It wasn’t a totally cold approach. We first met around 2019 through our friend circles, but never got to know each other. I’d sometimes see her at get togethers, always with a bunch of other people around, so the conversations remained surface-level.

After our unplanned encounter that day, we talked on the bench for a little, then went for a glass of wine at a nearby tapas bar, and have been dating ever since.

What makes chance encounters like this possible?

This example of how our relationship started is exactly why I created Serendipity Lab.

Ever since moving to Barcelona, I felt an urge to share my experience of what it’s like living in a place with good social infrastructure where you run into people by accident as you’re going about your day.

Before moving to Spain, I’d only lived in places that prioritized cars over people. But with density comes great benefits.

Not a day goes by where I don’t bump into a friend or acquaintance while I’m out and about. When I meet someone for the first time, I joke that I’m sure we’ll run into each other soon by accident. It leads to a sense of community just by the frequency of which you see each other.

My relationship with Cristina came to fruition because we both enjoy being outside in public spaces. Sitting on a bench while in the company of others is what leads to these seemingly random interactions.

These frequent collisions with acquaintances don’t happen as often when you live in a place that’s full of sprawl. I’m certain the suburban style of living in the U.S. leads to loneliness and consumerism.

This is the main reason I left. When getting around requires you to sit in a climate controlled bubble shut off from the rest of society, serendipity dies. Car culture and lack of public life nudges people to stay at home glued to the screens.

I saw a video making it’s rounds a few months ago and haven’t been able to get it out of my head:

Screen-time is has dominated everything while time spent outside meeting with friends is way down. Having sex fell off the list right before the 90’s and was replaced by watching porn.

When you live in a place where you do have the opportunity to go downstairs and be around other people without having to get into a car, it makes it easier to put the phone down and go outside.

This is why I find the expression “wherever you go, there you are” misleading.

Some people say no matter where you live, life is more or less the same. I think that’s an oversimplification and more so describing internal states.

Where you live shapes everything about you, from your friends and hobbies to the type of work you dedicate your life to. Where you live determines the dating market as well, there’s some places where your odds are simply better.

If you’re single and looking for love, it’s helpful to take these factors into account:

Among 20- and 30-somethings, almost every single city in America has more single men than single women. Although no single woman in New York will believe it, I promise it’s true. Once you get up into your 50’s, though, the balance shifts to extra single women everywhere.

The changeover from extra men to extra women starts in the late 30’s, but doesn’t overtake California and the Pacific Northwest until everyone’s in their 50’s.

If you are looking for single women in their twenties, they’re hiding out in Durham NC, Savannah GA, or Jackson MS. The North has nothing for you, it’s Southern belles or bust.

It’s not just the odds though, it’s about the density and amount of public life available where you live. Do you bump into familiar faces as your going about your day, or does your lifestyle resemble more of a silo where you’re rotating between home and work closed off from chance encounters with acquaintances?

Certain places make life much more enjoyable in ways that are difficult to measure.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs describes this idea:

Most of it is ostensibly utterly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all. The sum of such casual, public contact at a local level — most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone — is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need.

The quote resonates because as I mentioned, when I met Cristina I was out on my bike running an errand. And since we already knew each other, it felt natural to approach her and strike up a conversation.

Cheers to being in the right place at the right time.

If you haven’t found your person yet, don’t give up, it’s quite possible you met them already and just don’t know it.

And whatever you do, don’t go on a date to a restaurant with a chatbot, that’s weird.

<3 B

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Living in Spain has opened my eyes to the beauty of free flowing social spaces. There is an abundance of parks, plazas, and trails where you can sit and enjoy the great outdoors while sharing a meal with someone or banging out an essay like I am now.

This builds on the idea of Third Places, but for this essay I’ll focus on the places where no transaction is required. Let’s call them Transactionless Third Places.

With so much of our work and social lives online, it’s even more important to put focus into the built environment and how our public spaces are designed.

Earlier this year, I saw a report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that says Americans spend approximately 90 percent of their time indoors.

It explains why touching grass is now a meme. After reading that report I started bringing more awareness to how much time I was spending indoors myself.

One of the downsides of remote work is it can get boring being at home behind a computer all day. In the past I’ve joined different co-working spaces and they were great at first but then got to know the regulars and would end up chatting too much.1 I did the coffee shop thing for a while but they were hit or miss, sometimes too busy and loud, or too much traffic of people in and out.

So a few months ago I decided to change up my routine and add some more serendipity to my days. I started going out for bike rides in search of picnic tables.

There’s something special about a good bench or picnic table with a nice view. I once heard a saying about how if you see a public bench, you should sit on it because someone went to the trouble of placing it there for people to use.

Now I’m hooked on bike rides and taking my laptop with me and enjoying some fresh air while working or writing.

What I like about going to a public picnic table is I still get to observe the social life around me, but don’t have to participate in the conversations. I’m just a bystander in the background.

I was researching to see if anyone has gone around Geocaching picnic tables and it turns out there is a crowdsource app (Picnick) specifically for picnic tables around the world. But it seems like it hasn’t picked up yet in Spain, there’s few and far between when I opened the app, so I started digging more and I found someone else who shares my love of picnic tables and outdoor spaces.

In 2012 Marta Dach was looking to spend more time outdoors exploring Catalunya and couldn’t find any good resources on where to find picnic tables, so she started her own blog Som de Picnic (We are Picnic) and began collecting locations on there.

When I found Som de Picnic I was stoked. There’s a link to an interactive google map with pins of picnic tables all over Catalunya, now I want to go hunt down all of these:

It’s funny scrolling through her IG account to see all the different flavors of picnic tables, I’m a fan of the stone ones, they’re always nice and sturdy:

And if benches are more your thing there’s also this guy who goes around the UK rating benches:

When I find niche accounts like this it brings joy knowing how much other people also appreciate good public infrastructure.

Unfortunately Marta from Som de Pic is no longer uploading new picnic tables. I think I might have to pick up the torch and continue the quest, I’ve started marking spots I’ve found around Barcelona, I’ll keep updating this map as I find more.

If you feel like you’ve been spending too much time indoors, consider this your nudge to get outside and find a good picnic table near you.

Until next time,

<3 B

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1

For those who do want to chat, I remember seeing an idea spreading across the UK to help combat loneliness, they’re called Chatty Benches, it’s a bench with a colorful sign that let’s people know you’re open to conversation:

Scenius = the communal form of genius.

By plugging yourself into the right scene, it can propel you forward in ways that are more difficult to achieve than if your just by yourself.

There are periods throughout history where certain places attracted a certain type of individual, often sharing a common goal or vision.

These places are known as “scenes”.

Some scenes played a major role in progressing humanity, when talented people come together and socialize, it creates fertile ground for serendipitous discoveries.

It was Brian Eno who coined the term Scenius in a letter to a friend in 1996:

A few years ago I came up with a new word. I was fed up with the old art-history idea of genius - the notion that gifted individuals turn up out of nowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow.

I became more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new.

I call this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’. It is the communal form of the concept of genius.

Creating the conditions for Scenius to emerge

Big discoveries do not occur in a silo. Instead, progress tends to accelerate in clusters.

They happen through the mixing of talented people sharing ideas. This is exactly what a Scenius is, a bunch of people with different skills who sharpen each other through proximity. It’s a clustering of smart minds in a particular place and time.

Here’s a table by where we can see some examples of Scenius, it’s fascinating how almost all emerged out of catastrophe:

The common thread in all these examples is something bad was happening in the world and then great minds got together and created a scene.

I know things feel kinda weird right now. At times, it seems like the world is on the brink of collapse and there’s all these reports about how unhappy people are, but we’re living through an amazing moment!

The scenes listed up above came together slowly through word of mouth, but things are different now. The internet makes it so much simpler to conjure up scenius. Let’s say you want to become a Sword Guy, it’s easier than ever to find your people and create a scenius that revolves around swords:

Even though we have technology to connect with others, it’s just the first step.

Getting together in-person is different than meeting on a group Zoom call. Online communities have exploded since the pandemic but getting together IRL for an extended period of time is where the magic happens.

I feel as if I’ve found my Scenius in Barcelona. I’ve made friends with a bunch of other creators and people who work online. I’ve hosted Substack meetups to connect with other writers and bounce ideas off each other. Also, can’t forget the cycling scene, I’m certain the reason I fell in love with bikes is because of of where I live.

And now I’m on my first visit to Casa Tilo right here in my backyard where I’m participating in this micro-scene with other writers this week. Being here is helping me become a better writer, or at least it feels like it, I’ll let you be the judge.

I always knew I was somewhat creative, I think we all are, but it wasn’t until I surrounded myself with others who were already doing it that I felt comfortable putting myself out there and sharing my ideas in public like this.

So, have you found your scene?

Maybe later this week I’ll get a little more into the details on how to find one, if that would be helpful drop me a comment and let me know.

See you tomorrow,

<3 B

Then, right around a year ago, I found out he and his wife Nati started a new project called Casa Tilo. It’s a big house in the forest near Barcelona, just an hour away by train, but it feels as if you’re in the middle of nowhere.

Since I’m in a phase of getting to know my local surroundings more, I opted to come by bike instead of train, it was a great excuse to get a nice long ride in.

A lot of what I explore with Serendipity Lab is how spending time in certain places can change you.

It’s why I like the idea of trying mini-lives in different environments or learning by wandering. I think when you get out of your daily bubble and break your routines, it can open you up to new ideas or new ways of living.

It’s also a catalyst for Serendipity to occur.

When I saw the announcement for the Inscribe Residency here at Casa Tilo, I knew it would be a good opportunity to get out of the city for a week and shake things up a bit. Plus, since writing can be a lonely endeavor, I thought creating with others would be fun to try out.

So yesterday morning I packed my bags and set out on the road. It was an easy 3-hour ride to get here, mostly flat along the coastline, and I made sure to stop for a vermut at Espinaler on the way.

As luck would have it, when I arrived, I found out I’d be sharing a room with from .

I remembered saving his theory of life essay many months ago. In the essay he presents us with The Meaning Matrix where he breaks down experiences into four quadrants, and he goes on to explain that where people find the most meaning is inside quadrant four:

I tend to spend most of my time in quadrants two and three, which as you can see, it’s fun and good to be in these quadrants, but it’s not where you feel the most alive.

As Ben puts it:

In quadrant four you are rolling with the gang. It’s Ocean’s Eleven. There is an aliveness and a thrill that can’t be found anywhere else. Quadrant four is where the greatest memories are made.

But quadrant four is not the default. Quadrant four requires taking social risk. It is uncomfortable to initiate and easy to avoid.

