This country has an addiction to freedom, afforded to it by modern information technology, opening up once-in-a-lifetime sets of possibilities. 

Pure unadulterated freedom is like sensory deprivation, where long/forced durations of it "can result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, temporarily senseless, and depression."

To start 2018, I've made a resolution of maximizing my own happiness.

One of my friends on Facebook reminded of a Freakonomics podcast, about gender pay inequality, I'd heard earlier this year. It had crystallized my thoughts on the subject and pretty much confirmed my existing intuitions.

Here are the salient points in the podcast: 

I've recently been trying to reduce my possession footprint. It partially started in 2015 with the move, but it was more a utilitarian process of "will or won't I need this?" than a introspective "why do I have this and what do I still think about it?" It's good to do that time-to-time to remove the glut of stupid possessions that we all pile up. I like to reflect on what I own, with the Fight Club quote "The things you own, end up owning you" still hanging on after all these years.

I like to think that I know something about life. I've had 36 years of it. In that time, I've experienced much, and have met a diverse group of people, all of whom are driven by different things. Career, family, religion are some common examples, but there are so many others. If the world has taught me anything, it's that people have a broad and deep list of passions that drive them.

So what's the common thread here? Is there an objective way to say that something, definitively, is the meaning of life?

About three years ago, my walkabout the country made me noticed how winded I was just walking around. Some time after returning home I decided it was time to get serious about my own fitness.

Welcome to the new Who Is...? site. After 7 years of rocking an old site using a pretty dated design with out-of-date software, I finally got to updating it. It has been a perennial theme on this blog of very long hiatuses and vain attempts to catch up. 

I decided to put down some thoughts to the long-abandoned blog. Getting back to Who Is... was something on the agenda, but I just lost track of the time; between a career that has been sucking the life out of me, and trying to decide what to do with my life, the blog fell by the wayside, a victim of shifting priorities I suppose. 

After a year hiatus I've returned. This post is going to be somewhat short; I'm using it to tie continuity between what's happened in the last year and the following posts which will be a 2 month travel blog.