Tips to find your next adventure

Having built tech - a platform - a club - for people to connect in person, I am often awake at night, running, thinking, pondering, how we can do this all better - meaning how can we use tech to thrive as people - in our lives, in love, in work, socially, in health. What do we give up, if we continually let things be done for us. The search to understand it better on a personal and professional level, recently made me devour a recent article from the Guardian on this very topic - better researched and better written, if you have a moment to read it. 

Yet a quick summary, it explains the impact on us as people (and why) as humans we often look for the easier way out. Yes it's part of our DNA to progress - we don't need to do all our washing by hand, spend hours toiling in soil or bob about in a treacherous sea to fish.

We're gradually loosing our emotional 'muscle memory' to go it solo, without the assurance that tech has it sorted - tightly and perfectly timed and 'managed' for us.

We can now use the extension of our hand to do so many things or have it delivered to our door in a jiffy, including, for some, the thrill of a romantic encounter. But what does this mean for us on an emotional level? 

With logically more time to engage in activities, many of us struggle to know how to fill that time meaningfully. Instead, we find ourselves online, binge watching and pursuing the same old routines. Our streaming no longer coincides with our family, friends, colleagues, so we're are out of beat there too.

We're in constant search of adventure, but often in the wrong (online) places. We're gradually loosing our emotional 'muscle memory' to go it solo, without the assurance that tech has it sorted - tightly and perfectly timed and 'managed' for us.

The reality is that thriving - feeling a sense of achievement and success, of adventure - stems from confronting intellectual and physical challenges, learning, discovering, and problem-solving in real-world settings. This also means we need to continually build and maintain our personal resilience to adapt to whatever falls at our feet - and let it take us where it leads us.

So, the next time you find yourself reaching for your phone, consider for a second putting it down. Try striking up a conversation in person, navigating without GPS - it's a really good exercise to keep internal GPS highly tuned - or have that difficult discussion face-to-face. Embracing a bit of discomfort might just lead you to your next great adventure and an increase that sense of really living.