Life Back Then

I was born into a lower middle-class family. My father owned a printing press in what you could generously call a town. In 2012 I finished school with enormous dreams: becoming an astronomer, falling in love, earning a lot, and living a life of complete luxury, a five-year plan with the ambition of a man who has never once budgeted anything. I genuinely wanted to study astronomy. Stars, planets, the universe, all of it made me a little obsessed. Unfortunately I grew up in a society where parents believe engineering is the one guaranteed route to a better life, and mine were no exception. I didn’t have the nerve to fight them on it at the time. I learned that about myself a bit later, the hard way.

So I ended up in the final year of an engineering degree I never once felt was mine, a proud backbencher carrying six backlogs, which is its own separate story. I don’t regret those four years, though. They shaped the man I became, and they changed how I looked at life completely.

I’d always had questions about our existence. It looked, from where I was standing, like everyone was following the exact same cycle:

Born → study → earn → marry → have children → raise children → retire → relive the memories → die.

Until we finish studying, we do what our parents want. After marriage, we spend our whole lives raising our own kids. Everyone seemed to be running toward this without ever asking why, and it seemed absurd to me, but I also had no idea how to actually opt out. I remember wondering why nobody around me understood what I meant when I tried to explain it. My father once told me that if I kept thinking like this, I’d go mad one day. That genuinely scared me. For a while I thought I was the only person on earth who thought this way.

In 2014 I went to Courtallam with some friends, and that’s the first time I opened up to them about wanting to travel to every country. I told them, “If I ever get the chance, I’m taking it, whatever it costs.” I still remember saying those exact words.

Until January 2015 I didn’t even know “full-time traveler” was a real category of person. I was at the lowest point of a real depression at the time, and looking for anything to pull my attention elsewhere, when I came across a book called Ten Small Steps, One Giant Leap by the Travelling Dutchman. It was about seeing the world cheaply. I don’t usually read up on authors after finishing their books, but something made me look into this one, and I found he called himself a “full-time traveler,” a phrase I’d never encountered before. His blog was the real surprise: someone was already living the exact life I’d been quietly wanting. Finding out I wasn’t the only person with these thoughts, that other people out there were doing this on purpose, was an enormous relief.

Now I’m just a few days from my first solo trip. Thank you, Jasper Ribbers (the Travelling Dutchman), for the conversations that cleared my head. I still hope to meet you in person someday, exactly as I told you I would. 😉

— Yoki