Bren on The Road

Tag: how to quit your job

  • Solving The Quarter-Life Crisis

    Solving The Quarter-Life Crisis

    “Stay in school,” they said.

    “Just get good grades,” they said.

    “You need to get an education,” they said.

    “Work hard,” they said.

    “It’ll all pay off when you graduate,” they said.

    “You can be anything you want to be,” they said.

    They meant well. And technically they weren’t lying, because they probably all believed it too.

    But technicalities never made anyone feel any better.

    You played the game, just like me. You did those all nighters trying to memorise graphs and buzzwords. Is chapter 6 in the exam? Do we need to study chapter 6?

    You thought you were going places. You thought there was light at the end of that exam tunnel. Oh, those dreams. Such big dreams.

    Then you got to 25 and the dust settled. Holy shit, you said to yourself. There’s no pot of gold here. They were just buttering you up to be mortgage-paying, tie-wearing, tax-paying oompa loompas.

    Say hello to the quarter-life crisis.

    You know why every 25 year old is fucking depressed these days? Because we never got what we were promised. No one jumps through more hoops than a 15 year old. First you learn how to find the angles of a triangle. Then you learn how to translate Hamlet’s gibberish into a 1,500 word essay. Then you learn how to turn x and y into numbers and then back into letters again. And we did it all, just like they told us to. Why? Because good shit was supposed to happen after that.

    “You’ll have everything you ever wanted.”

    “The world will be your oyster after this.”

    “You’ll have the whole world in your hands.”

    The whole world? Really? All I ended up with in my hands was a calculator and a one hour lunch break.

    We were never going to be rockstars. None of us were meant to be rich or famous.

    There’s a sense of entitlement among my generation, but it’s not really their fault. We were raised that way. Parents and teachers and movies and governments said to us every day, “work hard in school and you can become anything you want to be.”

    Why the hell do they say that? It’s a lie. It fucks up our expectations. They teach us not to lie about stealing candy yet it’s okay for them to lie about life.

    Instead, they should be saying “work hard in school and statistically you are most likely to graduate with a bunch of student debt, get a job you don’t like, earn around $39,000 a year, spend 25 years paying off a mortgage for a house that wasn’t your dream home, drive a second hand Corolla and probably have a couple of kids before getting your first divorce.”

    It’s not the best sales pitch. But does it need to be? 100 years ago parents just told their kids “study hard and you’ll get a good job.” What happened to that one? At least it’s the truth.

    Jack Nicholson was just joking you know. We can handle the truth.

    Instead, we all grow up to be bitter and pissed off because we passed all those maths exams and didn’t end up a movie star.

    So here you are. 25 years old, give or take. At the quarter way point, and realising life in the real world isn’t quite what you thought it would be. It’s like a bad practical joke, 25 years in the making. You’re showing all the quarter life crisis signs, neck deep in quarter life crisis depression, Googling for quarter life crisis books to save you. Bad news. Nobody’s coming to save you.

    But here’s the good news.

    You made it. You survived. You got all those pieces of paper and you made it out alive. And you probably learned a few things along the way, like how to find the area of a triangle. By now you’ve probably figured out finding the area of a triangle isn’t essential to happiness, or even getting a job. But it might serve you well at a pub quiz one day.

    But here’s the real good news: You can break out of this. You’re young, you’re able, you’re fit and intelligent. With the right mindset, the quarter life crisis doesn’t stand a chance. Because me and you – we’re going to conquer this quarter life crisis together. Here’s the gameplan.

    How to deal with a quarter life crisis

    1. Start Over

    25 is not the quarter point of your life. It’s the beginning. Conquering your quarter life crisis isn’t about going extreme or living in self pity. It’s about starting over.

    Unlearn.

    Forget everything you were taught about the world.

    A degree? Just an option. Not a necessity.

    Marriage? There’s no such thing as too late. Only too early.

    Buying a house? Only once you’ve travelled the world and decided on a place to call home.

    The first step to solving the quarter life crisis is understanding you have been conditioned to believe what they want you to believe. You’ve been buttered up to be just another noddy. Now, instead of living in this Truman Show, you need to create your own. Understand that reality is whatever you want it to be.

