This piece is cross-posted on the Give Directly blog, for which it was originally written.
What would you do with an extra $1,000?
I would personally take a couple of months off and ride my bicycle solo from Copenhagen to Istanbul. In fact, that’s what I just did, and $1,000, the size of a typical Give Directly grant, is just about how much the whole operation cost me — including travel insurance and transportation back home. Growing up in a mid-lower class family in Brazil, I had always dreamed of traveling and experiencing the world like that. But I hadn’t had the financial means and opportunity until recently, after a couple of years at a well-paying job which allowed me to save some money and fund the trip myself.
the quintessential Bosphorus arrival shot (Istanbul, Fall ’16)
Those were what I judged to be my needs at the moment. Neither cigarettes or alcohol, nor another job, nor anything else. I don’t believe anybody could have made a better decision on my behalf. In fact, few people even understand what I chose to do with that time and money. And yet this experience, which I would hardly call an extended vacation, has made me feel alive in a way I hadn’t for years, and dramatically changed the course of my life. I came back a different person, with a whole new set of values and opportunities to pursue.
That roughly summarizes why I have supported Give Directly, and will continue to donate 10% of my gross earnings to them, as well as promote them in social media and real life. My vision is a world where everybody has the autonomy to decide their own fate. Give Directly’s diligent and incredibly transparent work, repeatedly vetted for several years in a row by reputable charity evaluator GiveWell, has shown that giving cash directly to the poor and letting them judge for themselves, within their context, what to do with it to improve their own lives might be a great way to realize that vision — if not the best!
The Internet can be exhausting — it keeps showing you stuff to click on — it’s now shown you this, and you’ve just clicked on it — see how it works?
In 2019 i will continue to move and stay away from social media — the ecosystem where three categories of content seem to thrive in their most spurious forms: the news, self-help, and listicles.
#1 The News
It’s no conspiracy theory that the news have been generally designed with one key incentive in mind: to capture your attention and sell it to advertisers. Your favorite newspaper costs a lot more to make than the $1–2 per issue or however much you pay for the online subscription — if you even pay for one anymore. That’s not the business model — the business model is to get your eyes on the personalized ad you’re most likely to click on right next to the story on Trump’s latest tweet — and social media, which came along promising to irreproachably curate your news in exchange for your personal data, turned out to have just taken this idea to a dystopian level.
I’m not saying the news are necessarily lying to you — they’re probably not outright lying to you, even if they do have an agenda on top of their ad revenue (although the growing incentive to capture and retain your attention does increasingly cause them to communicate something that is at best unverified). I’m not saying the news are not interesting either — gosh, they’re so alluring! Nobody would read them otherwise. No. ‘Fake news’ notwithstanding, the biggest problem with the news is that unexamined reliance on them for information will distort your perception of reality. They draw a disproportionate amount of your attention to the damage, loss of life and potential consequences of the California wildfires, while neglecting to adequately inform you about the daily catastrophe of malaria in the developing world. It’s not that those behind the news don’t care about people suffering from malaria — it’s simply been determined that you wouldn’t pay as much attention to that as you would to the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s recorded history — and they want you to click on that calculated ad popping up on top of it!
If you paid any attention to the news, you might never want to go to Ukraine. However reality can not only be quite different but, to some extent, perhaps even unrelated to what you might have seen on the news, as i experienced in my very first time in the country.
the Mad Astronaut and Mad Ambassador Catalin Potemkin (my travel companions during my North Cape Hypothesis cycle tour) innocently posing in front of the Intercession Cathedral in Izmail, my very first stop in the country (Ukraine, May ’17)
although many of Ukrainian roads are indeed horrible, that’s not at all always the case (Ukraine, May ’17)
I eventually moved to Ukraine about a year and a half ago, and this is what i can confidently say so far: it’s a huge and diverse country under insanely complex circumstances.
a tragically ironic crash between a “marshrutka” (share taxi) and an ambulance (Ukraine, September ’17)
the ruins of an abandoned cement factory (Ukraine, December ’18)
Between utter despair and enterprising optimism, you’ll find the whole spectrum here.
You won’t be missing much without the news.
First of all, you don’t need most of that stuff being advertised anyways. You know what you need, or at least you should — look it up — ask around — you’ll find it — you’ll even get a good deal for it!
Concerning where to go to stay informed about current events, there is now a wealth of podcasts such as Sam Harris’ Making Sense (and some references therein) that are delivered as ad-free, transparent, in depth conversations with authorities on the topic of interest, discussing many of the very questions you might be asking yourself about what’s going on in the world. If you must consume the news, then i strongly encourage you to at least supplement it with such commentary.
