The Jump...renamed to The Rant

I was scared shitless.  No, scratch that.  I am scared shitless.

A great job, a beautiful girlfriend, a successful career and a comfortable life guaranteed for the rest of my life, and I am going to leave it all.  Why in the world would I do that?  How could anyone in their right mind leave such an enticing and sought after life?

A comfortable life. Those three words frighten me more than my fear of drowning or burning at a stake.  Not that I'm a bad swimmer or a witch living in 17th century Massachusetts.  Those are just my two greatest fears, as unlikely as it may be unless my travels lead me to an unfortunate death in a boiling pot of gold in the Amazon rain-forest like a Spanish conquistador of old.  But I digress.

A little bit about me

My entire life I have been successful at what I do.  Much of it I owe to my parents who pushed me to my intellectual limits despite my stubbornness.  The rest I owe it to my own competitive and I'll-prove-you-wrong personality.  I'm not proud of being a competitive, stubborn dick who goes to great lengths to prove others are wrong about me or what is possible in this life, but that's who I am.  The past 5 years of my life have been an uphill battle against myself to tone down my less than pleasant personality traits, including my stubbornness, competitiveness and quite frankly being an asshole (whether intentionally or not) and a jerk more often than not.  I have toned down these traits a lot, but I will never completely rid myself of them.  I wouldn't want to either since these traits are beneficial when I have control over them and not vice versa.

A Successful life but an unhappy one

I passed high school with a International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma as well as a normal High School diploma (The IB program is the International equivalent of the AP Honors program).  I completed my bachelor's education at a large, prestigious university double majoring and picking up two language minors.  I speak Spanish fluently to the extent that native Spanish speakers are confused when I tell them I'm American.  My Italian is conversational but nothing exceptional.  I understand basic German and French and can understand Portuguese when I read it.  I started working at a prestigious organization 2 weeks after graduating from college in one of their most sought out career tracks.  Before that, I had an internship every summer of my four-year college life.

I was slightly mad when I wrote this

Before I lose myself in this narcissistic rant let me get to my point.  I am well traveled, educated and successful.  I've worked my ass off to get where I am and spent a large part of my youth working hard for the success and opportunity I now have.  I even did what every college professor, career counselor and mother mercilessly beat into your head: get a job you're passionate about!!  Well now I'm the poster child of the perfect son, a true, living example of the perfect college grad and I hate it.  I absolutely hate it.  The happiness I thought I would find on this path is an empty shell.  I like to describe it as a delicious, crisp looking, deceitfully bright red apple at a grocery store.  Not your average apple, and on top of that you are absolutely starved.  You buy the apple and the second you walk out of the store you bite into it only to bite into a soft brown mush.  You eat it because you're stomach is swelling from how starved you are (exaggeration) and it quenches your hunger but you're not happy.  The apple was deceitfully good looking but it wasn't what you thought it would be.  That's the reality of the stable, 9-5 job.  And I absolutely hate it.

How is a stable 9-5 job with benefits and a predictable, comfortable life a bad thing you might ask?  "Seriously dude", you may be thinking, "you need to be happy to have a great job, especially in this economy.  Stop complaining while others are desperately looking for jobs, and most of all, stop bragging about your success".  Well here's the thing people.  The 9-5 job is boring as hell and it sucks the life out of you.  Even despite my success, financial duress has been a reliable partner up until I got my job.  You wake up at 6:30am to get ready, then work and deal with corporate bullshit, leave work to do laundry, groceries or work out or any other chore for an hour or two and then you're too tired to do anything else but sit in front of the TV and fall asleep watching re-runs of Friends or Seinfeld mistakenly believing your mood will improve or you will find the energy to do anything else.  The next morning you wake up at 6:30 am from your couch still half dressed from the day before and the cycle repeats itself.  The weekends aren't any better.  "I get to sleep in!" is what you tell yourself.  "Fool" says your body says the next morning at 7 am, just around the time you normally stop hitting the snooze button during the week.  Grudgingly you wake up and lay in your bed wondering how in the world will you get everything there is to do done before the weekend is over.

How can this be living?  My above description isn't the best at demonizing the 9-5 work week, but seriously people, why do we give up the best hours of our day, the sunlight, the breeze, the adventures of the world to work in an office or cubicle?  "Bills!" "That's life!"  "What else would I do?" "Money!"  "A nice car!"  "Retirement!" Those are the most common answers I hear.  Valid answers all of them but fuck, there's got to be some other way to achieve those things without slaving 8 hours a day.  And this applies to all age groups. The youth should not spend the apex of their physical lives sitting in a desk chair.  Middle aged people want to enjoy their families, and who knows what seniors want.  I'm not a senior so I wouldn't know but I damn straight know 0% of seniors dream of working at the entrance of a Walmart, exacerbating their arthritis and knee problems.

And I was still mad...

So back to my original thought.  A comfortable life.  Fuck it.  I'm young and I am eager to taste more of the world than just the farts of my coworker sitting in the cubicle next to me.  I want to live adventurously and experience the wonderful and exciting things this world has to offer!  Two weeks of vacation time a year just doesn't cut it and weekends are too short to accomplish anything meaningful or fun without time pressures and monetary constraints.  Every single friend of mine and friend-of-a-friend and even many of my coworkers who are now friends with me have confessed that a million dollars in their bank account or winning the lottery would be followed by a resignation letter on their supervisor's desk the next day.  The age range is vast, therefore it's not just about me being young and rebellious.  Indentured servitude isn't really my thing and I'm resolved to become a master of my own fate, even if that fate puts me face-to-face with poverty, hardships and a shot or two of desperation.  I know it is possible to succeed and live well outside of the 9-5 job.  Just ask Tim Ferris and the thousands of people that post their success stories on his blog.  Ask the millions of successful entrepreneurs, independent online worker, bloggers, travelers, website owners who have done it.  If they did it why can't I?  Why can't you?

My plan

Here's my plan.  I'm quitting end of May or end of June to travel.  I will work on my online business ideas following Tim Ferris's guidelines, learning from success stories and using common sense.  This blog will be my silent shrink.  My doubts, concerns, plans, ideas will be posted on this blog but my focus will be on my adventures both past, present and those I hope to live...and live through (for a more accurate description of my plan visit my About Me page.  Perhaps other people with a desire to travel or live a non-9-5 work-week can learn something from my blog or I from them if they kindly post on my blog.  Mostly this blog (for now) is to express my scared-shitless, diarrhea-inducing fear of losing everything I worked so hard to get and taking a jump into the unknown.  The only way to know if my parachute will work is to take the jump off the cliff.  That is what it feels like.  Actually I take that back, it feels like jumping off a cliff with a parachute building kit. I have time to build the parachute (the online business) and actually use it (sufficient income) before I hit the rocks below (game over).  Luckily for me it's not really game over.  I get to restart...working another 9-5 job.  It may be life-sucking but I at least I can say I tried.  Now it's time to prepare for the jump.

Now I must get another chamomile tea to further soothe my nerves.