Here I document my adventures in travel, lifestyle, and thinking differently with the hope of broadening people’s perspectives. I hope you enjoy!
All in Lifestyle Design
Many of the most valuable lessons from my time at the University of Chicago come from a class I took this semester called “Economics for Everyone” taught by Steven Levitt and John List. One of these lessons was Levitt’s 6 tips for a strong personal finance strategy.
In my economics class this quarter, my professor has often stressed to us the power of defaults. The basic idea is similar to inertia: set people on a path, and they will continue on it. This has far-reaching consequences in various realms such as financial policies, legal decisions, and business plans. However, you can also use it to improve your social life.
For those of us constantly thinking about lifestyle design, optimization is a familiar concept that we are always applying to new areas of our lives. However, these trends can intersect, leading two optimized solutions to be one unoptimized problem.
People often ask me why I go through the effort of setting up a virtual assistant like Alexa, and all the routines, groupings, and shortcuts that go with it. The answer is simple: so I can devote more of my focus to the things that matter most.
Last week I began the long process of completely redoing the way I use my iPhone. As someone who who grew up around these devices, it always seemed that each new update and feature was serving up better ways to be productive and stay on top of the important tasks in my life. However, I am beginning to realize that these features, developer intentions aside, do not actually make me more productive or allow me to stay more closely in contact with friends.
My friends know I‘m notoriously late, but I don‘t tend to view myself and someone who is always running behind. Germans are stereotypically extremely punctual, and that is something I would say I value as well. Yet, numerous, unconnected, outside sources all were verifying the same thing: I am not punctual.
Recently, I've been thinking a lot about how I want to live my life. I have a notion of what that looks like after college, but my lifestyle now doesn’t reflect that. Perhaps this has to do with a hesitancy to box myself in before experiencing all the new opportunities college has to offer, but I am inclined to think it has more to do with the notion of constraints. Whether it be set class times and schedules or limited financial resources, there are some things which play a major role in shaping my daily life, but that I am unable to change without diverting some major life trajectories.
This past summer I was lucky enough to be able to intern with two employers at the same time. One of those employers provided me with the opportunity to work remotely, the type of job oftentimes held by digital nomads. Although I loved being able to work from afar, having such a job brought with it a host of unexpected challenges.
This month I decided to delete all my social media apps (Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat) in order to try and focus on living in the moment. So far, here are some of the things I have noticed.
