Why I Chased Travel Instead of Career Prestige in My Twenties
There was a chilling excitement of the unknown lingering in the air; I remember it like it was yesterday. After finally lugging all of my heavy, exotic house plants and framed artwork down a crowded elevator filled with sharply irritated glances, white walls surrounded me and stared back without any personality or remorse. A sterile office was laid bare by the abandonment of monotony in pursuit of the vague idea of a grand adventure just beyond reach. The bittersweet taste of freedom was on my lips after bidding everyone farewell and pushing through the front rotating doors into an overcast December courtyard.
Two weeks prior to that day, I politely pulled a neuropsychologist aside during a break in their patient consultations and broke the surprising news that I was resigning from my job because I found an opportunity to move across continents to Santiago de Chile. A wave of disbelief and critical speculation spilled through the fluorescent-lit hallways connecting the different departments of the NeuroMedical Center. The sterile atmosphere turned uneasy, and I wanted to escape the interrogation. The pressure was suffocating. How was I going to inform my friends and colleagues that I was jumping ship into an ocean of future uncertainty—without convincing them that I wasn’t insane?
Years of dusty, second-hand books piled on my nightstand, quiet and contemplative afternoons in elegant art museums, unwavering encouragement from my mother, and intriguing conversations with strangers built up to this decision. I didn’t just choose to leave my stable job on a whim; I was certain there was something in my destiny pulling me away from everything I had ever known in the United States. At the time I couldn’t grasp what it was exactly, but it accompanied me like a shadow that was becoming increasingly unbearable to ignore.
During my job administering psychological test batteries in the clinic, I spent countless hours gazing out of my floor-to-ceiling windows crowded with monsteras and blooming orchids, day-dreaming about the distant worlds depicted in the hundreds of novels that lined my bookshelves back home. With a background in the arts, the doctors were always curious about what book or publication was tucked under my arm as I left for breaks in between patient appointments, taking advantage of the little time I had to devour a few paragraphs before my next task. Although I loved my job and the people that I worked with, the monotony of routine crippled my soul and left me yearning for any chance I had to escape into the rivers of words that stimulated my imagination and blanketed me with awe.
While racing to keep up with the extensive job training following the series of pointed interviews and paperwork, I quickly realized that I had fallen into a wonderful opportunity to excavate a wealth of wisdom, seemingly inaccessible to the rest of my generation, from the diversity of patients that floated in and out of my door. They wandered in from all walks of life and carried an abundance of stories from the years that trailed behind them, detailing the highest peaks of hope and inspiration to the lowest valleys of tragedy, pain, and suffering.
Taking this to heart, I began to ask my geriatric patients particularly about their lives— careers, faith, families, relationship advice, dreams, biggest regrets, and fears—whenever we had some down time during our testing sessions. I had no idea what I was doing with my life and figured that some of their insight might help considering they lived twice or three times as long. During those two years, I interviewed thousands of patients and learned about the intimate life experiences that shaped them into who they ultimately became, walking away with an arsenal of unique and interesting perspectives that made it more difficult to connect with people my age.
Bobbing in a turbulent emotional soup—mixed with gut-wrenching laughter, painful tears, soul-jerking inspiration, warm hugs, and the weight of ominous sorrow, I was amazed at how quickly my patients were willing to confide in me. Though death loomed on the horizon for some with serious cases of Alzheimer’s or Dementia, a dim glimmer of hope remained, despite the anxiety regarding their test results.
While most of my peers and acquaintances were in a frantic scramble to snatch up the most promising jobs in banking, finance, commercial real estate, and consulting with big plans for futures filled with rigorous hours, tight cubicles, demanding expectations, and promises of luxury, security, and status, the patients that circulated through the hospital started to make me doubt the hollow facade that everyone else around me seemed to eagerly buy into.
Their regretful musings were constant, “I wish I would have tried to open that business when I had the opportunity,” “I regret not writing that book whenever I had the time,” “Looking back I don’t know why I didn’t book tickets and travel to that place that always captivated me,” or “I’m disappointed that I never did X whenever I was younger…”
Swimming in constant stories, I started to drown in disillusionment with the American Dream. The pressing reality of cruel and unforgiving time crept into my conscious awareness. It’s easy to take each day for granted, especially when we’re youthfully abounding with health and energy. But I started to view that season of my life as a balloon filled with helium—you let go of it and watch it ascend into an infinite blue sky, never returning once it slips from your grip.
The only thing you hold onto are the memories that remain.
It seemed to me like everyone, old and young alike, was living for tomorrow. They failed to take present action to live out their dreams, only to observe them wash away in the gutters of discouragement while living out compromising lives of quiet desperation.
Instead of going against the crowd to carve out courageously a chunk of fate on their own terms, I looked around and saw a bunch of people living to seek the approval of everyone else. Conforming their passions to the expectations thrust onto them, they were ultimately left aimless and empty. Associating with fake actors playing their assigned role, the reservoirs of meaning residing within were dried up and stifled. Selling themselves out for the sake of influence and prestige, they lost their own voices along the way and adopted the attitudes, opinions, and habits that were glorified in popular culture. Myself included.
The most interesting patients that came across my desk were the ones who did something different and unique with their brief lives, that were well-read and traveled extensively, open to new challenges and experiences that made for hilarious stories, the people that were humble enough to admit their mistakes and move on, continuously learn and explore outside of their comfort zone, that strove to be generous and honest despite the circumstances, the ones that lead their life by faith in God. Of all the valuable insight that I gained while working at the NeuroMedical Center, the thing that stuck with me the most was the deep understanding of the person that I didn’t want to become.
As a kid fascinated with the arts, politics, world history, modern and classic literature, psychology, every genre of music, fashion, foreign cultures, and poetic languages among other things, it was always a life-long dream to travel the world and see the distant places that were vividly painted in old, crusty coffee table books, creased antique maps, and dramatic, outdated artworks that consumed so much of my time. I was fortunate enough to have a mother who saw the value of adventure, taking my brother, my sister, and me on trips to surreal places like Iceland, Malawi, Alaska, and Peru when I was younger.
Coming home in bliss to a commodified American culture with confusion, I remember increasing my appetite for whatever laid beyond the seemingly empty and plastic boundaries of the world that I came from. Convincing myself that traveling the globe was impossible, I resided in burying myself into the books that took me to those enchanting landscapes that I hoped to see one day in the future like everyone else.
Those countless conversations with wise, old people served a purpose. They sounded a blaring alarm. I looked at myself in the mirror and reflected on my constantly troublesome and chaotic past. I thought about the emptiness of forgetting my desires to chase what the world told me was valuable. I considered the implications of the life that I was living. From the outside looking in, I was comfortable and relatively stable, but in reality I was paralyzed in fear from pursuing my dreams because they seemed so unrealistic.
I knew deep down that pushing myself outside of my stagnant comfort zone was the only way to learn, adapt, and grow. I was convinced that even though I was throwing away a promising future without a concrete plan, diving head first into the abyss of the unknown across foreign continents was going to be part of my fate. Sinking or swimming was the only choice. The opportunity to be young, healthy, hopelessly naive, and not tied down to anything serious wasn’t going to last forever.
The time to take action was now. I preferred to bear the weight of regret from stupid mistakes and money wasted on experiences, rather than continue living with the haunting idea of what could have been if I had taken the risk. Although it’s challenging to pinpoint exactly, that crucial year was a catalyst that launched me into the grand adventure that is now becoming my life story.
