Living well and lightly
Sustainable living, treading lightly, owning less, wanting less.
Not as ideology, but as daily practice: the ongoing, never-quite-finished work of walking my talk. I think 10x before making a purchase. I obsess embarrassingly over the waste we produce. I've ranted enough about single-use plastics and carbon emissions to be genuinely insufferable at dinner. It's a constant negotiation between what I believe and what's actually convenient. I've been at this for years and I'm still figuring it out.
Meraki Tiny Home
Building a sustainable, off-grid home
The Meraki Project was my attempt to live out, in the most literal sense, a belief in sustainable living. The goal: to design and build an off-grid, solar-powered, rainwater-harvesting tiny home in Malaysia from scratch, with volunteers, in collaboration with Epic Home, a social enterprise committed to community-led building. Read about the Meraki journey step-by-step → Watch a video of the tiny house build →
Financial independence
Less about money, more about options.
The ability to choose what you work on — and what you walk away from — is worth more than most salaries. Money is rarely the point. Financial literacy creates the conditions for a life lived on your own terms rather than someone else's. I wrote a series on personal finance some years ago, less because I wanted to be a personal finance writer and more because I think everyone deserves access to this kind of thinking. That hasn't changed. Read my guide on getting your finances in order →
Creativity across mediums
Relief, play, and proof that not everything needs a purpose.
My professional life runs on analysis, structure, and the relentless pursuit of clarity. Creative expression is the deliberate opposite: intuitive, unstructured, answerable to nothing but the making itself. Photography, visual art, poetry: each one a different way I pay attention to the world. I can't say I'm a master at any, but dabbling, it turns out, is its own kind of discipline. See what all my dabbling led to →
Exploration to satisfy curiosity
Going to places, not just reading about them.
I am restless by nature — it has taken me to all seven continents: underwater as a rescue scuba diver, under the northern lights in sub-zero temperatures, up mountain peaks on legs and down mountain slopes on a snowboard. Antarctica, in particular, reminded me of why I keep going: there is nowhere else on earth quite like it. Unsurprisingly, the best thinking I've done has usually happened somewhere uncomfortable and far from home.
If you're working on something that fits, I'd like to hear about it.