This article was hand-written.
This article is a work-in-progress.
I didn’t always have a sense of purpose.
I had just finished my B.Sc university degree in Digital Humanities, which had effectively left me devoid of intrinsic motivation, and lacking motivation to do what truly excites oneself, giving us reason to get up in the mornings.
After deciding to move to Barcelona with a new remote job in my back-pocket, I discovered it was quite a lonely time for me.
I made some friends, but in my experience, the bigger the city, the greater the necessity for isolation; the more inaccessible people around, the more lonely one can feel.
People have their busy schedules, and work-loaded lives to keep themselves above their expenses in expensive cities. People don’t as often take the time to talk to the person next to them at the bus-stop - after all - this is their 4th bus-stop today, and they have their phone to keep them company.
I have often felt somewhat disconnected in cities, Despite the the abundance of people around, there are always more that you don’t know, nor have the time or space to get to know.
It takes a while to build a circle of friends in a city. It’s like making kimchi. You have to spend some time prepping all the ingredients, give them some love every day, squish them a bit, nurture them and make sure they don’t foul, and in a few weeks/months you’ll have a spicy culture going.
But leave it alone for a while, and there might not be anything left to come back to…
Understandably, I recognise that cities aren’t everyone’s problem, but regardless, I wanted real connection. I didn’t want to be stuck living in structures of old.
I wondered, what kinds of connection could exist if we didn’t have the usual stuff holding us back?
The usual things: phones, jobs, transit-times, brokeness, lack-of-time, burnout and our fear of the unknown.
So I quit my job and went travelling on the cheap.
I worked on a homestead farm in a small village called Monachil, near Granada in Spain - there I met cave hippies, who were improving collectively-owned land and living off of their home-brewed solar energy.
I built an egg-incubator totally from scratch, on a fab-lab Farm with a crazy engineer called Lucio, in the south of Portugal.
I joined an experimental project that called themselves the psychedelic renaissance. (Among many other identities.)
These experiences were unforgettable. I cried, I healed, I transformed. Returning back to reality after these experiences was difficult, but I had found an underlying purpose:
Found a community.
The what, the where, the how, the who - I was sure I’ll figure it out, But the why, that’s the juicy part. I’d like to begin to attempt to explain why.
… TBC