I had about 10 minutes notice before I decided to take a flight from Panama to Paris, but I managed to take everything I own with me on the flight… and I didn’t have to check a bag. In fact, I didn’t even have to use the overhead bins!

I can now completely uproot my life and fit everything I need in the economy class seat in front of me.

It took a while to get to this point, and by no means was it easy for me to get here, but it feels like second nature to me now, and I feel like the age of globalism is racing towards us faster than imaginable as airline prices go down and more people become “global citizens”.

I feel like becoming a global citizen is no longer something that you have to be afraid of as there come to be more and more “digital nomad” communities popping up all over the world. I feel like this is an unstoppable wave that will break borders and I would highly recommend, to those who want to explore the world, to consider learning how to live well out of a backpack because now is a great time to get started.

I only got started like 4 years ago, and I now have hundreds of friends spread out across many cities all over the world. It was definitely super lonely at times, but I think it’s important to feel comfortable in loneliness.

As some people have heard of my recent travels, they’ve been asking me about my “digital nomad stack”, so I’ve been inspired to write a blog post about how I’ve systemized a way of living that I like to call the “distributed lifestyle” — a lifestyle of living globally without compromising many of the benefits of staying in one place.

My solution is not going to be your solution, but hopefully by sharing what things I own and why, I can convey my ways of thinking with people to help others to become global citizens as well.

Getting Started

I don’t really know my audience — and honestly sharing my current setup is admittedly not directly applicable to most people — unless you have zero responsibilities and you’re trying to build a globally distributed business. That said, I know of like 2 or 3 people who will get a fair amount of value from this so I guess I’ll tailor it to them: people who are just entering the workforce or have been working for a couple years and don’t like being in the Matrix.

I want to start off by saying that if you’re in a position with very little money saved up, the harsh reality is that you’re going to have to start with working your ass off to save up like 5–10k. You’re also going to have to work your ass off to get some real digital skills. I spent 14 hours a day, working countless 100-hour weeks to build up my own skillset quickly. I wouldn’t advise doing that for most people, and maybe you can do it more efficiently than I did, but I’m just stating that as an example of what it can take.

I would also recommend figuring out what “success” looks like to you — and work for the people you view to be “successful” for free or very little pay if you have to.

A rule of thumb I’d give is that you should strive to become your own version of the people you admire, and the best way of doing this is to surround yourself with either people you admire or colleagues who admire the same people/qualities as you. The rest should just be people you really like.

Also, give far more than you take, but know when to take or you won’t be respected.

Backpack

View my full backpack list here: https://akagi.co/things (will be updated over time)

Living out of a backpack means that your backpack is super important.

Everyone has different needs. For me, I like to stay in places for at least 3 months at a time so I need a bag that can carry a week’s worth of stuff and can also be used as a daily pack.

I searched through reddit a few years ago and I’m extremely happy with the bag I found — the 5.11 Rush 24(Liter) bag.

This bag is great for not only traveling, but can also be used for camping and as a roaming office for daily use. When I arrive at a new destination, I just take out my clothes and carry it around with me everywhere I go.

Clothing

Anyone who’s known me for the past couple of years knows that I wear the same thing ever day: a plain black v-neck shirt and black dress pants.

“Alex, does this mean you’re an anime character?”

Yes.

Warmth & Being Fancy

The setup I’ve been using for the past few years has been: a nice sweater, a light hoodie, and a soft-shell jacket. I recently also got a light and super compact down jacket because London is cold as balls.

If you layer them together, you can comfortably withstand freezing temperatures. That said, if you take my advice on this setup and freeze to death, I assume no responsibility. This setup will not work in NY or Boston in winter, so just buy a coat once you’re there, and maybe leave it with a friend once you leave the city.

Also be sure to wear all of your bulky stuff when boarding flights.

The nice sweater was a great hack that doubles up for semi-formal events so I don’t have to have a collared shirt, and because I wear dress pants in general I can go to fancy business stuff without thinking about what to wear. Oh, and I like to wear dress pants in general because they’re lighter than jeans. I recently took it a step further and got some rather expensive Lulu Lemon ABC pants, which are like dress-pants but made of yoga-pant material, and I love them. Before that I wore ~$25 pants from target.

Shoes

Shoes are arguably the least space-compact thing in existence. Only take one pair with you and get over it. I also have a pair of sandals but even sandals are a bit too clunky and I would get rid of them if I were savage enough to walk around hostels barefoot. I also use those sandals for hiking… but that’s a different story.

I do not have a solution for you if you want another pair of shoes with you while traveling, other than to make it your “personal item” when flying, but I don’t do that because then I can’t brag about fitting my backpack underneath the economy seat in front of me and this entire post would become a lie.

