These 4 Weeks Changed Me
I’m back. It’s good to be home after 4 weeks solo backpacking through Taiwan.
This is the video I shared with the MMN community detailing my travel learning approach.
I feel like I’ve been in a hyperbaric chamber. The pre and post trip me are very different. I didn’t really have a specific goal going into this trip other than somehow curing my burnout. Yet like art and inspiration, the harder you try, the more illusive it is.
So instead I let questions guide me:
What do I want to get out of this solo trip to Taiwan?
What are my values and how do I feel?
Will my social unease lift?
How do I become curious in others?
How do I restore my wonder of travel?
Who will I become when I’m no longer engrossed in the future? When I’m fully present?
As I lived into the answers, more inquires began popping up.
As the poet Rilke says, much of human experience is indescribable using words. Still, after writing 50 pages of reflection in my Traveler’s Notebook, I think I have captured the essence and turning points of my growth.
My dear Epiphany readers, over the next few weeks I will share those pivotal moments in hopes of showing you how travel can fundamentally change us through a process of inquiry, courageous living, and reflection. Instead of souvenir trinkets and selfies, we return home with greater self awareness, confidence, and enriched perspectives of the world and on life.
If you would like to see more memorable moments from my travels, I made a stories collection on my Instagram 🙂
Or you can enjoy this fast 20 second highlight reel 👇
Sincerely yours,
Sheng
🤔 What I’m Pondering Over
Have you seen this latest snippet on “emotions”? It's a succinct preview clip from a YouTube video I shared last year amidst upheaval and personal family crisis.
This short actually made its debut on my Instagram before hitting my YouTube channel. Don't miss out on future posts — if you haven’t already, follow me on Instagram at shengsilver (@shengsilver) for some of my most real-time updates, including my daily instagram ‘stories’.
I recognize that we're all entangled in a complex dance of emotions at any given moment, sometimes submerged in our feelings or at a loss for how to even recognize/clearly ‘name’ them.
I strongly believe emotional literacy is the cornerstone of managing our feelings effectively—if we can't name our emotions, how can we hope to control them?
It's more than a method; it's a way to stay sane as life falls apart around us: Full Video Here.
🧠 What I’m Absorbing
Sora, Groq, and Virtual Reality
We are on the cusp of a) real time interactions with AI, thereby making AI much more human like and b) real time immersive 3D environments generated by AI, thereby making true Virtual Reality possible.
I’m glad that Ben Thompson ended on: “The big question — one that we are only now coming in reach of answering — is if virtual reality will, for a meaningful number of people, be a better reality.”
This is when the technologist passes the baton to the humanist. As the saying goes, just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
While I’ll be chewing on this question, my initial thought is that VR will not be a better reality. One of my first principles is that the digital should facilitate the analog i.e. real life experiences, for we are born from the physical world. Every time I spend too much time on my phone or computer, I find myself feeling empty and isolated. After my sabbatical to Taiwan, I realized that I was truly happy in the presence of other people in real life not over Zoom.
The analogy is that VR, especially if it is multiplayer like the one depicted in Ready Player One, is akin to us landing on an alien planet. If we have not figured out how to be a healthy functioning society here on Earth, then we will just spread our human baggage to the stars.
In Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (vol 3), there is a cautionary tale of an alien race called the Kakrafoon who loved to party so much that they trashed their planet. So they created a spaceship to find a new place to continue their excessive lifestyle and presumably trash other planets.
So no, I don’t think VR will solve our problems if we have not figured out ourselves in this reality.
Do you think VR will be a better reality?
Make the most of your mind maps
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