I write for a lot of reasons but when you really get down to it, the people I’m addressing are the great unwashed masses who feel like life should be better than it is, with everything we know. They’re people who remember being told in high school that you should follow your dreams, only to find as adults that most people devote their lives to jobs that at best they don’t care about and at worst they hate. They’re people who realize that their religions are less holy than they’ve been led to believe, and that a normal life can grind a person into the ground.

Those are the types of anxieties that have plagued me throughout my adult life, and I’ve devoted all of my best existential crises to solving those issues in my own situation. Across time, my wife Angel and I have put together a pretty decent life after fleeing less inspiring existences multiple times, and I’ve written a couple of books about what we’ve learned. The Dirtbag’s Guide to Life is a distillation of what we know about how to build a life organized around the outdoors and adventure after doing so for years, and after spending thousands of hours listening to dirtbag life stories for our old podcast Boldly Went. I Hope I Was Wrong About Eternal Damnation is my story of leaving behind a high demand, fundamentalist religious community and a career as a minister in favor of truth and goodness.

I started out as a normal, working class guy from small-town Ohio, but by now my résumé includes a thru hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, a 500 mile run across Spain on the Camino de Santiago, multiple stints living in New Zealand, a bunch of months spent sleeping on buses traveling down the mountainous spine of Latin America, and a lot of other stuff. I’m not sharing any of that to brag. I'm just trying to convince you that it’s possible to get out of the rut and do the things that you daydream about. Angel and I have done it on multiple occasions, and we are still working hard to avoid regretting the lives we’ve lived whenever they eventually come to their end. 

Some of what I write is practical. Some is serious, and some is just for fun. All of it is my attempt to be useful to those of you who are keen to maximize the amount of life you live and avoid the traps that existence sets for all of us.