Orientation
Don’t make your life smaller. Make it cozier to live inside.
Cozy Little Universe helps people restore contact with what matters.
We’re a creative studio making tools for human wayfinding in an age of AI — ideas, guides, apps, experiments, and other methods for navigating seasons when the next step isn’t obvious.
Some help turn big questions into things you can actually try, then gather better evidence from what happens. Others explore how AI can help preserve, compare, question, and challenge what we learn from lived experience — without turning us into spectators to our own lives.
Together, they help you participate more fully in the life you’re actually living, and use what you learn to make a better-informed next move.
We’re interested in territory that often gets treated like a choice:
CLU explores what becomes possible in the space between.
When a five-year plan isn’t possible, the aim is to stay oriented:
Find what is worth participating in.
Learn from what happens.
Make more room for what proves to matter.
Habitability Check
Separate what happened from the story forming around it.
Use the Voice of Reason GPT to distinguish observation from interpretation, widen possibilities, and challenge a story before it becomes a verdict.
ReflectTech Protocol
Design the role of AI in self-reflection, not just the prompt.
A working set of principles for deciding what AI should retrieve, compare, question, and complicate — and where its authority should stop.
Integration Audit
What actually survives a meaningful experience?
Try a structured reflection method for discovering what remains after an experience becomes part of your life — and what deserves further attention.
Atlas for Lost Souls
A field guide for when an old map needs updating
Want a different kind of bucket list for your next adventure?
Atlas for Lost Souls is a collection of forty invitations to wander, notice, experiment, and move a little differently through the world.
It’s also where many of the ideas behind Cozy Little Universe first began taking shape: exploring how travel actually changes us, what stays with us after we return home, and how we learn from the lives we’ve already lived.
Bucket list item No. 7 | Deviate randomly from your itinerary … and have an experience that far surpasses your original plan.
Build a life where ordinary things can reach you again.
Don’t wait for the next trip, next job, next chapter.
Your life isn’t somewhere else.
It’s here.
Coming Soon
Liminal Wayfinding
A practical method for staying oriented when you don’t know what comes next
There are times in life when something ends, something stops fitting, or something new starts calling. The circumstances can be wildly different, but what they share is a need to get your bearings without forcing an answer.
And sometimes the reason you can’t figure out what to do next is simple: You don’t have enough information yet. Not because you haven’t thought about it hard enough. Maybe you’ve asked friends, made lists, gone in circles with AI, tried a few things and quit them.
The unfortunate truth is, sometimes you just have to live a little more.
This gets harder when the terrain is charged with hope, fear, habit, other people’s expectations — and your own. When you don’t know what comes next, possibilities multiply, and it can be hard to tell what’s actually worth trying.
Liminal Wayfinding helps you turn that kind of uncertainty into something you can actually investigate.
It begins with a live question. Maybe you want to know whether you’d actually like another kind of work, or if something smaller has gone missing from the life you already have. Then it separates what you know from what you’re assuming and turns what’s missing into a bounded experiment — a micro-adventure, a changed condition, a conversation, a different way of participating — that can teach you something you don’t know yet.
What you learn informs what you try next.
The aim is orientation: knowing where you are, what matters now, what remains unknown, and enough about the terrain to make the next deliberate move.
Now AI can help us participate more intelligently in the question — not invent an answer for us.
Give it a single moment and it can give you an interpretation. But give it a question you’re living through, and a record of what actually happened over time, and it can help you notice what repeated or changed, what contradicted your story, and what still hasn’t been tested.
Which means the first question isn’t what an experience means.
It’s: OK, so what actually happened?
The First Wayfinding Tool
Give reflection better evidence.
Experience gets slippery fast. We tend to rush to the first compelling story, and one vivid moment can start explaining our entire life before it’s earned the job.
So before you ask yourself — or AI — what an experience means, it helps to preserve what actually happened.
A Liminal Almanac is a field practice for doing exactly that.
Start with a question. Notice what catches your attention. Record enough to preserve the moment without immediately explaining it. Then return to your life.
Later, compare what repeated, what changed, what surprised you, what contradicted your expectations — and what remains unclear.
The free Pocket Guide is coming soon. Join the list and I’ll send it your way when it’s ready.
Before starting CLU, Jen spent more than a decade working with startups and high-growth companies, most recently at 2X, where she built and scaled the Content Operations and Marketing functions as the company grew from five people to more than 1,200 worldwide.
Earlier in her career, she worked as a features journalist for publications including Entrepreneur and Dow Jones, interviewing founders, operators, and experts about how people and organizations actually change.
Jen is also the author of Atlas for Lost Souls: 40 Life-Changing Journeys Across Space, Time, and the Self, drawn from twenty years of travel, many of those spent living and working abroad. Those journeys have taken her across high Himalayan passes by motorcycle, to remote Indonesian islands for diving, and through more unfamiliar places than she can count.
Business taught her to look at systems. Journalism taught her to ask better questions. Travel taught her how much the conditions around us can change what we notice. Together, they kept returning her to one question:
How do we keep discovering what else might be possible from inside the life we’re already living?
Cozy Little Universe grew from there.
A world human-scaled enough to inhabit — and open enough for connection, curiosity, discovery, discomfort, and adventure to find their way in.