I’ve succeeded at a few things and failed at many other things in my life, while still other things simply went sideways.
I have, though, without any doubt succeeded at one key goal from the age of seventeen: I’ve had an adventurous life, in fact, far more adventurous than I’d ever have imagined possible as a teenager. I used to read many fantasy and sci-fi novels, and played a few RPG-type games, but always envied the protagonists, as I thought such escapades could never occur on our mundane planet.
I had no idea how wrong I was. Our planet contains practically endless opportunities for novelty, excitement, danger, and the exploration of the unknown.
In my life in the interstitions, I often cross paths, in different forms, with members of different slightly-fringe tribes: backpackers in my day-to-day life, entrepreneurs and startup types in work-related contexts, intellectual and philosophical vagabonds online.
I have been quite antisocial for the past few years — one older British guy who I met in a hostel simply said to me, when he caught me smoking alone on a balcony later that night: “I knew you were an antisocial cunt”. Still, encountering such an eclectic mix of people gives me a few windows into the nature of humanity. I talk to many different people, but intermittently.
In day-to-day life I encounter many people with interesting backstories. In fact, things have gotten to the point now where I’m surprised to encounter people who live entirely normie lives. I suspect there are many more of them than I imagine, and I simply move in unusual trajectories and don’t encounter them often. Nor do they encounter me, or people like me.
I know that many don’t imagine that people like me exist. I am not self-important or seeking inverted glory. I am a cypher, and I like it that way.
The few people I’ve tended to stay in touch with often come from life’s miscellaneous drawer — I don’t intend this term as derogatory or an insult. People who have done a few different things, have lived in a few different places, who have gotten used to inhabiting the borderlands between professional and vagrant, insider and outsider, boring and freak. (My life is mostly boring and occasionally freakishly weird.)
I am not so much talking about the backpackers I mentioned above, the digital nomads, the startup founders, or others who move around the edges of society but within identifiable tribes. I am talking about the fringe backpackers, the fringe nomads, the fringe founders — on the edges of even the edgiest groups. (Here edgy does not mean cool, it means, literally, on the edge — that is, close to outcast.) Such people find each other. There is too much shared context.
Extremely high agency (often scarily high, to normies), unconventional to the point of near-madness, very probably highly creative or entrepreneurial (or both), idiosyncratic-but-tightly-held personal philosophies and ethical systems, dangerous fluctuations between excessively-high discipline and basically-dysfunctional inertia; all of these things lead to a kind of shared context — recurring patterns, even if the individual details are different. From time to time in hostels I will meet a wandering artist in one country, and then a former military guy in another, and wind up having almost exactly the same conversation with both. Partial, but near-instantaneous mind-meld with people who I may well never meet again.
I try to stay healthy and steadily build some kind of routine, rhythm and progressive daily goals. Diving head-first into the chaos is an easy temptation but one to avoid. I do in fact want to get work done. Still, if any curious youngsters (or oldsters, or midsters) reading this wanted to know — I can confirm that what they say is true: there are indeed still portals.