I’ve always been bad at endings. Things tend to start definitively — I can tell you I left the United States on Norwegian Air flight DI7152 at 9:05pm on the 13^th of August, 2018 — but more often than not they seem to fizzle out. I’ve fallen out of touch with more friends than I’ve lost from angry disagreements. I don’t quit many books or video games or TV shows so much as I set them down and never get around to picking them back up. And at parties I’m far more comfortable slipping out the back door without saying goodbye. It’s reassuring to imagine I could slip back in without anyone noticing.

I think this is going to be my last blog post, at least for this particular blog. Never say never and all that, but I haven’t been able to travel the way I did when I started out, and while I hope to get back to something like that eventually it’s just not very fun sitting down to write about visiting the same cities over and over again, especially when I’m disinclined to spend money without having a steady source of income. I feel boring. Maybe I am boring. Maybe that’s okay.

I assumed I’d find some obvious demarcation to bring this to a close, like when I finally got residency in Portugal or if I bought property and settled down somewhere, but it’s increasingly apparent there just isn’t going to be something conclusive. I’m still traveling, if slower and to less interesting places. My health is more precarious than when I started but I wouldn’t call it bad. Everything’s just slightly off kilter, like a runner who got a tiny piece of grit in their shoe. It’s thrown everything off, and it’s going to keep being a problem until I finally stop and deal with it. So I’m just choosing a semi-arbitrary date, like New Year’s, and I’m calling it. New Year’s has always been a time to reflect on what’s come before and prepare for what’s lying ahead. It’s as good a time as any to wrap this up.

I’m grateful to everyone who’s been following me. It’s been more people than I expected, especially since I put approximately zero effort into self-promotion. Whether you’ve read every single one of these posts or only dropped in from time to time, I appreciate it. I also learned a lot about writing. The real value, it turns out, comes from forcing yourself to write to a schedule. I may not have been entirely strict about what constituted a deadline — I’d typically but not consistently post an update any time I crossed a national border — but the relentless pace really hones your skills, especially for a serial procrastinator such as myself.

If there’s anything that failed it’s that I wanted this to feel like more of a conversation. It should be obvious by now I never had any great wisdom to impart beyond double checking the dates of any tickets you buy before you purchase them. Writing here has always been as much about working things out for myself as sharing the experience with others. But I had the misfortune of writing this over the course of the great social media die off. I was never sure how to consistently get my writing in front of the people who wanted to see it, and a large portion of the people I cared about seeing it have almost completely disengaged with social media anyway. Not that I blame them.

So I’m taking a break from writing online, and when and if I come back it’ll be to write something else. I don’t what that’ll look like. But I’ll figure something out, eventually. Lord knows I don’t have much to do except puzzle out what that might be, these days.

I spend a great deal of my time thinking about how I’m spending my time, or at least how I ought to be spending my time. Say what you like about unemployment, but it at least affords you a lot of space to think about things like that, if you’re so inclined. And in the middle of all this I stumbled onto a book about time management, although it’d be more accurate to describe it as an anti-time-management book. It’s called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and it raises a lot of difficult questions about our relationship with time, and modernity, and death.

One example: I just talked about “spending” time. People commonly use that kind of idiom. We’ll talk about “saving” time in order to “spend” our “free” time doing things we care about, or we’ll worry about “wasting” time by working slowly and once we’ve “lost” time we’ll have to “steal” time away from something else to catch up. These metaphors all fall out of industrialization, which imagines time as a resource which can be commodified. But time isn’t a commodity. By virtue of being human we all experience time in the exact same way, one moment following another, an unceasing stream in which the present constantly replaces the past. You can immerse yourself in that or distract yourself from it, but there’s no saving it up and spending it once you find something worthwhile. Time is an intrinsic and inalienable quality of our experience. It’s not separate from us. It is us.

Put that way, it’s not your time which needs managing. It’s your attention. You can direct your attention towards the things you think are important or you can let your attention wander. And we live in a world filled with chat apps and binge watching and TikTok and doomscrolling where hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested to try and monopolize what limited attention we have.

None of this would matter very much if we lived forever. You’d always get another bite at the apple, an opportunity to try again at anything you missed the first time around. But 4,000 weeks is roughly the length of a single lifetime. That’s it. You’ll never be able to do everything you want. You probably aren’t going to be able to do all the things you think are important. You’re going to have to ruthlessly narrow your focus to the most critical things, and even then you’ll likely have to choose between them.

