Goals for my travels

In eleven days, I will graduate. this will mark the beginning of a new era for me. the endless options for what my future could be will lay themselves out in front of me, and i will have to pick one. to make this decision easier, I have decided to leave my environment so that I can decide what I want for myself, without the influence of mimetic desire. my one-way ticket to London has been secured. there is no turning back now.

travel at my age is typically viewed as something where you go out, explore, and “find yourself.” my concern is that these notions are vague, and leave a lot of room for excuses to be made. I want these travels to be a formative experience for me. therefore, it’s a good idea to be as precise as possible about what I am looking to achieve over the next few months of my life.

1. Get really comfortable talking to strangers

while i am abroad, I want to devote a considerable amount of time to upgrading my social operating system. to me, there are a few ways in which my social skills can be developed: learning how to build mutual understanding with people who have different values, getting more comfortable starting conversations with new people, and learning how to quickly build rapport with people who I have just met. I plan to collect as many data points as possible to reinforce the mental narrative that everyone is my friend, even people i haven’t met yet.

2. Improve my Spanish

my spanish-speaking capabilities are intermediate right now, and they’ve proven to be quite useful. but over the past five years, I haven’t had the opportunity to practice. I hope to address this situation by working on a farm in Spain for a few weeks through the WWOOF program.

3. Read great books

War and Peace changed my life. Recently, life has been too hectic for me to maintain my reading habit, but once I’m on the road I will have lots of time to spend reading the masterpieces of classic literature. I’m currently thinking of reading Fathers and Sons and Moby Dick. If I go to Spain, I’ll read Don Quijote.

4. Go on a lot of dates

learning how to engage with women in a way that is mature and not awkward is one of the best ways to improve my social skills. this aspect of life wasn’t much of a priority while I was in school, but now that i have more time on my hands and won’t be surrounded solely by engineers, dating life is definitely something i want to explore in more detail. it seems like a great way to get to know people somewhat deeply, and who knows, maybe I’ll find someone i really connect with.

5. Do more random stuff

everything in college was very goal-directed. oftentimes, I fell prey to Goodhart’s law: the metrics I was using to measure success became targets. when I started to use them as targets, they sucked the joy out of living. so while it is good to have goals, I plan to be emotionally unattached from them in the short term and do whatever the moment calls for. it’s arrogant to assume that you know exactly what the consequences of a situation will be. I resolve to let things play out in their natural course, even if it doesn’t make sense in the moment. i can always reevaluate and readjust if things veer too far off-course.

6. Figure out what to do next

Do I find a job overseas? do I return home and work for a tech startup? do I try to land a job once again at SpaceX? start my own business? go to grad school? where? what would I study? do I want to be an engineer, physicist, or a writer? maybe all three? maybe none?

there’s a lot of open questions right now for me, and I don’t think i’m going to find all of the answers on a mountaintop in Switzerland. but travel will give me some new perspectives that I can use to think about these questions more deeply. the goal of exploration, as Isabel so eloquently puts it in this essay, is to find something I would be willing to commit to.

the closer my departure date comes, the more the excitement begins to bubble in my veins. I have no idea what to expect. But I know one thing: I feel alive! And I’m so glad I’m doing this before I commit a long-term endeavor.

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