Prior to the onset of lockdowns I discovered an internet personality named Andy Lee Graham who spent the previous 20 years traveling and producing media about his world travels under the brand, Hobo Traveler. As someone fascinated by cultures, and therefore the potential to experience more of them, I devoured his wisdom because his methodologies seemed attuned with my own personality. His lifestyle represented a reality of some deep aspiration I had not fully articulated in years. Wanderlust.
I also mention travel guide producer Rick Steves. The differences between Rick Steves and Andy Lee Graham could fill a library, but they both compell me to travel in their own way.
When I discovered Andy, I already established a routine of visiting my cousins in Brazil in the summers when off from work as a substitute in the Miami-Dade County public school system. He often said that 80% of the world lived on less than $20 a day, and that it cost him less to travel all the time than live in the USA. To some extent, my experiences in Brazil reinforced this contention.
Having made so little of my financial and professional life, the pandemic provided me a profound opportunity to reassess my monetary future. In my then 33 years, I saw many ways of living and enjoyed the company and time of people representing those lifestyles. I knew I could live on relatively little compared to most USAmericans, but I had not established some means of providing for that. I had so many dreams in my mind which failed to manifest through action into the physical world.
How could I travel cheaply without either first saving money, or on the other hand having an ongoing way to make money while traveling? I would start saving for the months prior to June, and then leave to Brazil as soon as I could. Ambiguity regarding human civilization in the first few months of 2020 resulted in my canceling my normal trip, however by October an opportunity to meet a strange cousin from an out of touch branch of my family served as a sufficient justification to travel. I spent three months in Brazil, the longest amount of time I spent away from home.
Parallel to this, and certainly supplementary to it, I read an article in a local paper promoting marine technician training in the context of the ongoing and worsening shortage of skilled labor in the USA. Some light bulb lit up in my mind from the combination of the ocean and cultivating personal manual skills. I could go back to customer service type jobs at any time, but when would I have the energy and time later in life to take on a new trade? Perhaps one that could fulfill a dream of mine to sail the seas.
I weave this narrative to give some explanation or, maybe, justification for why, over the last year, aside from bitcoin brunch, I participate in little social activity. Before writing this I watched the first few minutes of the Orange Pill Podcast episode Microdosing the Book of Max, in which, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert invited bitcoiners to come to El Salvador and explore the frontiers of bitcoin. They compell me to travel, but can I build my citadel in the cracks without first creating a foundation on which to build it? In the last year I might have attended a few conferences, plenty of crypto social events, or taken on several interesting projects. Instead, I worked on my foundation.