It’s time to wrap up the series.
Over the last few months, I’ve written about what I’d do if I ran Bluesky, Mastodon, my own platform, a fund for decentralized social media, Twitter / X, and NPR and PBS. These posts have brought together my experience in tech, media, human-centered, prototype-driven venture design, and building both teams and companies. Although they’re thought experiments that verge on being pipe dreams, they’ve been well received; I’d originally intended to leave it at three posts, but readers asked me to write more. So here we are.
For the final post in the series, I want to turn inward and ask a more personal question. Knowing what I know now, with all the experiences I have, how would I run my own life?
The question might seem absurd, but here’s what I mean. Our lives are a product of a combination of our experiences, our context, decisions we make for ourselves, and decisions that are made for us: they evolve naturally as we live. We have the ability to design aspects of how we live, but others fall into place in ways that aren’t fully in our control. That’s not bad: it’s how life works, no matter how intentionally we travel through it.
But I think there’s also value in taking a step back and considering what our lives might look like if we had the luxury of designing them from scratch. That’s no less a pipe dream than imagining what it would look like to run NPR or Bluesky — in some ways it’s more of one — but I think it’s an interesting way to surface your values and figure out what you really care about. By naming these things, there’s a chance we can also make them possible; knowing that something is a desire allows you to consider the concrete steps that would make it real. In many ways it’s a self-indulgent exploration, but sometimes you need to be self-indulgent in order to grow.
I recognize this entire exercise reflects a certain degree of privilege: financial stability, professional flexibility, and passport advantages most people don’t have. I’m not suggesting everyone should or could make these choices. I’m not even suggesting that I could make these choices. This is a thought experiment, not a life plan.
So that’s this piece. If I could intentionally design my life from scratch, what would it look like?
My hope is that my sharing this reflection with you will encourage you to do your own reflection, and perhaps share it with me, too. We can learn together.
Let’s go.
Personal values
Later on we’ll talk about career and how I think about making decisions about what to work on and for whom. But I think it’s also important to have a strong set of values that you can look to when you need to make decisions or decide how to show up in the world. These values will color the other explorations I’ll make in this piece later on.
I haven’t always been good at following my values. Many of us aren’t. I’ve found it particularly hard to follow them in the wake of trauma; I’ve also struggled with self-esteem throughout my life and have sometimes felt a sense of shame that I’ve allowed to lead me into a kind of nihilistic toxicity where it feels like nothing really matters. Things do matter, and people rightly judge you by your actions, so living by your values is important. But I want to make clear that by listing my values I’m not trying to suggest that I’m a perfect person; I am saying that I want to be a better person.
When you’re a part of a family unit, as I am, I think it’s important to have shared values. That’s particularly important when you’re raising a child. Some are implicit, while others are named and agreed-upon. But like all brainstorming activities, it starts with individual work, before working on figuring out where they intersect and diverge, and finding common ground that everyone can agree on. And if you can’t agree on core values — well, that’s important to know, too, for other reasons.
Some peoples’ values are derived from their religion or spirituality. I don’t have either. That’s not a value judgment on being religious or spiritual; I’m just not. Instead, I’d like to think of my values as being broadly humanist in nature.
These are the values that I think are particularly important.
Internationalism. See humanity as interconnected rather than divided by borders. A diversity of contexts and cultures makes us all stronger; everyone is important, regardless of where they live or where they come from. Justice. Everyone deserves equal dignity and opportunity. Privilege creates responsibility to help dismantle barriers for others. Inclusion. Build bridges, not walls. The best solutions and the best communities come from bringing together people with different backgrounds, identities, and ways of thinking. Curiosity. Intellectual openness: maintain the drive to keep learning and the freedom to explore new paths without worrying about whether you’re meandering or not. Self-direction. Maintain and protect the ability to chart your own course without caring about the templates for living other people might think are important, even if they judge you for it. Creativity. Choose to build rather than just consume. Refuse to accept that things have to be the way they are and always look for ways to make them better. Authenticity. Be honest about who you are rather than performing who you think you should be. Choose vulnerability over image, even when it’s uncomfortable. Peace. Do not promote, endorse, or collaborate with conflict, war, or harm. Be a net benefit. Be of service to your community and to the world. Make sure peoples’ lives are better for having you in them. Don’t take people for granted. Prioritize work that genuinely improves the world rather than just generating profit or status. Think carefully not just about the footprint of your actions and your consumption, but about being outwardly rather than inwardly focused.
