Ten Years a Nomad

by Matthew Kepnes

  All I had desired since Costa Rica was to travel more—elsewhere—but it felt impossible.

  Now, though, I felt like I found the answer to a question I didn’t know I was asking. The cure to my unhappiness, my boredom, my lack of confidence wasn’t anything I could find at home.

  The cure was to keep traveling.

  Backpacking was the lifestyle I had been searching for. It meant exposure to new cultures and new places and new foods. It meant forging instant friendships with strangers who had nothing in common with me but the same wanderlust. It meant ultimate freedom. It allowed me to take charge of my life instead of just merely watching the days and weeks and months waste away.

  This was the life I wanted.

  There on the beach I had my epiphany. I found that moment of clarity where I know what I had to do.

  Or so one might say.

  Looking back, I can trace my decision to quit my job and travel the world to that beach in Ko Samui but so much lead up to me being ready to make that decision. It had been slowly building—first in Costa Rica, then reinforced by my time back home at an unfulfilling job, then by the backpackers in Chiang Mai, and then by my experience on Khao San Road.

  Each moment was another step forward that would have been impossible to take without the one before it.

  On my last night in Ko Samui, I walked into the only English-language bookstore on the island and bought Lonely Planet’s Southeast Asia on a Shoestring. I held it in my hand and I dreamed of all the places I could go. The guide, sealed in plastic wrap, symbolized my future.

  When I was thumbing through the book at dinner, Scott wanted to know what I was doing with a new travel book for the very place we were just about to leave. I told him: I was going to go back home for just long enough to tie up my loose ends, and then pick up my journey again. I was going to quit my job, pack my bag, and travel for a year.

  He didn’t believe me, but my mind was made up.

  I went back to reading the book, holding it as if it were an ancient holy book. A relic that contained hidden knowledge that I, a new initiate, had to decipher. It was my guide into the unknown. How could I stretch my money for a whole year? How could I get by without speaking a word of the language? How could I avoid getting scammed? How could I make my travel as rewarding as I imagined it would be? How could I do it as effortlessly as the new friends I met in Thailand? All of those answers, it seemed to me, were in this book.

  Above all, I felt lifted up by the assurance that this adventure—this new path I had just discovered—was not going to end. I was not just going to be someone who went on vacation. I wasn’t going to take a temporary break. Travel was going to become my identity—it was going to become who I was and what I lived for.

  I was going to be a nomad.

  3

  The Pressures of Home

  Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

  —H. JACKSON BROWN’S MOTHER

  THE DECISION TO BLOW UP your life as you know it is often met by the people around you in a few different ways.

  While all I’d done by this point was buy a guidebook, that guidebook was an ironclad commitment. Buying it, packing it in my suitcase, and taking it home cemented my decision to become a nomad. I was too stubborn to change my mind. Breaking that promise to myself was not an option. Thailand had changed me, and there was no going back. I knew this to my core.

  Even still, it took me weeks to work up the courage to tell my friends and family. I sat on the idea, unsure what they would say and how they would react. We crave the approval of the people important in our lives, after all, and when it doesn’t come in our moments of greatest vulnerability, it can be crushing.

  Would they encourage me and help me slay the negativity in my mind?

  Or would they add to it?

  It wasn’t that I was wavering—it was just that I needed a little help, a little reassurance, a little, “I wish I had done that when I was your age. Godspeed.”

  I decided to tell my boss first.

  He was a bald, heavyset, affable guy with a love for cooking and wine, who always encouraged me to strive for more. I figured he would be the most understanding and encouraging. And I owed it to him to give him plenty of time to find a replacement.

  I was nervous about it. I had just transferred into this new role a few months ago and I felt like I was bailing on him, but once I walked into his office, shut the door, and sat down, I found the courage to lay it all out there. I told him about how ever since my Costa Rica trip I couldn’t stop thinking about traveling. I told him about meeting my new Canadian and Belgian friends and how I knew from talking with them that I had to travel around the world before I started my career. And I told him that whatever career that might end up being, it wouldn’t be in health care.

  He leaned back in his large leather chair and gave me a dissatisfied look.

  “You’ve only been here eight months, Matt. It’s hard to find a new person, especially someone good. I think there’s a future for you in health care.”

  As he spoke, I heard a mix of anger, sadness, and disappointment in his voice. He had taken to being my mentor, giving me more and more important tasks, letting me manage one of the training programs he was responsible for, and coaching me into adulthood. It wasn’t simply that he’d have to go to the effort of replacing me—I really think he believed I had a future there.

  “I won’t leave right away,” I replied. “I’ll stay until July, finish my MBA, and then leave for my trip. That will give you six months to find a replacement.”

  “I had always seen you as a potential hospital executive or CEO one day.”

  It was flattering, if not also totally manipulative. Not a lot of entry-level employees get that sort of vote of confidence from their boss, assuming he really meant it. I choose to think he did. And what did it mean if I was right? A million-dollar-a-year salary. A big office. A staff. Fancy dinners. Attractive things. But would I bet my future happiness that they were really on the table? And would I want to spend the next twenty-five to thirty years of my life getting there?

