Short one today.

At the beginning of the year, I maintained a remarkable consistency in “silent mornings”. Every day, I would wake up and spend the first 2-3 hours of the day without any input. I would avoid looking at my phone, listening to music, or even reading. Normally, that was when I could get my best writing done too.

The year then turned faster, busier, less routine. The silent mornings ceased. Now, as the year winds down, I’m content to have rediscovered them. Silence makes room for the type of thinking that will pull at a thread of an idea. Without noise, it’s easier to follow the thread.

The goal of the infinite game is to keep playing.

There is no goal, no next chapter, no final level, no end credits.

The infinite game allures because it requires no evolution. It is, at its core, a call to maintain the game as is.

If all we have to do is not lose, then the means to sustain it can be flexible, impersonal, and unthoughtful.

We love infinite games.

These types of people are in some ways the inversion of the auto-critical. Instead of standards for success coming from within, their standards for success are only set based on comparing themselves to others.

To justify this, when threatened with competition, the natural defense mechanism is to pull down or pull back their competition with discouragement rather than progressing by their own merit. The gain becomes one of relativity.

Why worry about motivating yourself when you can close the competitive gap by disparaging others?

This is no argument in favor of complacency. Nor do I encourage anyone to aim for less than their best any given day.

It’s a call for perfectionists, optimization-addicted automatons, and the all-in-or-all-out types to take a breath.

Failing occasionally is natural. Allowing that failure to perpetuate across weeks, months, and years is only when it becomes detrimental.

When I first started Ferg’s Focus, I redacted parts of some stories that I considered too vulnerable to share publicly. Moreover, as I continue with my life abroad, I find myself less-inclined to post about my experiences. I prefer the privacy, and there is something valuable in keeping memories for myself (a practice modern society is on the brink of losing altogether).

Contrarily, I enjoy writing for and stimulating the thoughts of those who take the time to read my pieces. That internal back-and-forth spurned me to finally put down on paper a thought that I had been previously unable to translate into words. What resulted is one of my rawest essays to date.

Critics might argue it’s delusional to treat a life chapter with a defined end date as permanent.

I would argue it’s equally delusional to treat a life chapter with an undefined end date as such.

This Ferg’s Focus edition inadvertently turned into an ode to Buenos Aires. While I didn’t plan on it, I certainly do not regret it. May it forever merit its praise. Routines don’t seem too common around these parts, but I have found a loose one nonetheless, granting me the structure to write once more.

Winter is setting in down south. My nomad friends are departing for warmer weather. The leaves have turned golden and now catch the autumn sun in colors unseen by me before. The swarms of mosquitos are surviving amid 8° Celsius (46°F) temperatures. Life is good.

A year later, I’ve joined their digital ranks. While still a fledgling in the brigade in many ways, I’m beginning to understand where the source of this discontent may stem. It is where many nomads deviate from a path ripe with growth opportunities and instead ravage on into a limbo as meaningless as the one they fought to escape at their domestic desk jobs.

This is the existential, privileged, curious case of the disgruntled digital nomad.

I’m finding new thrills in my permanence. Piecing together bus routes on disconnected backroads and haggling for the cheapest street eat have been replaced with piecing together a social life in a city with limitless opportunities and shopping around for a decent-priced cut of beef. Forging stronger foreign language capacity has given way to forging stronger relationships. Perhaps this is the novel experience left unsatisfied by my nomadic chapters. There’s still work to do though.

I’m a recovering vagabond after all.

If we continue to let the tastes of others determine which experiences to try, then we are succumbing to a one-dimensional reality limited by the bias of someone else, akin to allowing the title of artwork to restrict our creative interpretation of it. Continuing to take reviews, recommendations, and titles like these at face value will, at best, achieve a life of experiences that other folks would enjoy more than we would.

The human body cannot properly function when in a constant state of food consumption. The brain, equally, cannot properly function when in a constant state of information consumption. This is known as cognitive obesity.