life Archives - The Cracked Door

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.

Staring Back (A Short Story)

He had a long day at work, and he drove home exhausted, finally free to let his mind unwind. He looked out into the suburban expanse before him, full of businesses, parks with kids playing, and a few uncultivated fields. That’s where he first saw it. It was a skinny, pale figure, maybe six and a half feet tall, in a field about 50 yards away. It seemed to just stand there looking towards him. What a strange scarecrow he thought? He felt momentarily gripped by its wilting look making him think about how life slowly erodes us like the slow erosion of hillsides over centuries. Then his mind moved on to other things.

He felt weird when he saw it again during his drive a few days later. This time it was in the small woods next to someone’s suburban property, only 20 yards away. At this distance, he could get a better look at it. Like before, it was skinny, and pale, and he could not tell its gender. It just stared at him. Its expression was like that of curiosity that had slowly wilted away into a tired indifference. How did it get here? This was easily a fifteen minute drive from the last place.

He would frequently see it on his drives home from work, sometimes multiple times. He sensed that it was always there, but he only really noticed it when his mind was tired, bored, or otherwise wandering. He wasn’t sure why his mind would drift towards the figure. All he knew was that when he was busy, he didn’t think about or see it. But when he took a break, out there in the grass or by a tree somewhere, it was, staring right back at him with its expressionless face. Just thinking about it made him feel exhausted.

He didn’t tell his friends or family about it for fear that they would think he was crazy. Deep down, he couldn’t shake this fear that he was going crazy himself, and he assumed if he told others, they would write him off as such. He even felt too ashamed to think about it and would do all he could to remove it from his mind.

One Saturday, he saw it all the time. He tried to fill his day with activities like chores, striking conversations with random strangers he met, all in the hope that he could distract himself from knowing that the figure was there with him.

That night, when he went to bed, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He glanced out the window and saw it there in the backyard staring up at him, a stone’s throw away. He slammed the curtains shut, and all the other curtains in his house. But that didn’t matter. He couldn’t sleep, knowing it was out there. He finally decided to open his bedroom window and confront it.

“What do you want?” he shouted. No response. He desperately continued, his demands transitioning into begging, “What are you, and what do you want with me? Why do you keep following me?” But it said nothing. It just stared back at him with the same indifferent, lethargic expression it always has.

Furious, he finally decided enough is enough. He went outside to attack it. He rushed right up to it, but each step he took towards it, it seemed to move away. Floating above the ground, it slid backwards maintaining the same distance of maybe 20 feet (or 6 meters) from him. He chased it down the street in the middle of the night. It could not go through objects, opting to go around cars, poles, and other obstructions with ease, as it continued to stare at him. Finally, he had it trapped in a street with a deadend, but it somehow disappeared behind the fence of a house, where he was unable to follow. He could seem to find it again, forcing him to come back home.

He was never able to elude the figure. As he tried to live his life, some days he saw it only once; others multiple times. He couldn’t avoid thinking about it, whenever he went outside, he wondered whether he would see it in the background somewhere, and whenever he was indoors, he wondered whether it was watching him. Slowly, he became too exhausted to handle many of his daily activities. He stopped wanting to see friends and family, only doing the bare minimum at work. Others told him he looked tired and indifferent, and one day he looked in the mirror only to realize that other than several wrinkles from the stress, his exhausted face looked just like that of the figure.

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.

A Year Traveling the World: A Reflection on 2024 and What to Expect in 2025

I hope for three things in 2025 as I travel around the world:

1) Find balance

This past year, I ended up discovering how I want to live my life (or this current chapter of my life at least), and this year, I need to learn how to live that life in a balanced, sustainable fashion. In 2024, my girlfriend and I decided to start to travel the world. 2024 served as its childhood to develop, refine, and mature how to travel the world.

Now, I suspect 2025 will see an adolescence and introduction to adulthood. During the “childhood” of 2024, I determined whether I enjoyed this life, which I do, but then also encountered practical problems in how to bring it about. Like, how should I balance adventuring and seeing new places with the desire to do creative projects and other things like keeping up with friends, daily chores, etc.? What kind of stuff am I most interested in creating or doing? How do my girlfriend and I juggle our respective needs and paces when traveling together?

In childhood (in Western beliefs around psychological development at least), one also focuses on general skill exploration and development. You explore the world and attend school where you are supposed to learn the most basic foundational skills for your society. Likewise, in 2024, I have been similarly focusing a lot of my time on my own general skill development without knowing it.

