Thursday 5 December 2013

Jumping Overboard the Proverbial Boat

I thought I would start a new separate blog from my Restless Development one. This one will be used as my travel journal as well as to type my current thoughts.  

I am currently reading 'Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel' by Rolf Potts which touches upon something I have said for a long time, and something that I have been yearning to do for a long time too - which is to travel the world. Here are a couple of quotes that sum up some of my motives:


"The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we're too poor to buy our freedom." 


"...we end up spending the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it."


So essentially, I want to value my time on this beautiful blue planet more than I do currency. Ever since I left school, I have been working one tedious job after another just so I can earn the scraps of some wealthy people. And what do I do with the leftovers that I earn? I piss it all away just for some temporary enlightenment; spend it on "luxurious" wants, and occasional needs, just to keep me happy for short bursts of time. I was becoming a consumerist drone. And a depressed one at that.  


Shit. Eat. Work. Sleep. Rinse and repeat. I find routine so fucking boring that the conventional way of living (in a capitalist western world anyway) just isn't for me. "But Terry," people say to me, "We're all on the same boat here. You just have to tough it out like the rest of us." As if I should find solace in the fact that everyone else is just as miserable as me. No. That's not good enough for me. I can never be content with being on the same boat as everyone else. I'm going to jump of that boat and sail my own in to the horizon and be happy.