Travel Log — Prologue: How To Live a Li(f)e

I don’t know when it started exactly, but at some point in 2023, I started to hate my life.

It’s not that I was ill. I was physically active every day. It wasn’t that I had financial troubles. I made good money working for an insurance company. If you had seen my life from the outside, you would’ve thought that I was one of the luckiest people on earth (which I am, I know that now).

But this life wasn’t beautiful to me.

On the inside, I felt numb. Even though I loved the people I worked with and the company culture was phenomenal, the job wasn’t it for me. It was great for my bank account, but dulled my soul. Pair that with some unresolved issues from my past, and you've got yourself a cocktail of non-jollyness.

I’m fortunate that my mental predisposition is that of cheerfulness, though. My day-to-day might have been a numbing experience, somehow my essence still made me jump out of bed every morning, hoping for a better situation to arrive.

This quality of character might sound great, but it also leads to bad outcomes – or no outcomes at all. Waiting for your life to improve is hope wrapped in an ugly sweater: inaction. I was always waiting for something to get me out of the grayness I was living in. Yet I wasn’t ready to pick up the brush and paint the colorful reality I craved.

I was so scared of what other people would think of me. What if they talk badly behind my back? What if they thought I should finally grow up? But that fear was shattered by one of the lights of my life: my mother.

I remember her words clear as day – the words that finally led me to take action.

“It’s time for you to go. You must go and travel the world. And by the way: all these people would do it too if they had the guts.”

That broke me out of the stream of thought. Finally, someone acknowledged my situation. In hindsight, I know I was waiting for permission. For somebody to tell me that it’s okay to feel this way. Because how can someone not be happy if they have the life I have?

But the mind can be a savage beast. Nothing in this world can flog you more than your own thoughts.

That was never more true than during home office days. Working from home might sound like heaven to others, but it was hell for me. Staring at a screen for about nine hours a day without having any social contact is not something humans were made for. And no – online meetings are no substitute for in-person interaction. If I have to answer “can you hear me?” one more time, I’m going to jet. That’s exactly what my mind did on those days as well: it ran rampant.

After another particularly lonely day, I knew that the time had come. What would hurt me was that I’d leave all these great people I had met over the past three years. But this can’t be the reason to not forge on ahead in life.

I resigned from my job three days later. After another week, I knew where my journey would start: Thailand. How original, I know. But I had a great reason to visit the land of smiles. One of my best friends had been working as a diving instructor on Koh Tao, a small island hailed as a Mecca of scuba diving. My journey would start on January 3rd, 2024.

Little did I know that my greatest enemy – the gatekeeper to the life of dreams – would follow me every step of the way.