My life is exciting. Every day presents a unique challenge and I look forward to those obstacles because I know I can overcome them.
I didn't always feel this way.
It wasn't that long ago that I lived in an exurb, commuted over an hour to work every single day, and wondered how I was going to have a positive impact on my kids' lives, because I barely ever saw them. I had this nagging feeling that my life should amount to more than getting a paycheck and grinding out the hours of my existence to prove that I knew how to "work hard."
Turns out I'm not alone. Follow me past the Orange Squiggle of Infinite Destruction and I'll explain.
For more years than I can remember my spouse and I have dreamed of seeing the world. We longed for the open road and living a life free from responsibilities and the daily grind.
Beliefs that held us back
What we discovered was that those dreams kept crashing into the walls we had created in our own lives. "We can't do that, because" became an all too common refrain in our house.
Q: "Why don't we..."
A: "...because the kids have to be in school."
Q: "What if we did this instead..."
A: "...because we'll lose the house if we don't have two incomes."
Q: "When we finally pay off the ___ maybe we could..."
A: "...because what will we do if it doesn't work out?"
We had a belief that we had to live a certain way. That belief is what kept us from living the life we really wanted. There were a lot of things holding us back, and only by looking at our self-imposed limits were we able to overcome them and live life on our terms. Some of the things that stopped us from living our dream included ideas like:
- You have to be rich to travel
- We had a mortgage and that represented a solemn commitment to honor our debt obligations
- Our children needed to attend the finest schools so that they could go to college and make a lot of money when they grew up
- Hard work will make you rich
- We need lots of stuff to make us happy.
Just looking at that list makes me laugh.
Turns out that most of the "American Dream" crap that we've been fed benefits the 1% far more than it benefits us. My wife and I knew that in order to travel we couldn't be burdened with a ton of debt; yet month after month, we kept filling up the gas tank to make the long commute to our jobs. Finally, it became obvious that we were just "middle men" between the money source, our employers, and the final destination for the fruits of our labor, the mortgage holder for our underwater McMansion.
BAM! Belief shattered. We found a lawyer, walked away and started banking all that money. This was a big moment for us because we started challenging all of our beliefs. We rented a cheap place, purged a lifetime of useless junk, and started making list of the things that were really important to our happiness.
The end of unchallenged assumptions
Turns out that once the mental dam breaks on something like this, the river of change becomes a flowing torrent that can sweep away many of the ossified and stagnant dogmas of an unfulfilled life. Suddenly, we started looking critically at everything we believed:
- Our belief about the importance of traditional education
- Our belief that we needed a career to be successful
- Our belief that responsible people lived in the suburbs so their kids would have a stable environment.
One by one we went after all of our sacred oxen and gored the stuffing out of them. Some were really, really hard to change, while others were obvious and easy. Over time the entire process became almost routine, and now I find that we enjoy evaluating our beliefs. I look forward to challenging them for the rest of my life.
The easy part
Having torn down the roadblocks to our dreams, we turned our eye to finding examples of what we wanted our life to look like. That is to say, we went looking for people who were living the life we wanted. As luck would have it, the Internet is a wonderful way to find great role models. Our list of required reading grew exponentially:
It turns out that there are hundreds of families out there making their dreams come true in various ways. Some of them work remotely. Others save for a few months and then go on extended vacations. Still more just go somewhere and learn to "live off the land."
People from different walks of life, all over the world, have discovered that they can live however they want, wherever they want. There isn't some magical formula for living your dreams and the only advice that I can offer to someone that is thinking of a life of travel is to find someone that is living the life you want and do your best to emulate their success.
Conclusion
A great many people, at DKos and IRL, have asked me how we "got out" and started living abroad. I've struggled in the past to explain the process, not because there aren't resources available, but because so much of the effort to make this all happen doesn't involve actual logistics.
Over-planning, over-thinking, and doubt are what held us back, and once we overcame our own limiting beliefs we were able to make substantive change far more easily. By critically examining the things that held us back and weighing those self-imposed limits against the shining light of our dreams, we were able to modify how we lived day to day. Once we stopped sabotaging ourselves, the rest was easy.
I hope that this diary inspires those who wish to see the world. Please feel free to message me or comment if you have specific questions and thank you for stopping by my humble diary.