Go ultra light. Essentially become homeless. Own at most two pairs of clothing. Don’t worry about showering daily (or weekly), but keep your face clean and your teeth brushed. Don’t let the gear&food on your back exceed 35lbs (15kg). Sleep under the stars when it isn’t raining.

How I felt during: pretty rad. there’s this surreal thing that happens when you spend all day in direct contact with the sun and the moon. You feel physically connected to the solar system. You sense the Sun behind the earth at night. You get a real emotional connection with the environment and that has made climate change a bit more personal for me. In general, I’d never felt as much joy as I felt then. There’s this other surreal thing that happens. If you quit your job to go hike, you start seeing the weeks in front of you as bare and free, and the present becomes one long continuous moment.

I also spent a lot of my spare time reading old classical Greek and American philosophy. Seneca, Plato, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Ayn Rand, Thoreau, Emerson. It plugged me into the “meta-game” aspect of life, of course we’re all living but how could we live.

Takeaways: society is full of strings, things you don’t actually need to survive. time is better spent learning or exploring. it’s okay to abandon people that you feel you’ve outgrown. People my age (mid 30s) talk about how stressed they are and I can honestly say my attitude was permanently changed by that trip. I suppose Im a happy nihilist. Nothing matters, but that’s not a bad thing. I’m not hitting all of my goals, but my understanding of what reality is has been fundamentally altered where I know it’s not all about me, so losing is actually not a problem. It’s a lesson for me in the present, and my loss might become somebody else’s gain.