Conversely, here are the values that I think I shouldn’t be optimizing for.
Wealth and power. Accumulation does not equal success. We should enrich our communities equitably, not ourselves, although freedom and security are important to maintain. Tribalism. Refuse to define yourself in opposition to others; avoid the trap of in-group thinking that makes you see other people as enemies rather than fellow humans. Patriotism and nationalism are all on a spectrum of exclusion that also includes xenophobia and other bigotries. Laser focus. Reject the myth that focus requires tunnel vision. A breadth of experience and interests makes you more effective, not less. Competition. Choose collaboration over zero-sum thinking; other people's success doesn’t diminish your own. Tradition. Question inherited practices rather than following them blindly. “We’ve always done it this way” or “this is our way of life” are anti-patterns that lead to exclusion and conservatism.
Parenting needs to be central. Now that we have a son, I think it’s vital to prioritize these values with respect to him. For example, I want him to have broad horizons, think inclusively, be justice and community-minded and consider himself a global citizen rather than someone who is individualistic, just cares about his particular tribe, cares for himself, or is afraid to explore or inhabit the world. Mr Rogers, not Ayn Rand. We need to make sure we’re fostering an environment that promotes those values for him.
Knowing our values is a good beginning, but it’s all about execution. One big factor in fostering an environment based on your values is determining where, geographically, you’re going to be. That’s a good place to start.
Location, location, location
These values imply somewhere that:
Makes it easy to maintain an international perspective. These are places that have a strong throughput of people coming through from different places in the world: they’re not monocultures, and the ebb and flow of people means the culture is constantly changing as the world changes. It also means having strong transport links, so you can easily leave for other cities and countries. Is diverse and values equity. Places with populations that reflect many different backgrounds, identities, and experiences; not just demographically diverse, but where that diversity is genuinely valued and supported through policies, institutions, and culture. This means strong public education systems, accessible healthcare, progressive governance, walkable communities, and communities that actively work to dismantle barriers rather than just tolerating differences. Allows you to maintain your curiosity and self-direction. Places that foster intellectual and creative exploration, with universities, arts scenes, and communities of people building new things. Somewhere that rewards curiosity over conformity and supports people charting unconventional paths. And somewhere where living costs are relatively low and that values infrastructure like strong public transit and great internet, so you have more options for how to make ends meet.
But I think there’s more I’d like to dig into. The above are explicitly dictated by my values, but there’s more that’s important about a place to live: things that effect how it feels to live there, how easily you can build community, how healthy you can be, and how ethically you can live.
So the following are implied rather than dictated by my values, but are worth calling out explicitly:
Is designed to be integrated. Communities that
Jane Jacobs would be proud of: places that are designed to be nurturing environments, that don’t prioritize cars. There’s lots of green space, public art, and they’re zoned to be integrated so that every neighborhood has what it needs. You don’t need a car, the built environment feels like it’s there to support your brain rather than support someone else’s commercial agenda, and you can always find culture and touch grass. Has a rich seam of progressive, internationalist communities. Bottom line: I need to make friends. This means places with institutions, spaces, and activities that attract like-minded people: co-working spaces, community gardens, volunteer organizations working on justice issues, maker spaces, arts festivals, meetups. Places where it’s normal to care about the world beyond your immediate surroundings and where curiosity about other cultures is celebrated rather than seen as pretentious. Is healthy. The air is clean; the ground is unpolluted; there are sensible protections to ensure both. There’s access to good food and fresh ingredients. Nature is easily accessible. Places that, on top of these things, prioritize mental health resources and don't have the kind of stress-inducing pace that makes authentic relationships impossible. Supports purpose-driven work. Places with nonprofits, social enterprises, mission-driven businesses, and institutions that value contribution over just profit maximization. Respects humans. Finally, this is worth calling out explicitly. These are places that respect peoples’ bodily autonomy, allow people to be themselves regardless of their identities, don’t criminalize or clear out the homeless, and provide strong, free programs to solve systemic social problems rather than penalize their effects. (In a perfect world, this includes free healthcare, education, and daycare.) They’re also real democracies, where people can get involved, have their say, and make a difference with their votes and community actions.
