I remember joking to myself years ago, after my company let me work from home for the first time: “I’m fucked now. I’ll never be able to go back to an office.”
Then I left my job. Became my own boss. “I’m even more fucked. I’m basically unemployable at this point.”
Then we left Miami with our suitcases and no return ticket. “Yeah... I’m completely fucked. I can’t go back to a normal life.”
I was joking… Kind of….
What I didn’t realize at the time was that each one of those moments was a door opening. And once you walk through it, it doesn’t close behind you. It disappears.
You don’t know what you don’t know... until you do. And once you’ve opened Pandora’s box, you can’t close it.
I’ve been living in Bangkok for about four months now.
Most of the time, I like it here. The food is incredible. I have a beautiful apartment, I can see the swimming pool from the windows as I’m typing this. The cost of living makes sense. The city has energy.
But some days… honestly most days for a while, I look at my life and feel... meh.
Not sad. Not miserable. Just flat. Like I’m going through the motions of a life that doesn’t quite fit.
I know how that sounds. I’m in Bangkok. I work for myself. I have freedom most people would trade a lot for. Trust me, I’m aware of the privilege here.
But it doesn’t make the feeling less real.
I think I’ve rewired myself in a way that made regular life almost incompatible with who I’ve become.
It started with loss. In 2017, after we lost our son, I made a promise, more to him than to myself honestly, that I would live the best life I could possibly live. That I would stop postponing happiness. Stop living on autopilot.
That promise set something in motion that I don’t think I fully understood at the time.
Years of intentional discomfort, growth, expansion... I became someone who only feels fully alive when being challenged. When things are new, unpredictable, hard. I started to understand that comfort makes you stagnant. That growth lives at the edges.
And now here I am, in a comfortable apartment, with a gym membership, a regular schedule, the same streets every day.
And I feel like I’m breaking that promise.
That’s the thing that actually bothers me. Not Bangkok. Not the routine. The feeling that I’m not living up to what I committed to. That somewhere, that little boy is watching, and I’m not delivering.
That’s the quiet anxiety underneath it all.
There’s something no one talks about when it comes to personal growth: it raises your baseline.
You go through the work. You expand. You build a version of yourself that craves challenge, novelty, aliveness. And then one day, you find yourself in a season of life that doesn’t match that version, and normal life feels like wearing someone else’s clothes.
Where some people find comfort in anchors, a cozy apartment, familiar things, a place that feels like home, I find myself feeling weighed down by them. The gym membership, the lease, the fixed expenses. Each one a small reminder that I’m less free than I was.
Rosie is the opposite. She finds security in those things. She is genuinely happier here than she’s been in years, and I can see it clearly. That matters to me.
I want to say something about this, because it’s important.
No one forced me to settle in Bangkok. Rosie didn’t threaten me. She expressed what she needed, stability, a home, space to breathe, and I said yes. Freely. Because it’s the right thing to do, and because I love her.
We’ve been together a long time. For most of our relationship, “I called the shots.” We moved from Paris, a city she loved, to the south of France because I was done with Paris. Then to Miami for my job. She always had my back without hesitation.
So when she told me she needed this, I didn’t have to think long.
That’s what a real partnership looks like. Not two people always getting what they want. Two people taking turns holding the other one up.
But the discomfort I feel is my problem. Not Bangkok’s. Not Rosie’s. Mine.
Blaming her would be the easy route. A lot of people take that route. We live in a world where it’s always someone else’s fault, always someone else’s responsibility. Pointing fingers is comfortable. It gets you off the hook.
But it’s also a lie.
I chose this. I own it. And that means the work of figuring it out is mine to do.
Things have been shifting a little over the past few weeks.
Work picked up, which helped more than I expected. There were a few months where things were really slow, not making enough, feeling unproductive, wondering if I was failing. That does something to you. It’s hard to feel good about life in general when work isn’t working. When business started moving again, some of that heaviness lifted.
We also made real friends here. Two couples we actually see regularly, play padel with weekly, text for no reason. Sometimes it’s couples hanging out, sometimes it’s the boys, sometimes Rosie goes off with the girls. That kind of easy, low-drama friendship... it helps.
And this past weekend, Rosie and I decided to book a trip to Japan. It’s been at the top of our list for years. Just sitting there planning it, staring at my phone for hours, looking at cities and temples and places to eat... something woke up. I’m so excited to see somewhere new, a place I’ve always been intrigued by.
I think that’s part of the answer: I need to find ways to get my “aliveness” fix without blowing up a life that’s working for Rosie. Weekend trips. New parts of the city to explore. A new country here and there when finances allow.
That last part matters. When we were traveling full time, traveling was our expense. Now we have fixed costs no matter where we are, the apartment, the gym, electricity, all of it. A trip on top of that is a holiday, not a lifestyle. With both of us self-employed, planning that far ahead financially isn’t always easy. So it depends. But things are better right now, and I have some visibility on the next few months. For now, that’s enough.
And there’s something the stability gave me that I genuinely couldn’t have had on the road. In January, I got a DEXA scan done, a quick test that measures bone density, muscle mass, body composition. I did it out of curiosity, mostly because for the first time I’d actually have consistent gym access. What was supposed to be fun data turned into something more serious: my muscle mass and bone density were low enough that the doctor told me, go lift weights, fix your nutrition, come back in 12 months. So now I go to the gym four times a week. I eat like I mean it. I’m building something for future-me that simply wouldn’t have been possible while living out of a backpack.
So even in the “meh,” something real is happening. I just haven’t made this chapter feel memorable yet. I’m working on it.
Last week I wrote about Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, the idea that you should be willing to live this exact life again, infinitely, in every detail.
My last three or four months? They wouldn’t pass the test. Not yet.
But I know that’s not permanent. I know I’m capable of turning this into something worth repeating. The question is just how. How to find joy and aliveness without constant movement. How to be someone who fits into this chapter without losing who I’ve become.
That’s the work. And I don’t have a clean answer yet.
Have you ever been in a season of life that didn’t feel like you?
Not a bad life. Just one that didn’t quite fit the person you’d become. I’d genuinely love to know how you moved through it. Reply and tell me.
J
An interesting perspective. I’m sort of going through something similar. Thank you for sharing.
I think some of us humans are programmed this way , always looking for a challenge a project.
Sometimes our brain is always searching for the next challenge.
You make total sense to me not sure I am articulating what I mean.