From 2024 to 2025, Designing Your Life, Living ‘Grid-Free’
Living "grid-free" requires deep interrogation of our soul, through this exploration comes profound growth. Here, I invite you to reflect on 2024 and set an intention for 2025.
GM, Happy Holidays, Christmas & New Year!! 🎉
Inspired by this End of Year Vision Mapping post, I'm excited to share some thoughts on designing lifestyles, being ‘grid-free’, and prompts 2024 Reflections & 2025 Manifestations.
But First, some holiday tunes ❄️
A Creative Life, the Pathless Path
‘the default life is so 2024.’
Being on a pathless path is scary.
Yet more people are embracing this unconventional choice — they quit their jobs, relocate, pick up new skills, and take on unexpected roles. These adventurous founders, explorers, artists, and dreamers, "high-agency individuals" are always manifesting something new.
Three years ago, I gathered my courage, ignored the warnings from everyone I knew, and (metaphorically) boarded a pirate ship to ‘chase my dreams’.
I deeply believed our world needed transformation. I envisioned building a better world — one that's holistically healthy, equitable, and sustainable. A world where humans and nature coexist in harmony; lonely individuals find communities easily; industrial pollution doesn't threaten our extinction, and we have alternatives from this destructive capitalistic system that leaves millions homeless, addicted, sick, and depressed.
I believed we needed an exit strategy. I keep seeing this quote displayed in articles, books, pitch deck presentations, as it shares a sentiment we all resonate with:
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Buckminster Fuller
This journey led me to a rabbit hole of exploring "alternative" ways of living, where people gather to build "new worlds" together—many of these experiences are documented in past articles of this blog.
Later I realized, this worldview were formed from my personal projection. I was the one who needed the exit strategy. My environment wasn't working out — I couldn't relate to those around me and felt uninspired by my career path. I needed something new, most importantly, I needed to discover a sense of purpose.
Idealism Powered by Agency 🌎 + 💪 = ❤️🔥
The power of idealists lies in their courage to dream, rebel, and create movements that push our world forward—like Greta Thunberg, the Green New Deal, the Stonewall protests, and most recently, an extreme example, Luigi Mangione's radical act against UnitedHealthcare's CEO.
They paint us a picture that we couldn’t fathom before, and it motivates us to keep going. But how often do these dreams become reality?
“Vision without action is daydream. Action without vision is nightmare.”
Generally, a healthy society is one where individuals have less friction to push for cultural and technological reform.
How can we enable the idealists in our world to gain enough agency and manifest their Protopian dreams into realities?
There are many ways to answer this, among all, having access to the right knowledge is a crucial first step.
Think about it, before the printing press, scholars would travel weeks, months to visit a place like the Great Library of Alexandria, carrying extremely heavy scrolls used to duplicate sacred knowledge, sometimes memorizing the books by heart to bring back to their worlds.
Now, with all the powerful AI tools, the whole world's knowledge is just one search bar away. Information is so easily accessible to us, we basically consume them like spoon-fed babies.
Freedom, Oh Freedom!
Modern tools expand our capacity to live better in so many ways, but this comes with a new set of problems. At the age where you can be anyone, live anywhere, do anything, the real questions are…
What do you want to build?
How do you want to live?
Who do you want to be?
Maybe you feel effortless to answer these questions, maybe not. Most of our ancestors in feudal societies struggling to survive don’t even have the privilege to think about these questions.
“I'm free, that’s why I'm lost.” -- Kafka
I heard this quote from an interview by Pieter Levels from Lex Friedman. In this episode, Pieter Levels — founder of many widely popular projects like nomads.com — shared his fascinating journey, the loneliness, confusion, mind-buggling struggles he went through with self-exploration in foreign countries, through the process he eventually discovered a ‘state of flow’ in constantly building projects as his happy place, and that brought meaning and purpose to his life.
As an incredible result, he figured out what ‘works’ for him, what excites him, and what he loves to do, and became great at doing them.
Other case studies show that when we leave our nest to build a better one, we discover that our old home maybe wasn't as flawed as we thought. It turns out, that we actually don’t know how to build a nest.
'I don't know what to do now that I left the rat race!'
'You know one thing about rats? They love to race.'
Finding YOUR Way
It takes some cognitive sovereignty to evaluate which aspects of conventional ‘default’ life serve us and which deserve reimagining.
Some people flourish with daily routines—fixed times for meals, exercise, and work—while others thrive in more fluid environments, staying up all night partying and then working all day to ship projects.
Maybe alignment means quitting your job, or getting a new job.
How would I know what works for me? How much structure does one truly need? Where do we find the balance between acceptance and discipline? How can I make a living doing what I love? How come others make it look so easy?
I applaud you for even diving into these questions — a well-defined problem is halfway solved.
“We’re all different and we’re all imperfect, and the imperfections are what makes each of us and our work interesting.”
“There is no right way. There is only YOUR way.”
