I felt like I did a million things through the past year. To my own credit, I visited far more places in the past year than any year of my life (the previous 30 years). There are other travel bloggers who do this years after years — they go through far more intensive travels for a living. Still, I am just deeply satisfied that I started sharing similar traits.
The Pandemic Style — Work Vacation
A year ago I blogged about how my 2020 ended in Vail Colorado. The 45-day trip was a bit risky but fascinating. I was instantly cooler (than the old me) after learning to snowboard. Unexpectedly, the experience also painted a new theme for our life during pandemics.
Vail Colorado was a testimony, not only of remote work but of a nomad-style remote work: far from home, almost always on the road, so-called work-vacation, or digital nomad.
We were able to balance vacation and work through 6 weeks in Colorado, then can we push the limit by being somewhere more absurd? Is it possible to get out of the expensive rent in the Bay Area? If anywhere to choose from the reasonable time difference, but still within the country, where could it be?
The limits: the farthest place to the west and the farthest place to the east: Hawaii, and NYC.
Define, Home
In the past, I’ve always emphasized how critical to have a home — a relatively stable living space, with things I need (food, water, internet), tidy, quiet, safe, and someone to co-exist with. Also importantly, my home usually follows where the job is at, common sense, right?
This concept of home solidifies as an actual apartment or a house, rented or owned. It is the social standard that I grew up with after all. But do I really need to be constantly at one physical location with all home definitions considered?
My new answer is NO.
Probably no, right? I tend to agree that human nature pushes us to stabilize, but maybe what settles us down is the fear of the unknown: what if I don’t have the same safe neighborhood as of now? What if the new environment is not great for my job? What if this, and what if that …
The hypothesis, the fear of the unknown, is legit. I personally made the poor choice of moving to Los Angeles and delayed my career by 2 years. Note the problem I had was, I changed my job because I have to be in Los Angles, and I end up being a loser (ish) on both ends.
But what if the fear can be conquered with careful research and planning? What if the fear can be resolved with proactiveness in solving those home needs? What if the job, one of the core factors that move us around, can be done remotely?
Remote Work
It is cool, I love it.
Coming from Amazon, illustrating ideas with documentation has been my strong suit. For me, the remote work was a breeze. I still crave human interactions (hopefully I get it from somewhere else after the pandemic), but communication is not a problem at all in remote work.
I understand this is not that cool for a lot of people when the home office is not ideal (kids, space, mental health reasons … etc). Obviously, the remote work cannot fit all, but it fits me personally pretty well.
Travel
After the testimony in Vail Colorado, we went on a 6-month long trip to Hawaii. After that, we took our days off and lived on an RV for weeks in Alaska. After Alaska, we headed to NYC for a few weeks. Eventually, we moved to Seattle for some time.
We love the cold winter in Seattle, don't we? Nah, not quite.
Traveling is tiring. We want to take some time to breathe, have something stable before the next journey. Meanwhile, we took our Christmas & New Year trip to South Lake Tahoe, our 2nd year snowboarding season.
The next stop would be somewhere east coast, planning in progress.
Thoughts on Politics
I’ve never had proper education of western politics, but inevitably, have been exposed to a lot of them the past year.
Being an outsider, it’s just a ton of political, culture, and history terminologies to understand. It’s honestly difficult to find a baseline when a noob like me swimming in a pool of so many different claims and arguments.
What I can make sense of is — these politics are not something that I can easily get educated on through youtube videos. I should probably take some more time to absorb, be critical when thinking about these vast amounts of issues, maybe read some books about them.
Nevertheless, 2021 is an eye-opening year of learning western politics.
2022
I anticipate my professional work to be challenging from a different angle. My non-professional life will perhaps continue to feature traveling adventures and content creation.
I’m yet to define my niche on Youtube in 2022. Coming out of the past year of experience, I have seen quite some possibilities in life which made me reconsider my way of thinking. Am I still too easy on myself? Should I push myself to experiment with new ideas? Why keep going the same path if that does not build momentum?
Okay, no, I’ll perhaps still grind on some similar stuff before giving up, that’s just my nature, but I promise to be more self-critical in 2022.