Modern society is constantly nudging us to be alone and consume more. We’ve all heard about the “loneliness epidemic”, yet more and more people are still choosing to be by themselves rather than hanging out with others IRL.

In his Atlantic cover story last year, Derek Thompson called it the Anti-Social century, where in the past people participated in shared activities more, now many people are amusing themselves to death behind a screen. This is why I’m so interested in the built environment and how it shapes our lives. With unlimited entertainment options, the easy choice is to default to consumption and being alone. But when you live in a place where there is an abundance of public life, every time you go downstairs it’s like “refreshing the timeline” on your neighborhood.

In one of my previous essays, I talked about how the things I enjoy doing the most are riding my bike and writing. Of course these things I can do by myself, but there’s something special about participating in shared activities with other people, it’s how lasting memories are created.

This is a why I decided to host a cycling retreat earlier this year. Instead of just going on rides by myself, I’m making it a point to participate in a shared activity with others and create memories that we can talk about for the rest of our lives.

It’s also exactly what this week at Casa Tilo is all about, spending time in quadrant four, creating with others. This is what makes me feel most alive.

See you tomorrow,

<3 B

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P.S. - If you’re interested in participating in a shared activity, I’m hosting another cycling retreat in Spain next Spring. Just fill out this form and I’ll be in touch with more info. 🚴🏼

“What is Serendipity Lab and why am I getting this email?!”

After taking a pause and reading through some older essays, I remembered the initial spark that got me to publish in the first place. So let’s take a trip down memory lane…

Right around a decade ago in 2016, I had just started working my corporate job in the U.S. and I really wasn’t a fan of the daily commute.

I remember many mornings sitting my company truck, closed off from everyone else around me, waiting in a Starbucks drive-thru line while half listening to a podcast and half wondering “is this it, this is what the rest of my life looks like?”

At some point I became interested in the built environment. I was noticing that some places make me feel good while others drain my soul and leave me feeling empty.

The first urban design book I read was Walkable City by Jeff Speck. This book put into words what I felt when I visited certain places, specifically cities or dense downtowns where there’s people walking around and less car traffic.

One of the things I always loved about cities is the serendipity that would occur just by going on a walk and being a flâneur.

I remember visiting my grandma in New York as a kid and that feeling of being surrounded by people everywhere but still alone with my own thoughts, it was so different from what I was used to growing up in suburban Florida.

Then when I moved to Barcelona in 2018, I again felt that sense of serendipity while going about my day. Not being stuck in a car exposed me to lots of random conversations and encounters. I noticed my screen time went down because instead of watching Netflix, it was more entertaining to be out in the public realm.

After a few years of experiencing what good urban design feels like, I started to understand the importance of place and the role that the environment plays in our daily lives. I became fascinated by all the happy accidents that happen throughout your day when you live in a place built for human connection.

And that’s how Serendipity Lab was born.

Even after eight years here, I’m still amazed by the chance encounters I experience on a daily basis. Just this morning on my way to the park, I ran into two friends by coincidence one after the other. On the surface, these frequent informal interactions might seem negligible, but they’re not.

There’s a particular chance encounter I remember so clearly in my minds eye.

It was early 2020, before the pandemic shut everything down, I bumped into my friend Danny who was walking with his bike. I asked if I could hop on and go for a quick spin. At this point I’d already been using the city bike share service Bicing for a few months, but after trying out my friends bike I knew I had to buy my own.

This is a concrete example of how living in Spain changed me.

Because of where I live, I’ve become obsessed with bikes. Not only as a mode of transit, but also as a way to get outside and explore my surroundings. My bike is now a core part of my identity, every other form of transit feels like punishment.

I often wonder whether I would have discovered my love of cycling if I didn’t live somewhere with such great bike infrastructure.

And with all the developments happening in our digital world, I want to double down and focus on the physical. After all, it’s the water we swim in. Plus I don’t think the world needs another AI booster/critic, there seems to be enough already. Speaking of AI, it drives me bonkers when I see the trillions being invested in data centers while public infrastructure remains largely ignored.

Even worse, I saw that last month the U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy redirected $1.73 billion in USDOT grants away from what he calls “DEI bike lanes” in favor of building more roads & bridges.1 We’ve already seen how this plays out, one more lane is not going to fix the congestion problem.

An important part of good urban design is giving people different options for mobility and this is something the U.S. has completely failed at.

As has mentioned, the only real “city” is in the U.S. is New York:

Americans who go to Tokyo or Paris or Seoul or London are often wowed by the efficient train systems, dense housing, and walkable city streets lined with shops and restaurants.

And yet in these countries, many secondary cities also have these attractive features. Go to Nagoya or Fukuoka, and the trains will be almost as convenient, the houses almost as dense, and the streets almost as attractive as in Tokyo.

The U.S. is very different. We have New York City, and that’s about it.

Across the entire country people are forced to commute by themselves in their cars instead of being around other people. While this may seem more convenient, it’s often cited as the worst part of peoples day.

I’ve found that my favorite parts of the day are when I’m out on my bike running an errand or going to meet with a friend.

All those in-between moments bring me so much joy. When I’m commuting by bike, the act of getting to my destination is usually the most fun part.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Since becoming more interested bikes over the past few years, I’ve gone deep down some rabbit holes trying to find ways where I can make an impact other than just writing this blog.

Back in November I signed up to be a host on Warmshowers. Think of Couchsurfing but focused on cycle touring and people on long bikepacking trips.

My first guest was Yuma, a young Japanese guy cycling from Vladivostok, one of the eastern most cities in Russia, to Cabo da Roca in Portugal, the westernmost point of mainland Europe.

Hosting Yuma for a few days got me fired up about doing one of these bigger multi-day, or multi-week trips.

Since the beginning of this year, my girlfriend Cristina and I have been going on longer rides and prepping for our first overnight trip in October.

When I discovered the Eurovelo, which covers much of Europe, I became even more intrigued by the idea of bikepacking around the continent.

Now I’m itching to do one of these routes from end to end.

A couple years ago I mentioned my growing love of cycling and how I want to get out and explore more of Spain. Yet time has slipped by and I’ve hardly ventured out of my bubble here in Barcelona.

Some of my best memories over the past year have been those days where Cristina and I got on our bikes first thing in the morning and spent the entire day exploring. I want spend more time getting to know the rural areas of the country and cycling is the best way to see those more remote places.

What to expect moving forward

I’m enjoying getting back in the flow of writing. I’ll be attending a writers retreat at Casa Tilo next week so you can expect to hear more from me soon.

This pause was helpful because it made me realize I don’t want to be a critic and just talk about the bad things happening around the world. Instead, I want to be more Outcome Oriented, focusing on the physical and talking about how places have the power to alter your personality.

The goal is to show that maybe the secret to a better life isn’t optimizing your habits more, but that maybe just a change of environment could do the trick.

I’m also going to focus on highlighting places in the U.S. that are making changes.

Lately I’ve been listening to Avi Stopper and his podcast Bike Streets. Since 2018, Avi and his team have been working to make cycling a reality for people of all ages and abilities. What started as a “Low-Stress Bike Map” in Denver has expanded to dozens of cities across the country and I want to help spread the word on these initiatives.

When it comes to bikes, I’ve gone deep down the rabbit hole. Now having spent a good chunk of time revisiting my “why” behind all this, I’m excited to start sharing some of these insights with you all again.

What began as a fun little side project has turned into a readership of 1,500 people, which is not crazy huge number by any means, but it’s still significant. I appreciate everyone who has pressed the subscribe button and handed over their precious email address. If you decide to stick around, it’s a pleasure to have you along for the ride.

Until next time,

<3 B

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Not long ago, the society you were born into determined pretty much everything in your life. Now this is not the case. We are entering a post-globalized world where things are become more fragmented and people self-organize into new societies.

The Rise of Network Societies, Charter Cities & Cooperatives — that’s the theme of this weeks Sunday Serendipity…

Before 2020, nomad visas were still an idea floating around and immigration was a bit more complicated.

Fast forward five years and it’s become much easier to move somewhere else if you’re not satisfied with your birth country.

Whether it’s in search of a better quality of life, cheaper cost of living, safer cities, more sun, more walkability, or just a different environment, there are plenty of places ready to welcome you with open arms.

The internet created coordination and fragmentation, which is why the work of Manuel Castells and his ideas on The Network Society is relevant.

Back in the 90’s he saw how the world was reorganizing around information flows instead of physical borders. Power and identity don’t sit inside closed borders anymore, instead they form on the internet and span across the globe.

Here’s an excerpt from his book that explains the concept:

This new form of spatiality is what I conceptualized as the space of flows, or the material support of simultaneous social practices communicated at a distance.

It involves the production, transmission and processing of flows of information.

It also relies on the development of localities as nodes of these communication networks, and the connectivity of activities located in these nodes by fast transportation networks operated by information flows.

These “cities” are no longer cities, not only conceptually but institutionally or culturally. In some cases, they do not have a name. For instance, Los Angeles is not the appropriate name for the spatial form of which it is only a component, because the relevant spatial unit comprises the entire Southern California Metropolis that extends from Santa Barbara to San Diego in a pattern of continuously urbanized landscape along the coast that extends for about 100 miles inland.

This is the undefined metropolitan region where 20 million people work, live, commute, and communicate by using a network of freeways, media coverage, cable networks, and wireline and wireless telecommunication networks, while retrenching in the polity of the localities of a fragmented territory and identifying their diverse cultures in terms of ethnicity, age, and self-defined social networks.

The key spatial feature of the network society is the networked connection between the local and the global. The architecture of global networks connects places selectively, according to their relative value for the network.

Castells idea “space of flows” describe how networks shape economic, cultural, and political life.

Networks can now do what geography used to do. The place you’re born and where you live still matters, but it no longer determines the full range of opportunities.

The global functions of some areas of some cities are determined by their connection to the global networks. The points of connection in this global architecture of networks are the points that attract wealth, power, culture, innovation, and people, innovative or not, to these places.

So why do these global networks manifest in specific physical places?

What is important in the location of advanced services is the micro-network of the high-level decision-making process, based on face-to-face relationships, linked to a macro-network of decision implementation, which is based on electronic communication networks.

In other words, meeting face to face to make financial or political deals is still indispensable, particularly when discussions must proceed with absolute discretion in the case of decisions that provide a competitive edge

No matter how advanced technology becomes, we’ll still always crave IRL interaction.

Especially when it comes to discussing big ideas and and spending quality time with the people we enjoy being around.

Balaji’s vision of The Network State

A few years ago published The Network State, a book about how to start a new country.

His idea is if digital networks organize most of our lives, why should political communities be tied to territory. For the past few decades, digital societies have emerged online where people gather first around shared values and shared goals.