    Unlearn everything. Try and see the world with fresh eyes. Learn to make your own decisions and generate your own ideas. Life begins today.

    2. Go Back To School

    They were right about one thing. You need an education.

    You need to learn, and you know nothing right now. Life has just begun, remember? So ask yourself, what do you want to learn? I know for damn sure it’s not trigonometry or algebra, so what is it?

    Maybe it’s the guitar, or painting, or dance, or sailing. Maybe it’s cooking or boxing. Only you know. School isn’t going to suck this time around. You’re going to be chasing a passion, you’re going to be hungry to learn.

    Nobody can force you to study periodic tables while dangling a carrot of fame and riches in front of you now.

    “Young man, you better learn that K is potassium or you’re never going to the job of your dreams!”

    Bitch please.

    Ain’t no periodic tables in my dreams.

    You decide when to show up. You choose the subjects. You’ll like school this time.

    Decide What You Want

    What do you want to be when you grow up?

    The best question you’ve ever been asked. Too bad it gets asked when you’re four years old, and all you want to do is eat ice cream and play with ninja turtles.

    Do you know the best time to ask yourself that question? Right now. When you actually know what it means. When you actually have the chance to do something about it. When you actually know what it takes to get there.

    Do you wanna be famous? A rock star? An A-list actor?

    Go for it. At least you know what it takes now. No more empty promises. You know the struggle, the unlikelihood, and the long journey it’ll require. But this is how to deal with a quarter life crisis. Seeing reality, and venturing out to create your dream anyway.

    Maybe your dream might be one that’s a little easier to attain – maybe a yoga teacher or a world traveller.

    Whatever it is, you know the deal now. You don’t need to pass chemistry to make it happen. Decide what you want and go for it with everything you’ve got.

    Understand there is no normal

    You know what the best part about the status quo is?

    Stomping the shit out of it.

    Think about all the people you look up to, your role models, the people you admire. What do they all have in common?

    I don’t know who your idols are, but I’m going to guess they’re all outliers. Exceptions. There’s nothing normal about them. They stand for something, and they don’t care what others think.

    There’s a handful of people I admire – Mike Tyson, Eddie Huang, Curtis Stone, Anthony Bourdain, Kobe, J Cole, Pharrell, to name a few.

    None of them are normal. That’s why they’re inspirations. None of them sit behind a desk in shirt and tie. None of them wait for their annual leave before they go get their shit done. They all believe in something and they live by those beliefs.

    What about you? Where do you want to go in this life? What do you believe in?

    People tell you normal is having a job you don’t like and mortgage you can’t afford. Blink twice and you’ll see there’s nothing to gain in striving to be normal. Normal is there to serve CEOs, governments, banks and corporates, but not you.

    So what do you want to be? A professional treasure hunter? A ballerina? Awesome.

    Are you afraid that’s not normal?

    Even better.

    The only thing that should be normal in this life is people being exactly who and what they want to be.

    Invest in yourself

    When people talk about investing, they always talk about the stock market or getting yourself a rental property. That’s all good stuff, but there’s an investment vehicle that’s far more important than any other – you.

    You can never, ever go wrong by investing in yourself.

    You will always be you. You will always have this mind and this body. Invest in it. Make it amazing. Upgrade yourself to the top model and then upgrade yourself some more.

    What does that mean?

    It means instead of spending your money on shoes and iPads and your time in front of the television, start spending as much of it as you can on yourself. Take classes every day – dancing, yoga, writing, martial arts. Read books. Eat healthy food. Learn a second (and third and fourth) language. Buy a gym membership. Travel. Take time each day to relax and meditate. Don’t spend your hard-earned cash on superficial junk and don’t spend your time building someone else’s dream. Invest your time and money on building the best possible version of you.

    Fuck everybody else

    I know how it feels. You feel like you’ve been living your life for everybody but yourself. You worry if your friends and family will approve of who you’re dating. You worry what everyone else will think of the outfit you wear to work. You worry what society thinks of your job.

    Worrying what everybody else thinks does nothing but make you miserable. You know why? Because you can’t please everybody in this world.

    Some smart famous guy once said, “I can’t give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.”

    If other people are unhappy, that’s their shit to worry about – not yours. So ask yourself, what do you care about? What would make you happy? Learn to put yourself first. You can worry about everyone else’s feelings later.

