Did Life Turn Out Like You Thought?

  On 8/14/2022 at 5:01 PM, zkom said:

I feel like longer trips, like 6+ months, fry my brain somehow and every time it gets harder to return to some vestige of normalcy. Maybe at some point I'm just going to be stuck on an orbit around the globe and never land back to normal life.

Yeah I understand that. I knew when I finished my travels when I was 32. I started to realise I needed to settle into some sort of normality. Don't get me wrong I've always worked hard, that's how I funded my trips, I'd work 14 hours a day six days a week to save money, I aint funded by mum or dad, so had a good grasp on reality and what needed to be done to achieve what I need to do. To be honest I was burnt out anyway, I was quite happy never seeing an aeroplane (or a temple lol) for at least 10 years. Which I followed through. but I felt trapped like a caged animal. And a caged wild beast goes kind of crazy. My three best friends all moved away, two of them I've known since nursery school. Then bad stuff happened. Self medicating with drugs, alone. Just to feel a burst of adrenaline and escape from the lethargic, heavy fog of life. That's a story for another time. But I overdosed twice. The second I was very close.

  On 8/14/2022 at 8:21 PM, beerwolf said:

Yeah I understand that. I knew when I finished my travels when I was 32. I started to realise I needed to settle into some sort of normality. Don't get me wrong I've always worked hard, that's how I funded my trips, I'd work 14 hours a day six days a week to save money, I aint funded by mum or dad, so had a good grasp on reality and what needed to be done to achieve what I need to do. To be honest I was burnt out anyway, I was quite happy never seeing an aeroplane (or a temple lol) for at least 10 years. Which I followed through. but I felt trapped like a caged animal. And a caged wild beast goes kind of crazy. My three best friends all moved away, two of them I've known since nursery school. Then bad stuff happened. Self medicating with drugs, alone. Just to feel a burst of adrenaline and escape from the lethargic, heavy fog of life. That's a story for another time. But I overdosed twice. The second I was very close.

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I've met people who have been traveling for most of their lives and they just can't stop. One time I met a woman in her late 60s who had been living in some pretty hardcore places from Haiti to Papua New Guinea. She said when she went to visit her family in Scotland for a Christmas she got very bad anxiety after just a few days and started to cry all the time so she had to leave for Africa.

I also met a guy in Africa who had resigned or gone awol from the US navy sometime in the 70s and had been traveling in Africa since then. He just said it's impossible to return to US anymore. He had tried it but failed.

I have also a friend who basically left Germany when the Berlin wall fell and lived around the Balkans and Black Sea area, never returning to Germany but somehow ending up in Japan with wife and kids and seems pretty miserable now that he can't travel anymore so freely.

So I'm a bit wary what might happen if I travel too much..

I used to work and save money and then go traveling. The pandemic put a stop on that for a bit. But now that the borders are opening the pandemic has actually made combining work and travel easier because there is much more remote work available in my field so I can travel and work at the same time to some degree. Although it does get a bit hard if you're somewhere with an abysmal internet connection and rolling blackouts and several timezones off from your coworkers..

In hindsight, based on my socioeconomic and family background and psychological/neurological profile mine has turned out better than expected. I've managed to occasionally thrive and even succeed regardless of my neuroatypical and psychopathological traits - properly adjusted medication is a good thing - but there's also a lot of serendipity and luck involved, not everything has been due to conscious and directed activity I'm responsible for. I'm on my second marriage, and we've been together for a couple of decades, so I think it'll last; one kid. Most - if not all - of the negative things in my life are internal or self-generated, so I'm in a really good place at the moment (at 48). I don't think I've ever really had any actual, explicit expectations for my life, so expecting nothing has avoided disappointment almost altogether. Of course there have been disappointments and adversities, some really crappy things, too, and I do have baggage, but nothing I haven't been able to deal with.

When i was in high school in the early 1990s, I had no interest in joining civilization and I pictured I would be homeless and use grill charcoal to make drawings on brown paper shopping bags and sell those, so things pretty much turned out as planned except the drawings aren't selling.  I did a lot of good in my life but i took care to do a bunch of stupid things too I guess so nobody would mistake me for Jesus. The world of people has decided to do equally stupid stuff as a whole, and it's hard not to get solopsistic and think the world is a perceptual model in the skull and all we do is borrow and assign meaning to abstract tokens, and that the outward world of stupid stuff is really a subconscious impression/culmination of my own karma. In case I'm right and I'm imagining the world into existence, I am sorry and I will try to behave better.

I don't have an album out on rephlex or warp, so no, sincerely everyone on watmm dot com