The rich seam of communities is worth highlighting in particular. Everyone needs community. I want to build mine with informed, skeptical, progressive people who are concerned with the world; the kinds of people who marched against the war in Iraq rather than buying into the war on terror back in the Bush / Blair days, and are worried about the state of the world today. They’re people who reject the idea that America (or Britain, or anywhere) is the best country in the world, not just because they understand its shortcomings, but because they reject the premise entirely and wonder why we care about best countries to begin with. They think gender norms, like all traditional norms, are to be questioned rather than blindly obeyed. They think immigrants should be welcomed as they are and don’t ask them to assimilate. They’re more Greta Thunberg than Jordan Peterson.
Defaults matter. A community where traditional norms — homogeneous, heteronormative Christianity with little ethnic or cultural diversity — are considered to be the “default” are the anti-pattern. There shouldn’t, ideally, ever be defaults. But for me to feel comfortable in a community, it needs to be free of the creeping xenophobia that sits just under the surface of many places; ideally, it should lean towards xenophilia — the love of difference — if anything at all.
This is a tall order. So where fits the bill?
After doing a little research and asking folks, I came up a shortlist of places. None of them are perfect — the Netherlands has a right-wing government right now, for example — but as enduring cultures, they fit my criteria well.
Amsterdam, Netherlands. Strong international perspective with people from 180+ nationalities, excellent public transit and bike infrastructure, progressive governance with robust social services, thriving arts scene, relatively affordable by European standards, integrated neighborhoods, strong democratic participation, universal healthcare, and a culture that celebrates curiosity and unconventional paths. Montreal, Canada. Bilingual international city with strong cultural throughput, diverse population with genuine multicultural policies, excellent universities and arts festivals, affordable compared to other major North American cities, walkable neighborhoods with good public transit, universal healthcare, strong social safety net, and a collaborative rather than competitive culture. Toronto, Canada. One of the world’s most multicultural cities where no single ethnic group dominates, official multiculturalism policies that go beyond tolerance to genuine power-sharing, excellent public schools with diverse populations, universal healthcare, strong public transit, relatively affordable compared to other major North American cities, proximity to nature, and a culture where speaking multiple languages and crossing cultural boundaries is completely normal. Copenhagen, Denmark. Highly international with strong transport links, exceptional commitment to equity and sustainability, bike-friendly design with integrated green spaces, thriving maker/startup scene, excellent public services including free education and healthcare, democratic participation culture, and prioritizes mental health and work-life balance. Vienna, Austria. Central European hub with constant cultural exchange, excellent social housing and public services, world-class arts and intellectual institutions, relatively affordable, beautiful integrated urban design, strong democratic traditions, comprehensive social safety net, and a culture that values both tradition and innovation in healthy balance. Berlin, Germany. Deeply international city with a culture built on questioning authority and traditional norms, remnants of its divided history creating strong anti-nationalist sentiment, thriving arts and tech scenes, relatively affordable for a major European city, excellent public transit, strong social safety net, vibrant LGBTQ+ community, and a default assumption that difference and experimentation are normal rather than exceptional.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the legal right to live in Montreal or Toronto, so I’m going to remove those from the list. (I’d love to spend more time there though!) That leaves strong contenders, all with different pros and cons.
None of the above are in the United States. This wasn’t a deliberate choice; it was just how the chips fell after I conducted my search. If I had to push myself to absolutely include an American city, I’d choose:
Portland, Oregon. Strong progressive values with active justice communities, diverse neighborhoods with good public transit, lower costs than other West Coast cities, excellent food scene and maker spaces, prioritizes mental health resources, strong civic engagement culture, and celebrates unconventional career paths and creativity. But it’s also very white, in one of America’s least diverse states.
Oregon as a whole formerly criminalized being Black and didn’t ratify the 15th Amendment that gave Black citizens the right to vote until 1959, 89 years after it had been first introduced. Even recently, the Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival had to resign after receiving racist death threats in part for programming more diverse and contemporary work and in part for being Black. Of course, Portland is significantly more progressive than this, and these issues don’t solely define Oregon as a whole (Erin’s family is from there and are not represented by this). But it can’t simply be ignored.
Even considering all this, Portland comes out as the best pick in my analysis, but clearly this is a difficult choice. San Francisco / Oakland / Berkeley would also be on my list (I’ve lived there before and loved it) were it not for their very stark financial inequality, which also limits the kind of lifestyle you can feasibly have if you aren’t financially independent. New York City is one of my favorite places in the world — and is overtly diverse — but suffers from the same financial shortcomings.
