Listen, I can see you from here. Well not literally. I’m currently three thousand meters above sea level, and unless you’re flying a very small, very lost drone, we aren’t making eye contact. But I can see you. I can see the blue-light glow reflecting off your retinas in that darkened room. I can see the way…
Let me describe what I looked like last Tuesday at 7:30am on a public hiking trail. Phone mounted to my chest like a police body cam. Noise-canceling earbuds jammed in both ears. A cable running from the phone down to a portable battery in my hip pocket, giving the impression that I am perhaps medically…
Someone sent me a tweet this morning that made me put down my coffee. Which, if you know me, is a significant event. Very few things outrank the first cup. Here’s what it said. Some guy, a regular, muggle hiker by the sound of it, describing a person he keeps running into on a trail….
I used to take 4,000 IU of vitamin D every morning. Little golden capsule, right next to my omega-3s and my magnesium and my ashwagandha and whatever other supplement some podcast bro convinced me I needed that month. I had a pill organizer. One of those weekly ones with the little flip lids. It sat…
Every time I talk about Viking, I get the same objections. They come in a very predictable order, like the five stages of grief except the final stage is buying a chest mount for your phone on Amazon. “What about cell signal?” Fair question. Bad excuse. First: you don’t need signal to think. The most…
There’s a question I’ve been asking every developer I meet, and the answers are depressing. “What do you do while your AI is generating code?” The most common answer, by far, is nothing. Or rather: the modern nothing. Check Slack. Scroll Twitter. Open a new tab, forget why, close it, open it again. Stare at…
Let me be honest with you for a second. When I started doing this, I had no scientific justification. I wasn’t reading papers about “ambulatory cognition” or “nature exposure and creative output.” I was just a guy who felt like garbage and accidentally discovered that walking made his brain work better. The science came later,…
I need to manage your expectations here, because what I’m about to describe sounds ridiculous. I know this because my mother saw a photo of my “work setup” and called to ask if I was having a breakdown. Here’s what a typical Viking day looks like for me. I wake up around 6:30. No alarm….
Here’s something nobody warned me about turning 36: your body starts sending you passive-aggressive emails. Your back reminds you it exists like an old friend you owe money to. Your eyes unionize around hour six of screen time. Your sleep starts asking questions you can’t afford to answer. I ignored all of this for two…