Then in Western psychology, adolescence is the time when individuals most wrestle with their identities and emotionally how they will resolve the issues that come their way. One reason teenagers have so many mood swings is because they are encountering adult stressors for the first time and are initially developing their emotional techniques for how to respond. As they get older, these emotional techniques become ingrained as the patterns for how they will react when they encounter similar stressors, and thus they do not need to adjudicate between as many potential emotional responses as when they were a teenager.

Similarly, by the end of 2024, I seem to have encountered some of the big issues I will face traveling the world while also trying to do creative work), and I suspect I will use the beginning of 2025 to wrestle with how to best juggle all my priorities and how to overcome these potential problems. For example, I felt like I was not sufficiently in the moment and did not ingratiate form as much cross-cultural connections as I would have liked. Instead, I got too caught up and stressed out by the many many items I put on my to do list. I will likely test out different approaches, some of which will help and some won’t, determining over time what works best for me.This I consider my adolescent period for traveling the world.

As I finalize figuring that out, I predict my lifestyle will eventually transition sometime later in 2025 into a “young adult period” where I start to find my groove. How long will the adolescent period take? I predict I will be done and have a sense of balance by the first half of the year, with a decent likelihood I will be done by March or April, but I really don’t know. That may be way too optimistic, like maybe this adolescence will take the whole year, and if I read this in the future, I may chuckle at my own naivety. But I am still going to tentatively go with it.

2) Create something I am proud of

I would like to develop something insightful and useful for the world in 2025. In 2024, I focused on my own exploring, learning, and experience: being able to see interesting and great places in the world, having my own adventures, and learning about the world. But as I work through my adolescent stage and hit my stride, I would like to take those skills to good use and produce something interesting, insightful, and potentially useful to others.

I will still explore new parts of the world (don’t get me wrong), but I would like to spend more energy trying to produce something as well. Right now, my thoughts are writing a book or starting a podcast series, but I have a nearly endless list of other minor or less thought out ideas. I predict I will set my ambitions too high like I always do at first, but I will ultimately produce something that I am proud of.

Life amidst the Cosmic Clash between Chaos and Tyranny

(This is a second version of this original short story, with a different emphasis.)

When the world was formed, there were two evil forces. One was Chaos who represented destruction and anarchy, and the other Tyranny who wanted order and control.

They clashed. Tyranny had the entire universe confined into a small, dense point, but Chaos pushed the particles of the universe apart, causing everything to explode in a hot, fast bang. Tyranny tried to bring everything back together into an order or system, through forces like gravity, electromagnetism, and so on. She would design intricate formations ranging from small atoms to big galaxies, but Chaos would cause them slowly to rip apart.

Their fight raged for billions of years. Tyranny started to learn that every structure she built, no matter how strong, seemed to eventually fall apart. She realized two things that human scientists would discover far into the future: Entropy (or Chaos) always increases in the universe and that any structured, dynamic system no matter how perfectly built can easily splinter into chaos overtime given very small aspects of how they were initially built that she could not control. In enough time, Chaos always seemed destined to win in the end.

She had an idea. What if she could build structures that would continue to reproduce themselves overtime? When she tried to build a single system, it would never last forever. Something would always make it fall apart eventually. But, she decided to build structures that could replicate themselves but with slight modifications each time in response to mild intrusions of Chaos (which she called “circumstances”)? Even if the original version disintegrated a long time ago, the newest lifeforms would have adapted and survived. This seemed like the best strategy to build order that can survive the coming chaos and slowly take over the universe. She called these replicating entities Life.

Starting on a planet, these got better and better at replicating, becoming a network with other life that expanded across the whole planet. In time, maybe it could expand across the entire universe. As her life started competing more intensely in this environment, some started developing the ability to understand some of the plays in her playbook and write their own. They also started creating information and other systems that seemed to exhibit a type of life of its own.

As this is happening, she saw one fundamental weakness: these things are reliant on matter, and eventually even their matter might descend into Chaos. She struggles to think. Will life be able to transcend even the matter of the universe, or will Chaos eventually still have her way in the end?

The Dance of Water: Finding Beauty in the Tumult

The first time I whitewater-rafted was in a park called Ohiopyle at around 12 years old. Located in southwestern Pennsylvania we rafted along a famous stretch of the Youghiogheny River. My mother, father, brother, and I all shared a raft.

When the first rapids we had no clue what we were doing. Our boat rammed right into something. It knocked my father straight off the raft. I went flying out too, but before I could fall out of the boat, my mom’s body slammed into my legs on the boat, pinning them. Instead, I dangled over the edge, with my legs trapped on the boat and my chest and head hanging over the edge.

This was one of the most interesting experiences of my entire life. I hung there passively with no control over where I went or what I did as the boat careened down the water.

Waves would form around my face, in a circular vortex starting up from my chest and curving my face. They would form a cylindrical corridor like science fiction depictions of the inside of a wormhole. Within, I would marvel at the crystalline-like structures of water all around me.