America as a country has so many wonderful people, welcoming communities, beautiful landscapes, and rich and deep culture. But it’s troubled. It’s always been troubled. And the current context really sucks.
I didn’t cover climate in my criteria, but maybe I should have. None of the cities on my shortlist are what I’d call sunny, and many of them descend into deep, cold winter. At the same time, most of them are fairly resilient to the medium-term effects of climate change, with the possible exception of Amsterdam, which sits over six feet below sea level and is protected by a series of dikes, dams, and pumping stations. They’re also all cities, where an individual’s carbon footprint is lower than in the countryside because of shared resources and more accessible public transit, bike lanes, and pedestrian infrastructure.
Every parent wants their child to be safe, educated, and have opportunities. The question is how to best achieve that in a rapidly changing, potentially adverse world. The good news is that all of these cities have good options for raising a child. Copenhagen and Vienna have the best infrastructure for this, including free daycare; Dutch children are the happiest in the world, which is a big plus for Amsterdam. Each of these options would also natural lead to a multilingual child, which is a huge boost that will support him for life.
Portland is a good choice, for America, but public funding is, well, American, and is therefore inconsistent and lacking. And it’s much less likely that he’d end up bilingual or as comfortable with other cultures. So if we needed to stay in America, it’s probably the best option, but if we didn’t, it wouldn’t make the list. And if America continues its slide into fascism, nowhere here will be a good place to raise a child, however historically progressive it might have been. American schooling has always incorporated some degree of indoctrination — consider the awfulness of the pledge of allegiance and the intentional omissions around teaching historical injustices — but this would be a step beyond even that. As I write this, masked ICE officers are patrolling American cities, hunting for immigrants who are deported without due process, often to prisons in places like El Salvador where they are treated like animals. You can’t sugarcoat or ignore that. The historical precedents alone are screaming.
Although it is not descending into fascism to anywhere near the same degree, Europe isn’t always as great at inclusion as it thinks it is: there’s a pervasive racism sitting just under the surface, which goes unacknowledged because much of Europe thinks it’s better than that while not actually being. Almaz Teffera, Human Rights Watch’s researcher on racism in Europe, shares experiences that sound similar to those in America:
As a Black woman, I was born and raised in Germany. I have faced a plethora of lived experience of racism, at school, by strangers on the street. I see how my father is treated in Germany. My mom is white, and my dad is a refugee from Ethiopia who has lived in Germany longer than Ethiopia, yet is treated like he doesn’t belong in German society. People ask us questions like, where are you really from? How do you speak German without an accent? At the airport, my father’s been pulled out of line by border officials to show his documents before even reaching immigration control.
The average quality of life for people is higher there, there is a higher life expectancy, and the quality of basics like food and neighborhood design can be significantly better. But it’s not a panacea, and significant problems persist for people of color and immigrants; some of these problems are accelerating, just as they are in America. (Although, again, there are not masked officers hunting down people to send them to concentration camps. I am not trying to establish a moral equivalence here.)
For now, it’s easiest to start in the US. We’re already here, which makes it administratively easier, and our immediate families are here. But it’s important to have red lines: creeping fascism is like boiling a frog, so setting up the things that will trigger you to leave is important to do in advance rather than in the moment.
At some point, even regardless of the ongoing state of the country, spending time in a place like Amsterdam or Copenhagen at least for a few years would be healthy for our child and healthy for us. There is no location that absolves its inhabitants of being watchful for bigotry and doing their own parenting work to raise a child according to their values. But demonstrating that other places exist and are viable, expanding our son’s horizons, and skewering restrictive propaganda like the idea that America is the only free (or free-est) country in the world feel central to setting him up for success throughout his life.
If I could wave a magic wand, I would establish a new community with likeminded friends, somewhere in Europe. Creating something new may be the answer. But that requires money, willingness, and flexibility that not everyone necessarily has. It’s not realistic, but at the same time, I can’t stop thinking about it. So, maybe.
Of course, all of this needs money. I’m not independently wealthy and I’m fairly unlikely to become so. Therefore a healthy lifestyle, wherever it might be, requires a job.
