My mom likes to ask me, “But what do you want to do with your life?”
Which I hate, because no matter what I say, neither of us really believes my answer. There isn’t an answer that ticks a single, “holistic” box. There’s an answer that ticks many boxes, almost none of which have anything to do with getting a “good job” and “making money” and owning a “nice house” and [insert classic Americana here]. I’ve always, and I mean it—always, felt like I was just out of place in everyday society.
My boxes include any of the things that you’d catch Indiana Jones doing.
I remember one day, when I was motorcycling through Kanchanaburi in Thailand, a friend and I walked across a stilted railroad scaffold in the jungle because we heard we could find a cave halfway down the scaffold. Was the train line running that day? We didn’t know. But we parked our bikes and balanced our way around a railroad bend, a hundred feet above the jungle floor, and saw the cave: dark and gloomy and a quick jump off the tracks.
We walked to the cave mouth, hopped off the tracks, found a Buddha statue and shrine, plumbed the depths of the cave into darkness so dark I felt like I could actually taste it, then were about to hop back onto the tracks when a train car rumbled around the corner. A long passenger train line passed not 5 feet in front of the cave mouth. My friend and I stood aside and watched the passengers roll by. The passengers looked at us with incredulity. We looked back with smiles.
Had we been on the tracks when the train came around the bend, we may have died. Maybe. Who knows. But we didn’t die. Instead, we felt so elated at the adventure that we half-danced the way across the tracks back to the bikes. I called out, "Indiana Freakin' Jones!"
That’s what ticks my boxes. Dumb, awesome, mundanity-killing quests where the whole point of them is to see what’s out there. And in my twenties and early thirties, I made a career of doing stuff like that: living in Thailand, Liberia, India, Mexico and working in international development program evaluation.
The problem with that lifestyle is that steady jobs with predictable growth and a stable family life simply don’t fit. I wasn’t able to check those boxes and be Indiana Jones. And as I got older, that started to really wear on me. What was once an incredible and unpredictable adventure became a steady routine of uprooting myself and replanting myself in various hemispheres. Loneliness, which at first was impossible in the early days of my international travel, became the norm. And with loneliness came existential dread. And with existential dread came drinking (so cliché, right?). And when I got in a motorcycle accident in Liberia and was prescribed Tramadol, so came a pill habit that lasted a year. And with kratom, even when I was back on US soil with an apartment and a girlfriend and no intent to go off for another yearlong adventure, once I tried Feel Free kratom tonics, I was hooked.
It's like I was using substances not just to help me ignore my loneliness and existential crisis, but to inject the kind of euphoria that I once got from being my own version of Indiana Jones. The high of seeing that train of people pass me by, as they stared in awe and waved at me, is difficult to put into words. It was sublime. It wasn’t normal. It was the very antithesis of “good job” “good money” “good house” that most of my friends and loved ones had (in my mind) settled for.
But once I reached my mid-thirties, I realized that my friends and loved ones hadn’t settled. Not in their eyes. They wanted a good job, with good money, and a good house. That way they could start and provide for a family. And so they did. And the older I got, and the lonelier I became, the more I envied them. I had gone from living a life of pure adventure to living one of uncertainty and restlessness. My blend of dread, loneliness, and envy was (and to some existent still is) a powerful catalyst for seeking easy escapes. Drugs are the easiest escape I ever found. Alcohol, Tramadol, kratom, even cigarettes back in my twenties, all of them became mechanisms for chasing the bad thoughts away.
Despite this, I didn’t change my lifestyle. Not until I reached my late thirties. Because I was still unwilling to “settle.” But I never captured in a bottle that motorcycle ride-train bridge-cave exploration-almost death kind of that lightning I found with ease in my twenties. And that’s because, as I learned over the years, that kind lightning doesn’t exist in bottles (pun very intended). You simply can’t put that kind of thing into a liquid or pill. It just doesn’t work that way
But I want anyone reading this to know what I learned when I stopped using altogether: all that lightning is raging out there on the horizon, waiting for you to go chase it down. It’s still there. Since quitting kratom, I started a business that is by all means changing lives of people for the better. I never thought that would be my life. But here I am. And the existential dread is evaporating. The loneliness? Still there. I don’t go party anymore. I spend most of my time working. But my life has a purpose it was lacking for so long, so it’s tolerable. The envy of other peoples’ lives? Nonexistent.
No matter what you may be struggling with right now, just know that all the lightning you could ever hope to capture is inexhaustible and waiting for you to go get after it. Go be your own Indiana Jones, and don’t worry about trying to check the boxes that don’t fit who you are. Make your own boxes, then check those off. And do that for the rest of your life.