Over time, these communities can crowdfund physical spaces or negotiate for territory and recognition. He outlines how it works here:

It’s a modern version of how new countries have always been built. Throughout history, new societies emerged when people left systems that no longer served them.

Today there’s a similar pattern. Large numbers of people are relocating because they feel their home countries no longer match their values, and they now have the option to choose alternatives.

Different societies are taking form in various shapes and sizes all over the world

Here’s a handful of projects and places that have come up on my radar:

• Singapore is home to Balaji’s Network School. It’s small in size yet massive in influence because it integrates into global flows of talent and capital.

• Dubai is an example I wrote about it last year. It reinvented itself by appealing to entrepreneurs and people who value speed and flexibility.

• Próspera in Honduras is part of the Charter Cities movement which I linked below, wrote a review of his visit last year.

• Edge City is a “society incubator” that runs month-long popup villages for people exploring all sorts of emerging technologies. Good option for someone curious looking to learn more about these different movements.

• Esmerelda is a project by , it’s a walkable village 90-minutes north of San Francisco which Devon envisions as a modern adaptation of Chautauqua.

• Worker-owned cooperatives like Mondragón in Spain also deserve a mention. I found out about Mondragón through and since I live in Barcelona I’m itching to make a visit.

Most of these aside from Mondragón are still in their early stages, but the communities behind them see where things are heading and are choosing to organize around networks rather than geography.

I realize these ideas can sound a bit cultish, but one of the key premises of network societies is mobility and exit. People can join or leave based on alignment. It all aligns with the predictions Castells made around the network society, networks allow fluid affiliations rather than fixed memberships.

But are people open to alternate options?

A recent Gallup survey shows Americans still favor capitalism over socialism, but both lines have been trending toward the center the past few years:

My guess is a large chunk of the population no longer associates with either of the political parties because of how extreme the views have gotten. Plus the rising wealth inequality doesn’t help.

It’s a similar story in the UK, data in the Henley Wealth Migration Report 2025 predicts a loss of 16,500 millionaires in the UK in 2025. When inflation makes it impossible to enjoy the basic necessities of life, more people will look for a way out:

In a recession, even a severe one in which unemployment climbs to seven percent, this means seven out of every one hundred workers loses their job. The other ninety three people carry on. Yes, they are affected too and maybe it hits close to home because a family member has been laid off, but that’s survivable. If only seven out of every one hundred people is directly hurt by a recession due to job loss, it’s bad but not catastrophic.

Inflation, on the other hand, is the opposite. It affects all one hundred out of one hundred people in our sample. Everybody hurts. It infects us. Turns us against each other. Produces the sort of firebrand politicians and harebrained political solutions that tear at the divides we already face, making them worse and more glaringly apparent. Inflation creates the conditions for outsized and unexpected reactions among the electorate. It turns dissatisfaction into dystopian rhetoric. It turns disagreement into distrust. It eats away at everyone and everything.

If a recession can do all those things to those who lose their jobs, inflation can do all those things to everyone all at once, working or not. And if unchecked, inflation becomes less survivable than an “ordinary” cyclical uptick in joblessness - the thing we used to worry about most. It’s enough to make us vote for something crazy.

I’m not certain what comes next, but seeing all these people experimenting with different models of what’s possible reminds me of the classic Graeber quote:

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

See you next week,

<3 B

P.S. - I’m hosting a writing & cycling retreat in Spain May 13th - 17th. If you’d be interested in joining us fill out this form and I’ll be in touch with more info. 🚴🏼

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We have this deep desire to be in control, but it’s the randomness of life that makes it special. When I connect the dots and think about where I live, my hobbies, my relationships, my work, the places I hang out, much of it is the result of coincidences and being in the right place at the right time.

Unexpected chance encounters led to ripple effects I never could have predicted.

The Butterfly Effect — that’s the theme of this weeks Sunday Serendipity…

A couple years ago I was racking my brain thinking of what to name my Substack.

I decided on Serendipity Lab because I’m obsessed by the randomness of life and how tiny experiments can change the course of our lives. As much as we try to predict how we want our future to play out, it’s impossible to calculate every detail.

In the 1960’s, Edward Lorenz was at MIT modeling weather patterns and rounded a number from 0.506127 to 0.506 to save time in his experiment. He assumed the difference would barely matter, but it caused the entire weather simulation to diverge and eventually opened the door to a scientific field known as Chaos Theory.

Years later, Lorenz gave a talk titled “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” and the term Butterfly Effect came into existence.

It’s funny because about a decade before Lorenz’s weather experiments, Ray Bradbury wrote a famous essay titled A Sound of Thunder:

It’s a fictional story about a man named Eckels who joins a time traveling safari.1

Time Travel Inc. provides a service where wealthy clients can go back to the dinosaur era and shoot a tyrannosaurus that was already going to die to avoid altering the timeline. To pull this off, the guides take extreme precautions. They build a levitating path and hunters must stay on the path at all times. No touching plants. No touching the ground. No interacting with anything that has a future.

At one point Eckels accidentally steps off the path and crushes a butterfly. When he returns to the present all of reality has shifted.

We see this play out in any movie about time travel.

There are always warnings not to touch or change anything because of the ripple effects it could have. Here’s Doc Brown in Back to the Future:

And here’s a hilarious clip from the Simpson’s which comes directly from Ray Bradbury’s essay:

We never know how small decisions in the present will influence future events

The most shocking example I’ve come across is in ’s book Fluke.

In the opening chapter he tells the story of Henry Stimson and how a trip to Japan in 1926 altered the course of history.

Decades before the war Stimson went on a trip all over Asia and Kyoto was one of the stops. At the time of the trip he was already involved in politics, but when it came time for WWII he had worked his way up to Secretary of War under Truman when the atomic bomb decisions were made.

One of the cities on the shortlist of potential targets was Kyoto. On his trip to Japan Stimson visited the city with his wife and they fell in love with its beauty. When the time came to finalize the targets, the memories of his trip resurfaced.

Stimpson’s personal diary explains how he persuaded President Truman to spare Kyoto and remove it from the potential target list. Shortly after, on August 6th, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima instead of Kyoto.

It’s crazy to think that a random vacation to Japan played some part in saving a city and destroying another one.

Three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, the second atomic bomb was supposed to be dropped in Kokura, the next target city. On the day of the bombing Kokura was covered in clouds and they couldn’t see the target clearly enough to drop the bomb.

The plane circled multiple times but fuel was low and they needed a clear visual. In a last minute decision, the plane took a to turn toward the secondary target, Nagasaki, where the second atomic bomb was dropped.

If Henry Stimpson never went on that vacation and if the weather behaved a bit differently it’s possible the fate of Japan would have been much different.

Chaos theory for mortals

There is a common paradigm that if you just “work harder” you can be more successful. This is true to an extent, but I know a lot of people working really hard who are not wealthy.

Studies show intelligence and skill follow a normal distribution, but wealth does not follow that pattern, wealth follows a power law:

If credentials alone determined success, the distributions would mirror each other, but they don’t.

This is why things feel weird right now. Life is not a fair contest where the “best” always win. It is a non-linear game where a small percentage of the population holds a huge portion of the resources.

Just due to sheer numbers, luck is more likely to strike someone from the vast billions of middle-level talent, not the tiny sliver of übertalented geniuses.

The older I get, the more I realize how little we actually control. Still I think I have a knack for noticing patterns and following my intuition. All my life I’ve been called lucky, but it’s not all just blind luck, I believe it’s a skill you can develop by practicing.

In a world filled with so much chaos and randomness, my final tip is to find a balance between surrender and control.

In minute 53 of this lecture, Brian Eno uses the example of a surfer on a wave, there needs to be a balance between surrender and control.

See you next week,

<3 B

P.S. - If you’d like to experience some randomness in your life, I’m hosting a writing & cycling retreat in Spain May 13th - 17th. Just fill out this form and I’ll be in touch with more info. 🚴🏼

Their song Virtual Insanity won an MTV music award for best video in 1997, but they never really caught on in the mainstream. And that was on purpose.

Lead singer Jay Kay has said in interviews that he didn’t want to conform to what the record labels were asking of him. Now almost 30 years later, their music is more relevant than ever.

Virtual Insanity — that’s the theme of this weeks Sunday Serendipity…

My first time seeing Jamiroquai was at Sziget Festival in 2008.

I was in Hungary for the summer visiting family and prior to this I’d never heard of them before. I remember my cousin and my friend Norbi were so excited.

Still to this day it’s one of the most memorable concerts of my life. Now after seeing them again, I realize how ahead of their time they were. This was written when cell phones were still a luxury and social media was non-existent:

“Futures made of virtual insanity”, what a tune, and he was right…

Now the average American spends more than 90% of their time indoors with 7 hours a day devoted to screen activity.1

We’ve become an indoor species and total time spent outdoors is the most insignificant part of the day. Jamiroquai’s music encapsulates what Niel Postman was writing about in Amusing Ourselves to Death a decade earlier in 1985.

There’s a running joke about how much Postman is cited recently, here’s in a recent essay:

“Believe me, I tried to keep old Postman out of this—he’s over-exposed enough these days—but as I wrote, I could hear the ghostly thump-thump-thump of his posthumous fists knocking on the door of this essay, and I had to let him in.”

People are discussing Postman’s work because the things he warned about are coming true and have been amplified to extremes. Summed up by here:

“The multi-generation moral panic about improved video entertainment driving social isolation is largely correct. The technology keeps improving, but it’s not making our lives better.”

Conscientiousness and extroversion have dropped across all age groups becuase people are spending more time in the digital word, passively consuming and investing in para-social relationships instead of IRL relationships. Meanwhile neuroticism has increased leading to what dubbed has the Anxious Generation.

I’m not against social media. Like all technology, it’s a tool. But as has observed, throwing the whole world into a single room together doesn’t work:

It started with the Facebook feed. On the old internet, you could show a different side of yourself in every forum or chat room; but on your Facebook feed, you had to be the same person to everyone you knew. When social unrest broke out in the mid-2010s this got even worse — you had to watch liberal friends and conservative friends go at it in the comments of your posts, or theirs. Friendships and even family bonds were destroyed in those comments.

At first Twitter seemed less bad than the Facebook feed, since you didn’t have to reveal your real identity if you didn’t want to. But Twitter was far more extreme in the way it threw everyone in the whole world together. Your family and friends might fight on Facebook, but at least you didn’t have to get deluged with angry comments from random anonymous Nazis or communists or weirdos mad about video game journalism.