Work
I want to do good, important, hard work, but on my terms. I want to have time and space to do my own creative work. And I want it all to be in balance with living a good life.
A good friend, who has also been a startup founder, remarked to me once: “founders are ruined for regular work”. I believe this is real (or at least, real for me): we’re terrible employees because we want to be fully self-directed. We’ve had a taste of environments where we have full creative control over our goals, our strategies, our methods of working and our hours. Founders have accountability — customers, investors — but they shape their companies. Going back to a standard working environment, in a conventional company with traditional hierarchies, can be a real adjustment.
That creative freedom is what I’m looking for in everything I do, but it’s not important that it’s a startup or that I work for myself. I didn’t become a founder because of the potential financial upside; I became one because I wanted freedom to define how I worked. In part that’s because I wanted to feel safe; I’m an introverted third culture kid who needs to mask if he wants to fit in to a lot of mainstream cultural norms, and as anyone who masks knows, that’s exhausting. It chips away at little at your self esteem every day. At its worst, work culture can feel like it’s trying to push us into homogenous boxes; I want a space where I can be myself and not feel any pressure to apologize for it.
What I’ve learned is that, at the very least, I need some kind of an outlet for my energy where I have that freedom, even if it doesn’t come from my day job. That’s what my writing in this space is; that’s what creative work is for me. Having a spot where I can create on my terms keeps me anchored, allows me to follow my interests, and ensures that I have a bubble that supports me as a human. I can work a more traditional job if that outlet with creative freedom is in place and I have space and time to do it.
But even then, the kind of work really matters. Making career choices is a privilege; everyone’s latitude varies, but regardless, I think it’s a good idea to have a values-based North Star that helps you make decisions. To build a career strategy, I like to borrow a little from how I think about company strategy.
Well-run companies have a mission, a vision, and a strategy. This is something I wrote about in both my Bluesky and Mastodon pieces. As a reminder, here’s how they fit together:
The mission: why the company exists The vision: what world it intends to create, in service to that mission The strategy: how, concretely, it will take its next steps to get there
I’ve also written about how this framework can be useful personally, too. In that piece, I articulated my mission and vision for my career:
My mission is to work on and support things that make the world more equal and informed, while living a life rooted in creativity, inclusiveness, openness, and spontaneity, in opposition to competitiveness, aggression, tribalism, and conformity.
I more or less stand by that, although I’d add the word “authentic”: “[…] while living an authentic life rooted in creativity […]”. (I wish there was a better word for this; isn’t it weird that describing something as authentic almost automatically feels in-authentic?) But a lot has changed in the world this year. In light of that, I want to restate my career vision — the world I want to help create through the work I do:
My vision is a world where everyone has equal opportunities, a voice that can be heard, and an equal, well-informed democratic say, and everyone has the right to live a good life, with no fear of violence, oppression, or hardship.
Given these principles, what kinds of work actually serve this mission and vision?
I keep coming back to the intersection of technology and democracy. My background is in building digital products and platforms, but I want to use those skills in service of genuine equity rather than just efficiency or engagement. This means thinking carefully about what problems technology should and shouldn’t try to solve, and how it can amplify human agency rather than replace it.
What I specifically don't want to work on: surveillance technology, advertising-driven platforms that profit from engagement regardless of social cost, anything that facilitates harm to vulnerable populations, or technology that consolidates power rather than distributing equity.
My hardest lines involve military work or contributing to any project with the potential to lead to direct physical harm of a person, anywhere: I won’t do it. But there are a lot of companies that, say, do business with the military, or invest in arms. Some of them aren’t obvious: the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek, just invested $694 million in a defense startup, and the company itself has long hurt independent artists. It’s not always immediately what will cause harm and what won’t. Companies that make weapons, provide services to ICE, or help facilitate the annexation of Gaza, are easier to spot (and obvious no-gos). But doing harm can be deeper and more nuanced. Staying informed, and adhering to your pre-defined values, can help you navigate — as long as you have creative and strategic control of your work, so you have the freedom to make the right decision.
The organizational model matters almost as much as the work itself. I'm drawn to public benefit corporations, co-operatives, and non-profits with earned revenue streams: structures that bake social mission into their governance rather than treating it as an afterthought. I want to work somewhere that measures success by impact on the community rather than shareholder returns. Those are non-profits, and public benefit corporations. B-Corps are fine, too, but that framework doesn’t bake in legal requirements in the same way an incorporation structure can.
