Free-Agent Lifestyle Snapshot
+ social-learning & folk-festivals
Hello from the Himalayas,
I hope the new year is getting to a pleasant start for all of you. Hopefully, we would all be getting vaccine shots soon.
New Experience: I never had cats but I got a temporary first-hand experience of being a cat-owner this month. My housemate has two adorable cats and she’s out of town for a while. That means, I got to spend a lot of close-up time with her cats in these last two weeks. Only now I realized how territorial, skeptical and detail-oriented cats are. Always be seeking special vantage-points, to keep a skeptical eye. Always be grooming themselves, to stay clean and sharp. I kinda enjoy watching a cat do her thing, but for a pet, I’d still go for a dog. A dog is cuddly, playful and trusting. That’s all I want.
Covid-Era Snapshot of Free-Agent Lifestyle
The lifestyle of a free-agent is kinda unstructured in general, which can be a good or bad thing, depending on who you ask. Despite the deficiency of explicit structure, there are meta-patterns that drive everyday behavior of a free-agent. For the purpose of giving a relevant example, I took a conceptual snapshot of what the lifestyle of a typical free-agent looks like in the Covid-era. I made a rough 2x2 and plotted some of the salient behaviors of a typical free-agent.
The vertical axis denotes the scope of the environment that enables the behavior —from Local to Global.
The horizontal axis denotes the underlying meta-drive that drives the behavior — from Self-Preservation to Exploration.
Self-preserving behavior inside the home-environment are things like grocery-hoarding and getting an ergonomic chair for your home-office setup.
Exploratory behavior in the local environment are things like curating a cozy-nook or group baking-sessions with your neighbors/friends.
Examples of self-preservation behavior that need a global scope include keeping up with the pandemic situation and how the public institutions are handling them. Less global but not homely behavior can include shipping your current client project and paying your bills.
In the bottom-right quadrant, exploratory behavior aims to generate new things that need a global environment to incubate within—new date, new gig, new mental-model, new side-project.
Peer-to-Peer Learning Models - Beyond Lambda School
This is a topic I keep coming back to, since I was highly disappointed with the higher-education model I experienced after listening to all the hype of elite universities. So, I am keeping an eye on the interesting experiments being done in this space— particularly new, sustainable models for peer-to-peer learning. Are there models that can give me the social-learning experience without all the monetary cost and irrelevant gatekeeping that comes with the traditional university model?
I narrowed down three essential components any such model would need to succeed:
Curriculum Curation — self-consumable content that translates into useful projects, via the application of demonstrable acquired-learning.
Social-Bonding — regular socialization with peers to share values and intentions, and build trust via both learning and non-learning activities (e.g: a group side-project as well as a shared meal).
Paid Employment Path — clear path to monetizing the specific-learning by aligning it with the near-future market-needs, along with a curated list of employers that are open to hiring for the specific acquired-learning.
Here are a few interesting social-learning experiments that I’m keeping my eye on:
Pioneer —leaderboard + community chat to incubate indie-projects into startups
Hive-Fi — on-campus, tuition-free bootcamp with no teachers/classes
Hyperlink Academy — cohort-based learning clubs/courses to facilitate peer-discussion
Yak Collective — loose network of indie-consultants focused on collaboration
Folk Festival of A Mountain Village
I am fond of folk-festivals that are hyper-local and involve freestyle social-bonding. So, I was delighted to discover that the nomadic mountain village of Nesang in the Kinnaur district of India has an annual festival of flowers(Fulaich) during which the whole village goes on an eventful 5-day camping trip up on the mountains. It’s about 300kms from my current base near Dharmsala.
I recommend watching this video made by an Indian backpacker. This is probably the first complete documentation of this folk-festival on camera.
Whole village hikes together to the mountain-peaks & camps in stone-huts.
Synchronized dancing in traditional dresses & shared meals.
Family-pairing made via a lottery, to be each other’s go-to for the next 3 years.
Twinhead flower-hunting in the mountains.
Mythological rituals to pay respects to the recently deceased & mock-weddings.
That’s it for today. Thanks for reading.
I will leave you with this musical time machine — browse it to listen to music from any decade from 1900s to 2010s and from any country in the world.
Until Next Time,
Vinay