Go Somewhere Strange

Diego’s worldview on travel, adventure, and Burning Man

Diego’s favorite places are not merely attractive backgrounds for being the same person somewhere else. They change what he notices, whom he meets, what he wants, and how much life seems to fit inside a month. Travel is pleasure, social opportunity, an encounter with unfamiliar forms of life, and sometimes a way of releasing his mind from its own relentless management.

The itinerary may look peculiar. An important philosopher, a national park, a dance gathering, and a place with promising animals can all exert serious gravitational force. They are not interchangeable attractions. They offer different ways for the world to become larger.

Geography changes the available life

As early as 2012, Diego was encouraging other rationalists to consider where they lived in terms broader than institutions and employment. His portrait of Rio de Janeiro praised the combination of natural beauty, accessible people, and ordinary convenience:

Forests and beaches and mountains abound, all 4 minutes away from a supermarket.¹

This is a particularly Diego form of paradise: the landscape is magnificent, but obtaining dinner need not become an expedition. He values cities where encounters and outdoor activities are readily available, where visitors and newcomers are also looking for friends, and where a pleasant evening need not first defeat the climate.

In a 2013 essay written from Oxford, he defined one sense of individual freedom as:

amount of things per unit time someone could be doing²

That definition makes place morally and personally interesting. It is not only a container for a salary. Different places permit different repertoires of action. Cold cities, in his account, channel people toward indoor and intellectual activity; sunnier places allow more spontaneous outdoor life. He was weighing both sides because he wanted serious intellectual immersion and the freedom to live bodily, socially, and outdoors.

The result is not a universal ranking that every traveler should copy. It is an insistence on asking what a location will actually let this particular person do. A city can be prestigious and wrong for the life you want that year. A park can offer something no amount of institutional prestige supplies.

Other people demonstrate possible lives

Travel also loosened Diego’s sense of which life arrangements were mandatory. In his 2014 writing, couchsurfers and long-term travelers appear as practical demonstrations. He met people who worked part of the year and traveled for the rest, people who left graduate study, people traveling with little money, and people who built lives around movement rather than a conventional career calendar.

He described the effect of meeting them this way:

You’ll feel much less pressure to make money after meeting similar people and being one of them.³

The point is not that everyone must become a vagabond. It is that a possible life becomes easier to imagine when a human being is standing in front of you already living it. Diego wants to discover alternatives at close range. He does not want the menu of existence restricted to whatever the people in his immediate environment happen to consider normal.

His own travel changed as his resources changed. The 2024 road-trip account explicitly contrasts earlier couchsurfing, trains, and supermarket food with later hotels and steakhouses. The pleasure of moving through the world precedes the more expensive version. Money expands comfort and ease; it does not originate the interest.

He is equally clear about one preference that money alone cannot buy:

traveling alone is the bomb and there simply is no way to beat it because it forces you to meet the best (and worst) people.⁴

Solitude in transit can become a route into company. It removes the ready-made social unit in which a traveler might otherwise stay enclosed. Diego likes being exposed to the possibility of an encounter he could not have arranged from home.

The natural-history department has escaped the building

In September 2024, he returned from thirty-five days and thousands of miles across the American West. His account contains volcanic parks, lakes, mountains, bears, wolves, elk, birds, and enough Yellowstone references to suggest the park had successfully installed itself as a default answer:

In north America Yellowstone is the park to rule them all.⁴

For Diego, animals are not generic scenery. The list distinguishes species and the difficulty of seeing them. His scientific curiosity and enjoyment of living creatures travel together. Geological variety also matters: different landscapes make different experiences possible. The itinerary can be read partly as a tour through forms of matter and life that he wanted to encounter in person.

Human variety is just as prominent. He writes about meeting glassblowers, dancers, taxidermists, a bat specialist, and a couple celebrating a long marriage. The trip is made of particular conversations, not just views checked off a list.

Montana earned its own affectionate post. He liked people whose lives and presentation differed dramatically from his urban, academic background. One acquaintance was a burner, but with an important regional modification:

Not a California burner, a Montana burner. All the dust with extra leather.⁵

Another meeting became an expansive conversation about bats, echolocation, flight, altruism, and evolutionary biology. The subjects arrived with the person. This is one way travel feeds a mind that likes connections: go somewhere expecting mountains, come back having spent the evening discussing what bats are doing with their social lives.