Unionized workplaces help. They typically have stronger benefits, better work-life balance, and push back on management to create a better equilibrium between the needs of strategic leadership and of on-the-ground employee well-being. It’s unfortunately rare for tech companies to be unionized; other industries fare a little better.
For the last decade and change, my focus has been on supporting journalism. This feels like it’s aligned with my values and with the mission I’ve established for my career; I can follow what’s important to me and further the values that I think are important in the world. Working in non-profit journalism — I’m currently the Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica and was previously the Chief Technology Officer at The 19th — particularly meets my thematic and structural needs, as long as it continues to allow me creative freedom in my work and how I lead my teams.
When I made this career pivot away from tech, my salary dropped significantly. And the perks are, to be frank, not the same. But the value and meaning of the work trumps financial compensation. It feels like I’m doing something important, and I feel privileged to be able to do it. I also get to work with some of the smartest, values-aligned people I’ve ever met; whereas in tech I felt like I was often at the leading edge of living by my values, in non-profit journalism I’m in much more of a learning position.
That’s important. When these kinds of leadership positions work well, they also satisfy my need for creative freedom as well as meaning. I’m not just setting the tone for my own work, but I’m working with teams and across entire organizations to build better systems that affect everyone’s work, and make an impact in the process.
Would I found another startup again in the future? Absolutely. I like creating new things. My ideal would be to build something that helps strengthen the future of news and democracy by tackling a specific problem (or specific problems) that the industry needs to deal with. Until then, though, I’m happy doing what I do.
Creative projects are work too
But even then, I need space to work on my own projects. Some of the most impactful work I’ve done has been kickstarted in my own time. Elgg, the social networking platform I started that wound up acting as the intranet for governments and powering social movements, was started in my evenings and weekends. The same was true for Known and many of the other things that have both propelled my career and been the most useful for other people.
This is meaningful to me. Having an outlet for my own creative work is at least as important to me as having creative control in my day-to-day work. What’s different to the Elgg days is that I have a kid — I don’t want to spend my time with him working on some project instead of being present. So that means I need more space in my days, as well as after he goes to sleep.
Depending on the project, these can be investments in the future or just in my mental health. They should be considered to be just as much a part of work as a salaried position.
I guess what I’m saying is: I want the time and space to write and to experiment. (I’ve had a book in progress for years now; I would prefer to be able to finish one every six months.) In turn, that implies some serious choices around lifestyle.
Life (oh, life)
These things need to be in balance:
Family (including fully-present parenting) Work (including creative work) Rest (including health)
Inevitably, these partially connect back to things we’ve already spoken about — location and work — while also considering the culture of life at home, parenting, health, and the time balance of it all.
Some people build their lives in stages, like a lasagna: they advocate over-dedicating yourself to work early on and then having more space to rest later. The FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early) is one example of this: here, people work intensely while saving intentionally, with the intention of retiring from the mainstream workforce before the official retirement age, and then living however you like.
I have a few problems with that idea. The most important one is: you can die! That’s not a dark hypothetical; there’s a genetic telomere dysfunction that runs in my family. Many members of my family, including my mother, have died early from it. We lost some of my cousins when they were effectively the age I am now. There are no absolute guarantees that your life will be long, and if you front-load an all-encompassing work ethic with the expectation that pleasure will happen later, you may find that you gave your life for a job and didn’t ever see the benefit. I think this is less problematic in an impactful, mission-driven job that helps to make the world better, but it’s still a problem. What good is a life if you’re not living it?
If you’re a parent, living like that also necessitates neglecting your child. There’s no way to prioritize parenting and dedicating most of your time to work. However much you might be building freedom for later on, or however much you think you might be leaving them, you’ll never get those years back. If you look at life as a series of investments (which you shouldn’t), the best investment in them is the experiences, love, and context that will build the neural pathways that will set them up for success. If you just think that loving your child and doing things with them is important, the right thing to do becomes obvious.
I like the model the eight-hour day movement fought for, as coined by Robert Owen: Eight hours’ labour, Eight hours’ recreation, Eight hours’ rest.
