Roll the Dice on Life and Travel

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by admin
October 23, 2018
2 min read

Let the dice take charge. Making decisions isn't always easy, and can sometimes lead to hours, even months, of deliberation. That's why when Isaac Stone Simonelli started to get the travel itch, he decided to take a radically different, and whimsical, approach to planning out his expedition. The ardent traveler threw caution to the dice as he embarked on a year-long motorbike expedition where the majority of his travel decisions were made by rolling the dice. The result is Dice Travels, a website chronicling this adventures with dice. When we launched our Travel Dice, we never envisioned such a potential use for this handy travel set.

Dice for Simplified Decision Making Hack

A long year of making decisions by dice certainly left a lasting impression on Isaac. Though he's now back from travels, Isaac says he still uses dice to help make decisions, and sees great benefit in doing so "Dice can be used to cut down on decision fatigue, help build personal narratives. In dreams, our minds tend to connect unconnected events -- such as those produced by the dice -- and impregnate them with meaning. Dice can synthesize happiness. I know this all sounds like a lot, but the deeper I dug into the idea and the further along I found myself in the project, the more these elements began to fall into place and make sense. "Though these ideas are complex, using the dice is really very simple. Basically, you choose options that exist within a 40-60% "you don't care either way" range. If you really want to go to Indiana -- go to Indiana. If you really don't want to go to Indiana, don't make it an option on the dice. As we get closer and closer to a 50-50 decision, where each option will bring about equal happiness, it becomes harder and harder to make the "right" decision, and that's where the dice can become an excellent tool. "Even if we do make the right decision, the self-doubt about it and the energy expended often don't justify the difference in the results. "I find more often than not, I use the dice for binary decisions, as it's easy to come up with two options that are better than the rest. However, when it comes to travel destinations, I'd load a die all the way up with six options. Other times, I have three good options and split the die up that way.

Isaac's Dice Kit

Obviously our small travel die, a compact game that handily doubles as an attractive necklace, wasn't the tool Isaac used for his complex decision making. Dice aficionados will appreciate Isaac's travel toolbox: "I did carry role-playing dice, so I had a 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 and 20-sided dice. However, I mostly used the standard cube."