By the way, this piece of advice includes comedy news — stay away from them — they will eat your brain — just listen to Reggie Watts, and such as, a lot:
#2 Self-Help
I’m mostly referring to that article or video claiming in its very title to be the last thing you’ll ever need to read or watch to become the next Elon Musk or whomever — as long as you’re willing to snap your fingers and immediately rearrange how you spend about 10% of your time.
To begin with, you probably don’t need most of that either. At least i find it highly controversial whether whatever you believe anybody has achieved should be the standard for your success.
But even if it should, success stories can be deeply misleading — simply following someone’s morning routine will most likely not bring you their results — you might also need some of their genes, environmental history, network, and who the hell knows what else — my favorite account of the complexity of social and economic systems is Duncan Watts‘ Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer. Furthermore — or further to the point, conventionally successful people have wildly different morning routines — now what?
If you do want to level up on any aspect of your life, then you’ll need to prioritize and work hard on it. Do some research. Pick up a book or sign up for a program — preferably something written or designed by someone who has spent a significant amount of their time training for that. Follow the blog or podcast in which they regularly write about it or discuss it with other people with experience in the feature of interest. Join a meetup or online forum and start interacting with other people pursuing the same path. Do all of the above — or yet something else that involves some action and commitment!
Change is an active process. Reading those articles/watching those videos and trying out what your current favorite one says for about a week until the novelty dissipates is most likely just distraction and procrastination.
#3 Listicles
Listicles seem to be most often about something i wasn’t even interested in, but now think is the most important topic in the world to believe i’m learning something about. They’re designed to be consumed mindlessly, like cheese puffs — and also sell advertising space, by the way — and typically teach me nothing of substance about anything i actually care about.
Wanna become acquainted with remote places on Earth? Search the web! Post a question on some travel forum, and get involved in the discussion of what being ‘remote’ even means — is it remote in the sense that it’s physically far away from anywhere else in the world where people live? — because it’s uniquely difficult to reach?? — because it’s been culturally isolated for a very long time!? — because it’s largely unknown!!? Read up the Wikipedia articles about the places you get referred to. Perhaps there’s a well produced documentary or a well written book on them, or maybe someone has visited those places, taken good photographs, talked to people living there, and written an engaging account of it on their blogs!
Don’t settle for the listicle. Maybe an opportunity to go there yourself is not even such a long shot — as it turned out to be the case for me with the opportunity to visit the Faroe Islands in 2016.
view of the village of Gásaladur, in the Faroe Islands, from the top of the Old Postal Route — the only way to reach the village until a tunnel was opened in 2004 (August ’16)
Mykines, on the other hand, the island that can be partially seen enveloped by fog in the picture, might be an objectively remote location on the globe — it can only be reached by helicopter or boat, and under exceptionally good weather conditions — the weather in the Faroe Islands changes often, dramatically, and rather unpredictably! (August ’16)
It’s not that i’ll avoid lists altogether — in fact, i like lists — very much so! I just prefer the kind of list that helps me think about how they’re constructed, and actually teach me something about the underlying theme. For example, if you’re interested in the intersection between ethics and entertainment, the Very Bad Wizards podcast is a good place to find such thoughtful lists — their episodes on their five favorite movies on the nature of reality or dystopias immediately jump to mind. This is a passionate podcast by avid consumers of pop culture who also happen to be scholars in the subsuming fields of moral philosophy, psychology and neuroscience.
If you’re not interested in something, then don’t worry about it — and if you are, then don’t be shy to go all nerdy on it!
Oh, you noticed!
That’s right — this is (almost) a listicle — and essentially a self-help one at that — that’s two out of three!
It’s OK — you didn’t know better 😉
But now you do — so, share it (just not on social media, please), close the tab, then move on with you life!
This is the 2019 revised and updated edition of the article i first published on Medium on January 3rd, 2017, and then re-published on this blog (with some changes) on January 15th, 2017 — it’s become a bit of a tradition for me to revisit it every New Year, and fun to observe how it has evolved. Featured photo courtesy of Nicolai Berntsen.
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UPDATED March 6th, 2019 — the journey alluded to at the end of this piece concluded a few months later in Fall ’17 — check out the North Cape Hypothesis to find out more about how it went — if you want to follow me in real time, sign up for my weekly newsletter!
Yet another friend of mine has just landed a sweet programming job.
I’ve been flirting with the idea of pursuing a career in programming myself for the past several years. For some reason i could never quite put my finger on, this has never panned out, at least not as smoothly as it seems to have been the case for dozens of my friends and acquaintances from graduate school or the effective altruism movement.