— Rick Rubin, The Creative Act
There are a gazillion ways to answer these questions, and a gazillion books, articles, videos, talks to consume. I believe that we are our best radar and filters, the important part is initiating the search.
On this journey of discovery, we're like algorithms finding our way through a maze, or sculptures emerging from stone—one chisel at a time.
Living "grid-free" requires deep interrogation of our soul, but through this exploration comes profound growth.
May the Universe flow with You 💜
2024 reflections & 2025 manifestations✨
I created these prompts, attempting to offer some framework and guidance to assist your journey of exploration, I hope it can be helpful for you to dig into your reflections for last year and intentions for the new year.
My Answers 🤔
2024, Personal Wins:
Developing my first XR game Everything is Alive
Collaborating with Edge City as a designer
DJing at events like Popup Fest & DevCon 2024
Helping to curate a worldbuilding AI art workshop for Eden.Art in Lisbon.
Giving a workshop about AI and Worldbuilding with Existential Hope
A book I illustrated for ‘How to Build a Regenerative Village’ — printed physical copies and made great sales
Building for Snapchat’s annual XR hackathon with the new Spectacles
Winning the Edge City hackathon with The Future I Want video, in collaboration with Colton
Co-founding PopOut Club
Made 31 pieces of art for an Inktober
Personally, I made an effort to prioritize health, focusing on clean food and a workout routine. This was such a game changer, it made me feel more energetic, happier, more confident to tackle hard things in life.
Shout out to Boots for offering excellent training and Colton for being my No.1 workout partner! ✊
2024 Struggles 🥹
Navigating through complex interpersonal relationship dynamics, feeling insecure.
Building out Sunflower Lab & other hard work at Mars College, digging holes for compost and pouring concrete
Working 3 very different jobs and burning out
Unsure of what my professional role in this society is
Wearing way too many hats and being pulled to so many things with my ADHD
Unsure of where I want to live, feeling unrooted, missing a sense of home…
Thankfully, most of these are resolved. Each of these challenges were incredible opportunities for growth. In the end, I am grateful to be able to stand on the other side and feel better positioned, stronger, and more resilient, after experiencing the difficult times and trying what doesn’t work.
Best Things in 2024!
Having great communities! I remember the time when I was surrounded by people but constantly feeling like an outcast, a misfit, a vagabond. And now, after many active involvement in community building & searching, I really feel aligned with the people I frequently see in life, the mycelium network plays its magic.
Beyond friendship, many incredible people inspired me professionally in 2024, It really broadened my imagination of what’s possible. For example, my mind was blown by visiting this beautiful place custom-built home by Nick Foley.
On a positive spin about Sunflower Lab, the result of our sweat labor was worth it. It’s about community, love, art, culture, regeneration, and being Solarpunk, beyond just talking about it. 🌞
In 2025! I’d like to grow…
Be more goal-oriented, timebox my projects, prioritize tasks, for mental sanity
Say ‘NO’ to projects in order to say ‘YES’ to the right things.
Hold more compassion and grace about the world, and myself.
New routine?
A consistent mindfulness practice, meditation, journaling
Events I really look forward to…
A 10-day Vipassana silence retreat in January, LFG!
Burning Man ❤️🔥
Move to the Bay Area, collaborate locally, grow gardens, curate a space to BUILD more awesome things! 💪
If I can ask for a gift… 🎁
I want the beautiful Protopian worldbuilding movement to become more prevalent, accessible, well-defined, and popular.
I realized that in order for this to happen, the best thing I can do is to be a better me — develop my professional skills, practice mindfulness, keep a loving attitude, contemplate and write often.
If I could ask for a gift, it would be meeting the right partners along the way 🙏 (which is kind of happening already, so thank you…)
Enjoy Some Feel-Good Content
“By deliberately changing your image of reality, you are changing the world.”
— Identity Designed, David Airey
I’ve been enjoying exploring the philosophies and psychologies of visual design, it’s unreal how subtle and deep visual design’s role is in our society. I mean we shouldn’t be surprised, can you imagine our world without art?
Musically, enjoy this playlist with ‘Protopian’ vibes, listening to these tunes makes me feel hopeful (yes I am a nerd)
I thought of this short film as I wrote this article, amazing that it was shot on iPhone. The story is about growing into multiple identities, moving to different environments, family, tradition, self-love, and all the exciting, daunting, beautiful parts of entering a new life.
This Blog is a Labor of Love ❤️
Thank you for reading, really, thank you for taking out time from your busy life and read this blog. It means a lot.
Please share your reflections & manifestations in the comments if you’d like.
Enjoy some lovely celebrations, wherever you are. May the flow be with you! 💫
Ahhh love everything in here so much. I can relate to so much of what you shared! I’m grateful that we met this year. Love you and can’t wait to continue this journey of exploration and manifesting our dreams, while supporting each other along the way!
Grid-free rainbows to the end of the universe :) A man after my own heart. You might vibe with what I wrote yesteryear in attempt to build the new grid
https://medium.com/@numundo/the-key-to-building-a-truly-free-society-791e0cb120a3