  I remembered my elsewhere. And I remembered the guidebook sitting in my desk.

  “I appreciate it,” I told him. “But I know this is the right thing for me right now. And the timing is perfect.”

  He sat there in silence, his face lost in thought as he processed the information. I grew more nervous as each second on the clock ticked by.

  He rubbed his head and sighed.

  “Okay, I’ll talk to the office manager and we’ll start looking for your replacement. I’ll miss you. But if you feel this is right, I think you should do it.”

  It was a hard conversation, but as I walked out, I realized that it went about as well as I could’ve hoped. He appreciated me enough to push me to stay; he understood me enough to accept that I wouldn’t.

  My parents? They were not as understanding.

  “YOU ARE GOING TO WHAT?” they screamed in unison as I broke the news over dinner.

  “Think this over a little more. What about your job? School? What will you do for the future?” said my mom.

  “It’s too late. I already quit my job.”

  “When did you do that?”

  “Last week,” I said.

  They were dumbfounded.

  “Well, that was stupid,” my dad said sternly. “Unquit it.”

  “I don’t think it works that way, Dad.”

  “Why can’t you just go to Europe like a normal person? What about safety? What about money? How will you stay in touch? Where are you going to go?” my mom continued, reciting every question I asked myself as I listened to my Canadian friends in Thailand describe their lives on the road.

  “Mom, I’m going to Europe. I’m also just going to all these other places, too. I met lots of travelers
when I was in Thailand. They were fine.”

  Their list of concerns could have filled a library.

  They were certain I was setting off toward certain death. They listed every natural disaster and political uprising they could think of. They reeled off facts about earthquakes and terrorists and coups like they were reading a deck of Trivial Pursuit cards designed to frighten children. But I held fast. I told them I loved them, that I would be fine, and that I would be sure to call them regularly from the road.

  As for my friends, I imagined them taking this news incredibly well. That I’d share news of this amazing adventure and be bombarded with congratulations and admiration. “This guy,” they would tell people, “he’s off on an adventure of a lifetime.” For once, I’d be the one who was envied.

  But that was just a movie in my head. It was wish fulfillment. I hoped that doing something crazy would make me the most interesting man in the room. Instead, I learned that no one becomes interesting in a day. Being interesting is a quality you build up over the course of your experiences—not a quality you get by planning to have experiences.

  Contrary to the movie in my head, my friends generally shrugged. “Oh, cool,” was the general reply—and then they’d move on. I don’t think they knew what to say. There was no frame of reference to point to. No friend, TV personality, celebrity, or social media star where they could say “Oh, just like so and so.” What I was doing was so out of the norm—so far from their bubble—that the best reaction was indifference.

  But their indifference hurt me more than my parents’ outrage. I wanted to talk about this amazing life change I was planning, but everyone was more caught up in their own lives. No one wanted to hear about my planning, worries, itineraries, or my must-see list. If anything, they thought I was crazy for leaving a good job, wasting a new MBA and leaving with lots of new debt.

  I learned that being interesting would be harder than making a single dramatic decision. More than that, there’s a paradox about being “interesting.” Just as confident people don’t talk about how confident they are, and funny people don’t tell you how hilarious they are, being interesting is not something interesting people aspire to. I’ve met my share of interesting people on the road—starting in that cooking class in Thailand—and what I thought of them was not something they were actively striving to cultivate. Rather, being interesting was a quality they carried with them; it was part of who they were, a character trait. It came out in the stories they told, in the way they carried themselves, in the confidence from pursuing a passion whether or not other people gave a damn.

  Interesting people aren’t interested in being interesting. They’re deeply interested in some part of the world around them—in learning karate, or in brewing the perfect cup of coffee, or in watercolor painting, or in travel—and that passion rubs off on the people around them. Whatever it is, pursuing that passion weighs more heavily for them than, say, impressing friends or looking cool at parties.

  * * *

  SOCIETY USES SCRIPTS—PATTERNS OF action stored in our cultural memory—to make sense of the stories of our lives. We all understand, “I’m going off to college,” or “I’m going on vacation”—those are culturally sanctioned ways of leaving your home. In the Middle Ages, the scripts were different—maybe “I’m going on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land”—but they served the same function. Pilgrims were recognizable figures. It’s not necessarily that everyone knew one—but everyone knew about them, had read stories of them and seen depictions of them. They demonstrated what travel looked like; talking about them was a way of talking about what it meant to leave home.

  But we can only fit so many of these scripts, these models of travel, into our heads at any given time. When we hear about a kind of travel that doesn’t fit into them, it’s as if we can’t imagine it. We can’t conceive of such a thing. Imagine using a time machine to teleport back to medieval England, strolling into the nearest marketplace, and announcing: “This summer, after everyone is done planting the crops, I am going to ‘vacate’ this town. I am going to borrow an oxcart and travel several hundred miles to the coast. When I get there, I am going to spread out a piece of fabric on the sand and sit on it. I will bring along a cask of ale to drink, and maybe I will hire a minstrel to sing me tales of great deeds while I am sitting on the sand on my piece of fabric. I am going to do this for two weeks. After that, my period of ‘vacation’ will be over, and I will reluctantly travel home.”