Lodging

Depending on how likable you are, finding couches to crash on is a great way to establish yourself in a city early on because you get to stay with locals.

Hacker houses are great if you’re only in a location for a few months. I’ve lived in 3–4 hacker houses in the last 4 years and they are a fantastic way of meeting others in a similar situation as you. 10/10 would recommend — and living in a bunkbed as an adult is actually kinda fun.

If you’re staying somewhere for 6 months to a year, I would highly highly recommend living in a communal house. Those things are dope and they’re popping up everywhere. A communal house is pretty similar to a hacker house, and there are no formal distinctions, but they typically have 1–2 people per room and longer-staying tenants, which means you develop deeper friendships and really get to know people. I would actually highly recommend any young professional moving to a new city to see if there are any living arrangements like these because they’re a phenomenal way to make tons of new friends in a city.

I recently lived in a 70-person house in San Francisco and it was incredibly fulfilling. One week feels like a month and you’re constantly doing stuff. You experience emotional ups and downs but it’s worth it in the end. I know of many great communities in the SF Bay Area and NYC so let me know if you want any intros or recommendations.

Sentimental Stuff

Several months ago, I took a deep dive into the things I own. Even though I claim to live out of a backpack, I still have tons of stuff lying around in a bunch of places. Like, I still claim ownership over my lego sets back in Indy…

Here’s the thing about sentimental things — they’re hunks of stuff that you don’t actually need but your feelings like them and you see them as irreplaceable.

That’s fine!

What I typically do with things of sentimental value is either stash them at my parents’ house or with my friends in whatever city I was in. If you don’t have the luxury of parents or friends, then get a storage garage in your hometown? Or maybe dig a hole somewhere secluded and make a treasure map?

Your objective is to simply have the peace of mind knowing that you can get back to it again someday once you have your shit together. Ooooh how about this: “You shouldn’t have shit if you don’t have your shit together.”

Distributed Living

The “distributed lifestyle” is just a fancy term I like to use because I’m a huge cryptocurrency fanboy.

You didn’t ask, but all you really need to know as of right now is that cryptocurrencies will be the money of the future as more and more people embrace globalism.

What I really mean by “distributed lifestyle” is that I have friends all around the world who I can rely on for various things, and through my own reputation, they can also rely on each other for various things. This is not a novel concept.

The key to making this work is to 1) be socially aware, and 2) give more than you take anywhere you go, and “giving” doesn’t have to be financial. It can just take the form of building social capital or maybe even an IOU of “let me know whenever you’re in X-City and you’re absolutely welcome to crash at mine!”

One of my favorite gifts left by a friend who crashed at our place in NYC was a massive handle of Grey Goose on our table with a note that said “Thanks for letting me stay”. That’s a FAR better parting gift than just $$$.

Closing

Wow it was really fun writing this!

I’ve had these thoughts on my mind recently and I’m really happy to have gotten them out there and I hope a couple of people get value out of this.

It took me a while to feel comfortable with this lifestyle, and I seriously mean it when I say it’s fucking difficult. That said, human beings are super resilient and it’s also fun and fulfilling during the struggle so I say it’s worth it. I’m probably an outlier on the ambition spectrum so this really isn’t applicable advice to most people, but maybe something I mentioned vibes with you somehow, and that’s really all that matters.

Anyway, thanks for reading my ranting Medium article and let me know if you have any questions!

Assuming I’m not a bad programmer, you should be able to shoot me an email by filling out the contact form I just built out at https://akagi.co

I believe that if all people altruistically strive to be truly happy and attain self-transcendence, that human ingenuity and creativity will compound into an unstoppable river of incredible ephemeral experiences.

Time and resources are limited, so we should pragmatically direct our focus on the most influential and powerful places available.

We should help companies, with leaders who share similar ideals of building utopia, convert their internal structure to be a highly competitive technologically oriented company that makes decisions off of first-principles, in order to bring maximum long-term happiness and satisfaction to their employees.

Phases:
1) Make Money
2) Research / Engineer
3) Build / Fortify in every major city

1) Make Money

This step basically consists of finding and optimizing various money making machines around the world in order to build wealth for both myself and for people who I’ve subjectively deemed to be “good people” who also strive to help their employees attain altruistic self-actualization and true happiness.

I’ve been building software and companies for over 4 years now, and I’d like to think that I’m pretty good at first-principles thinking and automation. We will work with companies to develop well designed projects to then build with the highest of coding standards, with an emphasis on maintainability and sustainability.

In order to accomplish this, I’ve completely compacted my life and am very used to moving around (living lavish out of a backpack). We will hopefully eventually develop a distributed team with offices in every major city. This is a moonshot, but why not try?

This phase will likely last 2 more years, but the goal is to build a system that generates enough money for my team and me to focus full-time and afford resources for research and engineering.

