story of a nomadic traveller | goodbye before hello

2 | must reads

The same meals, conversations, pubs, women, routines, thoughts—it all became unbearable.

   As a young man with an active mind, the rinse and repeat of working nine to five, living for the weekend, began to make my life feel empty. I existed in a dazed state, a constant interplay between heavy binge drink comedowns followed by the pursuit of enough nourishment and hydration to go on through long days. Long days where the pain of monotony consumed my being like fog.

   But towards what, exactly? This question began to rattle around my skull like a pebble in a tin can. I think most people are conditioned by social constructs and exist in habitual cycles. I was one of these people. I am still one of these people, it’s just the habits changed. But I was also young then and understood the world was right in front of me. I believe risks are better taken earlier than later. But I also saw the friends I knew cashing in on laboured careers and mortgage payments. This felt conflicting, premature decision making was also, apparently, a more secure approach to life.

   It’s wild that the brain doesn’t fully begin to mature until your mid-twenties. Because by then most people have bedded into a lifestyle of responsibility without spending more than a few weeks living in another culture, doing things outside of the common things they were born into. Too few people I knew back then wanted to know what was out there, beyond our common horizon and weekly routines. This felt like a form of mental illness or complacency to me. If honest, it turned my stomach. I don’t know why exactly, but it kind of made me feel sick to hear the same expressions all day, see the same characters go to the same places in mobs formed at school.

   I don’t know, maybe some people are just lucky, born into what they will call home for all of it. Maybe my own unrest was the problem? Seeking something else without knowing what that something is, this can be dangerous. I probably have something going on upstairs that belongs to a trauma in my childhood. Who the hell knows. I’ll tell you one thing; governments and policy makers are about as sneaky as it comes. Get us all consumed by debt, committed to clocking in long before we have had a chance to mature, develop into adulthood and consider another way of living. Sneaky fucks. The industrial age has a lot to answer for, that’s all I’m saying. The structure of classrooms at schools, clocking in each day, sitting in rows, facing the front. Schooling was redefined during the industrial age and is structured on factory lines. That doesn’t sit right with me. The rote memory, mirroring of rigid structures in industrial workplaces, it’s all meant for efficiency and conformity. We are literally forced to conform and be complicit in schools. Think about that.