Then suddenly the wave would collapse. My head hopelessly dunked in the water. My existence precariously converted into a blinding stream of bubbles and gagging as the water pummeled my face, and I thrashed amidst the current.

Then just as suddenly as it ended, another crystalline wave would form. This would go in cycles: the beautiful moments of respite to catch my breath while I marveled at the unique formations around me followed by periods of chaotic pummeling in the water.

It lasted for several minutes until the boat finally concluded its rapids. Then, my mother finally moved from her perch against the edge of the boat, releasing me to drop fully into the now calm water.

When I came back on board, she was not aware that she was pinning my legs against the side of the boat as she had entirely focused on how to navigate the coming waves. My father returned from his swim, and my older brother stayed perfectly safe in the back of the boat the whole time, steering it through the rapids, wondering why everyone else on the boat couldn’t keep their seats. It goes to show you how different people given their personalities and initial positions in life have very different experiences with the same phenomena.

Watching the waves crash above me reminded me how I really have very little control over my life. I am really being taken along for a ride by bigger forces around me outside of my control. At the same time, I still get to see wondrous sites as these entities form and break around me. The glory of life lies in these moments of surrender towards the unique dances the world creates.

At the same time, at least for now, I have been given enough of a break from the chaos of life to catch my breath and survive, to have my needs met in between the moments of serenity and chaos. That has been enough.

Time with the Glaciers of Patagonia: Finding Humanity’s Place in Nature’s Power and Majesty

Visiting Perito Moreno Glacier in Los Glaciares National Park, I was struck by how interesting I find glaciers. They remind me of nature’s majesty and subtly. Millions of bits of snow and ice slowly pack one by one until they become a landscape-shaping force. Even through nature’s slow, subtle works, all-inspiring entities emerge. Glaciers go on to reshape the landscape around them.

Every few minutes, its mass creaks with white thunder and whole towers of ice fall into the water, demonstrating how the glacier’s powerful yet slow flow builds overtime. A glacier can seem like a static entity, but the entire walls of ice falling out of nowhere into the lake below challenge this assumption. They really flow very, very slowly as they slide down the mountains. All that pressure eventually causes the ice at the very bottom to snap off. The ear-cracking thunder removes any notion other than that these glaciers are powerful forces working their way through the valley they inhabit.

In Torres del Paine National park, I hiked within the dusty leftover basis on the retreating Grey Glacier. Glaciers move tons of earth and leave the lakes, rivers, fjords, islands, moraines, and much more in their wake. For example, massive glaciers during the Ice Age produced or reformed Long Island and most of New York City, and significantly reshaped the Eastern United States.

Seeing towering walls of ice the size of skyscrapers fall suddenly into the water, humanity’s contribution to the world looks small in comparison. Natural entities like glaciers that are bigger, bolder, and older than us emerge naturally.. We can only experience the eons of time glaciers have existed in the ways they mold the landscapes around them.

At the same time, humans have had a pretty significant impact on the glaciers. Climate change is slowly melting many glaciers around the world, piece by piece. Our decisions too can accumulate into massive impacts on the landscapes around us.

Nevertheless, this glacier is still here. No matter what humans do to it, we can never get rid of the impacts its ice has had on the landscape. Maybe this will be the route of humanity as well: slowly creep into a massive force that slowly wither as well once we reach our zenith until we dissipate out leaving an impact on the landscape around us. Specific societies will most likely go that kind of route: wither until it becomes unrecognizable as it transitions into whatever comes next.

Nature produces massive emergent forces like glaciers and humanity, and those same patterns of physics will eventually take them away. Our lives will most likely only ever be one towering column of ice in nature’s system that also eventually falls into the water below.

Shattered Icons: Rebuilding Identity in Times of Change

The last several years have felt like an iconoclastic phase in my life. By this, I mean a stage of life where most of the things I once held dear have fallen apart right in front of me, and I have had to figure out how to reform myself.

Iconoclasm refers to movements where people would destroy the sacred icons or images in their houses of religious worship. In particular, this would happen from time to time in Medieval Christianity. The Christians would slowly accrue many icons (statues, sacred objects, or other things) that would become a core part of how they experienced God. Churches would become full of such icons.

Then, every once in a while, a movement against icons would sweep through the church. They would feel that the icons got in the way of true worship of the divine and would seek to purify or cleanse the church of such “idolatries.”

This metaphorically matches my current period in life. Many of the things that became most important for me and central to my identity demolished right in front of me, or at least that is how it felt. For example, jobs that gave me a sense of who I was turned out not to be what they seemed; important relationships withered; disciplines and interests that once compelled me have lost their favor; and the places where I lived that once centered have withered away.

