My travel project “Good Things Everywhere” was the single most enriching life event I can remember, a real game changer… 2 years of non-stop travel bartering my skills as a web developer. All kinds of experiences, people, countries, languages, interesting projects and challenging situations. I say ‘was’, because now it changed into something else, the life I choose after everything I learned, I guess.
I’m now living in sunny and tropical Brazil, in an eco village on the coast. My electric energy comes from the sun, the water I drink straight from the ground (and goes straight back into it, filtered by Banana trees). I wash all my plastic packaging and dry it in the sun, delivering it once a week to a local pickup point. Every week I get 25 green coconuts delivered with a wheel barrow, every morning I open one with my machete and drink it. Paradise is not perfect, it’s remote, there’s lots of crime in the area, my Internet connection is slow and I can’t go to a shop around the corner to just buy something. Either way, living in community and Nature this way, trying to travel less and causing less harm to the environment and having a smaller footprint is something I wanted to try.
In March this year I travelled to Chile to barter with NuMundo, a startup creating a network of eco villages and retreat centres. I wrote about how I decided to join the project and since then I’ve been donating many hours every week to the platform. Recently we completed our crowdfunding to finance the next features of the platform.
During the 10 years I’ve sat in front of a computer writing code or designing things for the internet, when I’m working on projects like NuMundo I feel things make more sense. More sense than being paid for spending a night awake launching a website for some big corporation or brand. Sense because we all feel that some aspects of our world need changing, because I feel my energy invested in the right spot. One might argue about which aspects are paramount and where to start first. One might argue if a company like NuMundo ultimately wants to generate revenue that it is part of the old world, and not the new world it claims to be. As usual the idealist might curse on the hypocrite, but when it comes down to it, they will agree that things need changing. Not that NuMundo will solve the worlds problems, but if it works and grows, branching out to all corners of the earth, there lays incredible potential to what a platform like this can do. Imagine what Couchsurfing did to travelling, what WhatsApp did to free messaging, what AirBnB did to finding a place to stay. A well designed and accessible platform interconnecting sustainable projects and likeminded people around the world, might just open up a whole world of possibilities to education, individual transformation and ultimately contribute to a growing movement that changes things for the better.
After everything I saw and experienced during those 2 years bartering my skills, it was impossible to just return to Germany and get back to what I was doing before I started my journey. Something truly transformational happened, the things I knew were out there, but felt out of reach, are close now. I just did it. To walk the road to the life I have now was a conscious choice, a choice we all have. It is what the growing network of eco-villages and projects on NuMundo advocates, and what it inspires us to do: to grow consciousness and awareness, look inside, reduce your impact, consume less, use renewable energy, be a change-maker. The more of us making this conscious choice, the more the world around us transforms with it.
So what’s next? Enjoying all the good things everywhere, of course!
An older version of this article was originally published on my website.
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