The Well-Lived Life is Now Live Wild

How this will look going forward

The author, living wild

I have an apology to make, folks.

I disappeared for a while. Almost a year, to be almost precise. And before that, I wrote sporadically, departing from the schedule I’d made for myself.

The road took me, I suppose. It turns out my writing mind likes consistency and structure. But that’s no excuse. Something much larger has shifted in me.

So I’m sorry for not writing you more, and I’d like to explain myself.

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When I left my job, my country, and started my movement journey in July of 2021, I realized something:

I didn’t know anything.

Sure, I’d already lived a bit, enjoyed a non-traditional life, and racked up a few stories. I’d read a lot of books and developed a handful of interesting perspectives. But I was completely clueless about almost everything.

When I started The Well-Lived Life in January 2021, it was simply to have a place to put fans of my writing. I had written a piece that had gone viral, and I wanted to capture some of that momentum.

I wrote all sorts of articles back then, using The Well-Lived Life as a place to double-publish my writing on Medium. Then I tried to launch a paid subscription here without the vaguest idea of what I should offer for exclusive subscribers.

A few people were more than happy to support me simply because they liked my writing, but then imposter syndrome reared its ugly head.

I realized like a kick in the teeth that I’d been writing about happiness and how to live from a purely theoretical perspective.

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When I started writing on Medium and then Substack, it was late 2020. The world was falling apart. I had no idea what my future held, and I was scared and stressed.

The motivation for writing came from a desire to escape the life I was living. I hated my job, I was in a small town with very few dating prospects, and I had lost my way.

Writing about happiness helped me remember what was important, but I wasn’t living it. Which was hilariously ironic, considering I titled my publication The Well-Lived Life.

As soon as I was out on the road, free, I started meeting truly happy people. And I started becoming happy again.

It hit me like a thunderbolt then:

There are very few happy people writing about happiness.

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Happy people are busy being happy. They’re out living their lives, often oblivious to what’s happening in the world of mortals. They’re generally not sitting around asking themselves why they’re happy and flinging that information out to people.

It’s the miserable and depressed who follow the happy people around and treat them like lab rats, trying to dissect them to find out what’s inside.

I was in the former camp. Sure, I’d always been happier than average, but was I as happy as the wild and free people that I’d met out on the road? No way.

How do I get there? I wondered. How do I smile and laugh again in an uncomplicated way?

I’m sitting here a year and a half later beaming with pride, raring at the bit to tell you: I did it.

When I sat down a few weeks ago and tried to distill it, the phrase came down to one simple, two-word philosophy:

Live Wild.

This name nagged at me for weeks, and I knew it had to be the new name for this newsletter. The Well-Lived Life was a very pretentious title and implied that I had wisdom that I simply do not possess. Live Wild is an action statement, a philosophy, and a love letter to life all in one.

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That’s what I’ll be sharing going forward. In the last twenty months, I’ve:

• Become a 500hr certified yoga teacher, spending most of that training at a school called Durga’s Tiger School for Tantra Yoga and Shamanism (yes, really, and yes, I do struggle to say it with a straight face).

• Been certified by two masters in Thai massage.

• Earned an Acroyoga International teaching certificate.

• Sat overnight in two Ayahuasca ceremonies and one San Pedro ceremony.

• Learned how to therapeutically massage someone and decompress their spine by using my legs to invert them.

• Studied partner acrobatics and dance lifts, and taken some amazing pictures that I’ll be sharing.

• Lived in the mountains and close to the sea in several different countries, following the rhythms of nature.

And much, much more.

Now that I’m coming to the “end” of this particular journey, I’m returning home and mining it all for lessons.

I’m still figuring out what the new format will be. But I can tell you with confidence that I’m moving forward as one of the very few happy people I know who’s writing about happiness.

I hope you’ll come along for the ride. I’ve paused all subscriptions as I think about what the new format will be.

Let’s move forward, wild and free.