The Sovereign Minimalist

The life I want contains a fair amount of ambition for someone who likes travelling with a backpack. I want to build businesses, learn difficult things, see more of the world and share it with people I care about. I would also like to do that without spending most of my days looking after everything I have acquired along the way.

I think of sovereignty as having enough independence to make choices I believe in, including the ability to leave a bad situation. Minimalism helps me stay selective about what I own and take on. Together, they describe both the freedom I am trying to build and the judgment I need to use it well.

That freedom has to be useful in an ordinary day. It should let me give proper attention to a project, say no to work I do not believe in, spend time with someone without watching the clock, or go somewhere because I am curious. An impressive list of options would not mean much if I never had the time or inclination to use them.

What a business gives back

Running Sneakers Daddy taught me that earning independently and controlling my time were different achievements. The business could pay for a freer life, but an order could still pull me into the exchanges between a supplier, a customer and a shipping carrier. I was responsible for the business and also for keeping too much of its information moving.

Argus changed that. I commissioned a custom business-management system that connected our customer and supplier records with stock, orders and shipping. Information no longer had to pass through me at every step. Once it worked, I could run the business in a couple of hours a day from my phone, wherever I happened to be.

The change was valuable because it reached beyond the work itself. I had more say over the rest of my day. That became something I expected from a business, rather than a pleasant exception I had happened to experience once.

It also explains my interest in leverage, a subject Naval Ravikant has helped me think about: work that continues to be useful without needing the same effort from me every time. Software can handle a process repeatedly. Writing can explain an idea to people I will never meet. Capital can support work beyond what my own hours can fund, while knowledge and a reputation for doing good work can make opportunities possible in the first place. I am interested in what these things let me do, not in collecting them as signs of success.

There is a choice to make when they work. I can use the extra capacity to take on a larger undertaking, or leave some of it free. Both can be worthwhile. But expanding a business until it needs all my attention again is a different decision from making my life less dependent on it. I want to notice which one I am making.

The cost of keeping something

For years, I enjoyed clothes, appearance and the world around sneakers. Travelling with a backpack gave me a practical reason to reconsider what I wanted to own. Every object had to be useful or enjoyable enough that I wanted to keep carrying it.

The question became less about how much I could acquire and more about what I was glad to have with me. A beautiful or expensive thing could still earn its place. I was simply becoming more interested in the life it contributed to than in the satisfaction of acquiring it.

I now ask a similar question about things that do not fit in a bag. A new app can mean another place to check. A subscription can become a payment I barely notice for something I rarely use. An extra device may solve one problem and leave me with something else to charge, maintain and carry. Each seems small when I add it. Together, they can consume a surprising amount of attention.

Taking an Uber or Grab is often an easy choice for me. I get the journey without owning a vehicle or doing the driving, and I can use the time differently. Keeping software and information on remote servers lets me reach them without carrying all the equipment myself. These choices suit what I value. Someone who loves driving or maintaining their own machines may happily choose otherwise.

Responsibilities deserve the same consideration, with rather more care than an unused subscription. I am selective about what I agree to because I take my commitments seriously. When I say yes to somebody, I want to have enough time and attention to mean it.

A light life still contains things worth looking after. I want less unnecessary maintenance so I can do a better job of caring for those.

Enough independence to choose

I do not like the thought of having to accept something I believe is wrong because I have left myself no alternative. That could involve work, money, a service I rely on or the place where I live. The ability to say no matters more when I can actually afford to use it.

This is part of what interests me in thinking across jurisdictions and institutions rather than assuming that every important part of my life has to depend on the same one. I want to understand where I have become vulnerable and which alternatives would be genuinely useful.

More alternatives are not automatically better. Each may require money, knowledge or administration. A complicated collection of options that I cannot keep up with would do little for the freedom I hoped to gain. I would rather have a few choices I understand than many that work only in theory.

The same judgment applies to technology. I accept some cloud dependency because it makes my daily life lighter. I care about control and sensible ways to move when I need to, but I do not want personally maintaining every machine to become my occupation. For me, independence includes knowing when another person’s competence is worth relying on.

People belong in this picture for another reason too. A friendship, a partnership or a shared project can ask more of me while making my life much better. I want the freedom to choose those commitments wholeheartedly. Staying because I want to be there is as important to me as being able to leave when I need to.