He closes the Montana post by joking that the people he has met constitute a substantial fraction of the state’s population. The bartender recognized him from a visit the previous year. The combination matters: strangeness and welcome can coexist. A place need not resemble his background to feel generous to his presence.

A country can rearrange the map

Diego’s 2026 trip to China illustrates how travel can change the territory that attracts him. In Hong Kong, he enjoyed the food, buildings, people, and culture. His fellow Brazilian travelers preferred Macao; he registered the disagreement with his usual restraint:

Objectively Hong Kong is way better. If you define objectively as according to Diego, master of the universe.⁶

The joke leaves the reader in no doubt whose travel guide this is.

After returning home, he found himself watching more China travel videos and responding warmly to Mandarin in an Asian market. The country had become unfinished business. Its scale made it obvious that his month had revealed only a fraction of what remained to see. An area of the world that previously held relatively little attraction now drew him toward Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and further travel in China:

A complete 180 in my interest in that general area of the Earth.⁷

He liked what he had seen enough to want the unseen parts. Curiosity had multiplied rather than been discharged. Travel, in this mode, does not consume a destination and remove it from the list. It generates more possible journeys.

When he asked himself whether he wanted to reconnect locally or head out again, his mind supplied an unusually concise strategic report:

adventure time!⁷

One suspects the committee meeting was short.

The place that says welcome home

Burning Man occupies a special category. It is an adventure Diego returns to because it delivers an unusually concentrated combination of art, play, strangers, physical experience, and a social world in which he feels at home.

His recollection of arriving for the first time is entirely on brand. He had deliberately learned little beyond what he needed to bring. A stranger answered a question, welcomed him home, put his head into the car “like a safari dromedary,” and licked the side of his face. Diego’s conclusion was:

That's when I knew I had finally found my place in the World.⁸

Other people might have concluded that the reception desk needed retraining. Diego had discovered a fit between his temperament and a temporary city.

He repeatedly resists the idea that the experience belongs only to one age group or type of partygoer. His 2024 invitation mentions older art and photography enthusiasts, children he had befriended, early sleepers, sculpture viewers, and people pursuing quite different nocturnal schedules. In the same post, after recounting a wide range of places and people encountered in his life, he concludes:

of all the things in the world, Burning Man is the best one.⁹

The enthusiasm did not belong only to his first visit. After his ninth burn in 2025, he wrote:

Nowhere else my soul feels more at home, more deeply satiated, more open and more earnest than at burning man.¹⁰

The religious and sacred dimensions have their own room in this collection. Here, the practical point is that this journey repeatedly puts him into a state of being that he treasures. Going back can be as meaningful as going somewhere new. Novelty matters, but so does knowing where a beloved kind of life reliably becomes available.

A month that is actually a month

The return from a good journey gives Diego a special comparison with ordinary time. At the end of 2024, he felt much of his year had passed in a blur, while months containing travel, new people, and animals had been distinctly full. The criterion is lived richness: how much happened that he can feel and remember?

His American West account describes another benefit:

Above all, traveling shuts off a lot of the problem seeking and worrying systems of my brain. It allows me to live care free and without long term plans for weeks on end, and without concern that I may be doing the wrong thing.⁴

This is an important release for someone capable of turning virtually any subject into a problem requiring an essay. For a while, being there answers the question of what he should be doing.

Travel is therefore one of the ways Diego converts the opportunity to be alive into actual life. He wants unfamiliar landscapes, surprising people, beautiful creatures, and periods when attention can follow what is happening in front of him. He wants room for a spontaneous turn, a new fascination, or an unexpectedly absorbing conversation.

His own closing instruction to readers of that road-trip account is a fitting exit from this room:

And try to find places to play and dance along the way.⁴

Further doors

• “Good Places to Live as a Less Wronger” (2012): the relationship between place and possible life.
• “How Not to Make Money” (2014): travelers as demonstrations of unconventional options.
• “Thirty-Five Days Across the American West” (2024): animals, people, and the freedom of the road.
• “China Is Hard to Leave” (2026): a journey creating a new field of curiosity.

Continue: How to Spend a Finite Diego