Here’s a writeup on my ride to Alaska. I ride back home to Quail haven in another couple of weeks to get ready for EREfest24.
I rode to Alaska because I met someone.
I met someone that made me feel a certain kind of way and so I rode up here to spend a month with them. That was my Quest, and why I was in no mood to stop and smell the roses along the route.
You might be thinking to yourself that buying and riding a motorcycle to Alaska from California is kind of a dumb thing to do spur-of-the-moment just because I met someone, and you’d be half right. I could have flown up for far less money and far less danger. That’d’ve been the sensible thing to do.
But there’s no magic to booking a flight, waking up in California and falling asleep in Fairbanks. And I wanted magic. I wanted a story, a narrative arc that lent some extra sense of meaning and purpose to what I was doing. I wanted to go on a romantic quest.
I also had a sufficient cash buffer, personal autonomy, healthy body, and sufficient skills to pull off a motorcycle trip. So I didn’t overthink it: I just got on with getting it done.
That’s something to keep in mind when I go off on a tangent about The Flotilla, about collapsing now to avoid the rush, and all these other big ideas that make it sound like all I think or care about is how my life relates to The Predicament.
I do care about how my life relates to The Predicament.
And I also care about living a life full of things like romantically charging off to faraway lands on the spur of the moment for reasons that have nothing at all to do with anything outside of my own personal life.
It turns out that you can have both.
Reading and LIstening
Do Quests Not Goals by David at Raptitude is worth reading, and mirrors some of my own thoughts I had while on my trip up to Alaska.
Die with Zero, spurred by a question from Sarah who responded to my AMA. There’s a lot to unpack there, so expect a full writeup/episode on that soon. I disagree with a few of the explicit and implicit premises of the author, which makes me disagree with much of his ultimate advice, but I think the questions and thinking process he walks through is top notch. I recommend it.
This might come as a surprise but I am deeply in love with David Senra’s podcast Founders. The episode on Murakami is a recent favorite, but they’re all excellent. I’ll probably do a post explaining why I like Founders and why I think it’s relevant to the sorts of things you and I care about.
From the Archives
I re-listened to The Hypercompetence Loop while working on the skills chapter of my book and had that experience where you’re surprised at what a previous version of yourself had already figured out. I think there’s some gold in that episode that I still have some work to do to unpack and refine - in the meantime, if you missed it or haven’t heard it in a while, I recommend giving it a listen.