My journey to build the ideal lifestyle begins with a question: Where is the sweet spot between structure and freedom? Nothing is as terrifying and lovely as facing a white sheet of paper, or attempting to thoughtfully parcel out one’s immense free time. What are you supposed to do when anything is possible? By now, the paradox of choice is a well-known concept and an ever-looming threat lurking in the shadows of my privileged generation.
On the surface, funemployment (having “fun” while intentionally “unemployed”) is like summer vacation that never ends, or a lifetime free Ben & Jerry’s card — a good thing that you can never have enough of. But there’s a reason why humans don’t live on ice cream alone.
Finding yourself still in pajamas at 5 pm or watching three hours of Netflix a day loses its taste after just a short while. I know that sounds crazy for those of you slugging out long hours at a desk job right now, but it’s true. Not because of the guilt — one of the great benefits of growing older is not being easily guilted — but because you are deprived of the pleasure of productivity. Feeling productive gives me a small high.
I know that my old lifestyle — the one where I had to wake up at 7:45 am every day, rush through my morning routine, catch the train, and end the day late and tired and having stared at a computer all day — did not leave me wholly fulfilled. Conversely, having no structure at all feels indulgent and aimless. It feels like I’m tearing down and rebuilding constructs that have lived in my mind for a long time.
After trying various approaches at home and abroad, I think this is what my ideal life looks like. If you’ve gone through a similar process of structuring & unstructuring time, I’d love to hear what worked for you. (Hidden agenda: I wrote this post just to draw out your comments! You, who’ve done this before.) So here are the things that make me feel good about my day.
1. Physical and Mental Wellbeing
- Meditate every morning. I use the i-Qi timer and Good Habits on my iPhone to record each 20-minute sit. Documenting my sits helps me visualize and inspire consistency over time. I’ve also heard good things about using Insight Timer to see your friends’ meditations.
- Listen to music while cooking breakfast. It’s an instant way to start the day already winning.
- Change out of pajamas and into clothes every day. Wearing clothes I like makes me more conscious of my body and reminds me to care for it well.
- Listen to my body for cues about when it’s hungry, full, or tired. Meditation helps with recognizing these cues. As someone who’s unwittingly let my mind rule over my body for decades, I find this difficult. My mind is damn determined and expensively educated, but I’m not practiced at recognizing and honoring my body.
- Be active. It took me 29 years to realize that I really love sports.(In retrospect, I spent my childhood on the wrong things…who needs ten years of piano when I could have been dancing?!) And nothing beats California weekend hikes with friends.
- Get into the sun. Lounging in Dolores Park actually reminds me a lot of being on the beach in Brazil. Just pretend that the scenery is merely a stage set, and the squawk of vendors carrying trays of cold beer, cold water, and magic truffles serve as the musical backdrop. In both places, we are graced with the presence of carefully-dressed hipsters impressing other good-looking bodies, drinking beer, reading, and doing absolutely nothing but lying on a blanket with friends. Beach = DPark.
- Cook with fresh produce. After six weeks in a country where vegetables literally aren’t on the menu, just being in the presence of gorgeous farmer’s market produce felt like being embraced by an old friend.
- Read the Kindle or a book before bed. Reading makes me sleepier than looking at an LCD screen, especially certain nonfiction that bores me nearly to sleep. When I was in Brazil, I never missed my computer. I’m puzzled as to why I seem to need it so much more now, just because it’s there.
- Go to bed early, before 11 pm, whenever possible. (For the record, I am really bad at this, like this guy.)
2. Communities
- Hang out with close friends any chance I get.
- Reach out to people whom I like but don’t get to see often.
- Find co-conspirators with open minds and flexible schedules to explore ideas & places. (Hello, Diana)
- Invite people to do things more often, instead of waiting to be invited. I finally figured out the reason I didn’t hang out with people as much as I wanted to — I wasn’t being proactive. San Franciscans prefer scheduled hangouts and working a lot of hours. So now if I want to see friends, I’m more likely to ask.