I believe i may have finally understood what’s going on — despite having taken several courses, used a fair amount of programming in my mathematical research, and occasionally enjoyed playing with an Arduino, i simply don’t think of myself as a programmer.
I’m not talking fixed mindset here — on the contrary. To me a programmer is more like the person who spends a whole month of their lives figuring out how to put this together — indeed, when i look close enough at anybody i know who’s eventually become a full-time programmer, i see a clear story arch under which programming is not merely instrumental to their interests, but rather the key interest itself.
What’s my narrative then?
Well, if coding won’t keep me up all night, planning a hiking trip in Iceland, researching visa requirements and weather patterns along the Silk Road, or checking out how to become an Uber driver and deciding whether that’s a plausible source of travel money will! Anything related to world travel and exploration will not only keep me up late, but also wake me up obscenely early — i’m an explorer!
I have a public confession to make: when i left Brazil in 2008 to attend graduate school in the US, what i was mainly looking for was an opportunity to live abroad.
Unlike many of my friends’ families, mine didn’t have the means to send me on an exchange program while i was in high school. I continued to pursue my path to financial independence by going to college study math, which i had become quite passionate about and understood to be a scalable degree which could eventually place me anywhere between a teaching or actuary job. As soon as i realized that many of my professors in college had gotten their PhD degrees abroad — and with a scholarship from their host institution! — i knew that that was going to be my way out 😀
This is not hindsight bias — anybody who has interacted with me during graduate school can probably attest to this — i was pretty openly not there primarily for the degree — in fact, i couldn’t even relate to how seriously most of my peers seemed to take what they were doing!
As much as i have enjoyed doing Mathematics, what interested me the most about attending Rutgers University, in New Jersey, was the priceless opportunity it awarded me with to meet people from all over the world, and have experiences i could have only dreamed about up until then.
Wheeler Peak, New Mexico, climbed in Summer ’10 while i was in Los Alamos for a Summer School
my first tandem jump (Sky’s The Limit Drop Zone, Pennsylvania, Fall ’11)
Rutgers University International Student Orientation volunteers in Summer ’12 — can you find me!?
Towards the end of 2013, i was about to graduate and, just like most of my peers also about to graduate, applying for academic jobs for the following year. A close friend of mine noted at the time, and i paraphrase, “dude, i really like how chilled you are about this whole process, everybody else is so stressed out.”
I felt pretty relaxed indeed — not because i was overly confident about getting a job, but rather because i had a pretty neat plan B — if i didn’t get a job, i’d sell all my stuff, spend a year or so riding my ’96 Honda Rebel all the way back from New Jersey to Brazil, and take it from there.
Plan B it was
I ended up getting a job, selling the motorcycle, keeping much of my other stuff, and moving to Denmark for a two-year postdoc instead.
When the next job application cycle came about towards the end of 2015, i started thinking very seriously about whether a proverbial motorcycle ride across the Americas shouldn’t actually be plan A that time around.
After my contract ended, i packed my belongings into a few boxes in my landlady’s attic, hopped on the cycle touring rig i’d been slowly putting together for the past year or so, and set off from Copenhagen to Istanbul!
taking my ’96 250cc Honda Rebel out for a spin (New Brunswick, New Jersey, Summer ’13)
my cycle touring rig Kamila, somewhere along the Danube between Bačka Palanka and Novi Sad (Serbia) on my way to Istanbul (Fall ’16)
Along the way, i turned down an otherwise tempting offer for another two-year postdoc and kept going. I arrived in Istanbul on November 24th, 2016, after two energizing and rejuvenating months on the road. I had not felt as alive and present since i was preparing to leave Brazil almost ten years before!!
the quintessential Bosphorus arrival shot (Istanbul, Fall ’16)
Büyük Valide Han (Istanbul, Fall ’16)
Now what?
Yes, i could see myself back in academia at some point in the future. Most likely not as a researcher though — i feel like i belong much more in a liberal arts setting, as an educator, particularly somewhere with a large international student population. I’d love to apply my training as a mathematician and teacher, as well as the deeper understanding of people’s needs i’ve developed through my travels, to promote and facilitate the self-actualization of others.
My global learning has barely begun and, for the moment, we go with plan A though: first, i’ll go spend some quality time with my grandmother, family and friends back in Brazil — i haven’t been there for more than just a couple of weeks ever since leaving in 2008, and we all need that — i’m then getting back on the road in the end of March, and we’ll just take it from there!
