A woman who is 40 years old today can expect to live another 45 years, on average, while 5% will live to see their 100th birthday. The average 40-year-old man will live another 42. For many people, most of those years will be healthy enough to continue work that doesn’t involve intense physical labor. So why are we still packing all of our career and family obligations into a few frantic decades?
This article is a story where I openly share all my learnings and challenges I’ve experienced throughout my journey of working remotely as a software engineer.
It’s been three years to the day today that I left my job and went self-employed and location-independent. And while three years of being a digital nomad isn’t even special in my circle of friends, I’d like to share some of my learnings and thoughts around being a digital nomad.
What’s happening? Who cares. Meet JOMO, FOMO’s benevolent younger cousin.
Namibian hunter-gatherers deride those who stand out. What does this tell us about why, and how, we care about fairness?
Four best practices to help you work well with your boss when you don’t see them face-to-face all the time.
My most recent experience with insurance, is the travel kind. Before leaving London to begin life as a ‘digital nomad’, I initially dismissed the idea of even bothering to buy insurance, having never had a successful claim in my life. But I eventually took the plunge and wasted countless hours comparing insurers, trying to find one that would actually pay out in the event of an accident…
I just sent off over NZ$15,000 worth in invoices for freelance design work performed last month. It might have been my most lucrative month ever. I’d like to talk about what’s making this period profitable for me, and share how I’ve gotten to this point in my design career.
How did you find your passion?
A major new study questions the common wisdom about how we should choose our careers.
Sleep is becoming more important to me as I’m getting older. In this unique analysis, I have tried to quantify the effect that sleep has on my happiness. The results are very interesting. Sleep deprivation definitely seems to influence the lower limits of my happiness ratings. It can be summarised like this: being sleep deprived does not mean I will become less happy, it means that I may become less happy.
What is your ‘end game’? What kind of life are you striving to live?
Sure, I dream to travel. I wish a did a bit more of it in my younger days before I had kids and a mortgage. But when I travel I like to enjoy that holiday. I’m not a fan of mixing travel with work — they both distract so much from each other that you end up doing neither of them well. Instead, here are my personal most valuable reasons to continue being freelance.
The part that’s especially poetic to me is that AirBnB touts a firm brand message of community and connectedness with their “Belong Anywhere” campaigns but the frightening reality is that any individual user is completely disposable, without a shred of appeal to due process.
We now know that our brain has certain cognitive biases that stop us from seeing the world as it really is and interacting with it in a way that will maximally benefit us. Many of these biases are a product of our emotional judgments; we are too quick to trust our intuition.
This story is about quitting the corporate world, making indie games, and becoming a digital nomad in Mexico.
The civilizational trend seems to be more centralization. I’m curious if anyone has gone in the opposite direction. It seems that rural areas will become more and more of an opportunity for those able to capitalize on them. Rather than a small apartment in a megacity, live in a restored farmhouse in the countryside. Theoretically, anyone with a remote job can work anywhere - so why not? Especially as a tech salary goes infinitely further in rural areas than it does in downtown SF/NYC/London/etc.
Practicing for countless hours before we can be good at something seems burdensome and boring. Maybe that’s why we’re drawn to stories of instant achievement. At the same time, we teach children they can’t master a skill without discipline and diligence. We repeat pop psych theories that specify the exact number hours required for excellence. The number may be arbitrary, but it comforts us to believe that practice might, eventually, make perfect.
In a recent report published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, “the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%), with an associated increase in electronic interaction.” Rather than increase face-to-face conversation, open office plans increase the tendency for employees to “socially withdraw” and use tools like Slack to communicate instead.
8 single-paragraph stories that show how one business skill brought in writing gigs with rates of $100/hour, $500 per article, and $1 per word.