The early 2010s on Twitter were defined by fights over toxicity and harassment versus early-internet ideals of free speech. But after 2016 those fights no longer mattered, because everyone on the platform simply adopted the same patterns of toxicity and harassment that the extremist trolls had pioneered. By 2019 you could get mobbed by angry librarians or history professors. The only defense against an angry mob was to get your own angry mob.

The never ending cycle of toxicity is causing the internet to become more fragmented.

More people are choosing to move away from bigger platforms like Meta and X to places like Substack and private communities.

Why some social media feels different

As described by one of the co-founders — “Traditional social media is designed to lure us into an attention game that keeps us locked in an endless scroll. It can be fun, but it’s often maddening and divisive.”

Substack is social media, but it feels different. I like how Emma Gannon said it here:

I love Substack because it requires me to actually sit down and write every week—to find ways to express things, tell stories, ingest culture and books I love, and generate new ideas regularly. Writing and reading calm the nervous system. I’d always rather write something than make—or watch—a thirty-second video.

Since I started writing here, I’ve used Instagram less and less. I haven’t posted there all year, I mostly just use it as a messaging platform now.

Not that Instagram is all bad. I follow plenty of creators I look up to sharing cool stuff. What bothers me is the algorithm promotes the most extreme views and the ads have gotten to be overwhelming.

With AI, it’s only going to get worse. The ads and content you’re seeing will continue to be even more hyper-targeted causing people to spend more time on the app.

Here’s what Zuck said on the last earnings call:

Across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, our AI recommendation systems are delivering higher quality and more relevant content. Video is a particular bright spot, with time spent on Instagram up more than 30% since last year. As video continues to grow, Reels now has an annual run rate of over $50 billion.

On YouTube I can pay for premium and choose whether or not I want ads. With Substack, I only subscribe to writers I want to read and there’s no ads being shoved in my face when I don’t want them. Substack also has a feature on Notes where I only see people I’m following.

On Meta’s platforms, as far as I know there’s no way to turn off the onslaught of advertising and consumerism. Have you noticed the number of ads you get hit with has increased? In 2019, Instagram generated less than $20 billion in advertising revenue, now it’s grown to over $70 billion.

Every time I open the app, there’s a 20-something-year-old screaming at me to buy their course. What makes it worse is that they’re bringing religion into the marketing and preying on people’s emotional and psychological weaknesses.

The other day I opened IG and the first video I saw was an AI marketer telling me that the reason Gen Z is thriving and happier than ever is because they started believing in God. He goes on to say that Gen Z is starting more businesses than any generation in history and that they’re in the best shape of their lives:

But the data tells a different story, Gen Z is the LEAST LIKELY to attend church:

When the algorithm prioritizes conviction and engagement over facts it leads to more divisiveness. For these reasons, people are getting fed up with their attention being stolen by these giant monopolies.

This all ties in to the message of Jamiroquai’s music, they’re not saying technology is bad, they’re just asking us to take a look at our relationship with technology:

Technology can bring us together or tear us apart. Depending how you use it and which platforms you engage on will determine your relationship with it.

See you next week,

<3 B

P.S. - Are you going virtually insane and spending too much time indoors? If so, I’m hosting a cycling and writing retreat in Spain next Spring. If this is something you’re interested in, fill out this form and I’ll be in touch with more info. 🚴🏼

I understand why there’s so much panic and nihilism, but it’s kind of ironic since this what we’ve been waiting for! It’s WHY we developed technology in the first place, to eliminate the boring, mundane, and repetitive tasks.

Economists in the early 1900’s already predicted less working hours and more leisure time for creativity and connection. What I’m curious about is how our definition of work is changing and what comes next.

After the death of corporate jobs — that’s the theme of this week’s Sunday Serendipity…

One of the first essays I published on was about quitting my corporate job so I could explore the world and get to know myself better1.

Soon after starting, I realized I wanted out. There had to be more to life.

I dreaded the commute every morning. Driving home from work one day, I called my Dad and told him how much I didn’t like it. He asked such a simple but profound question - “Would you be happy if you had your boss’s job?”

I knew more money was not the answer. Even if my salary had doubled or tripled I still would have yearned for more flexibility. My plan was to leave after 1 year, but it was hard to break the Golden Handcuffs, they had a solid grip on me. The salary was decent, I had a company truck with meal per diem, and the yearly bonus was enough to make me stick it out.

Yet every day that passed by, I could not get Barcelona off my mind. I visited before starting the job and told myself I would move here one day. At last, in June 2018, I threw my work boots away for good and bought a one-way ticket to Europe.

It’s been seven years since I threw those boots in the dumpster.

I left behind a guaranteed income and a predictable path forward so I could embark on what calls the Pathless Path. That decision was one of the most pivotal decisions of my life.

When I was about to quit, most of the people around me didn’t understand why. My family, friends and work colleagues thought I was being foolish, but I knew I could find a way to make a living other than selling my soul to a 9-5 job.

Having to choose a career and profession at such a young age with hardly any life experience is kind of strange if you think about it.

When I started my career, I gave in to the gospel of workism and my job became my identity. Then when I quit and moved to Barcelona, I discovered so many unknown parts of myself. Now I’m crazy about urban design and cycling. I landed a remote job in sales and worked in different online startups which led to experience with different business models. I got clarity around what I want to do for work and how I can combine my unique insights to build a life that I don’t ever need to escape from.

I’m reminiscing on all this because a couple months ago wrote a viral essay — The death of the corporate job. I was reading through the thousands of comments and the topic seems to be resonating:

Still Wandering

The death of the corporate job.

Last week, I had coffee with someone who works at a big consulting firm. She spent twenty minutes explaining her role to me. Not because it was complex, but because she was trying to convince herself it existed. "I facilitate stakeholder alignment across cross-functional workstreams," she said. Then laughed. "I genuinely don't know what that means anymo…

Read more

a year ago · 13180 likes · 1189 comments · Alex McCann

Alex references David Graeber who first introduced the idea of “bullshit jobs” in an essay in 2013 and it went viral almost instantly. His main point is that vast numbers of people are doing jobs that serve no real purpose.

The essay got such a big response that Graeber began collecting stories, surveys, and interviews and eventually published Bullshit Jobs: A Theory in 2018.

So we’ve known for quite a while that a lot of people are working bullshit jobs, and now AI is here to take those jobs, but how did we get here and what’s next?

The Embedded Economy (c. 500 BC – 1700)

For most of history, work was a means of survival as well as a form of participation.

Moses Finley called this the embedded economy. This is where labor was part of the social fabric of the community.

In ancient Greece and Rome, the economy was bound up with religion, honor, and civic life. Your reputation is what held weight and which class you were born into pretty much determined your life.

This lasted for centuries until industrialization began.

The Great Transformation (c. 1750 – 1900)

After the Embedded Economy came The Industrial Revolution and what Karl Polanyi describes as The Great Transformation.

Everyday life was reorganized. Up until this point, markets had been embedded in social relations, now social relations were embedded in the market.

This inversion is what created the modern day job, a contract between your time and someone else’s capital.

It fueled the wealth of the 19th century but drained work of its moral and communal meaning. This is also how cities came to form. Factories on the outskirts, office towers in the centers, and trains shuttling workers in and out.

For nearly two centuries, we’ve been living inside this experiment.

The Servant Trap (1970s – present)

Next came what André Gorz calls the re-feudalization of labor. This is a society where machines can do the heavy lifting yet humans are still made to serve.

He believed that as automation began reshaping industry, technology could either liberate us or recreate servitude in new forms. Instead of sharing the benefits of technology, industrial societies started outsourcing labor downward.

He said a “neo-servant class” was emerging (cleaners, drivers, delivery workers) to sustain the lifestyles of the professional elite. Half a century later, machines can do much of the work but we keep inventing new forms of busyness.

Now the gig economy has become the modern day servant class.

Return of the Artisan & Age of Experiences (present)

Between the rise of the gig economy and the hollowing out of white collar jobs, we’re seeing the Great Reshuffle in action. This is the Second Artisan Age, a world filled independent creators and experience-makers. With todays technology, a single person can teach to a global audience.

In his book The Age of Experiences, Ben Hunnicutt says we’re witnessing a transformation from an economy of goods and services to one of experiences.

With platforms like Airbnb Experiences, anyone can design an experience and create a memory for someone. My friend Aiden is a great example. He is a history and psychology guide here in Barcelona, his Happiness Tour has over 600 positive reviews.

I’ve been inspired by people like Aiden and David Whyte who hosts multi-day walking tours and also who does a similar walking experience with friend Craig Mod. It’s why I’m hosting an experience in Spring. I want to share my love of writing and cycling with others. This is how we get to know unknown parts of ourselves.

If you’re interested in writing, riding bikes, and sipping wine together in the Catalan countryside, you can sign up here for more details.

Also if any of this resonated with you, there are quite a few of us exploring non-traditional careers over in the Pathless Path community, it’s much easier to make changes when you have others around you doing the same.

See you next week,

<3 B

1

Often what happens when you try to “get to know yourself” -

I’m crazy about bicycles too. Ever since I started using a bike as my primary mode of transit, I’ve become obsessed with cycling. Not like I put on Lycra every weekend and do long group rides with other cyclists, only sometimes, but more so I’m crazy about the serendipity it brings into my life when I ride around the city.

Oh and writing is another thing I’m crazy about. One of the reasons I started sharing my writing to help other people find their crazy. Because when you find things you’re crazy about, I think you develop more enthusiasm for life in general.

Finding your crazy — that’s the theme of this week’s Sunday Serendipity…

I. Sailing with Phoenix

I love finding people who are pursuing things they are crazy about. That energy is contagious and you can sense the enthusiasm through their dedication.

For the past few months I’ve been following the story of Oliver Widger, better known as Sailing with Phoenix on social media. Oliver worked at Discount Tire for 11 years and after being diagnosed with a rare spinal condition, he decided to go all in on his dream of sailing to Hawaii with his cat.

In an interview recorded before he set sail from Oregon, he describes how miserable he was and how much he hated his job. He felt trapped and wasn’t sure how he was going to do it, and then he talks about the moment he realized what his crazy is:

Three years ago I was watching a YouTube video and I saw some guy leave California on his 28-foot sailboat and he sailed from California to Hawaii.

That was Sailor James, and I looked at my girlfriend at the time and I was like, ‘I’m 100% going to do that.’

He goes on to talk about how his girlfriend broke up with him and he fell into this loop of partying on the weekends and hating his life even more.

Then one day his brother convinced him to start uploading videos to social media about his plan sailing around the world.

