Travel
Sesto Calende, Italy
The Stay
My dad lives in Sesto Calende, a beautiful northern town situated on the Ticino river next to the mouth that opens into Lago Maggiore.
The town commands a stunning view of the Alps.
Sesto Calende is my home and my place to rest comfortably whenever I stay in Europe and it’s my go-to place in between my travels like it was this time around
I stayed here for the week between my Portugal and Thailand trips
Favorite Food
Home cooked lasagna! Nothing quite like Italian home cooked meals!
Chiang Mai, Thailand
My first flight was 12 hours from Milan to Singapore, I then took my final flight to Chiang Mai for a total of 15 hours of flight time. As of this week review (which I wrap up on Saturday/Sunday morning) I have only been in Thailand for one day. I am looking forward to spending a month here!
The Stay
I stayed in the Residence Hotel because it was a cheap option that was also recognized by the Thai government to offer the “test & go” quarantine option.
This option essentially offers tourist the chance to land into Thailand and go to a hotel in order to await a PCR test and its result. Once you get the negative result you are free to travel the country
Favorite Food
Pad Thai!
I used the Grab app (think Uber Eats on steroids) in order to order some great Pad Thai to my hotel room as awaited to take my PCR test
Run
Mileage
Took the mileage fairly easy this week and only ran twice. Both of them were trail runs near my dad’s place in Sesto Calende. It was nice change of pace and scenery.
Most of my runs this year have been on paved roads or marked roads for pedestrians and cyclists. So, having the chance to run in a hiking area was a great reprieve from the usual.
Sesto Calende has a 1 mile dedicated pedestrian and cyclist trail that leads into a longer paved trail that I have taken for over 10 miles in the past, so running out there is great
Runner's High Thoughts
Running in the woods makes much easier to get into running flow state. I kept telling myself to keep going on more mile leading to run a 9 miler and 8 miler on runs I intended to be short
Trail Running > City Running
Taking an epson salt bath is still my favorite post-run activity
Book
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkman
Snapshot Thoughts
I will undoubtably be listing to parts of this book multiple times over. There’s a lot to learn and enjoy with this book
Chapter 12: The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad
This chapter really hit home. Back in January, when I was in Rome, I had my first bout of feeling lonely even though I was supposed to be happy that I was traveling.
Thankfully with a bit of perception change and listening to this chapter I have been able to appreciate the positive aspects of solo traveling
Chapter 13: Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
This is a powerful chapter, and if I could only recommend one chapter, this one would be it! In fact, if you don’t want to pay for the whole book but want to hear the chapter, The Tim Ferris Show Podcast has it on there for free. Episode #555
In this chapter Burkeman did a great job to reduce the overwhelming stress that I can build up at times when I think I am not doing the right thing or enough things in my life. I highly recommend the book and this chapter especially
Favorite Quotes
“Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.”
“The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.”
This next one is long but I believe the whole of best serves Burkeman’s point:
“our lives, thanks to their finitude, are inevitably full of activities that we’re doing for the very last time. Just as there will be a final occasion on which I pick up my son—a thought that appalls me, but one that’s hard to deny, since I surely won’t be doing it when he’s thirty—there will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the ocean, or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend. Yet usually there’ll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you’re doing it for the last time. [Sam] Harris’s point is that we should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it. And indeed there’s a sense in which every moment of life is a “last time.” It arrives; you’ll never get it again—and once it’s passed, your remaining supply of moments will be one smaller than before. To treat all these moments solely as stepping-stones to some future moment is to demonstrate a level of obliviousness to our real situation that would be jaw-dropping if it weren’t for the fact that we all do it, all the time.”
The All In Podcast
This podcast has these four powerhouses of industry that will cover economic, tech, political, social topics every week.
I just wanted to recommend the entire of this podcast series because while I don’t get bogged down by the daily news cycle anymore, but, it’s podcasts like this one that allows me to feel like I still have a decent understanding of what is happening in the world and I genuinely like the attitude of these four guys that are clearly great friends
Current Events
Ukraine & Russia
I usually don’t usually keep up with current events ever since choosing to live a more digital nomad lifestyle. However, the Ukraine and Russia issue illicit too much emotion and curiosity for me.
So, I jumped on the phone with a couple of my friends the night of the invasion in order to get their thoughts on the situation and just wrap my head around what the next couple days and weeks could look like. My two friends, like me, are former Marines but unlike me they have boots on the ground experience in war so I value their opinions highly on anything that could potentially lead to risking a US ground war. Here are a few key takeaways that I took from our conversation:
US Actions
The US will NOT risk going to war and will NOT send boots on the ground
The US has been bogged down by too many domestic issues (Covid, inflation, record low approval ratings, etc…)
Since the US will not go to war, they will begin to tap roil reserves to stabilize the market AND/OR they ask OPEC to reduce oil barrel price by creating an oversupply
US has sent boots on the ground to protect NATO allies as that is an obligation we have made
EU Actions:
Russian is by far the largest supplier of European oil and gas. Anywhere from 30-50% of their gas comes from Russia
The EU needs to continue doing business with Russia and could not afford cutting off the relationship
Russian Actions:
Russia is taking a highly strategic move. Taking over Ukraine=
Becoming the 3rd largest economy in the world
Russia will become much richer in minerals, ores, and farmable land
Russia will MOST LIKELY take over Ukraine with little difficulty when taking in the reluctance and lack of incentives for the US and EU to resist the invasion militarily
Chinese Actions
China will continue to build their forces and artificial islands in strategic valuable areas with a more focused eye on Taiwan
Will continue to beef up their navy
Result
The USA will most likely be in a much weaker international position
Russia was warned through sanctions not to act and yet they have now invaded a sovereign country
China will feel more comfortable to openly defy the US
US allies may no longer be able to comfortably rely on the US for defense/protection and we could see more countries looking to Russia and China for economic and military support
Not Covered
We did not discuss these, but they are topics that I wish to think and learn more about in the coming weeks.
Digital war landscape/cyberwar
Nuclear
War with world powers that have nukes
nuclear strike aftermath
human error issues
archaic nuclear infrastructure
Gratitude & Feedback
Thank you for reading up into this point. Please share any book recommendations or podcasts that you may have. I appreciate all of you that are continuing to follow me on the wild project as I try to live an uncharted and non-traditional life.
Keep pushing & much love!
-Dylan