Work, travel and the meaning of life
Opinion: Three years ago Richard Meadows chucked in his day job to make the kind of escape most of us dream of – and he has since learned a few truths about happiness.
Sometimes I wander through the suburbs in the evenings and peek into living rooms and fantasise about watching telly and bickering with my spouse and buying curtain rails at Bunnings.
These domestic reveries are new and disquieting. The traditional path through life – a steady job, white picket fence, two point three children, monthly mortgage payments – never held much appeal. Now, if I squint my eyes up, I’m starting to see it: not a rut as I originally thought, but a well-worn groove; like settling into an armchair moulded to the exact contours of your butt.
As for me, I’m forging my own path. Enthusiastic onlookers tell me I’m ‘‘living the dream’’, and technically, I guess that’s true.
I used to have an office job at this very publication. It was a great gig, but I got itchy feet. I saw the future rolling out in
front of me, a great grey swatch of flannel, comfortable but dull. I was desperate to escape these parochial little islands on the ass-end of the world.
So I saved up my pennies, quit my job, sold all my stuff, broke up with my girlfriend, and flew across the Pacific.
That was three years ago. I’m writing this from a coffee shop in Medellı´n, overlooking the Andes. From the outside, my life is Insta-perfect. Colombia is the latest in an ever-changing lineup of exotic locales: tropical beaches and rice paddies and skyscrapers, oh my! I have total freedom over how I spend my time. It’s exactly what I dreamed of during those slow afternoons at the office.
Which is what makes these quotidian fantasies so funny. If you are the slightest bit envious of my life, know that I’m a little envious of yours; and that both of us are doomed to never quite be satisfied.
As far as I can tell, everyone has a baseline level of happiness, and once you have the basics of life covered, that’s about as good as it gets. Some of those basic requirements are obvious: safety, a roof over your head, being able to buy shoes for your kids. Others, less so.
After I quit my job, I spent a lot of time lounging on tropical islands, barely moving my carcass from the hammock except to skin up a joint or get another bottle of wine. The only sign of life came from the geckos on the ceiling. Occasionally they licked their eyeballs or caught a moth; this being a source of great excitement to my English friend, who insisted on narrating every scene like a low-rent David Attenborough.
It was around this time I decided that maybe total unconstrained freedom wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
On the ninth day of lizardwatching, I stumbled out of the haze of ennui and Cambodian sativa and back into some semblance of a useful human being.
Since then, my life has been a continual process of circling back to the fusty old institutions I’d been trying to escape. These days, I dutifully sit myself down at a desk in a co-working space, with nary a hammock or a coconut in sight. My younger self would be disgusted that I am paying hard-earned money to voluntarily go sit in an office, but it gets worse.
I decided I needed more daily structure, so I played around
If you are the slightest bit envious of my life, know that I’m a little envious of yours.