Why I left New York City
My "great resignation," farm life & finding new inspiration
Some context to start…
I quit the longest, most stable job I’ve ever held (for a grand total of 2.5 years baby!) after asking myself a simple question: if you could do anything you wanted, without limitations, what would you be doing right now?
It started off as a “haha let’s get stoned from the Wellfleet weed that we hoarded from literally every dispensary in plain sight during our dreamy week-long summer trip” creative exercise. But then, after I thought the thoughts I’d had, wrote them out, and had them leave my brain…they became real. They had weight. They meant something.
I stared at the new timeline I’d drawn. And it was like, well, what’s holding you back?
It was like, I scrawled out an alternate reality for myself. The one where I wasn’t living in a sun-lit, cozy, 2-bedroom, 5-floor-walkup apartment in Williamsburg with terrible management, getting cute breakfasts and lunches and dinners and drinks in Fort Greene and Bed-Stuy and Flatiron, volunteering at the compost hub, failing to grow tomatoes in my windowsill, biking to the park, working as a design manager full time—which, to be clear, I loved all of and was what I’d wanted for a long time. But hilariously, all my marijuana-induced messy scribbles, somehow, suddenly became the clearest thing in the world. And I could actually just…do it.
So, as paradigm shifts go with most other New Yorkers, it was over when my apartment lease ended. It was time to leave for the French countryside. ✨
What about now?
I’m currently writing, reading, creating, thinking, and designing from Paris, where I’ve planted my feet for the past month, speaking grammatically incorrect French and exploring new corners of the city that inspires me most.
Through an incredible program called WWOOF, I spent the month prior in Val de Loire, living and working on an organic farm for their fall harvest. I still purchase weekly paniers from the association that I helped prepare orders for during my humbling time there.
What’s next?
Working at various capacities with agencies, startups, and nonprofits over the course of my career has given me the power of perspective. How can we tell this story best to stakeholders that matter? What design systems or processes can we implement to ensure these work at scale? With our limited resources, what can we create?
Hyper Normal is a design practice, consultancy, and space for people who share a similar philosophy: that by exploring and learning from different perspectives, we can reframe narratives and empower communities to work more efficiently and sustainably.
What can I expect?
In its most broad sense, design. I’m interested in exploring a few things with this project.
Systems & structures, and how they directly inform and influence the manufactured environments we live in. So yes—how individuals create algorithms for companies to capitalize on their users’ addictions in lieu of striving toward a mentally healthier society, but also what others do to prioritize profit and commercial agriculture (in a similar manner) over fresh, organic, complex-tasting, incredible food that’s bursting with flavor. The thing is, everyone would hypothetically and objectively want these things. But what isn’t apparent is the digital dangling carrot in front of each person’s nose-screen, distracting us from those things we really need. By reframing these narratives, I want to better understand where these carrots come from.
Sustainability, of not only reaching the “1.5-2 degree C increase limit” global climate change goal from the Paris Accords (which has inevitably become an abstract goal that’s seemingly unobtainable on an individual level—more on that in here), but also taking a look at our relationships with labor and exploitation, resourcing, and technological advancement. There’s a reason why so many people are quitting their jobs on a mass scale in the latter half of 2021. If we want to sustain what we build, we need to create systems with the support that these people need. We need frameworks that are scalable and sustainable, not ones that will get us over only the next hurdle. Until then, we’ll keep seeing “burn and churn” in modern workplaces, a detriment to employee morale everywhere. We’ll continue to be climate anxious. We’ll chase superficial clout around meaningless products for consumption. Amidst a culture of hyper-growth and employee burn out, how do we design new structures that sustain our needs?
Modern art & culture, what we need more of, and what we need less of. We need more publicly funded art. We need less beauty brands spun out by celebrities. More dialogue around invisible labor. Less emissions. Can we develop a framework for artists and creators to do so more mindfully, at scale?
Thanks for reading, and expect more to come. Let me know your thoughts below.