Here we go

Peace out

Today is my 59th birthday. It’s also my last day of work. I don’t remember a time in my life where I didn’t have a job of some kind beginning with car washes and cutting lawns as a boy, delivering the newspaper for years during junior high and high school, and working in restaurants and hotels during college. Eventually I discovered the creative life and worked my way into the professional photography business as a young man where I traveled the country as a photo assistant lugging cases, setting up cameras and lighting, and gaffer-taping the heck out of everything before spectacularly failing when I briefly tried to go out on my own.

I finally found my calling as a graphic designer after returning to art school in my mid-20s. This began a career as a designer, art director, creative director, and finally finishing as the creative leader for an entire publishing division at Deloitte, the largest professional services company in the world. I worked at Big D for 24 years leading teams, large and small, in the mission to publish the best thought leadership in the business. It has been an unlikely journey because while I do have a highly developed and natural sense of space and composition, my real talent is flapping my gums. I always thought I would have been a good lawyer. Others have told me I missed my calling as a salesman.

As of today, I am retired.

This is simultaneously liberating and terrifying. I have managed to convince my 53-year-old wife, Chien, to join me. She’s giving up a 10-year career as a burn unit nurse. But we have planned for years to do this—at least since Covid. We saved and invested and then we cashed out this month. We sold the house, the car, and all the furniture, and we gave away everything else. In just a couple of days we will leave on a journey that will take us around the globe as fulltime travelers. We joke that we are both unemployed and homeless. Ha. Not funny. Rather serious, actually.

When we started telling people what we were about to do we received a lot of different kinds of responses—all of them understandable. It became clear that whatever thing that someone would most miss if they were in our shoes became the thing projected onto us as doubt. “Won’t you miss your house? Won’t you miss your career? Won’t you miss your family, your friends, your coworkers? How can you just give away your stuff?  What are you going to do with yourself, you’re so young? Did you win the lottery? Isn’t travelling expensive? Do they have good healthcare in ______?”

What I can tell you is that we value our time and our health more than making more money at this point in life. While we have the strength to carry backpacks around the globe we’re going to do it. We want to spend weeks at a time in places and live like the locals. We’re looking for a new perspective, one where time slows down a bit, and the competitive nature of hyper-capitalism—that feeling of being whipped about at the end of the tail—is replaced with purpose, intention, and at least the illusion of more control of our time.

The American lifestyle is a wonderful thing. It has afforded us the resources to go on this adventure. The education system has afforded us the critical thinking skills to figure out HOW to do it. It has provided us with a lot of luxuries: careers that matter, a nice house, a nice car, Apple technology, retirement savings, health insurance, annual vacations, uncountable bottles of fine wine, and great meals both at home and in the county’s top restaurants. We have amazing neighbors, and our friends are the nicest, kindest people that we could ask for, and our families will be far away. Who willingly gives that up?

But we’ve also heard from so many people that we are brave. We are bold. We are doing what others can only dream of doing. That were it not for X, it could also be done by them, too. And this makes me wonder if many of you feel like we do. Are you struggling with the feeling that time is running short? That health is a gift. And that nobody avoids the ultimate fate.

Letsbeenthere.com will be my platform for sharing our experience, so at a minimum there can be vicarious journeys. When Chien and I are watching YouTube, or a movie, and we see a place in the world we’ve already been to, we give ourselves a little high-five and say, “Been there!” Thus, our desire to add more places to that list, to truly be somewhere, not just go there, experiencing the people, the food, the art, and the culture of some place we’ve always dreamed of sensing in real time. Together, let’s “been there.”

I will write about what it feels like to do this, sharing the challenges and the difficulties, as well as those moments that are profound and enriching. I’m not exaggerating when I write that dozens of you have asked me to write this blog, and I am thankful for the purpose and structure that it will bring to my life. I hope you’ll follow along as I post each week.

Here we go.