Who is the Retired Instagram Boyfriend?
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We've all seen it. Guy gets a girlfriend and suddenly he's holding a camera 24/7 and is her personal photographer. Beach photos with 🍑, “candid” walking-away photos that required four attempts because the light wasn’t right on the third one, and everyone is staring at you, waiting for the best time to walk by. Three months later, those same photos are on Bumble. I’ve been that guy.
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All intel →For the traveler who does their homework last minute.
The Perfect Road Trip is in Albania
There's a specific guilt that comes with writing one of these posts. You've watched it happen before. Some place is "undiscovered," someone writes about it, then someone else does, then a boutique hotel opens, then the prices double, then a guy in linen pants and a girl in a dress are doing a photoshoot in front of the thing that used to just be a thing. I know what I'm participating in here. As Bourdain put it: "You're probably going to find it anyway, so here's a little preemptive truth telling. There's no happy ending." There's no version of this where the place stays exactly as you found it.
Visiting the Maldives on a Budget
So can you visit the Maldives on a budget? I went to find out. In fact I had ChatGPT and Claude scope it out for me before I committed to anything, just to see if it was even possible. I was going in early April, right as the busy season was winding down, and it's the natural next stop from Sri Lanka anyway since it's about an hour flight away. Most people who go to the Maldives go for resort life. And the cheapest way to do that isn't actually staying at a resort, it's basing yourself on the island of Maafushi, the main budget hub, and hopping back and forth to neighboring resort islands so you can use their beaches and facilities without paying the $2,000 to $6,000 a night to sleep there. Roughly $120 a day, not including the boat out. I wanted something different after hearing it's not that great outside the resort day trips themselves, although it will probably be the most social version of this trip you can have. The Two Maldives Here's the thing nobody really explains before you go. There are two completely different scenes here. There's the resort islands, which is what you picture when you think Maldives. Perfect beaches, barely any clothes on, cocktails, the whole overwater villa fantasy. That's for people who came to spend money. And then there's everything else. Everything else is not that. It's genuinely Islamic, so much so that the country didn't open up to international tourism until 1972, just over 50 years ago. Before that it was fishing villages and not much else. On the local islands, here are the rules. You've got designated beaches where you can wear what you want. In town, you cover up, and sometimes that's rough when it's 90 degrees out. Guys, no tank tops, you'll get looks you don't want. Even shorts get side-eyed depending on the island, though I wasn't wearing pants and survived fine. There are signs everywhere reminding you to respect the culture. Can't really complain about that. It's their country.
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Latest Hippie Thoughts
All thoughts →Random uncensored thoughts of someone pretending to be cultured. It's really just an echo chamber. Maybe you'll learn something, but probably not.
We Built the Machine and Forgot to Free Ourselves
The American hypocrisy is funny. We work so hard as a species to make life easier, to create comfort and progress, and then when we finally get there, it is never enough. Or worse, the system treats the progress like it was never the point. Take remote work. Humankind has literally figured out how to work from anywhere in the world. Anywhere. That should be one of the greatest achievements of modern civilization. I remember being a kid thinking, “Imagine if you could see someone on a screen and talk to them face to face. Wouldn’t that be insane?” That sounded like science fiction. Like something that would not happen in my lifetime. But now we are here. We have laptops with eight plus hours of battery. Video meetings. Cloud tools. WiFi in places that barely have running water. We can go to sleep and wake up on the other side of the planet and still show up to work. We can build careers from islands, coffee shops, buses, balconies, anywhere. No one truly understands what a feat that is. The world is smaller. Connection is instant. Cultures are more accessible than ever. Progress is happening everywhere, all at once. And corporate leaders are still arguing about whether people need to sit in cubicles in windowless offices for “team building.” What makes it even more absurd is the contradiction. You are told being in person is about culture and relationships. But then if you hang out with your coworkers outside of work too much, it becomes unprofessional. So what is the point? Why are we spending forty hours a week in environments no one wants to be in, with people we are not really allowed to connect with on a personal level, all in the name of culture? It is forced proximity disguised as leadership. Then comes the definition of success we are all supposed to accept without questioning. More money. The salary number is bigger, but usually it barely covers inflation. You get a raise, but rent goes up faster. Food costs more. Travel costs more. Debt increases. Insurance costs more. Everything costs more. So you are told you are crushing it, but in reality you are just treading water with more responsibility. That is the scam. You are not building freedom. You are maintaining survival. So people overspend on a nice dinner to get out of the house and out of the office. They buy small escapes to make the lifestyle tolerable. They purchase a new car on an 8 year loan because they can "afford" the monthly payment with their raise. Then they break even again and repeat the cycle. That is success? More money, more debt, and less freedom? And the job you built your life around could disappear tomorrow. Restructuring. Layoffs. Leadership changes. Budget cuts. Performance reviews. Suddenly you are stuck with more debt, fewer options, and the same freedom you had before, if not less. The bigger point is the one no one wants to say out loud. Advancing technology was supposed to mean building toward more freedom. That was the goal. Not just productivity. Not just efficiency. Not just squeezing more output from people. Freedom. Technology should have been the thing that gave us our lives back. Instead, it feels like we built a machine that made the world more efficient, but we did not reward the people who built it. We did not shorten the workweek. We did not increase vacation time. We did not cut hours while keeping salaries the same. Instead, we automated parts of jobs, laid people off in the name of efficiency, and asked the remaining workers to do more so companies could chase endless profit. And we called that progress. Working hard until you are sixty five, just to retire exhausted, sick, and too tired to enjoy what is left, is no longer an attractive dream. Not when the possibilities are endless. If that is not the goal, then what truly is?
Go to the Source
The algorithm knows you. It knows what you’re afraid of, what makes you angry, and what makes you feel smart. And it will use all of that to construct your opinions for you, if you let it. Most people let it. Here’s what I’ve noticed traveling: everyone has opinions about places they’ve never been and people they’ve never spoken to. Europeans who’ve never set foot in the US have fully formed takes on Americans, and the conclusion is usually that we’re stupid. Americans will tell Europeans their country is the best without anything to compare it to, while also bashing their own countrymen and women. I’m from rural western Pennsylvania. I’ve lived in California. I’ve spent years somewhere in between. I know exactly what it costs to live in America, and I know what it costs to live in a place the rest of the country wrote off decades ago. Nobody who hasn’t lived that can tell me about it. They can describe it. They cannot know it. And that goes both ways. People in rural Pennsylvania can’t fully understand the pressures of living in Los Angeles or San Francisco. People in Los Angeles or San Francisco can’t fully understand what it feels like when the factory closes, opportunities disappear, and leaving means abandoning your family, identity, and community. Neither side is stupid. They’re solving different problems. We’re all living inside our own bubbles. The lazy read is, “Those people are just dumb.”
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