Exactly a year ago I moved from Northern California to Poland. Besides a month-long visit back home for the holidays, I’ve been living in Warsaw, the capital city. Its been a great experience, not without its challenges, but overall a dramatic improvement to my previous lifestyle.
Sleep
This is probably the most underrated and arguably the most important aspect of not working an 8-5 job. I allow my body to wake up according to its own rhythm as the sunlight starts illuminating the edges of my bedroom curatains. The only time I set an alarm for myself is once a week for my PhD seminars or if I have a flight to catch or other event, but this is rare. While working at a regular job I struggled with chronic fatigue from lack of sleep. I do best with about 9 hours of sleep and tend to wake up naturally around 8-9am. Forcing myself to go to sleep at 10pm and waking up to an alarm 5 days a week at 6am (or earlier on gym days) was depriving me of sleep and forcing an unnatural pattern of waking. While it may be hardcore to wake up at 5am everyday, I think its stupid if you’re body isn’t geared for it and you’re tired and sluggish because of it. Sleep is a key ingredient to energy, mood and post-workout recovery and muscle growth. I can’t imagine going back to forcing myself to wake up early, unless I was doing it for myself as an experiment or in pursuit of a specific goal, but definitely not to go punch a time clock for the system.
Exercise
My exercise schedule in California was inconsistent at best. I forced myself to wake up at 5:30am several times a week to go to the gym before work at 8am, since I was too tired and often busy (not to mention the gym was crowded as hell) to go after work. In Poland I found a gym that’s a 15-minute walk from my apartment and costs about $280 for an annual membership. I’ve found a rhythm over the past two months where I go consistenly every Monday and Thursday for about an hour and a half. Three times a week would probably be ideal for me, but I haven’t been able to do it with consistency. Besides twice-weekly weightlifitng, on Saturdays I do Yoga and bodyweight exercises at home. I’m sure I’ll keep tweaking things as time goes on, but for now I am making progress in terms of weight loss, muscle growth and physical well-being. The way I’ve been able to get a constent routine going is tied to time. I go to the gym around 9-10am, this would be impossible if I were working a regular job.
Diet
Living alone and with a lot of free time can tempt you to eat out a lot and snack. I went through a phase where I liked to order pizzas or ate kebabs, on top of store-bought snacks and of course great Polish beer. While I still “cheat” about once a week and eat out, my diet has become much healthier, especially since deciding to cook most of my meals at home. A typical breakfast for me includes scrambled eggs with spinach, red bell pepper, salmon and hummus. For dinner I usually have turkey or beef, along with brown rice, sweet potatoes or grilled onions, topped with Palo Alto Firefighter Pepper Sauce. I essentially eat two meals per day, breakfast (or lunch on gym days) and dinner. In this way I do a form of intermittent fasting with about 14-16 hours between dinner and the first meal the next day. I still snack more than I should, but its gotten much better this year. Since January 13 I’ve lost 6.5 lbs and nearly 2″ off my waistline, while gaining muscle.
Besides deciding to cook at home, the biggest change of the past few months has been juicing twice a week. My juices typically include: spinach, bell pepper, apples, organges, grapefruit, ginger, carrots and sometimes pineapple. I usually juice on Sundays and Wednesdays, making about 30oz of juice, which I consume over the ensuing days. I’ve also timed my juicing so that I also make a separate beet juice that I consume before I go to the gym.
Women
While this has been a big challenge for me in its own right, living independently has allowed me the time to meet and date more women in the past several years (including my 2012 sabbatical from work) than I had in my entire life since my teenage years. This of course coincided with learning about game and pushing myself to approach women, but I never would have taken the initiative on this scale if I didn’t have the freedom to spend many hours endeavoring to learn, apply lessons, gain experience and learn some more. Learning to meet women isn’t a panacea for depression or loneliness, in the words of Rollo Tomassi “a woman should only ever be a complement to a man’s life, never the focus of it”, but going through this phase is important for a man to understand the joys of female company and its limits. I did daygame a fair amount while living in California and working full-time, but it doesn’t compare to living in a major city with several million inhabitants, having the freedom to go out where and when you choose and also to meet women that are decidedly more feminine and attractive than many of those in North America.
Writing
While I haven’t written as much on this blog as I wanted to, I’ve written more than before and I’ve also done a lot of writing for another website as well as my PhD dissertation in history (the official reason I moved to Poland). Its taken time but I’ve come to see writing (content creation in general) as the full-time job that it is. It doesn’t mean that you spend 8 hours every day writing, but you need to write something daily and make it a habit. One of the greatest features of life in the 21st Century is access to information, including a wealth of knowledge about writing. Amazingly, some of the best writers or “blog artists” give away their advice for free. This is not to say that you shouldn’t purchase good information, it can pay for itself many times over if you use it wisely.
Travel
My main travel destination in the past decade has been Poland. I was able to visit Vilnius and Lwów in 2012, but I wouldn’t have doen that if I weren’t already living in Warsaw for an extended period. Last year I visited Bucharest, Romania as well as Lublin and Gdańsk in Poland. Living in Europe allows me the freedom to travel to many other destinations at only moderate expense in money and time, compared to doing the same from the U.S. Working at a job limits you to about 4-5 weeks of vacation per year, maximum and taking that all at once would probably cause problems with your employer. Now that I live in Poland the only considerations for travel that I have to make are whether I want to go somewhere and spend some money, and whether I might have to miss an interesting, though not critical PhD seminar. I don’t have to ask my bosse’s permission and I don’t have to account for a 2+ week trip (it doesn’t make sense to visit Europe from the U.S. for the less than 2 weeks since it’ll take almost that long to get over jet lag, a month is far more preferable).
Culture and Leisure
Living independently gives me a lot of free time to do with as I wish. This also requires a high degree of discipline and personal responsibility to use my time wisely, but if I happen to get a bit lazy, I’m good about getting myself back on track. One of my favorite things to do in Warsaw is to take long walks. This way I can see the many changes to the city as new buildings are constructed, restaruants are open and all types of people go about their day. Warsaw has a number of interesting museums that I have visited, most recently the ultra-modern Museum of the History of Polish Jews and also the Warsaw Uprising Museum where I volunteer. I often attend talks given on politics and history, which broadens my knowledge of these subjects and deepens my understanding of how they relate to Poland. I don’t advocate watching too much TV, but I have several favorites on the Polish equivalent of the history channel and have probably learned at least a B.A. degree worth of knowledge in the past year this way. Reading is my favorite pastime, and my life now allows for several hours or more of reading per day, where before I would read during work or just before falling asleep, never feeling that I had enough time for it.
Forward
My life isn’t some kind of a dream, it’s a goal I set for myself and have achieved, though there are still challenges that I will write about soon, and I’m not satisfied to keep things the same for too long. Comparing what I do now to what I did just a year ago, I can’t help but smile knowing that I’ve made a dramatic leap that most men will never make.
If you’re considering making a big move in your life, my example is just one template to learn from, a lot of guys have done this. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments below.
