Individual life
I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to live a healthy and meaningful life. Cal Newport’s concept of The Deep Life resonates strongly with me. Above all else, I have noticed I am most happy when working deeply, spending time in nature (as Mary Oliver beautifully describes in Upstream, or Thoreau in Walden), and connecting meaningfully with those around me.
When it comes to ethics, I am fond of the stoics, although I still have plenty to explore in this domain.
Thanks in part to Andrew Huberman’s fantastic podcast Huberman Lab, I have recently been venturing more and more into the field of health and exercise. Mindfulness Meditation is also a fundamental part of my routine, ideally coupled with some form of journalling.
Collective life
As an aspiring social scientist, the ways Humanity has organised itself in towns, cities, and countries is nothing short of fascinating to me. Since my background is in Economics, I usually think in terms of the collective allocation of resources: “How can it be done more efficiently? What is the right remuneration for a certain job, or price for a certain good?”. Of course, these questions are often related to others from different fields, such as Philosophy and Politics: “What is justice? Why is the Government entitled to tax, or confiscate property?”. These types of questions, and the fields which encompass them, lie very close to who I am.
From a more practical point of view, I am a big fan of Jonathan Haidt’s work regarding the psychological drivers of political preferences (The Righteous Mind), as well as his study of the effect of social media on the decline in teen mental health (The Anxious Generation). I am also particularly interested in the Economics of Education.
Art and Culture
The way I see it, life wouldn’t be worth it if we didn’t have a great song to listen to on a sad day, or a book to lose ourselves in during a holiday. Art, creation, and the pursuit of beauty are valuable pursuits which can shed light on all spheres of Human existence, and, as such, it is an important part of my life.
I am a huge music fan, mainly Alternative Rock, MPB (Brazilian Popular Music), and Portuguese Music. I also often read literature; John Steinbeck and George Orwell are among my personal favourites. In the future, I would like to explore other art forms, especially theatre, painting, and film.