How does one make sense of all of this; might as well respond? It can feel overwhelming, making it hard to know what to do. For me, it has been a slow trickle over several years, not a single cataclysmic event. Thus, the stress and processing has come in trickles as well.

I have noticed that I have been more cautious of relying on new things, since in the back of my mind, I doubt whether to trust it. I also notice that I have to give myself more time and patience to process everything that has happened. I need to be patient with myself while I do so.

Having an iconoclastic phase does not seem bad in the long run. It is teaching me what really matters in my life. A kind of refining fire of those past things that I have held onto, allowing me to transition into whatever new life stage I am forming. Often someone needs an iconoclastic phase during transition stages in life to supplant what one has and make room for whatever is to come.

That’s how I have been handling this stage of life. Maybe if you have such a phase, you would handle it similarly, or maybe in a completely different way. Either way, you learn a lot about yourself, however, by how you handle transitions.

Life, Death, and the Dance of Memory (A Short Story)

There was once a society that discovered how to become immortal. They lived their lives for decades, but as the decades transitioned into centuries, it did not feel the same. They lost their wonder at new things. The first time they experienced something it was fresh and new, but overtime, they started to realize how cyclical the universe actually was. It just endlessly repeated itself every several decades or centuries in a constant cycle.

Some explored differences by trying to have children. This was strictly forbidden in their immortal society to keep the population down. The children provided a sense of newness. They could vicariously see the world afresh through their children’s eyes, which gave them a type of innovation that they craved.

This, though, eventually began to fade: after so many new generations, the experience of begetting another round of children becomes routine and boring. As they got used to the wonder of new life, its novelty started to fade.

Others tried building their own business empire, but that too did not last. One can only build or expand so much before one reaches the limit of one’s space, and the vitality of competing against other businesses in the industry also starts to fade.

Others tried to create their own art, but creativity can only go so far. After one has explored one’s style to the furthest reaches and delved into other styles one might be potentially interested in, art too loses its novelty

So, the people of this society made a bold decision. They decided to learn to forget. Every few decades – 8 decades seemed like the best number – they would induce the ability to forget.

That way, they could relearn the world as a new space each time. They cascaded their forgetting so that each decade there was always still a knowing group who could train the ones who had forgotten. Thus, the community could maintain itself over multiple generations of forgettings.

Through this, each experienced the wonder and novelty of the universe without seeing its novelty fade into the lethargy of endless iteration.

The Importance of Singleness

One of the most common mistakes I see US Americans making about dating is to assume they must be with someone. US society has subconsciously taught us that to live a successful life, you must have found someone, and this can cause people to rush into relationships without really examining whether that person is a good fit for them.

Someone once told me that as an adult, she had only been single for a handful of times, and that these were the worst periods in her life. The longest was a two year period after breaking up with someone before finding someone else. She lamented how bad she felt about being single. She had internalized the societal messages that you are supposed to be with someone and had assumed that during these periods of singleness that she was doing something “wrong” in need of correction. She wished she had better used these opportunities rather than spending her time immediately rushing into a relationship.

Our single periods are precisely that: opportunities. Opportunities to learn about yourself, who you are, and what makes you happy in life. When we view singleness as an issue in need of correction, we fail to learn from that time what we can.

We should be more comfortable being single. Some people might want to be single their whole lives, and that’s fine. And some people might ultimately want to be in a long-term relationship, and that is fine too. But, periods of singleness are excellent opportunities to become comfortable with who we are and what we most value in our lives. They are an asset, not a liability.

The mindset that we ought to find someone can make us do one of the worst things in a relationship: settle. By viewing not being hitched as a problem to be solved, it turns whatever potential partner in front of us to a potential “solution.” Is this person “good enough” to be someone that we can use to meet this requirement? That can produce a sense that if they check certain boxes, they are good enough to be the person we want to spend the rest of our lives with.

But, if we are fine being single, the question becomes more open and genuine: Do I enjoy spending time with this person enough to spend the rest of my life with them? If you are comfortable being single, you can always move on and continue your single life until you find someone who you do want to spend your life with.

If you need to find someone, then your threshold for what kind of things you cannot tolerate must be much lower. This can lead to people staying in relationships that are not a good fit – or even with people who mistreat them – because they feel like the psychological or social cost of leaving is that much higher. Relationships built on such a premise are also much more likely to become unhappy, have problems (like abuse, adultery, etc.), or to end in divorce later (cite).

Spending your whole life with someone is no small matter, so it should be taken lightly. And trying to force your way into a relationship only disrespects and lowers the effectiveness of the process. Ironically, the best way to take the question seriously is to make it only one option in the first place.