Not Mad Yet

My name is Mika, and I’m a process. I value autonomy, diversity, and conversation, and I’m searching for a global story we could all relate to. While that’s admittedly been a largely passive search, every now and then, I’m reminded of how much that matters. Not Mad Yet is a confused and incomplete attempt to document this process. In 2016, I left my career as a mathematician in academia to travel and learn more about the world and its inhabitants. Since then, I’ve been conducting long-term, independent, overland travel experiments — cycle touring, hiking, or hitchhiking for several months at a time while maintaining a home base of sorts in Ukraine and cultivating connections online. In my travels (and in between them), I’ve iteratively played, contemplated, worried, and fucked up talking to people, taking photos, drawing pictures, and writing chronicles, poems, and short stories. I’ve shared a lot of that on this blog, my newsletter, presentations, interviews, and beyond. My most recent project was a 66 km-long solo walk around the Ukrainian Carpathians, executed during the 2020 lockdown.