Day 153: Where to next?

Today I went to the beach with my housemates and remembered how nice it is to be outside and be around other people. I miss traveling!

Some friends have asked me what I plan to do after my stay here in this Santa Cruz house, and I honestly have no idea. I had moved to Austin a year ago to try to make a home base there after being nomadic for the past few years and ended up leaving in February for the Hacker Fellowship in New York. Once the program shut down due to COVID-19 in March, I came to this house in Santa Cruz and have been here since. I’ll have been here for 3 months next week! Holy smokes, time has flown by.

At some point though, I’ll move on, and I’m not quite sure where I’d like to go. My original plan when I went to NYC was to go to someplace in Asia because it’d be nice to live there and also attend some meditation retreats. I had been thinking of going back to Bali, Thailand, or Korea — the first two because they’re popular for digital nomads, and it’d be fun to meet more indie makers working on interesting things (not dropshippers) and Korea because it’d be neat to try to get more in touch with my roots and improve my Korean so that I can converse with my family using vocabulary beyond that of a five-year-old.

Or I can also go back to Austin. I loved my time there, and I got lucky in meeting awesome people who I’d like to spend more time with.

There’s also the option of living in San Francisco, which has the highest density of my close friends than anywhere else. But for some reason, living in SF doesn’t quite appeal to me right now.

I’ve also considered moving back home in Orange County (in southern California) to spend more time with my family and childhood friends, but I’m not sure how much I’d like living at home. I guess I can just get a place near my house, but I’m also not sure how easily I’d be able to find a community of people I’d vibe with.

There’s a bigger question here of whether I should try to set roots down somewhere and invest in building deep connections rather than moving around so much. That sounds more appealing than being nomadic and traveling a bunch since I’ve done quite a bit of that, but I’ve also been pretty happy in whatever situation I’ve found myself in so I don’t think I can really make a “bad” decision.

I recognize though, that it’s a lot easier to build strong friendships when you see people IRL on a somewhat regular basis, especially since I’m (deliberately) terrible at digital communications.

In short, I basically don’t have any plans and am figuring things out day by day, but I feel comfortable with that. Since leaving Google back in 2017, I’ve gotten much better at accepting the uncertainty that’s inherent in life and being open to what life has to offer rather than needing to have a plan to try to maintain a sense of control.

Life simply is, and I’m here for the ride.