Adventure Today

Let's start off slow and simple. My name is Casey and, just like you, I'm living my life. However I believe I have something unique to offer: ideas. If there's one thing that has always driven me it is certainly hope; hope of a better tomorrow, of chasing the sunset, of finding freedom and the meaning of life. Yes, all vainly romantic ideals. However, I find that it's increasingly difficult to make it through the days, with college now and the 9-5 of working at a summer camp. This isn't how I was meant to live; this isn't how humans were meant to live.
    Our ancestors spent the vast majority of their days outrunning carnivorous quadrupeds with razor sharp claws, and searching for clans with whom they could "barter" for fire. (Entire families of primitive peoples would make their prosperity by being "fire keepers" in the days before fire was something man could make at a whim). Although this is, perhaps, not the best course of life for all of us as it certainly brings a great risk of death, and disease and of course the possibility of being ripped apart by ravenous beasts, it certainly has a few essential things modern life lacks.
    First and foremost, adventure. There is nothing adventurous about waking up, brushing your teeth, driving your car to a square building full of square cubicles, punching in and out, coming home to cook dinner, and then repeating. Some people might find adventure in driving their cars, perhaps you have a particularly fast sports car. First off you're most likely a stuck up hypocritical executive who is overpaid and underworked, but I digress. What I meant to say was that even today's views of an adventure (fast cars) are really not all that adventurous. Purchasing vehicles is a staple of consumerism, and a focus on a material life (I stand accused, I love my motorcycle!) but alas it is ingrained in us with the society in which we all exist to be consumers.
    A real adventure is something more, something life changing, something that makes your heart beat out of time with society and in time with the world around you. I am talking adventure on the extreme scale, a lifestyle of adventure. Quit that day job, invest all of your money in "green" technologies, build a home off-the-grid, gather your own food, learn how to build a stone mill to grind your own flour. Or maybe you're more of the traveling adventurer. Try to live off of websites like Couchsurfing, or Workaway. See how long you can make it for in China with $5,000.
    I know a guy who moved to China from Holland when he was 18. "I landed with $500 and it got me through two months in China," he would tell me, quite proudly. He moved there because he wanted to study Kung-Fu. That's right he followed his adventure to China at age 18 never having been there before. He now speaks fluent Mandarin that most natives would be jealous of and is married to a Chinese woman from a Hill Tribe. Oh yeah, he teaches Kung-Fu in the states, it pays well. ;)