The very first video he recorded accidentally got uploaded to TikTok and shared with his bosses at Discount Tire. This led to a cascade effect of him emptying his 401k and going all in on his dream. He did it:

If you unpack what he’s doing, it’s absolutely crazy. But when you find something you’re crazy about, you prioritize that thing and you forget about everything else:

My plan was to sail to Hawaii a year from now. But when I got fired I had a realization, “I can if I work really hard and get weird with it and creative, I could leave in six months.” I was like, fuck it, that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna gun for six months and I didn’t even know if it was gonna be possible. I just announced that I’m gonna leave in six months and then tackled everything as quickly as possible.

Dude, I’m going weeks without showering. You know what I mean? Like I don’t even know the last time I showered. I’m a crazy person. I’ve turned into a crazy person. I’m losing my mind.

Funny enough, I just wrote about how taking a shower is a privilege of our modern complex world anyways. When I find stories like this, I try to dig deeper and listen to long-form interviews.1

Social media can make it seem like success happens in a flash, as if from one day to the next you can achieve insane goals.

Rarely do we see all the work that went into getting there:

It doesn’t matter whether your into sailing or not, the story itself is contagious.

I just wish it didn’t take some sort of rare spinal conditional for someone to take action on their dreams. But usually there does have to be some sort of anomaly that takes place in order for change to happen.

It’s the classic Hero’s Journey, one of the oldest stories in history.

II. Wandering & sampling

If you haven’t found your crazy yet, don’t worry, life is long.

Also don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Remember that the question “what should I do with my life” is a modern day problem.

For most of human history, we had little to no choice in what we did for a living. And now, even though we have a choice, I see too many people stuck in a career they don’t enjoy just for a steady paycheck. If you’re still looking for that thing your crazy about, I recommend wandering and sampling as much as you can.

Then once you find it, share your crazy with the world. It might inspire someone else to make a change in their life. Or at the very least, you’ll make internet friends and they’ll send you stuff they know you’re crazy about.

That’s exactly what happened to me this past week. My friend who I finally got to meet in person sent me this awesome song about bikes:

When you share your crazy on the internet, you never know what kind of serendipity it will bring into your life.

See you next week,

<3 B

P.S. - I’m crazy about writing and cycling. Hopefully it’s contagious. If you’re interested, I’m hosting a writing & cycling retreat in Spain next Spring. Just fill out this form and I’ll be in touch with more info. 🚴🏼

I was getting ready to quit my job and move to Europe so I wanted to share the lessons I was learning along the way. I even bought a domain that never got used and wrote stuff that never got published. It was a desire I kept putting off until “someday”, and the longer I waited the more it bothered me.

From the moment I bought that website and set the intention, it took me eight years to upload my first essay. Once I started, I felt liberated. I’m no longer hoarding the desire. It doesn’t mean writing comes easy or naturally, just that it feels like a pressure release valve has been opened inside of me.

Desire hoarding & unpacking— that’s the theme of this week’s Sunday Serendipity…

I. Desire hoarding

Every day we are endlessly exposed to possibilities and alternate realities we think we might like, but we don’t actually know whether or not we will like it until we try it.

It might be that you just like the idea of it.

It’s not bad to have desires, it’s part of being human. Just make sure to experiment with those desires. If you don’t experiment, life becomes filled with too many “what-ifs” and “somedays” and you end up becoming a desire hoarder, as explained here by :

Most of us accumulate unrealized possibilities and potential futures, storing them in our minds like precious objects we refuse to part with. This is “desire hoarding” — the compulsive gathering of all the things we might want to do someday, regardless of whether we’ll actually pursue them.

We pile up desires (even the sort of tepid desires, the lukewarm desires, the barely-has-a-pulse desires) in our psychological storage unit, right next to that box of emotional baggage we’ve been meaning to unpack since 2018. Instead of putting these wants on trial by, I dunno, actually experimenting with them, we let them multiply and clutter up our mental and psychic bandwidth with “somedays.”

I know the feeling. I’m one of those people who has a Notion folder labeled “Possible Futures” where I jot down ideas I might want to try someday.

I’ve found that if you pile up too many “somedays”, it creates a burden and eventually you will feel the weight of those desires on your shoulders. Not taking action starts to eat away at your subconscious.

This is why it’s good to unpack our desires every now and then.

II. Unpacking desires

When you’re about to take action on your desires, it’s intimidating. There are likely many steps involved and maybe you’re not sure which to tackle first.

This was one of the issues I ran into when I first tried writing online.

The barrier to entry was higher because platforms like Substack didn’t exist. Choosing which website builder to use became a quest in itself. When I finally bought a domain, I got a little dopamine hit and it felt like I was “taking action”, but then I never took the time set it up or finish any essays.

has a great analogy around the idea of unpacking:

I meet a lot of people who don’t like their jobs, and when I ask them what they’d rather do instead, about 75% say something like, “Oh, I dunno, I’d really love to run a little coffee shop.”

If I’m feeling mischievous that day, I ask them one question: “Where would you get the coffee beans?” If that’s a stumper, here are some followups:

• Which kind of coffee mug is best?

• How much does a La Marzocco espresso machine cost?

• Would you bake your blueberry muffins in-house or would you buy them from a third party?

• What software do you want to use for your point-of-sale system?

• What do you do when your assistant manager calls you at 6am and says they can’t come into work because they have diarrhea?

The point of the Coffee Beans Procedure is this: if you can’t answer those questions, if you don’t even find them interesting, then you should not open a coffee shop, because this is how you will spend your days as a cafe owner.

The Coffee Beans Procedure is a way of doing what psychologists call unpacking.

After I unpacked what it takes to build a website and write blog posts, I abandoned the desire. I liked the idea of being a writer, but I wasn’t interested enough nor was I willing to put in the time and effort to execute.

I let many years go by while hoarding this desire. Eventually the longer I held on to the desire without acting on it, the pain of not writing outgrew the fear of posting.

So maybe now is not the right time to pursue a particular desire. Maybe it’s better to unpack first and then do some planning. But don’t just hoard it away in a deep dark corner of your mind. Put a plan in place. Set dates and deadlines. Create some sort of forcing function. Do whatever to lower the friction to take the next smallest step. I wish I wouldn’t have waited so long to start, that’s often the case with these things.

Another desire I’d been hoarding for a while was starting a YouTube channel.

Similar to writing, I gave it a shot at one point, but then abandoned it once I saw how much work it takes. Instead of giving up completely, I took a break and now I’m experimenting with how to simplify the process.

I’m trying to have fun with it by going out in nature and telling stories instead of sitting in my apartment reading a script:

Whenever I unpack one of these desires I’ve been hoarding, I feel the weight lifted off my shoulders. Sometimes I end up pursuing it long term and making it a part of my life, like I have with writing. Other times, I’ll test a desire and realize it’s not for me.

This is why I recommend sampling your desires whenever possible.

At the very least, this will give you a taste to see if it’s a desire worth hoarding or if you’re better off clearing the clutter.

<3 B

P.S. - I’m hosting a cycling and writing retreat in Spain next Spring. If this is something you’d be interested in, fill out this form and I’ll be in touch with more info. 🚴🏼

As I sat down to write this, I called my 93 year old grandmother to confirm. She said her and her three sisters would use the same bucket of water to take sponge baths one after another. Then the boys would use the same bucket to clean themselves. And then afterwards came all the laundry, in the same bucket of course.

We live in a complicated and complex ecosystem which is why things feel weird. In the daily news cycle, it seems like things are getting worse, but if you look at the big picture, our standard of living has improved a lot.

The big picture — that’s the theme of this week’s Sunday Serendipity…

1.

On Monday after I arrived back from Granada, I saw an essay by where he describes how we are different from all other humans in history:

“A Snickers and a power shower would blow Henry VIII’s mind.

This morning, I woke up in a comfortable bed, knowing there would be no deadly predators or pests to eat or infect me. With cheap soaps and pristine, hot water, I became cleaner in five minutes than was possible for any human in the past.

With a flick of a switch, I conjured hot coffee into existence with a taste and quality that could not have been summoned by any empire or fleet previously. In a safe car that could rapidly whisk me to another country in a few hours—by driving onto a train that literally travels under the ocean—I typed a few keystrokes on a magic device that allowed me to listen to virtually any music recorded, anywhere on the planet, in the last century or so. And the entire time, I never feared violence, starvation, disease, or death.

When we compare ourselves to humans past, we, not them, are the weird ones.

Funny timing since I just had the hot shower conversation the day before.

He’s right. We get habituated so quick and forget how good we have it. When I called my grandma to ask about the hot showers, she said she can’t remember the last time she thought about the bucket and the sponge baths. Hot running water is so ordinary that even people who didn’t have it when they were born forget it’s still relatively new.

And because we get habituated so quick, we forget how new the internet is in the grand scheme of things. If we compress the history of the earth into one year, humans have only been around for seconds. This confirms why things feel weird, it’s all new!

“More than half of the world’s population is under the age of 30, meaning that the majority of humans alive today have only lived in those 11 seconds—an era that is, without question, the weirdest period in human history.”

In a globalized and connected world, we can always find bad things happening at any given moment. But the things we get angry and upset about are not unique to us.

The sadness we witness on the news has happened to many civilizations throughout different points in the history of humankind.

Relatively speaking, this is a safe and luxurious time to be alive.

2.

The second big picture moment was this conversation with and Brian Eno:

In the episode, they discuss an idea from Stewart Brand, that if everyone could see the planet from outer space, it would change the consciousness of humankind:

“Stewart sort of gave birth to this idea, that if we could show the world from the outside, if we realized what an amazing, extraordinary, unique gift this tiny little planet teeming with life swimming around in a dead universe as far as we know. We still don’t know that there’s any other life which is phenomenal if you think about it. We might be the only life in the universe.

I think it’s the most sobering thought. I think that should be shouted from the rooftops every day. That’s my version of seeing the whole earth from space is getting people to understand that we might be the only life.

Those things make me constantly think and constantly be sort of grateful for the fact that I’m alive.”

In 1966 after an LSD trip, Brand became obsessed with the idea of seeing a picture of the whole Earth:

“A photograph would do it — a color photograph from space of the earth.

There it would be for all to see, the earth complete, tiny, adrift, and no one would ever perceive things the same way.”

A couple of years later, his dream came true. In 1968, we finally got to see our planet in all her glory. “Here we came all this way to the Moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our own home planet, the Earth.” said astronaut Bill Anders

Brian Eno and Steward Brand are both co-founders of the Long Now Foundation.

Their motto is that “Now” is never just a moment.

The Long Now means recognizing that the precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes. We tend to worry a lot about what the near future will bring, but we forget how much progress we’ve made in the span of just a few decades.

