👾 You don't have to sell everything.

A little while back I ran a reader poll about what to write more of.

One response stuck with me. They wanted the small version.

Not the sell-everything version, the small one.

It's a fair ask, and I think the reason I hadn't written it is that I'd accepted a wrong premise. The premise is that what I do is a travel thing.

It isn't.

The travel is the output. The method underneath it has nothing to do with airports.

Find a default you never actually chose.

Put a number on it.

Run a version of your life without it for a fixed period, short enough that going back is easy. Then keep it or revert.

That's the whole thing.

I've been doing this for twelve years and it has never once required a plane ticket. (Though some of my tests have involved a plane ticket by choice.)

The part that's easy to skip is the first step, because defaults are hard to see.

That's what makes them defaults.

You didn't decide to renew the subscription, you just didn't cancel it. You didn't decide to live in that city, you moved there for a job you no longer have.

A default is any part of your life that would continue unchanged if you never thought about it again.

Here's one from a few weeks ago, and I'm picking it deliberately because there is nothing romantic about it.

I paid $50 for the first month of an AI course membership.

The renewal was $130 a month, which is $1,560 a year. The product was fine, for the record. It wasn't a scam and I'm not building to a complaint.

What I did was treat the first month as the test rather than as the beginning.

I went through it properly, pulled out everything durable I actually wanted, and cancelled before the renewal date with a few days of buffer.

The important part isn't that I cancelled. It's that I decided.

Left alone, the renewal date would have decided for me, and it would have decided yes, at $1,560 a year.

In June 2025 I wrote down something I didn't love admitting, which is that I'd gotten bad at enjoying myself. Every activity had acquired a goal.

Reading was for learning, walking was for steps, travel was increasingly for content.

So I made a list of things to do with no purpose attached. Cards. Board games. Ice cream. Climbing a tree. Jumping in a pool. Cartwheels. Leaving my phone at home.

I'm aware of how that reads written down. It's a grown adult scheduling cartwheels.

But "everything must have a goal" was a default I'd drifted into throughout my life, and I'd never once looked straight at it.

The test cost nothing and reverting would have been free.

That's the same move as the one that ended with me living out of a bag for twelve years. Different size, identical shape.

And writing about this now, I'm realizing that I've reverted back toward almost everything having a goal.

So this is a default I need to re-challenge.

The nomad thing looks like a bigger decision than the subscription. In one sense it obviously is.

But I didn't make it as a bigger decision. In 2014 a work contract and a relationship ended in the same week, and I booked six weeks in Southeast Asia.

Six weeks is a reversible test.

If I'd hated it I'd have come home, gotten another traditional job, and nobody would have needed an explanation.

I just never hit the revert step. That's all "twelve years" actually means.

So I'm not going to tell you to book a one-way ticket.

Most people reading this won't do what I did and shouldn't. What I'd say instead is that the interesting question was never "should I travel full time."

It's narrower and much more useful: what's running in your life right now that you never actually agreed to, and what would a cheap, reversible test of the alternative look like?

To each their own on what you do with the answer.

— Caroline

P.S. If you want the version of this with actual numbers attached, the twelve-year ledger is the most complete accounting I've done.

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