becoming obsessed with a sailing lifestyle
[I have been away from the blog for a while. In the meantime, the ideas I want to write about have grown terrifyingly large. Rather than squeezing each in a large post, I wanted to try writing a series of smaller self-contained posts. Thus, I am starting a series on my journey in sailing.]
My obsession with sailing started about a year ago. At that time, I came across post on "Weathering Software Winter". In this post, Hundred Rabbits detail their journey on moving towards resilient and sustainable software: software that could be used at sea for decades to come. I really liked the idea of being intentional about using less from being constrained by the environment you're placed in.
To some extent, I have already adjusted my digital life to rely on less products generally. I use Linux as my operating system and spend time on Mastodon, both free software in every sense of the word. I also read and write here on bearblog, a minimalist blog platform.
Still, I have been feeling frustrated about my consumption otherwise. Why do I feel so compelled to buy yet another cute outfit or the latest gadget? Where can I even store it all? How much is it actually improving my life? I know such greed fills the landfills, but still it's so hard to resist the omnipresent pressure to consume.
In the essay above, Hundred Rabbits wrote:
Imagine two people in a small sailboat in the tropics, somewhere like the Marquesas, or another island in the South Pacific Ocean. These islands are covered with beautiful lush forests, they require rain and sun, that's all, then there's us sharing that same space, busy lifting a smartphone in a Ziploc bag up the mast to try and get one bar of signal to update Xcode, which at the time was 11 gigs.
This image really would not leave my mind. The (beautiful!) environment around them was placing clear constraints on their digital consumption and they naturally arrived on using free software. I was curious about how the rest of life looks from a sailboat gliding on the ocean.
The idea germinated in my mind for a while and eventually I got curious enough to start reading some books. These books opened my mind and my whole worldview started to shift. My partner and I joined a local sailing club to learn and have started planning towards living on a boat next year.
Look forward to the worlds that the books have offered me in my next post!