So much is completely out of our control. Like when and where you were born and whether or not you have the privilege of taking a warm shower every day.

This is why I’m so obsessed with the idea of Serendipity.

Just the fact that you and I are here on this pale blue dot floating around in outer space is such an improbable and amazing thing. During your next shower, I hope you take moment to reflect on how lucky you are to be living right now.

See you next week,

<3 B

P.S. - If you want to zoom out and reflect on the big picutre, I’m hosting a cycling and writing retreat in Spain next Spring. If this is something you’d be interested in, fill out this form and I’ll be in touch with more info. 🚴🏼

I didn’t like that I had to sum up my entire existence on a one-page document. I spent way too much time making it look pretty and adding all the credentials I gained over the years. Once I finished, I didn’t even want to send it out because reading the job descriptions made me want to gag.

I realized I didn’t want another normal job just to pay the bills. I wanted to find something more unique and aligned with my values. Nowadays, if you want to find work like this, it’s possible to create credibility in any particular field, you just have to master the art of communication.

Credibility through communication – that’s the theme of this week’s Sunday Serendipity…

One of my favorite things to do is time travel through my journal.

It’s a way for me to look back to different points of my life and see if I’m on track towards my goals or if I’m stuck in a loop. I traveled back to 2017 and found an entry from my time in the corporate world:

Another day, another dollar. I really do not belong in the work environment that i’m in. It’s not the type of work I enjoy. I’m not making connections with people I would normally associate with. I feel like I have a very different personality than everyone else.

I feel fortunate to have landed a job like this straight out of college, but if I could go back and talk to my younger self I would tell myself to read more books. I feel like i’m just now becoming enlightened with what I could be doing with my life.

I’m reading this book called the End of Jobs. It talks about how we’re moving toward an economy where more and more people are going to be independently contracted.

After reading books like the End of Jobs, I realized that the walls of credentialism have been permanently cracked and they continue to be torn down on a daily basis.

Credentials still hold some value, but they’re no longer the only standard of evaluation. They’re just one piece of the puzzle.

Demonstrated results matter the most now.

The reason I got an engineering degree is because I knew it would give me credentials to secure a decent job. At the time I was so focused on getting the degree and finding a job that I didn’t spend time much time reading and educating myself on alternative ways to make a living.

I was going through the motions and following the traditional career path that society tells us to follow. After I started working my job, I quickly decided I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life, so I started self-educating.

On the internet anyone can showcase their expertise in any domain that exists. You can create credibility without having to get a $200,000 degree from an institution.

An example of this is James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits.

He isn’t credible to talk about habits because he has degree in science from some university. He’s credible to talk about habits because he built an audience of a million people who followed him for ideas, advice, and science on habits prior to him selling a book that has sold 10 million copies on habits.

None of the startups I’ve worked with have asked where I went to university or what kind of degree I have. Having a masters in engineering is a nice bonus and it shows my work ethic, but what they care about more is my current performance.

Paul Graham wrote about this back in 2008:

In a world of small companies, performance is all anyone cares about. People hiring for a startup don't care whether you've even graduated from college, let alone which one. All they care about is what you can do. Which is in fact all that should matter, even in a large organization.

The reason credentials have such prestige is that for so long the large organizations in a society tended to be the most powerful. But they don't have the monopoly on power they once did, precisely because they can't measure individual performance. Why spend twenty years climbing the corporate ladder when you can get rewarded directly by the market?

In the past, if you graduated from university you were almost guaranteed a secure well-paying job with a predictable path to upward mobility. This is no longer true.

Recent graduates are struggling to find work and wage growth has been stagnant across the globe. Earlier this year, a LinkedIn executive warned that “the bottom rungs of the career ladder are breaking”.

In a sense, this is great news. If you’re a young ambitious person, you no longer have to climb the corporate ladder to be successful. Another example that comes to mind is Pieter Levels. He’s an excellent communicator who’s built a bunch of fully-automated businesses which generate over $200k/month in revenue.

He even lists all the different ventures and revenue numbers in his bio, another way of creating credibility through communication.

A few decades ago it was nearly impossible to achieve that level of success by yourself, let alone without any credentials. Now with the Great Reshuffle, you can create your own credentials through communication.

I’m a believer because ever since I started creating stuff and communicating my thoughts and ideas, I’ve had more opportunities come into my field of orbit. I started with writing and now I’m having a go at YouTube.

If you’ve ever felt like communicating your ideas but are not sure where to start, this video might help:

To make living these days, you don’t need credentials, you just need to get good at communicating your ideas.

See you next week,

<3 B

P.S. - If you want to practice communication together, I’m hosting a cycling and writing retreat in Spain next Spring. If this is something you’d be interested in, fill out this form and I’ll be in touch with more info. 🚴🏼

I’ve even seen studies that say it’s impossible to break the echo chamber effect of social media. It can be good in a way, because we get to see more of what we already like, but it also limits our field of reference.

This is why I’m always looking for new perspectives. So I can expand my field of reference to understand both myself and the world around me a little better.1

I know there are many different ways to play the game of life, and in many different environments. Just as if I were at Costco, by sampling as many flavors as possible, it helps me better understand what I like and what I don’t like.

Lifestyle sampling – that’s the theme of this week's Sunday Serendipity…

I was having tacos with the other night and he said something that caught me by surprise. He said he doesn’t know many other people who have such a love and enthusiasm for a hobby like I do for cycling.

It was news to him that I only developed this deep love of bikes recently.

He thought I’d been into cycling since before moving to Barcelona. I told him it’s not the case, the reason I fell in love with cycling is because I changed my environment. I moved to a place that caters to bike commuting, and that is what caused me to fall in love with it as a hobby and a means of transport.

The conversation with Matt got me thinking about how different my life would look if I had never taken the time to sample different lifestyles.

Sampling where to live

Where you choose to live is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make.

When people ask why I chose Barcelona, the answer is simple. I sampled a lot of other places and this is the one that felt right.

In 2015, I came to visit my friend Xavi. We met in college and he invited me out after we graduated. It felt different than a normal vacation. I wasn’t just here for a weekend trip seeing the sights. I stayed with a friend in his apartment for a couple weeks and got to see what his day to day looks like here.

After that trip, I went back to the U.S. and worked my engineering job for a few years, but I couldn’t get Spain off my mind. When I came back to visit again in 2018, I came with the lens of “could I see myself living here?”

I think approaching it like this is important.

If you go on a vacation somewhere, don’t just think of it as an escape from reality, try to imagine what life would look like if you lived there. Before I moved to Barcelona I came twice to sample what it would feel like. Then in 2019, I made it official.

A few decades ago this type of sampling was more difficult.2 You had to sign a long term lease somewhere or stay in hotels. Now we have Airbnb, home-swapping, and a plethora of medium-term rental sites.

Or find a friend like Xavi and stay with them.

Sampling modes of transport

Sometimes I talk to friends back in the U.S. who say they don’t mind having to drive a car everywhere, it’s just part of life. Some even claim that they love driving. I think it’s because they’ve never experienced what it’s like to live in a place where you have a bunch of different options.

When I moved to Barcelona, at first, I was just happy to be in a place where I didn’t need a car. I relied on the metro, bus, and my own two feet for a while.

It wasn’t until a year later that I finally signed up for Bicing, the bike share service. Then in 2020, I upgraded and bought my own bike. Now for the past five years, cycling has become a core part of my day-to-day life.

I doubt I’ll ever transition back to a life where I don’t use my bike both as a utility function and as a hobby.

Which begs the question… Had I never changed my environment and sampled life without a car, would I have discovered my obsession with bikes?

Maybe, maybe not. I think the chances are quite low. I don’t know many cities in the U.S. that have solid bike infrastructure other than Portland and a handful of others.

And what a shame it would be if had I never discovered the joys of cycling.

I’m sharing this story because if you’re someone that dreads commuting around in a car all day, it’s possible that you belong in a different place.

I realize these were kind of extreme examples. Sampling doesn’t require you to move to another country or sell your car. At least not yet. You can find little ways to start treating life more as an experiment. Just as I did when I was sampling Barcelona before I actually moved here.

Get out of your reality bubble and sample different modalities of living.

You might be surprised by what you find.

See you next week,

<3 B

P.S. - If this got you curious about bikes, I’m hosting a cycling and writing retreat in Spain next Spring. This started as an idea a few months ago and now we have 10 people signed up! If this is something you’d be interested in, fill out this form and I’ll be in touch with more info. 🚴🏼

Growing up in Florida, I didn’t experience the changing seasons. It was either hot, or really hot. Here in Barcelona, the temperature dropped quite a bit just between yesterday and today. Kind of funny how it lined up perfectly with the start of a new season1. I’m looking forward to cooler days filled with lots of time on the bike.

With the seasons changing, it reminds me that life is cyclical, not linear. And it also makes me think about how we approach the different seasons of life2.

Seasons of life – that’s the theme of this week's Sunday Serendipity…

In an interview with Robert Persig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he talks about the combination of doing and non-doing:

“If a plant gets nothing but sunlight, it’s very harmful. It has to have darkness too.

In the sunlight, it converts carbon dioxide to oxygen, but in the darkness, it takes the oxygen and converts it back into carbon dioxide. And I think people are like that. You have to have some periods of doing and some periods of non-doing.

And when you get both of them in a mixture back and forth, you lead a much fuller life than if you’re always committed to doing.”

I love turning to nature for answers.

has similar advice about working like a lion instead of a cow.

Cows graze all day while most of a lion’s life is spent in stillness. They sprint when it’s necessary and then take time to recover and rest. I’ve embraced this mindset throughout my life, I tend to do sprints followed by long extended breaks.

I’m enjoying more leisure time and following my curiosities. I’m trying not to be so strict with my schedule and instead making time to nurture important relationships.

I’ve had little desire to consume social media the past few weeks. It seems like there’s so much rage and anger online right now.

Even though I don’t follow political accounts, my feed is still flooded with all the controversy. I know a big part of it is the algorithms and the fact that the most extreme views are the ones that spread and get clicks. I don’t think the shouting represents the majority, but it’s still concerning.

Less consuming, more creating

Instead of consuming and getting caught up in the globalization of problems, I’ve entered a season of creation.

I gave YouTube a shot last year, but it felt like I was forcing it. I spent way too much time scripting the videos and trying to make sure the editing was perfect. I took a break and now I’m approaching it differently.

Less fancy edits and more focus on storytelling:

If you’ve ever felt a nudge to start creating stuff but not sure where to begin, check out the video. I discuss how I’ve been able to get past certain roadblocks around creativity and putting myself out there.

