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In January I went waldening for two months - my girlfriend and I packed up our bags and moved out of San Francisco and into a small house in the woods of Gasquet, CA. You can read my original post here and read about my theory behind waldening here . Our primary goal was to gain some outside perspective on our San Francisco lives. We accomplished this, but it wasn�t easy. At first I looked forward to our time away as an opportunity to be more productive while I was free of social obligations. We read Cal Newport�s book �Deep Work� and began to put into practice its suggestions for getting more serious productivity out of ourselves. But this didn�t work. Cal Newport�s advice is great for someone that knows what they want to accomplish and needs to focus all their effort on it. I am struggling with a very different problem - figuring out what it is that I should be spending my life on. Trying to focus deeply on my writing or anything else didn�t work because I�m not convinced that that ...

see the first post explaining the concept of "waldening" here The motivation behind waldening concerns free will. Humans appear to have the ability to choose how they act. But we understand the world through concepts given to us by culture. So it ends up that we have the freedom to choose between all the paths that our culture allows in pursuit of things that our culture tells us to value. This is a weak kind of freedom. Culture can�t be escaped. There is no such thing as seeing the world how it �really� is, without the interference of culture. Maybe babies do it, but continuing beyond a the age of a few months would require you to go full Romulus and get raised by wolves. After all, language itself is a cultural artifact. Perfect freedom isn�t possible or desirable. But more freedom is possible. Living in a new culture for a time can give us perspective on our home culture. We realize that things could be otherwise and no longer take things for granted. The more perspect...