If a reasonable workday is eight hours long, maintaining the other sixteen hours implies reducing the time it takes both getting to and leaving work. The longer the commute time, the less time you have for rest and recreation — which means less time for family, less time for your own health, and less time for pursuing other projects. If you’re a carer for a child, an elderly parent, or any other dependent, a long commute (or a workday beyond eight hours) also reduces your ability to care for your loved ones. In turn, that implies that to be able to have a life that contains enough time for living, you’ve got to cut your commute. Either you live very close to where you work, or you typically work remotely. And either way, you probably need flexible hours.
I do think there’s value to in-person collaboration at work — it’s just that I also strongly value spending time with my loved ones. Given that living close to work is usually more expensive, I think the best solution is a remote-default hybrid model: people work remotely most of the time, but come together on a regular basis for in-person collaboration. Not only does this model leave more room for life, but it allows people to live further away from the office, potentially in more affordable areas. Those workers then spend money in their own communities. It turns out that remote workers are more productive, happier, and build stronger workplace relationships; it’s a winning idea from every angle. That’s how I want to work: mostly remotely, allowing me to show up for my family and spend more time on my health and my own pursuits, but with some dedicated in-person time to push specific collaborative work forward.
So that’s work. What about home?
People talk a lot about work culture, but strangely, less about home culture, even though it’s arguably far more important. In both cases, a culture consists of the norms, agreements, assumptions, and communication styles of a community. But while the work cultures we connect with change over time, our home life is usually more enduring: it becomes the foundation of our whole lives.
When I was talking about work, I mentioned wanting to not have to mask. That’s even more important at home. It needs to be a place where everyone can be themselves and not have to apologize for it, and where they can be truly self-directed. Like a workplace, it needs open communication and feedback; unlike a workplace, it needs to run as a collective, with shared values, ideals, and goals as a North Star. There should be no leaders at home: everyone is in it together. Some families are led by a patriarch or a matriarch; some buy into outdated toxic ideas like “the man of the house” being the leader and provider. I have less than no interest in any of that. A family is a collective; as such, having strong shared values becomes paramount.
Similarly, no community can function well without good communication. I’ve read a lot over the years about ask vs guess culture; I read this as being a culture based on explicit communication vs implicit cues. Neither has to be selfish; I disagree with the idea that ask culture inherently includes the idea that you should “take care of your own needs, and others will take care of theirs”. In a family culture, everyone should look out for each other’s best interests (while preserving their own well-being; I’m not arguing for codependency). But guess culture only works well when everyone comes from the same background and shares the same implicit assumptions; forming more of an explicit ask culture is really important if people in the home come from different contexts. (As they should! Diverse families are great.)
This is all easier said than done. Remember, this is a thought experiment, not a claim that I actually live my life this way. As I mentioned earlier, particularly in the wake of tragedy and serious stress, I have sometimes found living up to my values to be hard. Living is hard, and nothing is harder than creating an enduring home culture that supports everyone. Building it requires explicit, open, truthful communication in itself, and more than that, a willingness to do it to begin with.
Raising a child means having a strong point of view about education. I think there’s a certain amount of leading by example to be done here: treating ongoing education as a good in itself rather than a vocational pursuit that you do to try and earn more money. Finding wonder in the world is important, as is valuing art, literature, history, and culture. The house should be full of books, but more importantly, he needs to see us love the books, love learning, love pushing our own horizons, being creative, and having intellectual conversations about anything and everything. We should go to marches for causes we care about, and bring him, so he sees that it is a normal part of being in a democracy. We should watch and read the news.
Home life should be about culture and soul, and about trying new things. It’s got to be a culture of being a creator and a self-led learner, not a consumer or a follower. That’s a huge amount of what underpins education.
As for schools? One of my most controversial opinions is that private schools should be banned. Everyone, no matter how rich or how poor, should have to go through the same system. This will force the system to be better, and helps ensure that everyone has the same opportunities. (It also ensures that children meet peers from other stratas and classes.) In reality, that’s never going to happen, but it’s another reason why location is so important: we need to live somewhere with excellent free schooling.
He can be whatever he wants to be, but there are a handful of cases where I would consider my parenting to be a failure. One is if he became a Republican or a Libertarian, succumbing to the politics of selfishness. A second is if he just stayed in one place his whole life, without trying to live in different places or explore the world; his ability to move is a privilege, and he should use it. And the final one is if he became someone who dove into TV (and particularly televised team sports) instead of reading books, making things, building things, and inventing. That’s all about education, context, and home culture.
