Why the BIG change?

There were many things that influenced our decision to leave the safety of our home and corporate jobs in the New York City area.  You read books about people reaching a breaking point in what they often describe as boring and monotonous lives where they feel unfulfilled and unchallenged.   Others wish to see the world or change the world and decide why not now.  Why not just take the plunge and deal with the consequences later if it just doesn’t work out.   For us, you could say that it was a gradual, organic process of weighing what we want for our future vs. what was perhaps inevitable given our current course in life.

We both sort of happened into relocating to New York.  It wasn’t particularly the ‘place’ we always dreamed of living, but when you’re young and fresh out of college, it is hard to pass up the opportunity to move somewhere with so much allure.  I grew up in a small town in Louisiana and she grew in Delhi, India;  so we probably both got theatrical tastes of NYC through movies and televised New Years Eve revelry.  I don’t think we really knew that much about how are lives would unfold when we moved there.

For both of us, the first 3-4 years was a whirlwind of working hard and playing hard.   When you go from poor, broke college kids to corporates with plenty in your wallet; the city that never sleeps sort of molds you as it sees fit and for the most part it was a blast.   We had so many great experiences and met some of our best friends in the world in NYC, but gradually the things that we used to hold dear, such as spending time with family and enjoying the outdoors kind of got de-prioritized as we raced through life with our peers to make more $$, party hard, and upgrade our stuff.   Eventually, we starting hearing ourselves say, ‘I just haven’t had time’ more and more, when your best friends and family ask you why you never call or why you haven’t visited. You can justify this for a while, and they even accept the excuses knowing that NYC must abound with distractions.   

Since it’s common to work from 8-8 M-F and often on the weekend, when you get a break you just want to escape, even to ‘treat’ yourself for all of your hard work; so you awash yourself in expensive meals and late nights of partying and drinking with your city cohorts.  But in NYC, even a featherweight can burn through thousands of brain cells and several hundred dollars in a night.  Weeks go by when you’ve been behind a bar more than in your bed but you somehow find a way to stumble into the office for early meetings.  There are more restaurants, bars, and clubs than you could possibly exhaust so it never seems like the routine will get old.  But then it does….

We caught the fever for change when we started to travel abroad.  We went to Bermuda, then Puerto Rico, then India for our honeymoon, then Argentina.   Trekking through the peaceful, vast wilderness of Patagonia makes you feel small but at the same time it sucks you into the splendor of nature.  We saw things we’ve never seen before and met people from all of the world.  We were learning so many new things about other cultures and places and it was energizing.  Our jobs became afterthoughts for the few weeks that we were away every year, and we started to get greedy for more.   The problem was pretty simple, we had a limited number of days of vacation and that wouldn’t change, but we wanted to travel more.  More than that, we wanted to sit in a cubicle and stare out of the window less.  I won’t go into the details of the lifesuck of corporate cubicalization because that has been experienced by most and documented so well by so many.   Everyone has their own version of the lifesuck, mine was always feeling like I was in quicksand, no matter how hard I battled to move things forward I just felt like a was sinking deeper into a hole of lack of productivity.  My days, weeks, months, and years of effort just didn’t seem to be helping me, my career, or others around me as far as I could tell.  I began to realize that I needed a change or I’d be officially lost down the river.  Probably not by coincidence since we worked at that same company and in very similar looking cubicles, my wife and I shared these feeling of emptiness in our careers often over lunch and dinner, but what were we going to do about it.

One horrible truth about life is that you can’t just not work and travel the world unless you’ve done a fair about of pre-planning, saving, and cost cutting, unless you have parents with deep pockets and don’t mind abusing them.   In a later blog, we’ll go into some of the things that we starting doing along the way to spend less and save more on what are not ‘Wall Street banker salaries’ but not average American salaries either.  What it really amounted to for us, and probably anyone who is young and wants to have more freedom from a cubicle before they are 65 years old,  was cutting out luxuries.  Some might argue that we went too far and others might even say some of these things are ‘necessities’ not luxuries, but the point is that when you start to examine your life and your expenses and your long-term goals become more significant than your short-term desires, you can cut deep and not feel it as much.  Saving will start to become a game that you want to master and win, because it is ultimately empowering you to do all the things that you’ve wanted to do but thought impossible.  The interesting thing is that once you are used to living leaner when you ultimately quit your job and start to travel, if that’s one of things you want, you can travel and enjoy yourself with far less money.  We are novices in comparison to some of the master vagabonds, who can travel the world for a year on less than $20k US.  The average New Yorker probably spends that on a year’s worth of restaurant tabs.

When we finally cut the cord about a week ago, we were not retiring from work, we had reached a sufficiency point where we were comfortable that we could travel responsibly without compromising our future retirement savings and perhaps savings needed to start a family.  We felt comfortable enough that we could also be selective before reentering the job market.  Our new priorities in this next phase of our lives would be to make more time for friends and family, to learn new skills, to meet new people from different cultures, and to enrich our own lives and the lives of others through community service.  The last one is so easy to say but so much more difficult to do, so we hope to be able to blog more as we find ways to get more active in worthwhile projects.

As we speak we are sitting in a hostel in Queenstown, New Zealand, having just met a very nice Japanese woman who teaches English in Tokyo wondering who else we’ll meet and what else we’ll encounter over the next four months of our travels.  We look forward to sharing our adventures.  Feel free to comment on any of our blogs or blast us questions if you have any along the way.    

Worn away from the daily grind….

Tossing the disgusting work heels…

New work shoes and new office with incredible views