2) Research / Engineer

We have several problems to tackle.

One thing we’ll have to figure out how to do is to understand city energy grids and come up with a plan to sustainably produce 10–100x current energy demands. I have a feeling that solar won’t be enough, and I’m not going to count on fusion, so my guess is we’ll go nuclear, but I really don’t know yet.

Another thing to figure out is highly compact and unitized vertical farms. Basically a Tesla Powerwall for food. Once we figure out how to build these, they’ll be distributed throughout the previously established network of money making machines.

Hopefully, if the energy problem is solved, we’ll be able to get the food problem to a low enough price-point to where on a 10-year timescale, it will make sense to grow your own food (fully automated, little to no effort required, ideally), or probably a hybrid between local farms and self-growing. Hopefully we get to a point where exotic foods no longer have to be shipped because we can just engineer them to grow in our basements.

I doubt I’ll be doing much research in desalination as cities seem to have clean water fairly figured out, and a lot of good people are figuring out desalination… but I’m not actually sure about that so that’s another thing to figure out.

Once you’re able to solve for the first two layers of Maslow’s for all people at scale, people will theoretically no longer have legitimate reasons to fear taking risks to build cool things and potentially losing all of their money because you can always start back up again without anyone’s help once core infrastructure for life is in place and maintained nearly autonomously.

I actually have like another dozen things that need to be built out, which apply to the higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy, but I’d like to keep them to myself for now…

3) Build / Fortify in every major city

At this point, we’re pretty far along and I feel like this is pretty self-explanatory. We’ve researched and spec’d out solutions, so then it’s just a matter of deployment, which is really just an education problem. If people learn how to read open-sourced projects, they can figure out how to do anything in any part of the world.

I don’t really care about money, as new wealth going to be one’s ability to tap into the internet and engineer solutions for themselves and others.

Well… we’ll be making plenty of money, too.

That doesn’t actually mean anything, but I guess what I mean by that is we should zoom out and question what we believe in today.

Today is just another data-point in history.

Back in the 1500s, people thought that humanity roughly knew how things worked. Think about how little they knew relative to what we know today…

Copernicus was like “Guys the Earth goes around the Sun!” and no one really got it.

What makes this point in history so different from then?

So if we haven’t figured it all out, then what are we missing?

We’re sitting on our tiny pale blue dot spaceship, in an inconceivably massive playground that’s so big that we can’t even look at it all because the rules of the playground say that light travels too slowly to see everything.

I think it would be fun for us to master our universe instead of getting all worked up about clickbait Facebook posts.

We’re all on the same team and the universe is on our side.

Let’s take a minute and focus on the bigger picture.

I think we can use science to master the universe, and have a great time while we’re at it.

It won’t be easy, but I think it’s possible.

I guess that’s what I mean by “think heliocentric”.

Be grounded in reality
Stay open minded
Remain tenacious
Accept your circumstances
Shed your negativity
Embrace your creativity
Lose yourself in helping others
Celebrate life

Okay, here’s my actual logical argument

You think therefore you are
There are many different types of thoughts, list them all out
If your existence is simply your thoughts, then you should maximize your ‘good’ thoughts
So what are good thoughts?
Good thoughts are those which maximze true happiness and self-transcendence
Now here’s why
All of the pleasure that you feel can be boiled down to experiences which are brought on by the help of others
List different examples of pleasurable experiences
Show how other people built you to a point where you were able to experience that pleasure
So why can’t we spend all of our time embracing pleasurable experiences?
Because there are a core set of constraints that we have as humans
Here’s how one could engineer their way to automate away all of those constraints, at scale (first principles)
So now that you have tons of free time to do whatever you want, what should you do?
You can either choose to escape your life or live it to its fullest potential
I personally have experienced a level of joy which gave me purpose to live
And a core part of that joy came from seeing all of the incredible things that others have built
Therefore I will dedicate my life to building things which help others build incredible things with their creativity
And if I can share that level of pure joy of celebrating life, that I personally have felt, with others, then hopefully it will send out a ripple that resonates with all humans to attempt to maximize their human potential

Alex has a lot of existential dread. He doesn’t think that life has any purpose — he thinks that it’s all one big joke… but that’s what’s so god damn fun about it! Because it’s all a big fucking game and you can do literally whatever you want. Literally fucking anything. All you have to do is find your good vibes people who also want to do shit.

So what does Alex want? All he wants is for his homies to have a good time. The people who look out for each other. The people who understand other people’s struggles. The people who are fucking positive. The people who help one another out in life. The people grounded in fucking reality. The people who want to make the world incredible. The people who think different. The people who say fuck it and choose to make shit better, and fuck everyone else, they can catch up later. They will someday see the incredible world that we have built.

