Earth Expedition

When 2025 started, I was working a job I was unfulfilled with, burdened by a house in a city I didn't want to live in, living in Minnesota three hours from the office, and unsure what I wanted to do with my life. While I still have no clue what to do with my life, everything else changed within a matter of months.

It all started with some simple goals. Every year I make a list of goals (which I typically fail around 50-80% of), but this year I tried something a little bit different. Rather than the typical SMART-style goals to appease the analytical mind, I wanted to improve my life based more on vibes. Who can fail vibes-based goals??

Here it is in its entirety:

2025: Pursue Passion

Form habits, not metrics

Work less, live more

Live more.

Ideas for living

Move across country (to Washington)
Read lots of books
Play some good chess
Take some nice hikes
Be active in community
Restart every month
Simplify
Simplify
Simplify

Happiness is something you create on your own, and hope someone adds to it. - Unknown Danish woman

HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED - Chris McCandless

Yup. That's it. I always include some relevant quotes to remind myself of what is important. You'll notice the themes centering around working less, living more, and simplifying. So as you might guess, to accomplish this, I quit my job in February on short notice and moved across the country to pursue a new opportunity, only it wasn't to Washington, and the new job required even more time and commitment than before.

Here I come sunny Florida! It was actually quite nice. When I left my house for the last time, it was -20F (-29C). By the time I got to Florida several days later, it was apparent to myself and my dog Aurora that the AC wasn't working well in the RAV4. But we made it. The new job gave me the push I had been looking for and was a way to try something a little different; full-on project management instead of power systems engineering policies and procedures. The work was actually a lot more fulfilling as I was able to see things getting done, I got to spend every day talking with friends (friends who became co-workers, not co-workers you have to try to become friends with), and having the potential to contribute to the growth of the company. But at the end of the day, something I can't explain just didn't feel right. I was itching to move to Washington, and the work drive I had in the years prior, when I would have killed for a position like this, had faded. So after a lot of consideration, I found it necessary to leave that job behind me too, and in May I made my way to the beautiful state of Washington unemployed and homeless, with just my dog, and my trusty* RAV filled with my remaining belongings.

While my end goal was and still is to end up in Seattle, Seattle rent and zero income don't get along. That drove me towards Big Beautiful Bellingham, where I knew I wouldn't be looking for a job, but being in the state might make interviewing in Seattle easier when the time came to that. Thankfully, despite some challenges with getting my short-term sublease approved, the woman in charge that day let me move in when I got there, and everything was “official” a couple days later.

Good news, the house sold. During my tenure in Florida, I had hired help for renovations on my house to ready it for sale, and got it on the market in May. It went fast. Almost too fast. But it was a huge weight off my shoulders and I'm okay with that. The lack of a mortgage helped open up a lot of financial opportunities. Should I invest in the booming stock market? Crypto? CS2 skins? Another house? Any one of those would have been more reasonable to my former self. Instead I chose to start planning a trip I never would have imagined myself doing just a few years ago.

First, a whole month in Europe. Then two. Then three, with either of the parents joining for multiple weeks (in Finland, Italy). Then maybe I'll go all around the world over 6 months, who knows - the possibilities are endless! At this point I had about 2 months before my sublease expired, and as I started booking things, it became a reality that it was going to happen. No need to look for a job. No need to have an alarm to wake me up. Just me and my dog enjoying the city, reading books, meeting locals at coffee shops, enjoying life and thinking about what to do next.

As the end of August was approaching, I needed to wrap up some arrangements, putting the few belongings I wasn't bringing with into a storage unit in Seattle, getting my dog to her temporary home on the farm in the Midwest**. A short bus ride and flight back to Seattle, and then off to Iceland.

So am I doing what's right? Not a clue. Six months ago I had a house, a career, and the default path I'd been following since college. Now I have a one-way plane ticket and a few hostel reservations. Is this going to help me find what is missing? Maybe. But a park in Europe isn't significantly different from one in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. Is it helping me to meet my goal of living more? Without a doubt. I might not know what I'm doing with my life, but I'm no longer sure that's the most important question for me to answer.

*Fun fact: my 2008 RAV crossed 300,000 miles while crossing the plains of North Dakota.

**Many of the Midwest states are on the east side of the country, and we should therefore split the group in half and refer to them as the “Middle West” and “Middle East”. See: Ohio.