I always suggest to start with writing. Even if it’s just writing to yourself, patterns will emerge and you’ll notice which topics you gravitate towards naturally.

To avoid perfectionism and overthinking, I recommend some sort of forcing function like deadlines or an accountability group.

Quick shoutout to for launching Act Two earlier this month.

This has been my forcing function for restarting the YouTube channel. It’s a five week creative accelerator to help get your project off the ground. I’ve met some awesome people in the first cohort these past couple weeks and it’s been a great way to get into the flow for this creative season ahead.

Wishing you a nice Fall. Embrace the changing of seasons. 🍁

See you next week,

<3 B

P.S. - If you’d like to create together, I’m hosting a cycling and writing retreat in Spain next Spring. This started as an idea a few months ago and now we have 10 people signed up! If this is something you’d be interested in, fill out this form and I’ll be in touch with more info. 🚴🏼

As you may or may not have noticed, I didn’t send a Sunday Serendipity post last week.

Publishing a weekly newsletter has reminded me what a great forcing function deadlines can be. I want to continue with it because I know the more often I write, the more serendipity it brings to both our lives.

That said, I’m not going to put too much pressure on myself. I don’t want to crowd your inbox and publish just for the sake of it. The deadline is arbitrary and self-imposed. My goal is to publish most Sundays, because I know the importance of leisure time every now and then.

Leisure time – that’s the theme of this week's Sunday Serendipity…

A lot has happened the last couple weeks.

I’ve had more leisure time than usual and it’s been wonderful.

After my trip to Brazil, I came back to Barcelona for a couple days and then took a ferry over to Mallorca to visit my sister for her birthday. My parents also flew in from Florida so it was nice having the family together to celebrate and see her new home.

If you’ve never been to Mallorca, you should go. It’s an incredible island:

There are mountains and beaches and beautiful little villages with hidden calas everywhere. It also happens to be a popular place for cycling and with the ferry I was able to bring my bike along easy peasy.

Last week I felt like I was letting myself down by not getting an essay out “on-time”.

The productive side of me always wants to be doing.

But after all the travel and moving around, I wanted to relax and prioritize time with my family. Plus, I was visiting one of the Mecca’s of cycling so clocking in some kilometers on the bike was also a priority.

Since my visit to Brazil a few weeks ago, I feel like I’ve entered a new season of life.

I parted ways with one of my big clients and I’m operating in Flounder Mode, trying to better understand who I am without the all the doing.

For the past decade, I’ve been busy building other peoples businesses, often in small startups juggling multiple roles while wearing multiple hats.

Instead of giving myself leisure time and space between the roles, I jumped straight from one opportunity to the next.

It’s been great for experience. Now I have more clarity around what I want and what I don’t want. I always knew none of those roles would be long-term. I had a deep desire to start my own thing, I just didn’t know what that thing was.

I like the way phrased it in her essay about not wanting a job:

“Yes, I worked in jobs I did not like, but I also refused to believe that this was it, that this was the way my life had to be.

Every job I took, I promised myself it was a means to an end, just for a little while.

There are ways to find deep meaning outside of our work, something we must do. But we spend a lot of our lives at work. And I refuse to accept that the majority of our time must be spent doing shit that doesn’t light us up. “That’s just life!” - it really fucking shouldn’t be.”

Some people stay locked in the golden handcuffs their entire lives. Everyone has their own reasons, and if they genuinely enjoy it, then great! But I know there are a lot of people out there who show up every day to a job they don’t really like, just because the pay is decent and their not sure what else is out there.

For some, curiosity takes control, and the pain of staying eventually outgrows the fear of taking the leap. I know the feeling well.

The last time I gave myself leisure time like this was when I quit my engineering job and moved to Barcelona. I took a sabbatical and developed new skills, and that pivot ended up being one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

It’s led to a life of more time and location freedom. It’s led to being able to spend more time with my family and never have to worry about asking for vacation days. It’s also saved me from hundreds of hours of sitting in a metal box commuting, which has been shown to be the most unhappy part of peoples days.

I feel lighter after the past few weeks. In a world that’s constantly begging for more, leisure does good for the soul. The German philosopher Josef Pieper wrote about this in his 1948 classic — Leisure, the Basis of Culture:

Leisure, then, is a condition of the soul — (and we must firmly keep this assumption, since leisure is not necessarily present in all the external things like “breaks,” “time off,” “weekend,” “vacation,” and so on — it is a condition of the soul) — leisure is precisely the counterpoise to the image for the “worker.”

Now I’m glad to be back home and I’m excited to continue building out Serendipity Lab as a resource for others who are looking to transition to a remote/hybrid role. If this sounds like you, then you can download it for free here.

See you next week,

<3 B

P.S. - If you’d enjoy some leisure time together, I’m hosting a cycling and writing retreat in Spain next Spring. This came up as an idea a couple months ago and now we have 10 people interested! If you’d like to ride bikes together, improve your communication skills, and connect with new faces, fill out this form and I’ll be in touch with more info. 🚴🏼

At the time I was saving up money and getting ready to quit and move to Barcelona, but I had no plan for once I arrived. Since I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, I decided to self-educate and keep learning.

I’d listen to the Tim Ferriss podcast on my commute to work, and after a while, I noticed many of his guests mentioned a writing or journaling practice.

I figured, OK, if this many successful people are talking about the benefits of writing, there must be something to it. Now writing is one of my daily rituals. I don’t think about it anymore, it’s just something I do.

Much of this writing has been journaling to myself, but a couple years ago, I started publishing online. My only regret is not starting sooner. Because after 10 years, I continue to be amazed by the compound effects over time.

The habit of writing — that’s the theme of this weeks Sunday Serendipity…

I’m still on a mini-vacation here in Brazil. It’s been a nice disconnect and it’s given me some time to think and reflect. I’ve been doing a lot of walking and writing. And eating, lots of eating. Some drinking too, especially the coffee.

Next week I’m planning to do a recap of this trip, but today I want to talk about something very near and dear to my heart. While wandering around São Paulo, I listened to a podcast from the 37signals team and it reassured me what a profound impact writing can have on your life and career:

We were sitting in our office in Chicago, and a few of us had been sharing links to things back and forth and we're just like, "We should just put this down somewhere because it'd be easier to publish it." We thought, "There’s probably other people who are interested in seeing these things or talking about the same things that we're talking about.”

And it wasn't like we're gonna do this, so we can do this, and this is gonna be this, and this is gonna lead to this. It's just sharing stuff that we're sharing already, so we're kind of documenting what we're already doing, and it just sort of grew from there.

Had I not already been publishing on Substack, I think this episode would have pushed me over the edge.

It’s funny timing, because last week I wrote about anti-career advice, and my father chimed in the comments section calling it “happiness advice”.

When saw the comment, he texted asking who it was. I said it’s just my Dad being the practical boomer he is:

I realize my Dad is just looking out for my best interest. He wrote that comment because he knows I invest a lot of time into this and he doesn’t see a business plan for how it will lead to any tangible income.

The thing is, I didn’t start writing for the money, that’s not the point of all this.

I started writing because it’s a way for me to think, and I know that by speaking my thoughts in public, it’ll make me a better communicator through sheer practice.

Paul suggested that it’s about having faith, but I think it’s more than that.

It’s about having a love and enthusiasm for something. It’s about being so obsessed with something that you can’t not talk about it. There are no expectations, I’m in it for the long game just because I’m so damn curious about these topics.

And if you feel a pull to create but haven’t found that “thing” yet, don’t worry about sharing your thoughts in public, just start journaling to yourself so you can identify patterns and see where your mind goes when your Default Mode Network kicks in.

Eventually you’ll start to collect information about yourself and the ideas that are interesting to you, and maybe one day you’ll start sharing those ideas with others.

Even after deciding what I wanted to write about, I hesitated on sharing my thoughts online because I didn’t consider myself a writer. Then I reached a boiling point and came to terms with the fact that I don’t need credentials to be a writer.

How liberating.

It’s okay if it doesn’t come naturally, as you exercise the muscle, it becomes more natural.

Writing has become a natural part of my routine, but I don’t think I’m naturally good at it. They discuss this idea on the podcast I mentioned earlier:

For a lot of people it may not come as naturally as others, like they have to force themselves to do this a little bit. And you know what? Then force yourself a little bit. I like to exercise the muscles of writing, and not everything's going to be a viral hit.

Sometimes you've got to put in base hits, and those base hits gotta sustain. You can't just do it for three months.

It's funny because Jason and I often talk about marketing and how hard it is to sustain the stamina to do something like "Let's put a lot of money behind these ads" or "Buy more billboards," and then we get queasy pretty quick when we don't see the results. Somehow this stuff exists in another category, where I will spend lots of time writing or sharing or engaging and not seeing the immediate feedback but still going like "Well, you know what? The net sum of 25 years in business and we are where we are today is because we did that.”

The point my dad was making with his comment is the importance of having a safety net and making money while I’m young. That way I can invest it and it will compound over time. I get it.

Of course it can be difficult to express your creativity and explore your curiosities if you’re living paycheck to paycheck, so I know this advice doesn’t apply to everyone. But sitting down to write and reflect for 30 minutes a day doesn’t cost money and it’s value also compounds over time.

When I talk about anti-career advice, I’m not saying jobs are bad. But the idea that you should always suffer no matter what for a paycheck is uninspiring. I have no idea where writing will take me or whether or not it will lead to some sort of career.

I’ve just seen the benefits that have come from writing, and the time investment has paid back dividends in non-monetary ways. It takes some patience, but what started as a journaling practice has turned into something much bigger:

Aside from all the great friendships and conversations that have come from this, it’s also led to collaborations with other creators.

Some of us from the Pathless Path community came together to form the Pathless Collective. After months of revisions and multiple rounds of peer reviews, we just released our first “zine” on :

The finished product is a zine/collection of essays that we are calling Unwritten: Crossing the Threshold. It’s a collection of essays on place, time, parenting, change, and the unknown. Everyone’s task was to simply write about the theme “thresholds.”

Grab a copy here

I know if I keep sharing my thoughts and improving little by little, opportunities will present themselves just because I’m increasing my luck surface area.

That’s what writing does, it helps you get to know yourself better, and once you get you to know yourself better, you’ll find what you’re curious about and maybe if you share those things for a long enough time it will lead to some sort of opportunities.

See you next week,

<3 B

P.S. - If you’d enjoy writing together, I’m hosting a cycling and writing retreat in Spain next Spring. This came up as an idea a couple months ago and now we have 10 people interested! If you’d like to ride bikes together, improve your communication skills, and connect with new faces, fill out this form and I’ll be in touch with more info. 🚴🏼

“The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it — basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.” — Charles Bukowski

Hola amigos — Today’s Sunday Serendipity is coming to you from São Paulo, Brazil.