The good news, if you want to call it that, is that it really doesn’t matter what you focus on. You, along with everyone who is living or has ever lived, are a rounding error in the scope of the universe. You don’t matter. No one does. And that frees you to decide for yourself what’s important. This ends up being another way into existentialism, in other words.

For me the big revelation is that we’ve collectively constructed a world that’s almost guaranteed to confuse and distract you away from the things you think are important. The same economic processes which find it useful to commodify time find it equally useful to commodify people. The things most modern jobs ask you to do — typically sitting at a desk and typing away at a computer — are neither inherently rewarding nor valuable in any way except to boost a corporation’s bottom line. And those jobs place constraints on you, often dictating the times and the location where you work, which necessitates so much effort in commuting and running errands and doing chores that you never really get to disconnect from them. The few breaks you get, you’re usually so exhausted that you barely have time to recuperate before it’s time to go back.

That’s why any time management system is doomed to failure. They’ll certainly help you get better at some arbitrary metric, like clearing your inbox or emptying the dishwasher in a timely fashion. But are those actually things you value? When you die, is that what you want to be remembered for? Maybe it is — you get to decide what’s meaningful for yourself, after all — but for most people they’re things you only do because they promise to enable you to get to the things you actually care about. And by forcing you to focus on the tasks which are almost certainly the things you don’t think are important, time management systems ensure you’ll never get to the tasks you do. And that — the idea that corporations have imposed a kind of false consciousness over much of the world, reliant on a deceptive commodification of time and structured so you never have the perspective necessary to think about what a life living without those assumptions might look like — that’s fundamentally gnostic. As any good gnostic will tell you, once you’ve noticed the superstructure the next step is to work your way around it.

It’s only in the wake of being unemployed and having nothing to do that I’ve really had the time to think about all this. And after several health scares, I’m a lot more fixated on the question of how I want to be in the world, what I want to focus on before I cease to exist. And to no one’s surprise it’s not sitting in an office and punching a clock, even if the office happens to be my hotel room.

I mentioned early on in this blog I seem to blow up my life every five years. It’s been 6½ years since I started traveling. I’m overdue. I feel like I’m in that awkward phase where it’s obvious things are going to need to change but still somewhat murky what that change is going to look like. I’ve entered my chrysalis era.

One thing I think I can definitively say is that it’s going to be more collaborative. The kind of projects I want to undertake and the future I envision requires far more skills and far more effort than I can bring to bear on my own. This is an uncomfortable position for me to be in; while I’m pretty good at communicating a vision and getting people excited about it I am abysmally bad at the day-to-day grind of keeping people engaged and on target and moving forward with a shared purpose. That’s something I’m going to need to figure out. I’ve lost interest in the projects I was capable of doing on my own. The problems I want to tackle are more grandiose. The solutions need to be as well.

That weirdly seems all seems to mirror where the world is, right now. Broadly speaking things don’t seem to be doing all that well. The world keeps getting more complicated and liberal democracy, at least in the state it reached in the early 20^th century, hasn’t exactly seemed up to the challenge. We’re collectively in the process of evolving something new, and it’s pretty clear it isn’t going to emerge in time to avoid what looks to be an unpleasantly turbulent number of upcoming decades.

So that’s what I’m focusing on. In the short term I’m still puttering around Europe, working towards Portuguese citizenship, getting some wisdom teeth extracted, visiting friends and attending some larps here and there. I may travel a bit; there’s a lot still out there to see. But I’m much more firmly focused on the future, now. There’s a plan of sorts, still being fleshed out, plus a backup for when it inevitably falls through; I’ll share more when I’m ready. I may not be able to fix the world, but I might be able to fix some small part of it, at least for myself and some friends and family. Maybe that’s all we can really ask of anybody. Plant some seeds, hope they flourish.

I celebrated New Year’s Eve in Copenhagen. Some friends of mine moved from the United States and I’m helping them welcome their new life overseas. I kicked off 2025 watching Dinner for One in a house largely empty of furniture but filled with friends and food and laughter. We should do this more often.

It’s been a calm and peaceful holiday season for me, a welcome pause in the ongoing insanity of life and politics. I know that’s only temporary. In a few days I leave for Lisbon, and I need to start closing this chapter of my life in earnest and starting the next one. It will be a disaster. It always is. All that I respectfully ask is that it be a glorious one.

If you would allow me one final indulgence, I’d like to close with the last words to Mary Oliver’s In Blackwater Woods. I first encountered it in Zagreb’s Museum of Broken Relationships. It made me cry. It still does.

I’ll keep in touch. I promise. Until then —

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