It's rational to move somewhere beautiful to write

Having unique and true ideas is, pound for pound, the most valuable human resource in the world. If you are blessed with periodically arriving flashes of insight, in the long-run it is economically worthwhile to organize everything around recording and publishing those insights.

The greatest inhibitor of unique ideas is everyday social conformity, which increases with the number of one's friends and the degree of one's dependence on those friends.

High-status cities contain the largest number of potential friends with power, which means dependence. These cities are huge conformity traps.

Natural amusements and challenges—random things such as learning how to kayak down a river—generate a kind of internal motivation and clarity when it comes to thinking. Many dumb social preoccupations suddenly dissipate. Basic truths and observations appear in sharper relief. Writing them succinctly on a blog feels more like a simple, obvious, internally gratifying practice. There's not much else to do when you're in the house.

Going into the mountains to focus on writing has typically been a romantic but economically self-destructive idea. In a remote-working era, if going into the mountains to focus on writing increases the number of unique and true ideas you publish on the internet, then it is the pound-for-pound most effective technique for improving one's economic position, in almost any situation, whether that be getting a new job, getting customers for a startup, improving one's network, attracting potential hires, or even selling one's writing.

The most old-fashioned romanticism is now aligned with the most hard-nosed rationality.