  I’m pretty sure the response to that would sound a lot like my parents’ response to me: “YOU ARE GOING TO WHAT?”

  I’d probably get burned at the stake.

  That’s how our mental scripts work. Only certain kinds of activities—travel, in this case—are allowed to fit into them. The rest are, by definition, crazy.

  The problem is that, when I broke my news to the people close to me, there wasn’t really a common script in 2004 for “I’m quitting my job to travel around the world.” Of course, people did it. People had been doing it for centuries. Hippies popularized it to a degree. The Hippie Trail extended from Europe to India and beyond to Southeast Asia. But not enough people did what I was planning to do to make it an easily recognizable pattern in modern middle-class America. My friends didn’t say much about my plans because they didn’t know how to think about what I was doing. And it seems that some people, like my parents, reacted so negatively because I sounded like a crazy person.

  My coworkers were no better. They too thought I was nuts.

  “Why are you quitting your job? That’s rash.”

  “The world isn’t safe. Don’t you read the news? Terrorists are everywhere!”

  “What are you running away from that you’re going to travel for so long?”

  “You’re an idiot for giving up a good job.”

  “You just finished school. What about your new degree? How are you going to pay for things?”

  “I wish I could do that. It must be nice to not have any responsibility,” they’d say sarcastically.

  The list of criticisms from all quarters of my life went on and on, pretty much all the way up until it was time to leave. On some level, I could understand all the fear and confusion surrounding my decision. News organizations paint the world as a scary place with criminals and terrorists lurking around every corner. If it bleeds, it leads, right? Movies make you think you’re going to be taken into sex slavery if you travel abroad. Every time my departure came up in conversation, my parents would express concern that I’d be kidnapped or end up on the nightly news another victim of a crime filled world.

  Like so many others in America, they were convinced the world outside our borders was falling apart. Pictures of riots in foreign streets, threats against Americans, and general violence are some of the dominant images we see of the rest of the world. We are sent a fairly clear message, even if it is never spelled out directly: “The world is unsafe. Stay here.”

  Bombarded by this for decades, Americans, for the most part, think this myth is reality. They assume that citizens of other countries are uniformly hostile to us. “No one likes us out there,” people, who had never been “there”, would tell me. The myth of a fundamentally frightening world is only reinforced by a culture that doesn’t put an emphasis on learning about the world. We don’t study languages in school, history classes get cut or crammed into a year (“Here, let’s learn the entire history of the world in eight months”), and we avoid overseas programs in college. The media doesn’t focus on the world unless it relates to something bad, and our politicians don’t seem to do much to encourage a more global view.

  For most of our history, Americans’ mental geography has been defined by the two oceans that separate us from the Old World. We’ve been taught to think of ourselves as secure and self-sufficient in our own hemisphere, a gigantic island unto ourselves. “Over there,” generations of Americans were taught, meant decadence or sin or barbarism—or, at any rate, something very unwholesome.

  Why
would anyone travel overseas under these conditions? was the conventional wisdom. Need beaches? Head to Florida. The tropics? Hawaii. Desert? Arizona. Cold tundra? Alaska. Temperate forests? Washington. Americans simply don’t see the need to go anywhere else when they can do it all in their own country. The result of all of this is that Americans may have a vacation culture, but we do not have a travel culture.

  While I understood that on an intellectual level, butting against that headfirst was still an extremely deflating experience. To learn that the people whose approval I coveted most were so strongly against my plans took some of the wind out of my sails. When you crave the support of family and friends, and all they give you are reasons why you shouldn’t do what you desperately want to do, it hurts. It’s hard to stay strong when they dismiss your goals and dreams. And part of me thought that this was my fault—my fault for making a bad decision, or my fault for doing such a bad job of explaining how my life had gotten to the point where such a drastic decision seemed like the only way to find happiness.

  So I kept the hurt inside. For the rest of the time leading up to my departure, my trip was like Lord Voldemort. It was “the thing that can’t be named.”

  * * *

  OVER THE YEARS, as blogging and social media have taken off, more and more people have started to travel the world and become semi-permanent nomads. Younger people, weaned on a diet of a global internet, travel more and to farther places. As the internet has allowed people to work remotely, and the term digital nomad entered our lexicon, it’s less weird to quit your job to travel the world. To young kids today, it’s more “Ohh, you’re traveling like that blogger Nomadic Matt? Cool! I hope to do that too” than “You’re crazy!” Even retirees are doing it more. I’ve seen a lot of “grey nomads” around the world. Long term travel isn’t as crazy an idea as it used to be.

  But, with no blogs or forums around in those halcyon presocial media days of 2005 to cheer me on, I had to find the mental courage to do it myself.