    Getting started

    The quarter-life crisis is inward. It’s a personal crisis. Feeling unfulfilled, following a dream that’s not yours, always desiring something or somewhere else – that all begins from the inside. You can only be happy if you do the things that make you happy; you can only do the things that make you happy if you choose to do them. What do you want to be good at? Who do you want to be? What do you want? These are the questions that change your life. Answer them.

    Where to begin? A few places:

    • If you want to travel, my free book and budget travel course is available here.
    • If you’re ready to go back to school, Udemy is a fantastic place to start – like a mini online university, with expert courses on pretty much everything. I’m enrolled in several (aff link).
    • For a toe-dip into self improvement, check out the 4 small things I do each day to try and be more awesome.
    • If you’re stuck in a 9-5, I’d suggest reading this relevant post on how to get the most out of it.
    • Start reading. Some of the best books for a quarter life crisis are on my reading list. Check it out here.
    • If you have any other questions, tweet or email me! I’d love to help.

    Here’s to your second quarter being fu*king amazing.

    Bren

    how to deal with a quarter life crisis
  • The Real Reason I Quit My Job To Travel The World

    The Real Reason I Quit My Job To Travel The World

    Back when I was a young teenager, I remember sitting in the car one morning with my Mum on the way to school. The night before I had just watched an episode of South Park, where the guys were sent a starving child from Ethiopia and then took him to a buffet, but kept stealing his food as he was about to eat it. While obviously just bad comedy, I remember being extremely angry at it, and thinking how incredible it would be to really take one of those starving children to a buffet and let them live in our shoes for a day.

    And so I blurted out to Mum, “One day, I’m going to get really rich and then go and build a village in Africa.”

    I don’t remember exactly what she said in reply, but it was probably along the lines of, “If you study really hard and come first in class, you can build as many villages as you want.”

    You might say, even at that young age, I was already dreaming of adventuring in faraway places.

    Of course those intentions were a little starry-eyed, and today I’d probably say building a village in Africa would just be a wasteful and ego-driven way to blow a bunch of money. But the point of the story has nothing to do with Africa, or villages; it’s simply to say that from my earliest years, I had never once dreamed or aspired to become an accountant.

    Nonetheless, around ten years later there I was, fresh out of university and sitting at a desk in an accounting firm. I had never planned it that way, and still to this day can’t really figure out how it happened; I just ended up taking accounting in high school, studying it at university, applying for a few jobs, and then, like clockwork, I was locked into a three year accounting contract. Funny how life can flash before your eyes like that, even when you’re not dying.

    And so I continued to drift along, following the crowd like I’d always done. Everyone signed that form, so I signed it too. Everyone joined that institute, so I joined it too. I straightened up my tie and cleaned my shoes. I paid my fees. I played the game.

    It was long, painful. Every morning I would wake up and curse relentlessly, starting every day as bitter as they come. But as much as I wanted to, I didn’t give up. My fellow comrades and I trucked along, just like we were supposed to.

    “Just one more year,” they said.

    “It’s all going to pay off,” they said.

    Three years passed slowly but I’d played all my cards right. I studied hard. I passed all the exams. My grades came back and they were “great”. It was seven years of study and tens of thousands of dollars in fees, but my efforts had finally culminated in two words – Chartered Accountant.

    Yet as I watched everyone else celebrate with such glee, I didn’t see many reasons to be happy. I hadn’t really enjoyed my time as an accountant, so I didn’t find a whole lifetime of it as something to be very excited about. I’d been told for years that accounting was an interesting and important career, yet nothing about it seemed very important or interesting to me.

    Before long, many of my colleagues had moved to London or Sydney, where they picked up six-figure salaries with relative ease. The ones that stayed in New Zealand landed jobs as managers and advisors in some of the country’s biggest companies. It wasn’t uncommon for them to be earning over $3,000 a week, and usually for doing a lot less work than we were used to. Here was the payday we had all been working towards, and finally it was sitting there in front of us, waiting to be taken.

    For several months I pondered the idea. London? New York? A fat paycheck and a sexy looking business card? It was extremely tempting.

    But it was different this time. Money didn’t entice me anymore like it did when I was 21. I was at a point where I hated my life and I hated myself, and no amount of money was going to fix that.

