Thought Shrapnel

I can’t remember how I stumbled across Ahmet Sabanci but he’s an interesting guy. A critical futurist, writer and researcher based in Turkey, before I get into the thing of his that I want to discuss in this post, I want to draw attention to his:

• Now page — I like the way he’s reframed this as a ‘status board’ to include all kinds of things that he’s up to
• RSS reader — A list of the news sources that he keeps up to date with
• Weekstarter — Instead of the retrospective weeknotes that I and others do, he talks about what he’s going to be doing 🤔

Anyway, in his most recent Weekstarter post, Sabanci talks about striking a balance between travel and what he calls ‘hermit mode’. I think he captures what, for me, would be the perfect way for operating for ambiverts. There was a time about a decade ago when this was true for me and I’d like to get back to it.

I love traveling and always get excited before a travel — especially if I’m going to a new place. Experiencing somewhere for the first time, observing and simply being in a place I’ve never been before gives me a unique kind of joy. Part of it is probably comes from the fact that I’ve spent my first 18 years in a single city and always been curious about the other places.

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That’s probably why I ended up pursuing a career like this because most of the other jobs forces you to always stay in one place and one normal. I can’t even think myself in a life like that.

But one thing I’m glad I learned early in my life is that I also need a calmer place to call my home to retreat, activate the hermit mode and spend time with the things I’ve seen, learned, and experienced. When you’re constantly on the first mode, overload is inevitable. And when you don’t have a space to go hermit mode, this overload can turn into something impossible to manage.

Most people are surprised when I say that moving outside İstanbul was one of the best decisions we made, but this is exactly why I think that. İstanbul is a great city and I love it but it doesn’t really allow you to go hermit mode when you need. Living in İstanbul means that you can’t really manage your mental load because the city constantly creates new ones. Sure, I might miss couple of events or certain social gatherings here and there but not living there means that instead of feeling a pressure to be everywhere, I’m able to choose what I want to miss.

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Knowing that your home is a calm place you can put a distance between yourself and everything else, go into hermit mode whenever you need makes travel so much comfortable. Knowing that you’re going to return a home like that is a luxury and if you’re in a career or a life similar to what I described, I highly recommend working towards this goal. It makes a real difference.

Source: Weird and Deadly Interesting

Image: Oussama