38: the best advice i've received while traveling
how to cross the street in Bangkok and also navigate life
March is, without fail, my least favorite month, but it’s also a marker of a time when I upended my entire life and made some radical changes. Three years ago this week, I quit a comfortable job that I didn’t necessarily dislike and booked a one-way flight to Southeast Asia. The job itself wasn’t the problem, and leaving it was a decision I deliberated over for almost an entire year. I worked with some incredibly smart people who pushed me professionally while also being supportive of who I was as an individual outside of work. The problem was that I found myself in a nearly 10-year-long career that I’d fallen into with zero intentionality. Despite the extremely volatile industry I worked in, I could predict my days and weeks and months ahead down to the minute. I had the classic what am I doing here realization, over and over, until finally I had enough.
I’ve always struggled with imposter syndrome, but beyond just worrying that I wasn’t insert whatever attribute I felt I lacked enough to be in the rooms I was in, I realized I no longer wanted to pretend to fit in with this particular career path. I wanted to get out of the room entirely and find a different way to spend the majority of my waking hours. I definitely did not want to continue to open my laptop at 8 am and remind myself to blink at 6 pm when the entire day had just disappeared in front of me. One of the best parts I’ve enjoyed about getting older is becoming better acquainted with who I am as an individual. I realized I’ll never be a ladder climber. I do not want to make more and more money until I can buy, on a whim, every single thing that crosses my monkey brain with zero scrutiny over what that decision means for my life and the world around me. I’m not even sure I want to own a house in the country I live in. I don’t want to be a person with excessive amounts of wealth, influence, or any of those things we associate with the metaphorical tops of those ladders. I actually find that idea repulsive and think the world would be a better place if more people allowed themselves to stop trying so hard all the time to embrace (often without realizing it) this mindset of more and more and more without ever realizing they already have enough.
Don’t get me wrong here—I don’t want to struggle, I’d like to have a relatively comfortable life, but, as I get older, I want to maintain the scrappy mentality I grew up with that reminds me I have enough and that I can do a lot with very little. Nothing is more boring to me than the accomplishments of people who have everything in the world. Nothing’s more depressing than the discontent that is so common among people who own more than they could ever need. I don’t regret the time I spent at those jobs. I definitely needed to be there to save up money and make the leap that I did. I learned things that have applications in other aspects of my life. Without the experience, I never would have known that I don’t want that kind of life. The ladder I spent 10 years on served its purpose, but it was time to jump.
I’m sure this is a relatable situation for a lot of people in their 30’s. Us millenials who have spent our entire lives navigating the post-9/11, post-financial crisis, post-housing crash and boom, post-pandemic, and post-nothing-can-ever-get-more-awful-than-this reality (while things keep getting worse) tend not to think with long-term plans in mind. We take jobs when we can get them and figure it out as we go. Loyalty to a career on the basis of some sense of security that it might afford us is a dead thing of the past (as it turned out, the team I worked on at my old job was eliminated three months after I left). There is no security in life, and actually, yes: the more you have, the more you have to lose. The silver lining of everything being awful all the time is that it emboldens us to take risks. I’ve found that what’s on the other side of those risks has almost always been better than the feeling of being stuck somewhere in life, watching your time slip by, and feeling unfulfilled.
This is how I found myself standing on the corner of a busy street in Bangkok in what felt like an advanced level of Frogger, with two months ahead of me in a place that could not possibly have felt further from my life back at home. Even if you’ve not been to Southeast Asia, you probably know that traffic doesn’t obey the same rules as other parts of the world when it comes to pedestrians. Crosswalks are rare, and the concept of sides of the road is a suggestion. Taxis, motorbikes, tuk-tuks, and trucks zipped through the intersection I was standing at as I looked for an opening to cross. It seemed impossible. I thought back on the advice that a friend had given me a few months earlier: look far ahead and don’t make any sudden or jerky moves. It pays to look cool and collected while trying to cross the street in Bangkok, even if it’s 110 degrees. I certainly had not figured it out at that time. Out of nowhere, a shirtless man on the other side of the street saw me calculating the risk of vehicular death and shouted, “Just go!”
