A new blog, a new start.

But wait, let's back up — why a new start, where am I now, and what's going on? 

Quick recap for newcomers:

Around the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022 for me, Teresa and I left our 9-5 day jobs at Google and NASA respectively. There were a number of reasons behind each of our decisions, but at the core neither of us were satisfied with spending our time and energy doing work that didn't feel meaningful to us. Fortunately, we had saved up enough money so we could take a break and explore other paths in life.

What we knew we both wanted was a home, but with the home prices in the areas we wanted to be in, that would mean we would need a mortgage, essentially forcing us back to our jobs to pay it off for the next many, many years.

But more importantly, we weren't really excited about the prospect of buying a home and living under the prevailing consumerist, individualist paradigm. To spend so much money to buy a house just to live isolated lives segregated from our friends and family, that seemed silly. Why not live with those we care about?

After some research, we came upon this notion of "intentional community". An intentional community is a group of people who have come together to live according to their shared values, based on the idea that cooperative living leads to a higher quality of life than one could enjoy under the existing individualist paradigm that dominates society today. In a nutshell, you find people who care about the same things as you, you all go in on a larger shared property than any individual could afford, and then you work together to figure out how you can live collaboratively and share the load of living while reaping the enormous benefits of collaboration.

It's an idea with tremendous potential, but difficult for a lot of people in the mainstream to imagine because we're not really used to living collaboratively. Most of us lack the skills to navigate the various social dynamics that invariably arise, and the fear of conflict makes many unwilling to try at all. It's tragic — especially because that's largely avoidable with the right preparation and planning — but true.

So after fate threw us a wrench with our rental situation In June of 2022, we decided to try one for ourselves. Teresa and I discovered a couple of people who were interested in forming a community in Hawaii — and noticed there were many others on the islands — so we packed up everything but our essentials into storage and took a leap.

The last 2 years have been us exploring what it means to live an intentional community there, and it was a amazing experience. We both learned so much, and I'll be sharing a lot of our experiences here on this blog moving forward.

Where we are now

Ultimately, while we valued our experiences in that community, it just wasn't quite the right fit for us. So we decided to move on, and in the process of figuring out where we'd go next we discovered a forming community that has a vision that seems to align strongly with ours. There weren't any other communities on the islands that appealed so us, so we packed up everything, put some more things in storage, traveled across the states once again to visit friends and family, and then went to Vermont to visit the other two co-founders of the forming community.

We knew from the beginning that it would only be a brief visit with winter fast approaching and no spare four-season structures on the land, but we had to leave after just a few days because of something we did not expect to be so bad: ticks! It just did not work with our long-haired cats. Even when they were just hanging around the common areas they would get probably a dozen ticks per day that we would have to meticulously comb out of their fur.

Sure, it's more or less solvable for the cats with flea & tick treatments, however, they would also bring them inside and there's no flea & tick treatment for humans, unfortunately (and over 50% of the ticks we were finding contain pathogens responsible for various tick-borne illnesses, like Lyme disease). Everything we've heard and researched about Lyme disease led us to believe that it is something to take seriously, and so we decided to leave until we could ensure their and our safety.

So in the meantime we are staying with Teresa's parents while we work remotely with the other co-founders building intentional community. For example, right now I'm coming up with the membership process that will outline the process that people go through if they are interested in becoming a member. So for example we'll probably want to have some sort of questionnaire they fill out to tell us about themselves, we'll probably want to do some background screening, have some kind of an interview, etc. Then we need to agree on how we decide whether someone gets accepted or not. Is it a community-wide vote, or is it up to a special recruitment committee to decide? All these things need to be thought about and codified and agreed upon, and I'll be sharing the whole process for building the community here on my blog if you are curious to know more.

There is one other thing I'm thinking about too, and that's how to earn some money again. Unfortunately, while Teresa and I saved a lot before we started and became extremely frugal spenders, there are expenses that are unavoidable and we're running on fumes now. So I need to make some money, and how else to do that but through doing what I'm passionate about?

For me, that has always been creating amazing experiences for people. That could mean a helpful product, a tool, software, or a video game, but in my case, I'm currently focusing on the latter. Teresa and I played some games recently and I was reminded how much potential there is in gaming to inspire and enrich the lives of people who play them (more on that later as well).

That's all for now. Thanks for reading. ❤️

See you later, universe. 😉