- Participate in more communities. Since moving to San Francisco five years ago, my primary communities have revolved around Burning Man and Stanford without changing much. One big reason why I love training capoeira is the close-knit and friendly community at Abadá. And I’m always down to participate in social experiments that bring people together for a moment before we all drift our separate ways, just like with the travelers I keep meeting. All these people I meet inspire me in a different way.
3. Learning
- Practice Portuguese. Every day for the last 3 months, I’ve been learning Portuguese on the best language-learning app I’ve ever used: Duolingo. It’s free and has an adorable owl mascot. I’m astounded by how much vocabulary I’ve learned in about 15 minutes daily. I still speak Portuguese poorly, but I have enough basic conversational skills to get around Brazil. If you have Duolingo, follow me at @globot so we can egg each other on with progress.,
- Train capoeira. One of the best parts of having free time is being able to train capoeira 4-5 times a week with the inimitable Mestra Márcia at Abadá Capoeira. Capoeira, the Brazilian martial art incorporating fighting, music, improv,and acrobatics, was what initially got me interested in Brazil. It’s a game that requires development of many disparate skills in order to play well. Playing capoeira demands such a high level of concentration and physical ability that it’s impossible to get stuck inside my head, which is a huge relief. And it’s possible to attain a blissful state in the middle of a game: a physical state of flow. Development happens in the opposite direction of yoga. While in yoga one starts with devotion and manifests that into a physical practice, I feel that in capoeira, one takes on new physical challenges one by one until things begin to come together. Gradually, strength, balance, flexibility, and muscle memory form technique. Technique becomes strategy and style. Strategy and style fuse into philosophy about how to take on new challenges, express yourself, help other people grow, and inform your approach in other areas of life.
- Reading has always been my favorite thing in life. Nonfiction, while somewhat boring and slower to read, has been going into the rotation. Now I have the time to read about five books a month, and it’s making me as giddy as the nerdy five-year-old that my parents used to drop off at the library. In particular I enjoyed A Death in Brazil by Peter Robb (an awesome novel to read while traveling in Brazil), Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman, and rereading Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha. I also gained a lot from The Blue Sweater by Jacqueline Novogratz, From Counterculture to Cyberculture by Fred Turner, and Daring Greatly by Brené Brown for their ideas, but they weren’t as fun to read.
- Podcasts are a huge pleasure for travel. They’re fast to download, are wonderfully stimulating, and allow multitasking comfortably, like staring out a bus window through meandering green valleys. Stuff You Missed in History Class and The Moth are new favorites.
4. Creativity & Inspiration
If I’m building my own version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, creativity is the tiny triangle perched at the top. It’s the hardest one to actualize, but maybe the most essential to a satisfied soul.
- I easily filled a notebook with all sorts of things while traveling. They were just small notes, but it feels like there’s something there. If nothing else, there’s an interest in writing. I don’t feel like I’m a good writer, even after a post of mine gets republished on a major magazine blog. But I want to be.
- I never lose my sense of wonder at beautiful aesthetics. I love visiting breathtakingly gorgeous places and marveling at art created by other humans. I love being around people who are unafraid to wear exactly what they want, even if it’s weird. This happens in San Francisco every day. In Brazil, locals show up at the beach in thong bikinis, regardless of body type or size. I loved seeing self-expression and sensuality trumping conventional beauty standards.
I realize that I’m lucky to even be having this dilemma at all — what should I do with all my delicious free time while I’m not working? But it’s also a great chance to face some fundamental questions that people end up having to answer at some point or another. For some, after a lifetime of hard work and retirement at 65, the existential questions come as a shock. I’m just on a temporary break, but it’s well worth it to recalibrate my habits as I go along.
Watch your thoughts for they become words.
Watch your words for they become actions.
Watch your actions for they become habits.
Watch your habits for they become your character.
— This quote has been attributed to Churchill, Thatcher, Gandhi, and so many others that I have no idea who actually said it. But I like it anyway.
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