I’m impressed with that I’ve seen so far, I like that it doesn’t feel like a touristy city at all. The weather has been perfect, 78 degrees and sunny. I wanted to escape the August heat and take some time to clear my mind.

I’ve also been inspired by and the way she approaches travel.

After reading a bunch of her essays this past year, I was craving a solo trip to a new place where I don’t plan anything and just follow my curiosities.

Following curiosities — that’s the theme of this weeks Sunday Serendipity…

When asked what young people should be working on right now, Kevin’s response was that you should aim to work on something no one has a word for, something where it takes a while to explain to your mother what it is you do.

He calls it “anti-career advice”:

Your 20s are the perfect time to do a few things that are unusual, weird, bold, risky, unexplainable, crazy, unprofitable, and looks nothing like “success.” The less this time looks like success, the better it will be as a foundation.

For the rest of your life these orthogonal experiences will serve as your muse and touchstone, upon which you can build an uncommon life.

Unfortunately I’m not in my 20’s anymore.

But no matter your age, I think we live in a world where it’s much easier to re-invent yourself multiple times throughout your career and life.

I went to school for Industrial Engineering. I worked in that profession for a few years and realized it’s not how I want to spend the rest of my life. So I quit and moved to Barcelona. I worked as a tour guide for a year and picked up some freelance photo/video projects here and there. Then I got into online sales and eventually made my way into an Account Manager role where I learned marketing and copywriting.

Instead of trying to follow some rigid linear path, I’m following my curiosities and making stuff along the way. I’m realizing the making part is becoming more and more important.

Credentials are cheap now. Everyone has degrees and certificates. Anyone can pay a few hundred bucks and call themselves a “life coach”.

What sets people apart today isn’t credentials, it’s what you’ve made and tried. It’s the experience you’ve built by working in seemingly unrelated industries where you don’t realize until later how transferrable these skills are.

When I was working as a tour guide, I thought of it as a way to pass the time and make a bit income so I wouldn’t burn through my savings. I didn’t realize it was teaching me valuable storytelling skills and how to keep a crowd of strangers engaged.

Now I’m combining these skills with my interests to become a category of one.

I’m always surprised by the hidden value in these odd jobs, random travels, and tiny experiments. It’s similar to what I discussed last week when talking about the good ol’ days. We hardly ever see the progress or insights in the present moment, only later are we able to connect the dots.

These days, when someone asks me “what’s your plan?” or “how’s business doing?” I reply with a framework I learned from :

“I am following my creative energy and seeing where it takes me.”

Instead of accumulating more credentials or climbing a crumbling ladder, I’m following my curiosities and leaning into where my creative energy is taking me.

For the past few years, I’ve lived an overly-scheduled life. I tried to take a sabbatical last summer, but it didn’t it didn’t last long. I was contracted for some part-time work shortly after I wrote that essay, and since then I’ve been juggling multiple roles and projects at the same time. I’ve felt constant overwhelm.

That’s the main reason I’m on this trip to Brazil. I wanted to commemorate this moment because I feel like I’m entering a new chapter of life.

I’m winding down some of the work that pays my bills so that I can focus more on building Serendipity Lab and helping others through transition periods. Whether it be changing careers or moving to a new country, I think we’re all just one conversation away from living a life that is more aligned with our values.

The reason I’m so obsessed with Serendipity is because I’ve seen this situation play out so many times in my own life, where a single conversation led to a pivot that completely changed my path.

This is still a work in progress, but if you’ve been considering a transition, I’ve started compiling a guide for how to create new opportunities in your life.

You can download it for free here.

Cheers to new chapters and following curiosities.

I’m off to explore São Paulo and find some more pão de queijo. I’m still here for another week so if you have any recommendations drop them in the comments!

See you next week my friends,

<3 B

P.S. - On the theme of following curiosities, I’m hosting a cycling and writing retreat in Spain next Spring. This came up as an idea a couple months ago and now we have 10 people interested! It’s in the planning phases now so if you’d like to ride bikes together, improve your communication skills, and connect with some new faces, fill out this form and I’ll be in touch with more details. 🚴🏼

Today’s essay is another one of those reminders.

There are times where I put too much pressure on myself, when I don’t feel the progress happening in the day-to-day. Then I remind myself that one the most important skills in life is to recognize when things are going well.

It sounds simple enough, yet it’s so easy to forget that these are the good ol’ days!

These are the good ol’ days — that’s the theme of this weeks Sunday Serendipity…

When I was working my corporate job, I dreamt of being able to make money from my laptop and not needing to “clock-in” to a physical location everyday.

It took some trial and error, but eventually that dream came true.

Inevitably, our baseline shifts over time. We get acclimated to our current situation and the goalpost moves further away, always just a tad out of reach. Sometimes we can be our own worst critic. I don’t give myself enough credit for the risks I’ve taken and how much progress I’ve made the past few years.

That’s the funny thing about this saying…

Often times, we don’t realize we’re living in the good ol’ days until after we’ve left them:

A couple weeks ago, I was feeling as if life was getting to be too routine.

I decided to indulge in one of my favorite forgotten hobbies, solo traveling. I booked a spontaneous trip to Brazil. I haven’t done a trip like this in years.

When I was on the default path working my corporate job, I fantasized about this lifestyle. Now that it’s real, I sometimes forget that this is exactly what I wished for.

That’s the thing about dreams coming true, over time it becomes your new normal, and this is why it’s important to pause and notice when things are good.

It reminds me of this Kurt Vonnegut quote where he tells a story about his Uncle Alex:

One of the things [Uncle Alex] found objectionable about human beings was that they so rarely noticed it when they were happy.

He himself did his best to acknowledge it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

So I hope that you will do the same for the rest of your lives. When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

I love this appreciation of simple pleasures. Constant connectivity distracts us from the goodness we’re already experiencing. It’s so easy to give in to the pessimism of mainstream media due to the globalization of everyones problems.

Our brains are wired to romanticize the past. It’s why we hear older people say “those were the good ol’ days”, as if there are no good days ahead of us.

But I’m certain these are the good ol’ days, we’re living in them right now.

Until next time my friends,

<3 B

P.S. - I’ve started compiling a guide for how to create new opportunities in your life. If you’ve been considering a career switch, you can download the guide for free here.

P.P.S. - I’m hosting a cycling and writing retreat in Spain next Spring. This came up as an idea a few weeks ago and now that some people have shown interest I’m in the planning phases. If you’d like to ride bikes together, improve your communication skills, and connect with some new faces, fill out this form and I’ll be in touch with more details. 🚴🏼

It’s a Mary Poppins style musical, set in the backdrop of a dystopian world where everyone is getting laid off from their white collar jobs and becoming delivery drivers. It portrays massive inflation and inequality, with the wealthy taking off to Dubai since the living conditions have gone to complete shit.

As everything around them crumbles, the streets are filled with dancers cheerfully singing to the tune “everything is just fine”. Welcome to the degenerate economy.

The degenerate economy — that’s the theme of this weeks Sunday Serendipity…

Even though the campaign was targeted at the UK, there’s a similar storyline playing out in many other countries:

Wage growth has stagnated while cost of living continues to rise.

I see reports saying most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and don’t have enough savings to cover a $1000 emergency.

Why are people struggling to get by in such a wealthy country?

According to the Coinbase campaign, the traditional financial system is not working for many — and crypto is a way to solve that:

When it got banned by TV networks, CEO Brian Armstrong tweeted:

“If you can’t say it, then there must be a kernel of truth in it. We welcome the attacks and any other attempts to censor this message, as it just helps it spread.”

And it wasn’t just the commercial, they also plastered Oxford Circus with ads carrying the same message:

And taxi cabs too:

Of course they want more users on the platform, but the underlying sentiment speaks volumes no matter which idealogical camp you sit in or whether or not you believe in the future of crypto.

Historically speaking, if you invested in BTC and held onto it, there have been plenty of gains. The issue comes with all the memecoins and fake pumps on social media.

We live in a non-linear world where a minority of risk takers are getting outsized returns. Howard Lindzon coined the term “degenerate economy” to describe the shift:

In this new economy, people are making high-risk moves and embracing a more speculative approach to finance, where digital wallets on your phone hold everything from investments to assets with just a few taps.

But the 'degen economy' is more than just taking financial risks. It’s a lifestyle shift that includes education, new experiences, and activities centered around digital platforms.

Whether it’s learning about markets through meme-driven communities or engaging with novel forms of digital ownership, the 'Degenerate Economy' represents a bold, fast-paced way of interacting with the financial world, where anything can happen and speculation is a form of entertainment.

The last line is spot on. Speculation is a form of entertainment. There are a million memecoins being produced a week and Coinbase is having difficulty regulating it all:

Not only have we seen this massive spike in memecoins, Americans are also falling more in love with long-shot sports betting. Pulling on a similar thread as the degenerate economy, describes this new era as the jackpot age:

That taste for outsized risk has seeped into everyday culture. Wage growth has severely lagged compounded capital, causing ordinary people to increasingly see their best shot at real upward mobility in negative EV jackpots.

Online gambling, retail meme stocks, sports betting, and crypto memecoins all testify to the phenomena of exponential wealth preference. Technology makes speculating effortless, while social media spreads the story of each new overnight millionaire, luring the broader population into one giant losing bet like moths to a light. We’re becoming a culture that worships the jackpot and increasingly prices survival at zero.

When does the bubble pop

Over the past few years, “Buy Now, Pay Later” options such as Klarna and Afterpay have become ubiquitous with online shopping.

The fact that you can take out a loan to buy a burrito is insane.

All this feels eerily similar to 2008 when mortgages were being given out with little verification of income and ability to pay them back. People are racking up debt using Buy Now, Pay Later for things like botox and concert tickets.

brought up the growing number of young people who have resorted to begging for money on social media platforms. In her essay “Financial ruin, but make it content”, she describes the rising trend of creators asking for engagement just so that they can make it into the TikTok creator fund.

It’s the digital version of standing on the street corner with a paper cup begging for spare change.

Let’s see how the next few years will unfold as we progress through the Great Reshuffle. The Vladimir Lenin quote seems applicable here: "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen"

Welcome to the degenerate economy, where everything is just fine!1

See you next week,

<3 B

P.S. - I’m hosting a cycling and writing retreat in Spain next Spring. This came up as an idea a few weeks ago and now that some people have shown interest I’m starting to plan out the details. If you’d like to ride bikes, improve your communication skills, and connect with some new faces, just fill out this form and I’ll be in touch with more details. 🚴🏼