Finally, rest and health.
I’m a roamer: I like to walk. Not so long ago, I would go out for four or five mile walks to end my day. I’d take an audiobook with me and roam around the hills in whatever city I was in. I found it meditative, and it kept me in reasonably good shape. (Back when I lived in the UK, I’d walk two miles to work, two miles back, roam around for an hour at lunchtime, and also walk for three or five miles in the evening.)
That’s harder to achieve with a child, at least until he’s old enough to come walking with me. So instead, shorter, more intense kinds of exercise is needed. Running, even on a treadmill, fits the bill. Ideally, I would start almost every day with at least a 5K jog — something that I did until I moved to Pennsylvania a few years ago.
I want to eat healthily; a range of cuisines, cooked from scratch, with good ingredients. (Another thing any possible location has to provide.) I like to cook. It’s a meditative, creative act in itself, although it can’t take the place of other creative work.
Where does tech fit in?
Technology is there to support a life; we should never be defined by it.
Above, I mentioned that a good home culture is centered on being creators and self-led learners, not consumers or followers. In order for technology to support this lifestyle, it needs to be centered on creation and reinvention, rather than locked-down tech designed to optimize us into being consumers. In order to adhere to my other values, it also needs to support internationalism, justice, inclusion, and curiosity. That means the platforms I use can’t be optimized to deliver propaganda; they also shouldn’t be designed to prioritize an American point of view.
Open source and indie web platforms are, of course, important. Devices like Framework laptops, which can be upgraded and repaired rather than replaced, should also be central. There’s no such thing as a hardware device with zero footprint today; they’re often assembled in factories with hazardous working conditions, and the precious metals required for their intricate chips and boards are sometimes mined by children. But we can continue to push for the right things, and the software we use can be built ethically. We can avoid platforms like X and Substack that promote fascism. And more than anything else, we can build our own stuff, and store our data in places that we control instead of being mined and profiled to try to control us.
That also extends to AI. I already try not to publish photos of him online for fear of it being used to track him, or to train an AI model on his face. We’re going to be pressured to normalize these technologies in the coming years; they certainly have uses, but they’re also sometimes used as excuses to gather more data, track more of our lives, run roughshod over copyright laws and environmental protections, and create surveillance ecosystems. Low-income people in developing nations are often used to tag and filter their input data, often to their own great personal detriment. Datacenters seize water from communities that need it and sometimes spew poisonous gasses into the air. The technologies themselves serve as black boxes for answers, with no accountability into their truthfulness, vendor points of view, or how the training data was selected. These things cannot go unquestioned. Technology cannot be separated from its human context. They must be conversations at the very least.
It’s important for our son to see us responsibly using technology as ethical creators. I think that also probably means putting down the phones. As slick and addictive as they are, they’re pure consumption machines, and they lead to other consumption device use: if we’re on our phones, why shouldn’t he be watching TV?
Instead, as he gets older, he should learn to program, and see the joy in creating his own work. For that to happen, we should build things together. That’s how I learned: when I was five, my mother patiently sat down with me and taught me BASIC on a ZX81. When I was 13, my parents gave me a copy of Prospero Pascal that I used to write games on our 286 PC. I learned to write on the computer and was writing stories in a word processor as soon as I could string a sentence together. That’s exactly how it should be. It set me up for success, not so much in terms of skills but in terms of a mindset of creating things; I want to set our son up for success in the same way.
I mean, this is a lot
In this piece I’ve tried to talk about the various things I’d do if I had free rein to design a life. In reality, how we live is full of compromises and agreements with the people we live with and care about, outside context, and accidents. It’s not so much a life plan as a way of naming things that are important and talking about values that I think really matter.
Our values aren’t hard and fast; instead, they evolve as time goes on. This is a reflection of where I am now: a combination of where I’ve been, what I care about, how I’ve been living and working, and the state of the world around me. Perhaps in another five years it’ll look very different. But if I was going to design a life from scratch today, these are some of the things I would care about. The first step towards building a life is to name your values and ocnsider what they mean.
This has been a more introspective, personal piece than I’ve run in a while. My hope is that it will inspire some of you to do the same. If you do write your own, I’d love to read it: please post it on the web and send me the link. And if you have thoughts, ideas, or questions, you can always reach out. I’d love to talk about it.
