Somewhere before I entered my teens I began to ponder the world in which I found myself, take note of the ways in which things were not as I thought they should be — within myself as well as my surroundings — and started to make my life a sort of experiment / quest to see what could be done about it.

The last dozen and a half years have been a long and arduous journey, from trying to make sense of the darkest corners of my own soul, to pursuing a multidisciplinary understanding of the world and humanity as it is, starting in the realm of theology and psychology, and gradually transitioning towards sociology, economics, and political history. The deeper I go the more I find history to be my textbook from which to study humanity, and economics to be the metric by which to measure and evaluate it, with some annoying details that don’t seem to fit neatly in either.

Along the way I’ve found travel to be a great study aid, both for stimulating and helping to organize thought (I’ve describe it as the world being a map to my own mind), and for the depth, breadth, and nuance I’m able to add through interactions and conversations with people I meet along the way, which also helps to add meaning to the whole process. This, along with other factors, has lead me at present to an itinerant, simple lifestyle, living out of a 30L backpack for the foreseeable near term.

But what I have not been doing, at any rate what I have almost made an effort to avoid over the last half dozen years, is intentionally writing out my own thoughts. A shift in this beginning to feel necessary for two reasons: 1) my own head is a disorganized jumbled mess in which I often lose things, sometimes temporarily and sometimes indefinitely, and as such my thoughts border on incoherent at times. 2) I wish to not become a sort of “Dead Sea” into which information continually flows but with no outlet, neither to the benefit of myself, nor of anyone else, but becoming more brackish and useless over time.

At any rate, here I am, feeling the need, finally, to write.