Jan 2025

I love the ocean and going underwater, so I travelled to the Maldives for my first 7 day live-aboard. It was a luxury boat with 20+ divers and 5 dive instructors. If you don’t know about the Maldives, the dive sites are mostly about seeing pelagics – the big fish like sharks, whales, mantas and stingrays in clear blue waters. I hadn’t properly seen a shark before this, so ideally, I should have loved it.

The initial dives were fun. Saw loads of sharks. But then the most fascinating thing happened – I got bored! I was sticking out like a sore thumb with how unimpressed I was, dive after dive, with the fish life. I was more focused on improving my diving skills – my finning technique, my air consumption, navigating the currents, buoyancy and terrain – than I was on the fish.

I was constantly logging onto the internet to read up on AI advancements and checking in on my work.

It was a fascinating self-discovery. Before the trip, I didn’t know my relative preference for diving vs tech vs my love of self-improvement. Now I know that the thing I love most is learning new things, getting new experiences, and technology.

It was a boat full of quite interesting people, but I could hardly connect with any of them because we had so little in common. They loved nature, freedom, leisure and fish. I loved the city, discipline, constant self-improvement and tech.

I was probably the only person who got bored in 15 minutes on a trip to a deserted island (which is basically this picturesque piece of pristine land with coconut trees and green shrubs with clear blue waters that you see when you look at pictures of the Maldives).

So what was the takeaway?

I don’t love the same things as other people do.

What I love are things that some people actually hate! Like going to the gym. Or reading about technology. Or doing an online course, learning a new thing, or putting in the hard work to create a skill.

Diving was that for me – a way to build a skill, and I still love it for that. But I’m not the person who would go for a week-long live-aboard with 4 dives a day.