Can You Crowdsource Adulthood?

A year-long experiment in the wisdom of the crowd

“I think I want another tattoo,” I say to Nicole.

“No,” she says. “You can’t trust yourself.”

Fine, I make bad decisions. There was that time I almost bought $140 of frozen meat from a guy at my front door. And the time I got the standard poodle perm that turned my head into a trapezoid. And the time a string of bad decisions led me to my mom’s downstairs bedroom for an 8-month stay.

I’ve been doing better. Five years ago I landed in Seattle with almost no money, and now I’ve worked up to a freelancing writing and design career. I’m this close to becoming the adventuress I’ve always wanted to be.

There’s this perfect version of me who lives just six months out, when I’m going to start eating less meat, meditate eight hours a day, and floss more, or ever. She’s a woman who stays off social media mostly and doesn’t wake up suffering from the pounding nausea of bad decisions.

“Oh, you’re doing fine,” my friends say when I go into my den of self-deprecation.

It’s hard to judge how well you’re doing. The problem is, we have so many rule books, but no rule book for all the rule books. I started this project because I want to hear what humans think about how to live. I want to start from scratch, and get diplomatic guidance. When was the last time you thought about how you would build a life from the ground up, if you hadn’t been handed a culture?

Designing life from almost nothing is a chance I have now. I’m packing up my apartment of five years, heading out to visit family, then to Colombia on a one-way ticket. And then, well, I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.

I’ll crowdsource travel destinations, purchases, and books to read. I’ll follow the crowd’s decisions unless I have a compelling reason not to, which we can discuss if it comes to that. We’ll see if, after a year, my life is better by crowdsourcing my decisions. In the same way that a crowd can guess the weight of an ox, can it design the ideal life with crowd-sourced decision-making?

Here’s how it will work:

1. I’ll ask you a question about how you think life should work.
2. You’ll give an idea in the comments, perhaps telling us why you think that’s the best answer.
3. If you like someone else’s answer, you can like it to help it move up the ranks. Like as many as you want.

Question 1:

What’s the most powerful thing someone could do on January 1 to set themselves up for the year?

Answer below and I’ll get the top answer done before midnight tomorrow.