Nothing to Optimize Here
Being in the airport coming home, I am seeing all sorts of destinations.
It’s a lot of noise to keep up with, and getting on the wrong plane will take me to a different corner of the globe.
Thankfully, you can’t just get on any random plane.
Your destination is the goal that you are working towards.
Every day we go into an airport.
Some days we don’t feel like flying anywhere. Other days we have specific cities to hit on our tour.
When a yoga teacher says to set an intention for this class or this day, I quietly shake my head and write it off as being corny talk.
But it has to be one of the most important lessons to hold onto for dear life.
If I have no intention for the day, I am wandering into an airport looking at 50 cities that are not even available to me.
With an intention, I bought that ticket weeks ago and have been tracking the exact time to go to the airport for days in advance.
Who’s Advice Are You Taking?
During my trip, I had two AI systems helping me figure out where to go and how to get there. They are both powered by ChatGPT, but one sits in the website version, while the other was an app that I wrote.
The website version is what most people are familiar with. A few weeks before the trip I put all the chats into a sidebar folder called Galicia Spring Trip.
Yet about a week before leaving, I realized that just because you talk to one ‘thread’ or chat, it doesn’t mean that it’s constantly referencing the other threads.
In plain English, that means the AI was prone to losing the shape of the trip. Where I’m going, what I like to do, when I have to be out of my BnB, etc.
That’s why I created AI #2, an app that was constantly logging different details of the trip. But in order to access this better AI, I had to load up a terminal on my iPhone which wasn’t the quickest form of access compared to the user friendly chat of AI #1.
Near the end of my trip, a full day in Porto, I got lazy and I talked to the user-friendly AI in the app that most of us use.
I like to go to parks, and I like to walk the streets that locals walk.
However, I did something stupid, which is I pointed the AI at a Lonely Planet article about how to spend 2 days in Porto.
So it was already primed to give me the worst information, aka alpha white girl mode, paired with the fact that it was not empowered like AI #2 was.
You can imagine what was next, going into the armpit of tourism. If Porto wasn’t becoming white/northern European enough as it is, now I was in the thick of it.
And the park that was suggested - a tiny patch of grass meant for tourists to catch their breath.
I pulled a full retreat, went home for a bit to catch my breath, and talked to AI #2. I didn’t tell it about the mishap, I wanted to test if it knew me.
Walking towards the Palácio de Cristal I find a small wine bar with a garden. How could you not stop here?
A tourist couple walked by from the street and poked their head in. One of them was interested and the other talked them out of it so they kept walking.
This is the reason people should go away by themselves once in a while. Even if you drive two hours to another city to walk around.
And if you do go away as a couple, just use the “Yes, and…” approach.
If two people stumble across something interesting and one person asks to explore, just say yes and… we can check it out for a few minutes. Or yes and I am dying to quench my thirst with a glass of chilled local white wine.
Arriving at the Palacio park I am floored by the atmosphere that I had been searching for.
In Porto, as with every city in Spain to the north that I visited on this trip for Hans’ wedding, there is nothing to optimize. Even my smart AI knows that.
As a traveller, no matter what you use, Lonely Planet, Google Maps, AI that is the most important thing to get into your skull.
It is a skill that I am trying desperately to hold onto now that I am home.
There is nothing to optimize for.
Have an intention of where you want to go, what you want to enjoy, and then just take your hands off the wheel for a bit.
Life is just one big wander.
We are floating in endless space, so just enjoy it 🥲
Important Elliott FM Update
You might’ve gone to this project in the past and heard only my own music. Or you might’ve visited while it’s playing other people’s music. And along the way in the past six months there were some playback hiccups.
But now, the site is playing a mix of different music combined with my own, that I think go well with a range of activities otherwise known as living.
I personally have it running from my iPad, connected to a bluetooth speaker so it’s always playing music in my home now.
Access at elliottfienberg.com or elliottfm.com.
I am just working on getting the iOS app updated to play this new stream properly, and then I can proceed with Android.