Field notes on life-building
Self-exploration, pleasure-seeking and childhood worlds.
In an era of algorithms ushering us into a recommended-for-you lifestyle, the ability to life-build is a skill we all need right now.
Life-building is the ongoing practice of designing, directing and experimenting with how you live – from your values and rhythms to your relationships, work and desires – without defaulting to external pressures like capitalism, cultural scripts or algorithmic influence.
I’ve had many conversations lately about what actually makes people happy.
The answer I keep circling back to – not because people say it outright, but because I feel it – is experience.
Experiencing life. Experiencing people.
We can’t rely on things to make us happy. Capitalism wants that, but it’s a lie. We can’t rely on people to make us happy either.
The mere existence or ownership of people and things won’t make us happy.
It’s about experiencing them.
Buying a child some chalk won’t make them happy. Them drawing a self portrait on the pavement with that chalk, and then laying on the ground in the same position while posing for a photo, though? Yes. [see photo]
Wouldn’t it be then that a life full of experiences – whether they’re successful or not – is a life well-lived?
Like the way a child moves through the day: messily trying things, being great at some, terrible at others, but always present, always curious.
They go to bed excited for tomorrow’s adventures – nothing more.
Could it be that if the world never told us success and romantic love were the end-all-be-all, we would be happy just experiencing life?
I think so.
I just started reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and in it, there’s a quote that says, “To make a game is to imagine the person playing it.”
In order to build your life, you need to imagine who it is you’re building it for.
I suggest finding a photo of yourself as a kid, from back when you were still living in your own little world.
Keep that image close as you life-build.
Try not to make decisions from your adult self – you’ve lived through too many algorithms, expectations and capitalist scripts that were never written with you in mind.
Instead, build for the version of you that existed before all that. The one who knew what you loved, what you were drawn to, and what made you feel alive.
This is mine, in my tomboy-ish clothes, next to my computer and other digital trinkets:
In my future pieces, I’ll explore how I can concretely build my life into a world that little girl imagined, because I have free will and I believe it is possible.
There’s this quote that goes, “We are all living in cages with the doors wide open”.
For a while, I was in a cage. And now, I can see the door is open, and I wander out sometimes. But I still find myself returning to the cage – either out of habit, fear or comfort.
Because when you live in a cage, the outside world is kind of … blank.
And until you build something outside the cage that feels compelling enough to stay for, you’ll keep going back in.
But it’s hard to build a life outside of what you know, especially when the examples you have in adulthood have been influenced by systems that prioritize output over aliveness – which is why we have to go back to childhood.
Sidewalk chalk and curiosity, tomboy outfits and muddy hands.
When I was a kid, I was sure that this world existed for adults too, and I’m just as sure now – we just have to build it.
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