I’m finding new thrills in my permanence. Piecing together bus routes on disconnected backroads and haggling for the cheapest street eat have been replaced with piecing together a social life in a city with limitless opportunities and shopping around for a decent-priced cut of beef. Forging stronger foreign language capacity has given way to forging stronger relationships. Perhaps this is the novel experience left unsatisfied by my nomadic chapters. There’s still work to do though.

I’m a recovering vagabond after all.

If we continue to let the tastes of others determine which experiences to try, then we are succumbing to a one-dimensional reality limited by the bias of someone else, akin to allowing the title of artwork to restrict our creative interpretation of it. Continuing to take reviews, recommendations, and titles like these at face value will, at best, achieve a life of experiences that other folks would enjoy more than we would.

Most of us have become well-trained at “saving time” but at the cost of knowing how to spend it.

Someone who spends all their free time building time-saving systems rarely knows what they will do with it once saved. Worse, they don’t even understand why they began trying to save time in the first place.

Time is indifferent to how efficiently we construct our days and is a resource that will diminish at the same rate no matter how much time we vainly amass.

Best not to delay spending it well today.

At their flat in the capital Santiago, we prepped four types of homemade mayonnaise and a fine array of pastries just in time to host an evening get-together with Marco and Sergio’s friends. Among the attendee list were the ambassadors to Chile from Austria, Malaysia, France, and Germany, a French opera singer who later performed acapella, and a Spanish communications officer who did well to reinforce his nation’s stereotype by smoking a pack by the hour.

The night climaxed when the Spanish officer’s artsy, young girlfriend began exhibiting her latest vaginal-inspired works to the clergy. Nothing is quite so entertaining as watching international bourgeoise react to interpretive, sculpted renditions of a woman’s genitals.

Learning is not as simple as just reading or watching an interesting piece of information. If it were, then consuming as much information as possible would be the ultimate goal—a belief that a certain sect of the productivity-obsessed community preaches. This is incorrect.

The means to a result are more important than the result itself.

The human body cannot properly function when in a constant state of food consumption. The brain, equally, cannot properly function when in a constant state of information consumption. This is known as cognitive obesity.