Mixing High Tech Hip with Mindful Living?

The way of living for the urban, young and upcoming professionals has certainly changed since my days of entering the work force.

This July, we had the opportunity to check in to a really cool apartment in downtown Seattle or “Amazon City” as its known these days.

At 1st glance, the minimalist styled capsule apartment looked okay, functional, clean and efficient. Then I checked out the rest of the building - gym, community lounge doubling as really cool meeting room, rooftop deck lazy chairs, workspaces including shuffleboard and an extra professional grade kitchen - all well designed and an inviting place to get together outside of work. No keys, instant WW connection, no need for a Telco to come and install 3 weeks later, everything you need in your minimal kitchen, just so and there, ready to work. Want 500 TV choices, while you're eating your ÜberEats delivered piping hot pizza? Plug in your Fire stick ordered that morning from Amazon and Boommm surf away! The ‘piece de resistance’ was the iPad-controlled spin yourself ‘fresh’ Starbucks coffee and tea from a tall americano to green tea laté!

Working and living here for a month is getting cooler by the minute. The nice thing to report, that makes me really feel good, is that we are not the oldest kids on the block. For a moment there, I really felt like a Hip Kid again :). Yes, we have landed right in the middle of the Millennial culture.

My mind over the few weeks living here, has been firing on all cylinders and in constant awe over what has changed over the last decade in corporate urban living. Driven by high tech, space : (transient) population ratio, mostly smart architectural design and how do we as a community adapt to this change?

All change causes stress and I am certainly feeling it at times. I had everything planned out for a quiet landing in Seattle in July, re-aclimatizing from a long summer stint in Europe. But NO, the planets had something completely different in store. No accommodation, a heatwave and smog worse than Beijing! STRESS, a gentle planned landing turned into living on quicksand.

Next week I’ll report back on how this minimal capsule , high tech hip mixes with my mindful lifestyle living! So far, so fun yet the heat is building.

Tip : Resilience building: when stress appears look for the opportunity, be compassionate with self and others. Where there is a shadow, there is light!

I love this saying: “When life hands me lemons, I make chocolate cake and keep others wondering how I did it”.