Work really fucking hard, create incredible stuff, celebrate the shit out of it, do it as many times as possible, and then die. Probably sounds sad to most people, but I argue that’s the best way to live.

Take the idea of all ants working together to be a single collective (Watch this https://youtu.be/16W7c0mb-rE). What is the goal of the collective? To help the colony thrive. What things cause the colony to stop thriving? Bad actors, disease, death… all things bad vibes. So it is the responsibility for each node in the graph to hold its closest nodes accountable for bad things, and reward good things. And the best case is for each node to have the true burning desire to pull up each of the other nodes as high as possible.

People are neither good nor bad, they just have their defense mechanisms and insecurities, which cause them to act in harmful ways. If the collective nodes work together to help each other node understand the true beauty of life, hopefully, eventually all nodes will see how much fun life can be.

Or not, fuck it, none of it matters anyway!! You can only go up from there!!

So now what?

Go out there and unapologetically make the world better.

Do the greatest good you can conceive of.

That’s it…

But these posts do look pretty slick, so maybe I will prefer this. It would also help a lot because that means I don’t have to build my own blogging infrastructure.

Typing actually is pretty nice.

I do enjoy it.

Here’s a link to my personal website

Why won’t it scroll down, I hate how it doesn’t let me scroll past where I am…

Oh well, I just inserted some spaces.

I prefer writing one or two sentence paragraphs, so hopefully it works well for my style.

Line. Break.

Actually I find short ‘sentences’ like that to be a bit tacky.

Oh. Well.

Haha maybe I should publish this post anyway…

I really do hope that I end up liking Medium enough to use it. I’ll totally start using it professionally, plus the analytics that come with Medium should be sufficient, right?

I wonder how they define a ‘read’. Is it someone who landed on the page, or is it someone who was active on the page for a detailed amount of time?

Again, I’m not a fan of how big this text is, I don’t think it’s very efficient.

Maybe I’ll start writing shorter posts.

I also don’t like how I have to scroll more because of it. Damn it. I really like 95% of it though. I think I’m going to have to settle. Just because it saves me like 40 hours of programming time. Plus it’ll be easier to sell as a service, probably. Actually I have no idea, maybe people do like custom blogs. I wonder how much custom CMS infrastructure exists.

Holy shit, I’ve never written anything on Medium and I have almost 100 followers! How did that even happen? I wonder how many ‘reads’ this will get. If the number is greater than 20, I bet it’s bullshit.

It’d be awesome if large numbers of people came to read this though, especially in the future.

Italics.

Bold.

Oh shit now I’m writing over here!

This could be fun.

I don’t really ever have images though

Maybe I should just make the whole thing a bunch of images so that the lines are narrower.

This is too narrow though.

Uhhh…

I want to use the rest of this space. Now I’m at the end, how long will they keep this up? What if — woah now I’m over here again.

Anyway, if they ever change their styling, this post won’t make any sense. I guess this doesn’t make much sense anyway.

Whenever I choose whether or not to read something, I typically scroll down to see how much there is to read, and this makes it feel like this post is crazy long.

Also I’m not a huge fan of the — (dash). — — — Damn it. Oh well, I get that’s the actual way to write a dash, but I like having a space. asdf-adsf. But that’s no good. -adsf- I guess I can do that? Meh.

I generally write something and instead of a colon, I prefer using dashes, but now I can’t anymore :(

• ooh
• but
• it
• makes
• a
• list

I’m sure there are plenty of other tricks to visit, but I think I’m going to wrap this up shortly.

BAM THIS IS ALEX FROM THE FUTURE 3 SECONDS AFTER POSTING THIS TO TEST OUT EDITING, ALTHOUGH ANYONE WHO ACTUALLY READS THIS IS READING THIS AFTER I POST IT SO I GUESS THAT MEANS I’M NOT ACTUALLY ALEX FROM THE FUTURE!!!

Ooh should I add an image?

I don’t have many good images for these.

Maybe I’ll publish this with an unsplash image just to make it look good.

“Quote. Oh that’s like Italics with a bar on the side. Just pretend I’m saying this in Abe Lincoln’s voice. Holy shit. I actually don’t know how Abe Lincoln sounds! Oh, but they say he had a surprisingly high-pitched voice, I guess. Hmmm. Okay not Lincoln, this was all said by Morgan Freeman. Now re-read it in his voice.”
- Technically Potentially Said By Morgan Freeman

Wow, I just re-read that quote in Morgan Freeman’s voice and it totally worked. Human brains are incredible.

Go read On Intelligence. -> Leads to Amazon, and I’m not even going to get paid for affiliate. That’s how good it is.

Okay.

Good work team.

Now how the hell do you publish?

Oh nevermind, there it is.