Why I quit my job and moved to Souteast Asia...
...and the myth about life becoming more serious when you get older
Meet me!
(born 1984, German, chaotic dude, 171 cm (based on the arbitrary metric system) or 5”7 (based on Freedom Units)
A long time ago
When I started secondary school, people told me, life would inevitably get more serious now. That turned out to be complete bullshit. Secondary school was pretty fun. In the later years I started partying, drinking, flirting, pocket money increased – in short, everything was fine.
My time in the army
After graduating with a miserable final grade of 3.2 (1 is best, and 4 is worst possible graduation) I went to the army. They had previously called me in for an examination on a Saturday morning. I got there after a night of serious partying and in a short moment of mental derangement I told some army guy that being a foot soldier sounded the most adventurous. So they assigned me to a pioneer division. People told me life would inevitably get more serious now. That turned out to be complete bullshit. Being in the army was like some kind of surreal game. During the first three month instructors would constantly yell at you and explain to you why you suck.
Meanwhile you would do completely nonsensical stuff like camp in a forest, dig wholes and walk around pretending to patrol, while basically no one else was in the forest. I was unbelievably bad at that stuff. When I built a tent, it collapsed. When I was told under no circumstances to forget my rain jacket I forgot it. At some point a superior was accusing me of purposely failing on basic stuff to annoy my superiors. That wasn’t true though. I’m just incapable of fulfilling practical tasks. After the first three month of camping and being yelled at, I pretty much did nothing for the following six month.
University
After the army was finished I wanted to start studying in another city. Since my brother studied in Karlsruhe and their university is famous for computer science I went there with pretty much no research about the university there whatsoever. People told me, life would inevitably get more serious now. That turned out to be complete bullshit. Since I wanted to study computer science and that could only be started during winter semester I started to study physics. Or more accurately, I started to act like I would study physics, but partied for 6 month straight and then changed to computer science. In my next two semesters I took part in exactly one exam and partied the rest. So basically in my first 18 month at university, I took one exam. I improved my beer chuggin skills quite a bit during that time.
Afterwards I slowly started to increase my studying speed, but never the less had unbelievably much free time. This „life will get serious“ stuff seemed to be some kind of con game played by older people.
Work
After graduating university I first did 6 more month of partying and then started my job as software developer in the vehicle manufacturing industry. People told me, life would inevitably get more serious now. And for the first time, they were kind of right. My life got very structured. Get up, work, get home, watch some cat videos on youtube, sleep, get up work, get home… Work was still kinda fun since we had a lot of running gags and I was taught a lot, but after the first two years I started to miss the strange hobbies I used to start when my life was less structured. I had hobbies like visiting random court cases in the district court for fun, or visiting other student fraternities and make the members hate me so much that they would kick me out. And a LOT of other strange stuff. Something was missing. A little bit of chaos.
My journey
I refuse to go to the same office for 35 years and then retire. People might be telling me my life will get serious, but I will do everything in my power to prevent that. I want impressions, ups and downs and a ton of fun. So I quit my job in October 2015 and started travelling asia.
It was the best decision of my life. So now I’m sitting in the Philippines and am writing on steemit. I became what is called a digital nomad. And I think it is one of the most exciting ways how you can live your life nowadays.
Reading from a different part of South East Asia. This is some interesting history you have.
Hope you enjoy this part of the world.
Wow. You have 3914 posts. Dude that's a lot :) You seem to be a nomad too. From which country are you from?
I'm no nomad. I'm in Singapore. Spent coupleof years in US, travelled a bit for work including to Hamburg but my life is pretty much in Singapore. The number of post is something i find misleading. They count the comments you leave as post. Go figure. I had many post since August but definitely not in thousands. :-)