Vacation thoughts

Just got back from a two week camper trip in Northern Queensland. For a lot of it, cell reception was pretty bad. It meant I went several 24hr+ stretches without any connection to the internet at all. In addition, obviously I was outside almost all the time. It’s always nice to reflect on what happens during temporary lifestyle changes that are so drastic.

For two weeks, all I did basically was keep myself and my kids alive. Buy food, cook it, laundry, dishes, bedtimes, “No we don’t eat cheese covered in sand from the floor”, “we don’t throw monster trucks at each other”, etcetera. One thing that always happens in my mind whenever I travel is that I can’t help fantasize about what it would be like to live there. In this case, around Cairns. Cairns itself has a population of 175k people. The nature around it is absolutely incredible. We went from red desert, with endless stars, to one of the most amazing rain forests I’ve ever seen. The number of scary and dangerous animals we saw was very underwhelming. Nights and mornings were cold enough to wear a hoodie. If Australia has one major national obsession, it is probably camping. Many parts of the country are only accessible by 4x4. If I were to live there, I would want to buy a car like this:

Other than mentally deciding on the ultimate family camping Landcruiser build, the non-stop barrage of operational tasks that comes with camping with young kids keeps you grounded and present in the moment.

In our regular life in Singapore, we have outsourced almost all house work. There is a sense of satisfaction from doing all of that, with the luxury of not needing to work1. But what also always happens, is that this wears off and after 10 days or so, a sense of restlessness and boredom slowly starts to set in for me. So, I’m happy to be back as well. And here are some other random realizations I’ve had while away:

My life and work are nice. I enjoy what I’m doing and I really like the social life we have in Singapore. I love being a parent, and to spend time with my kids. While I do think it would be a lot of fun to spend a couple of years in a more rural area blasting around in a Landcruiser and making fires, there are serious tradeoffs that would come with any implementation of that idea. In any case, there is still a lot of time. When I’m in my 60s and the kids are out of the house, there’s plenty of opportunity to go on a camping trip in a 4x4. While I was away, no meaningful new thoughts or insights have come up. I have no real problems that I feel are unaddressed. Sure, I should exercise a bit more and not drink as many IPAs, but my kids are 2 and 4, give me a break. If I were to talk to a coach, I wouldn’t really know what to tell them other than that I have no serious dissatisfaction in my life that I feel under equipped to work on. There is work to be done for sure. I’m nowhere near ‘done’. But I’m confident that I’m on the right path. So I spent the whole vacation being happy and mostly unworried. What a great thing!

Making campfires is a lot of fun. Sitting around them to stay warm and to just chat with a beer or glass of wine is amazing. Walking away from the fire for a ‘bush wee’, and looking up at a sky full of stars without any urban light pollution gives you a whole renewed love for nature and sense of awe for the earth. I’m lucky to have done this kind of stuff a LOT in my life, in some amazing places like Canada and Myanmar. But also in simple places like a farm outside of Zwolle. When it doesn’t matter if your clothes get a bit dirty, and your hands hurt a little bit from using them to break wood into smaller pieces, or you’ve burned a finger slightly, and you have a couple of scrapes and mosquito bites on your legs, I feel completely at home in a way that I don’t get in cities, and that is hard to explain. It’s not that I feel less at home in cities, because I also really love cities. It’s just different, and I want to have both types of home in my life.

Having grown up camping with my parents, I enjoy nearly every aspect of it. Even the things that are objectively uncomfortable have a strong sense of nostalgia for me. Being forced to live outside even when it is cold or rainy, doing dishes in a camping sink, hanging a laundry line, getting into a cold bed. On top of that, you’re sort of outside 24/7, especially with the rooftop tent we slept in, and I really love that. “What am I depriving myself of by not going camping way more often?” is something I asked myself in my only journal post of the entire vacation.

Well, I guess that’s a matter of perspective, and it has solutions. We’re already talking about the next trip. Japan is almost entirely unexplored for us, and it has amazing car camping infrastructure. Taiwan is another great relatively nearby destination. Western Australia is another one that’s still undiscovered.

Solving simple, physical problems for two weeks rekindled a sense of physical agency. The day I got home I DIYed a solution to a problem that started to render my child seat useless as my daughter was getting heavier.

The timing of this couldn’t be better. We’re moving to a new house in Singapore soon which is going to have back and front yards. There will be many more opportunities to DIY stuff. I hope to retain some of this energy.

What does a camping like this make? How many people live here? What kind of stuff do they buy? What would you do if you lived here? What is the camper gear landscape like? How much revenue does this company make? Maybe that’s what I meant earlier when I wrote that I’m happy with what I do for work. It would be a stretch to call ‘business’ or ‘entrepreneurship’ a passion perhaps, and I have a general distrust of the word ‘passion’ anyway as it gets applied to work. But I do just gravitate to thinking about what kinds of business could be build within any kind of location or context I am in.

Opening your mailbox for the first time in 30 hours is one hell of a reality check. What is all this shit? Normally, I insta-archive 80-90% of my incoming email, I think. But what if I didn’t have to? This happens after every digital detox I do, but I’ll spend some time cleaning up and unsubscribing diligently instead of just deleting or archiving. Good use case for AI.

I’ve never really been into electronic gadgets. Smart home stuff has very limited appeal to me, though automatic curtains are kinda cool. But I love outdoor stuff. For this trip I bought a new Victorinox pocket knife and I used it every day. I have accumulated a small flashlight collection, with the piece the resistance being a 4000 lumen beam of pure power, called the Acebeam E75 (highly recommend). Now, of course I’m being targeted for this stuff, and apparently there are several brands making Titanium outdoor gear (I love Titanium stuff). For the next trip!

Drafts in various states of completion:

• I’ve been reading ‘The design of everyday things’, and started writing a post about design

• Have a largely finished draft about what happens when the population starts shrinking, but I don’t think I’ll finish or post this

• A post about the surprising amount of detail hidden inside every task, told from the perspective of working on the old car I had as a student

Ideas without any words written yet:

• AI does not amp it up (on Claude accepting massive delays and not having any sense of urgency)

• Drawing together Ben Thompson and Evans on AI economics. What will happen with AI models and token pricing: incentives of model builders, incentives of software builders, big labs pulling up the ladder (disabling use of their LLMs for LLM development by competitors, kneecapping models more and more), the brewing fight about distillation, Big lab incentives to change data policies and/or secretly train on your chats and Anthropic’s Fable move that actually did that with surprisingly little backlash.

My kids have been obsessed with the Planet Song:

It’s pretty catchy. And I know a lot more about the planets than I ever have. I can now list them in order from the sun, and I know which one is the hottest (Venus), coldest (Uranus), biggest (Jupiter) and smallest (Mercury). Coincidentally, Venus was visible very clearly from Australia in the evenings just after sunset while we were there. It is the brighest object in the sky after the sun and moon and looks like a very bright star. Pretty awesome!