He’d probably seen it countless times before: a dumb foreigner incapable of crossing the street. I think about how little thought he probably put into it often because those two words will stick with me for as long as I live, simply because they came into my life at a point when I needed the advice most (and sometimes, I think, a little abstract advice from strangers is the best advice we can get). It didn’t land solely as advice, either. It was an affirmation of what I’d just done a few weeks earlier. The hesitant, awkward conversation of giving my notice through a computer screen, worrying about how it might land, waiting for a reaction, and wondering if one of our connections was bad when the face on the other side froze. One of my favorite realizations of getting older is that I absolutely can stop doing something that no longer works for me and start over. It seems hard because we’re all afraid of the discomfort of change, but once I committed to the decision (and survived it), I realized it led to the best moments of my life.
I often think about what my life would have been like if I’d just stayed at that job, inevitably been let go, and found another job similar to it. I wouldn’t have ridden a motorcycle across northern Vietnam. I wouldn’t know how it felt to stand in front of Angkor Wat at 4:50 am and watch the sunrise. I probably never would have spent a month in Taiwan, which ended up feeling like its own separate life. There would be no memory of celebrating Tết with strangers in Hoi An, eating a simple bowl of bun cha on the street, drinking an ice-cold glass of beer in Hanoi, staying at a homestay on a farm in Phong Nha, riding a bicycle in Chiang Mai, taking a slow boat up the Mekong River in Laos (and getting food poisoning), falling asleep on a beach in Koh Lanta, rejoicing at the sight of rain outside a train window in Ninh Binh after 38 days of not seeing it. I wouldn’t have decided to turn a 12-hour layover in Seoul into a 10-day stay in Korea. I likely would have never found the time to spend a month in Greece, which would lead to two subsequent trips back to that place I fell in love with. I would not have found myself back at home working at a coffee shop (an experience I really loved) or having the time and flexibility to shoot a story for a magazine that takes weeks of coordination and time. All of that and more because I decided to just go. I don’t have anything figured out, but instead of drowning that fact beneath an unintentional and mindless life, I lean into it and find a way through.
Some days are definitely harder than others (I have not ridden my life of deliberation, anxiety, and fear), but there’s a marker for me now in March of 2023 that divides my life before and after that time. Each year that passes gives me a little feeling of celebration. That year was, on paper, one of the worst in my life. I survived a divorce, lost one of the closest family members I had, and exchanged a stable life for one of tangible insecurity. I was still learning in real time that everything ends, because it’s one thing to know that and another entirely different thing to live it. The previous version of myself indiscriminately bought things I’d eventually have to let go of, while struggling with indecision over everything that was actually consequential in my life. I was exhausted by how much of my life felt temporary and how it seemed like I was in a never-ending phase of waiting for the next thing. Three years later, I have a much better understanding that this is the nature of life, and we can choose to either reject or embrace it. Waiting is an art that’s as important as action, I think, and there’s beauty in that part of life, too, as long as you know that you can’t wait forever. At a certain point, you have to step out into the street and just go.
They don’t walk blindly into the streets in Bangkok without looking. Much like mindlessly staring at your phone as you step into a street on a whim will get you killed, if I’d just quit my job without some thoughtful preparation, I probably would have regretted it. The just go advice also needs to be balanced with the acceptance that things will likely work out as long as you stay sharp and pay attention. In Thailand, they have an understanding that it’s mutually disadvantageous for someone on a motorbike to hit them, and they trust that traffic will weave its way around them to make room. They know that panicking or freaking out and making a jumpy move is dangerous. It’s about calculation, action, and trust. You can’t just stay on one side of a single street. Everybody’s got somewhere to go; there’s no time to stand around waiting to cross and look like a worried fool.
Great read, Chris. Crossing the street in Bangkok can be translated to approaching situations in life. I'm still hesitant in Bangkok, myself, but getting better. Naples was another fun place to try to cross in.