anyone who wants an adventure.

Unlocking the World: Balancing Exploration and Reflection While Traveling

One lesson I have learned while traveling is that in order to learn from the world around you, you must first be open to listen, and to be open to listen, you must be comfortable with yourself.

You no matter where you are in the world, you are always yourself. People often think that when they travel, they will magically become a completely different person with a completely different set of interests, but that is never the case. You are who you are, no matter what continent you are on, and when traveling, you will have to face the same inner demons and flaws you already struggle with.

At the same time, the ability to learn from the world around you opens up new possibilities; the trick is to use them wisely. By learning about the world and engaging with others, you both encounter new rhythms that can get you out of your cycles, try on different identities that may offer innovative ways to resolve some of your inner issues, and can learn from other lifestyles and ways of thinking.

But how to best leverage these gains is easier said than done. I find the trick is to balance extrovertedly exploring and learning about wherever I am and introvertedly reflecting and processing.

The more I explore and learn, the more I get my own internal juices going. Learning and creatively are multiplicative: innovation connections produce even more innovative connections, cascading out overtime, and new thinking from the culture I am currently in will naturally spill over into innovative thinking in my personal life.

An S-Curve: Ramping up suddenly and then slowing

But such innovation grows exponentially and can thus become overwhelming. I need alone time to rest and process all of it. Like the s-curve models of the spread of diseases in populations (common on the news during the Covid pandemic), my learning at first shoots up rapidly but then slows down significantly as my brain becomes too filled with new ideas to handle new ones. That’s when I need to rest and process what I have learned so far. If I don’t, I will become tired and often cranky. After taking the time to process it all, I can go back out and learn some more.

That is how I navigate between both personal growth and learning while traveling the world. How you do it may be different based on your different personality, but I hope this provides good food for thought. When doing something as long-term intense as traveling the world, intentionally strategizing how you meet your mental needs and work on yourself while experiencing a literal world of things is important.

How to Prepare Yourself When What You Want to Do with Your Life Keeps Changing

In life, if I have learned anything over the course of my life, it is that I cannot predict the person I will be in a few years. We all change overtime, often in unpredictable ways, and even though a core of me remains the same, my specific goals, passions, and interests always seem to redefine themselves over the years.

For example, I have held a career for over seven years that I didn’t even know existed a year or two before starting. Then, after thinking I would do that into the foreseeable future, I ended up pursuing a very different dream of traveling the world.

The same thing happens when you look back at your past. In the moment, you may experience a major life event one way – whether horrifying, frustrating, saddening, joyous – but years or decades later, when you look back at it, you will likely feel very differently about it.

That is one thing that gives me pause when considering quickly rushing into permanent actions that will lock me in for many years or decades. I don’t really know what my future self will think of it years down the line. So then, how can I be certain that I still desire what I am seeking at that moment?

So, how should someone respond to this uncertainty? I can think of three basic approaches: 1) maximizing one’s ability to act now, 2) planning long-term projects for future gain, or 3) preparing oneself to become as perfect as possible before venturing out into the world. I tend to choose the former: positioning myself so that my future self is best able to make a decision when he is ready to.

Thus, I have tended to choose careers, living options, financial decisions, etc. that combine benefiting my current short-term interests while increasing the options that my future self will have down the line. For example, I tend to pick the job that best pads my resume to increase my options later while giving me intellectual satisfaction and financial security in the immediate future.

If a person is a car, you could say I spend my effort optimizing the vehicle. Building myself up to the best of my abilities, in terms of personal fulfillment, skill-development, professional development, etc. This way, I am as souped up as best I can be so that I can later choose the route I want to go in, whatever it is that I will want to choose at that time.

To me, others who try to produce a certain route for their lives – like those with a five year plan – are like those who spend most of their time building a specific road in front of them. This can work well if that road ends up being the route they want to take, but to me, what route I think I will want to take rarely ends up being the one I actually want to take when I am older. Thus, if I focus on building a certain route, I end up getting stuck on that route in the future, or having all that work go to waste when I inevitably choose a different path later.

It may seem counterintuitive to constantly work on yourself like this, but my strategy is not to keep the car in the garage rather than taking it onto the road (that would be the third strategy above). That is not how short-term optimization for me works. I am already on the road, focusing on how to improve myself to be able to get to more places more efficiently as I travel. I know people who think they must stay in the garage until they are ready. Taking some time by yourself to prepare is helpful, but I have also seen many languish their entire lives in the garage, unwilling to venture out because they do not match their perfect image of how they should be. I am one at least who best prepares himself through trying things out in the real world.

This is how I handle it, and why I find it works better than the other approaches. You may have a different personality with different inclinations, but it can be helpful to think through what approach would work best for you.