    People often ask me, how did you do it? Why did you do it? How did you spend all those years and all that money working for something, just to throw it away in the end?

    People assumed I just hated working, but that wasn’t necessarily true. Others thought I was just lazy. Others thought I was simply proving a point. But it was none of that.

    Instead, it was a deep-seated unhappiness, a result of spending my whole life working so hard for things I had never wanted in the first place. People used to ask me what I did, and when I had to answer “I’m an accountant”, I felt ashamed of myself. And not because there is any shame in being an accountant, or because accountants are to be looked down upon; in fact, it is considered one of the more prestigious careers in my country. It was merely because an accountant was never what I wanted to be, and that was never the life I had envisioned for myself. Each day I would stare out the window and dream of living a different life; studying Spanish in Spain, exploring my ancestry in China, volunteering in rural Africa, backpacking through South America and Southeast Asia. To say I was an accountant only upset me, because it told me that I did not have the resolve, and was too afraid, to chase after the life that I truly wanted. I was a dreamer; someone who talks big and walks small. I was that guy. And I knew if that was always how I saw myself, there was no chance of me ever being happy.

    So, after 1,165 days working as an accountant, I quit.

    It was a strange feeling at first. I felt so…free. I thought back to when I first started working, in particular to a distinct memory I had of buying some gear online for my computer. At that time, I was barely two weeks into the job, and I had wanted to go pick my stuff up from the shop warehouse. However, I couldn’t go during the week because of work, as the shop closed at 6pm, nor could I go on the weekend because the shop was only open on Saturday morning and I had sport. The sudden feeling of paralysis hit me like a brick. I felt so suffocated; shocked at the realisation that someone now had so much control over my time that I couldn’t even pick up my own shopping.

    And now, I had too much time. Where should I go? What should I do? Options were literally endless, and all that seemed to do was spurn hundreds of ideas that collided with each other. Overwhelmed, I spent a month vegetating at home, but eventually managed to pull my plans together and set out on the journey I had been dreaming of.

    First stop: Kilimanjaro.

    Fast forward three years and all those Monday morning dreams I had have come true: I’ve studied Spanish in Spain, lived for a year in China, taught for six months in Africa, backpacked South America and Southeast Asia and so much more. All the things I had so longingly lusted for in that office cubicle, each of which had seemed like highly improbable fantasies at the time, became realities, and each of them were just as fascinating and fulfilling as I had imagined them to be. It seems that dreams, no matter how extravagant, do come true, and sometimes they are much, much closer than you think.

    These days, my old life is a distant memory. Sometimes I actually look back and find it hard to believe those years ever really happened at all. They just replay in my mind like a movie I once watched, or a dream from years before. Three years in the office is just one big blur, but three years on the road has blessed me with enough memories to fill several lifetimes. I can finally say with honesty: if I died today, I would have very few regrets at all.

    People ask me all the time about my future plans, and to be honest, I don’t have too many. In terms of money, I don’t need a lot; between life as a blogger, some side projects, my freelance gigs, my savings, and the investments I made during my working years, I make enough to live quite comfortably in many different countries. I live a much simpler life than I did before, and spend far less than I used to; at my old job I used to pay $13 a day just to park my car. That amount alone is enough to get by each day in many of my favourite cities around the world.

    And then, people often ask me if I ever regret my decision. Do I miss the office life, the routine, the putting on my suit and tie each morning? And the answer is, shockling, yes. Sometimes I do. Travel is not always the glamorous lifestyle it appears to be, and sometimes, you miss the familiarity of a routine and a community. But not once have I regretted setting out to fulfill my travel dreams. Exploring the world has been a truly priceless experience, completely my own, and totally irreplaceable.

    Try to remember that life is to be enjoyed, and we usually make a habit of taking it a little too seriously. As long as you have food to eat, clothes on your back, and a roof over your head, the only thing missing from your happiness is fulfillment. Forget the shiny life you are sold on television. What do you enjoy? What makes you happy? Start chasing that today, because waiting is a fool’s game. Sooner or later, the day will come where you don’t wake up, and none of us know when that might happen. It may be today, or 50 years from now, but either way your tomorrows are numbered.

    How are you going to spend them?