It's a hot, rainy night in Kowloon. Down a packed side street, up two flights of stairs, and tucked into a small Indian restaurant sits a group of international businessmen. Outside, the streets are bustling, the air is humid, and a thin mist of rain falls on droves of people flowing past the glowing, fluorescent shops and restaurants. The men are thousands of miles from home, living out of small suitcases, hopping from country to country, and working in a constantly fluctuating environment, yet around this table, they are perfectly at home. They live unbound from the typical restraints tying most individuals to static houses, towns, regions, and countries. Their lifestyles make them Misfits by default- unable to belong to just one culture or society and too mobile and dynamic to merit classification. Despite this, their lives are full of comfort and connectedness. Though all hail from different countries and backgrounds, these men enjoy a wonderful sense of camaraderie and ease. With friends always at hand and a relative sense of home, they lie at the forefront of a new way of living- one that frees the body from boundaries and the mind from monotony.
This particular group is part of an assemblage of odd fellows calling themselves the Curry Club. As international businessmen in the same industry, they see each other in meetings and trade shows all around the world. Wherever they go, they meet for curry and drinks. It's like one of the members says: "If there are any two things you can expect to find in any city in the world, it'll be a good Indian restaurant and an Irish pub." The Curry Club members are just a small sample of many highly innovative individuals whose creature comforts are relative. Now more than ever, people are adpoting a cloud living lifestyle- enjoying high mobility and success.
Cloud Living Meets the Misfit
Thousands of people every year are adopting this new way of life. Like cloud computing which frees individuals from relying on specific pieces of hardware, cloud living allows people to unhinge themselves from specific locations, social groups, and lifestyles. Interestingly, doing so allows Misfits to leverage their eccentricities and turn personal oddities into assets.
How does cloud living enable Misfits? It gives them the resources to convert a personality that inherently isolates them from the world into one that connects them to everything. Imagine, for example, a woman named Kelcy. Kelcy is a Misfit in rural California with an intense love of popsicles. In her current state, she's widely misunderstood as a woman with her head in the clouds and nothing much to do aside from buying a small house outside of down and waitressing at a local burger joint. Day in and day out, she fantasizes about new popsicle inventions, but her dreams amount to nothing and she finds herself socially isolated and bored with the world. While she would like to do more with her life, she has bills to pay, family ties, and no time to think about changing her life. Right now, Kelcy is bound to the ground. What she needs to do is try out cloud living and see what happens.
There are five major characteristics of the cloud living lifestyle: autonomy, flexibility, simplicity, comfort with technology, and entrepreneurship. If Kelcy were to adopt these aspects, she would find it much easier to jump on the cloud living bandwagon and spice up her life.
Autonomy
Cloud living requires self-reliance. Attachment is all about dependence, and that just brings itinerant mentalities to a screeching halt. What Kelcy needs to do is gain some independence. This does not entail severing ties with friends and family; it simply involves looking inward for support. As soon as Kelcy realizes she can get by on her own, she has enabled herself to truly own her destiny.
Simplicity
It would be difficult to live a flexible, creative life if one were bogged down with complicated obligations, an excessive volume of possessions, and a messy life plans. Kelcy should consider streamlining her life. She might auction off her porcelain figurine collection on Ebay, for example. That would amount to one less thing to clean, care for, and feel attached to, which would free up her time and cognitive capacity for more interesting endeavors.
Flexibility
One great perk of cloud living is its accompanying flexibility. Independent, streamlined individuals are well equipped to go with the flow- that is, if they are willing to. Kelcy needs to open her mind to change before any positive developments can take place. She might, for example, consider relocating to a new town, or changing careers. With a more receptive outlook, Kelcy will realize her life is not a dead-end road at all.
Technology
A major enabler of cloud living is technology. It connects us to the world, clears the way for countless opportunities, and allows us to feel at home anywhere we can find an internet connection. With the right tools and a bit of know-how, Kelcy can leave her hometown without leaving her loved ones; they are, after all, only a Skype, IM, email, or phone call away. This makes changing locations or careers half the formidable task it would otherwise be. Furthermore, Kelcy will find she has all the information she needs to get a move on in life, and she can even discover like-minded popsicle lovers who understand her unusual passion. Finally, she will feel included somewhere, and can cast off her castoff status.
Entrepreneurship
Finally, cloud living embraces an entrepreneurial spirit, which enables individuals to chase after what they love most and make a profit while they are at it. Kelcy, for example, can leverage her love of all things popsicle by opening a hip new popsicle joint in the city, or getting a job as a major popsicle exporter before starting her own popsicle manufacturing firm. Her possibilities are boundless so long as she has the heart to pursue them.
Simply put, with a couple of paradigm shifts, Kelcy can change the final destination of her life's path from nowhere to anywhere she wants. Cloud Living simply involves converting the negative aspects of being a Misfit into positive ones. After all, history's famous eccentrics are only weirdos who leveraged their neuroses.
Taking The World By Storm
Cloud living is drastically changing the Misfit's role in society. Thanks to this general trend, the isolated, lonely specialists, enthusiasts, intellectuals, nerds, geeks, otaku, and eccentrics have attained leverage in modern society. Their increasing levels of autonomy and flexibility allow them to step out from their pigeonholes while their use of technology allows them to connect with like-minded individuals and share their unique skills and viewpoints and their tenacity and entrepreneurship allow them to leverage their abilities and capitalize on them. No longer are the different and unique sidelined to mainstream society, in fact, cloud living has allowed them to instead dictate society's new trends and development.
Take the anime and manga-loving otaku for example. Once segregated from society and left alone with their books, figurines, and television box sets, they are now walking tall amongst mainstream society- and winning new converts right and left. Thanks to key websites, forums, and the right amount of ingenuity, anime-lovers have made specialized communities and conventions commonplace, and are even influencing the mainstream. Look at the manga aisles of major book stores for example- or check out today's popular cartoons. While American styles influenced Japanese illustrations for many years, the tables have started to turn, and cloud living had something to do with it.
Crafters have also utilized the cloud living lifestyle to their advantage. While crafting used to be the bored housewife's busywork, a group of creative, entrepreneurial Misfits have managed to turn it into a hip, blossoming industry via sites such as Etsy. Instead of sitting alone and knitting scarves for unthankful nephews and nieces, a cloud-living crafter is likely to be busy with a lucrative onlin business, and may find herself featured in one of many knitting publications- or even on the Martha Stewart Show!
Cloud living, of course, extends to conformists as well. Nothing, after all, can be much more mainstream than the corporate businessman. Nevertheless, cloud living has allowed them to adopt a whole new way of living, and has effectively converted them to Misfits in the process. Take, for example, the Curry Club. While many of its members started out on basic business tracks, they found themselves exposed to a world in which they had to detach from the mainstream just to keep afloat. While a closed-minded bureaucrat would never make it in the modern international business world, a tech-savvy adventurer will thrive, and the dynamic environment has unleashed a new wave of evolution amongst today's professionals.
With cloud living, every individual has a shot at being innovative, unique, and in control of his destiny. Is there comfort in hunkering down and falling into a comfortable, familiar pattern? Absolutely. But why settle for isolation and obscurity when you can take those eccentricities and build something beautiful?
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