Work I can stand behind

The way I earn matters to me. I want to be able to explain it plainly to somebody I love and feel proud of what I am doing. A profitable opportunity can still be an unappealing use of my abilities.

A business producing disposable AI videos, for example, might make commercial sense without being something I want to devote myself to. What draws me towards AI is the possibility of helping people do work they could not otherwise carry through. I enjoy the difficulty of making that useful in practice.

That is the direction behind Agent Chakra. I am building it so that a person who is not a software engineer can give a team of agents meaningful, ongoing work, then guide it through their judgment, feedback and taste. The person should be able to explain what they are trying to achieve and understand the result, rather than spend their day passing information between disconnected tools.

This website is one example of the work I have been developing through that system. The agents have drawn on material I shared about my life and how I write, while I have directed the design, corrected the details and decided what feels like me. That collaboration interests me far more than simply generating a page of convincing text. There is something I can read, use, challenge and improve.

It has taken a great deal of work to get here, and the work is still developing. I take it seriously because I have already seen what useful software can change in a person’s life. I also enjoy becoming capable of building something that once seemed beyond me.

More than one kind of adventure

Sometimes making something work is the adventure. There is a problem I do not yet understand, a result I care about and a chance that my first attempts will fail. I have to learn enough to move beyond what I already know how to do.

That willingness to take a risk and leave familiar ground is a large part of what adventure means to me. It can take me to another country, but it can also keep me occupied with a difficult project. Minimalism makes room for challenges I choose; it does not require me to choose only easy ones.

I recognise the appeal of preparation in stories such as Naruto: someone develops abilities they did not begin with and eventually gets to use them. There is satisfaction in becoming more capable, especially when the work behind it was not obvious to anybody else. I want some of that confidence in my own life, grounded in things I have actually learned to do.

At the same time, I want the work to stay connected to the rest of my life. There is always another improvement I could make. I need to give the things that already work a chance to be useful, and allow myself to enjoy something without first completing every project I can imagine.

Building and enjoying what I have built do not need equal portions of every day. Some periods will be more absorbed in work than others. What I want is for those periods to support one another, rather than make every good experience depend on an ever-receding finish line.

People I want beside me

Travelling has given me experiences I once only imagined. It has also taken me away from people I love being around. I miss the ease of familiar company, the ordinary evenings that do not need much arranging and the friendships that deepen because you keep appearing in one another’s lives.

Meeting somebody interesting and sharing a daily life are different pleasures. Movement makes the first easier for me than the second. I want room for both.

I would like a partner with whom to build and share a meaningful life, and a small crew of people whose curiosity and values fit well enough with mine that we want to spend time together. Part of the appeal of Tolkien’s unexpected journeys has always been the company: the people who make what happens along the way matter more.

That kind of closeness will influence where I stay, how I spend my time and which plans I make. I welcome that possibility. Having somebody else’s hopes become important to me would add something I cannot obtain by keeping every option open.

A world worth going out into

My parents showed me wildlife documentaries when I was a child, and I wondered whether I would ever see those places and creatures for myself. Travel and diving have brought some of them into my own experience. Seeing the Komodo dragons I first encountered in a biology book was one of those moments when a childhood fascination became something standing in front of me.

The ocean is where I most want to be. Diving has given me another way to explore it, and the more I see, the more I care about what remains for others to discover. I would like future children to be able to ask whether we could go and see an animal from a documentary, and for the answer still to be yes.

I am interested in what science and technology can contribute to conservation. The living world is part of what makes all this freedom worth pursuing. I want to be able to reach extraordinary places and have enough attention left to notice them.

One version of the future involves a boat, a small crew and businesses we can keep running as we move between islands. There would be sailing, diving, unfamiliar places and work we care about. I do not own the boat yet. For now, it is a useful picture of the things I would like to bring together.

Some of them are already possible on a smaller scale. I can spend time by the sea, make room for people and enjoy the capabilities I have already built. The larger dream gives me a direction without needing to become a condition for enjoying the present.

That is what I am trying to do as a sovereign minimalist: become capable enough to choose a life I believe in, and remain selective enough to give it my attention.

Take the longer route

The book gives these ideas more room: the business that taught me to work differently, the responsibilities I choose, and the people and places I want the freedom to enjoy.

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