I took down my gaming PCs permanently today. They have been sitting on my desk, unused and gathering dust for over a year now. They are finally getting taken down because I’m moving out of my bedroom and prepping it as a rental bedroom.

I unplugged all the wires, peripherals and put them in a box, then laid the mouse pad on top. I felt like I was laying them to rest… I was surprised how emotional it all felt especially since I have not touched any of it in over a year. But when I think about it, these gaming computers were a huge part of my life. Gaming took me on a crazy 16 year journey during which I had a ton of fun, I started businesses, got flown out to Prague as an influencer, got my dream job out of college, and learned invaluable life lessons and skills. They were my way to escape reality when I didn’t want to deal with it, for good and for bad.

Now these things are in my closet because I don’t have the heart to sell/donate/recycle them yet, but I know that’s their next destination because I don’t see myself setting them up again.

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The difference between active versus passive living is in whether or not you are the one making the decisions that affect your life or if somebody else is. I think most of us want to have control over our lives and not live passively, however decisions can be extremely difficult to make, especially when there are so many possibilities and choices. It’s a common problem for people living in first world nations. It’s a huge blessing and privilege to have a lot of choices, however it can paralyze us with anxiety as we get stuck analyzing the possible outcomes of all these choices, trying to pick the best one. It’s exhausting, and it defaults us to living passively, having other people or other circumstances in life make choices for us.

This is something that I have been battling ever since I took the reins of my life into my own hands and actively started making choices towards the goals I wanted, instead of wishing and waiting for opportunities to fall into my lap. It has not been easy but here’s what I have learned so far.

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I am sick, for the first time in a long time. I have been doing a lot of business networking lately to try and grow the web development business that I started, shaking a lot of hands, and I guess one of them must have had the flu.

It feels terrible to be suddenly too tired to do anything because I’ve been hustling every day for 3 months since I came back. Each day has been filled with trying to build up the life that I want and now I’m just passing time, stuck in bed with a fever, headache, runny nose, sore throat, the whole gauntlet. But I know the importance of rest and taking care of myself and it’s a good time to reflect on how things have been going so far.

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Last week I attended my very first open mic night. It was a weekly event at a local boba shop/cafe where anybody from the audience could go up and perform. There I met an unlikely somebody who had a surprisingly profound impact on me.

His name is Steven, he must have been no more than 20 years old and by all first impressions, seemed like a shy and nervous person. When the shop owner came around for performance sign ups, he signed up to perform a song. When it got to his turn, he strolled up on stage, told everybody that there wouldn’t be any accompanying music track and it would just be him singing, and he proceeded to deliver his rendition of ‘God Bless the Broken Road’ by Rascal Flats to the sounds of awkward silences. It was bad by all accounts, it was off key and it was clear he did not know how to sing.

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It’s been a while since I wrote about travel. Since I got back from my 6 month backpacking trip, I have been laser focused on building up my crazy new life back home. However I have a massive stash of travel stories I want to share before they fade into distant memories. So picking up from where I left off last time in Krabi, Thailand I headed to Bangkok, Thailand next. This is a look into the 5 days I spent there between December 14th, 2018 to December 19th, 2018.

By the time I got to Bangkok I was exhausted from moving around so much. I wanted a nice and clean place to stay where I could settle down for a few days, work on some personal projects and spend a couple days living ‘normally’ instead of being always on the go as a backpacker. I thought it was funny because I think most people come here to party and enjoy the nightlife in this vibrant city, but all I wanted to do was to slow down and find peace and quiet. Surprisingly I was able to find it here even though Bangkok isn’t normally at the top of people’s minds when they think of a ‘low key’ and quite place to stay.

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So far in my life the only work experiences I’ve had have been working a full time or part time job for somebody else. That changed recently when I voluntarily quit my job to travel for 6 months. Now I’m starting my own web and app development company because I want to work for myself. Here is the story of how I identified that I had this opportunity, took the leap, and how things are going.

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It has now been over a month now since I came back from my big solo backpacking trip and I have firmly adjusted back to living in one place. I like it, I feel like I can work towards my next set of goals from here because it’s a stable platform, instead of when I was bouncing around city to city every few days. However now that I’m planning and executing towards my long term goals, there is something I have realized about myself that scares me a lot: I find myself slipping away from the present again.

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It’s been over three weeks since I’ve come back from my trip and they say that three weeks is the amount of time you need to get a habit going. So I can now say that I’ve successfully implemented some really good daily habits from my travels into my life back home. Some of them even surprise me because I could never have seen myself doing them before.

Also these new habits have become things I take pride in. Every time I do one of these good habits I feel a little spark of joy, a little dopamine rush. This has made it really easy to keep them up, and biologically speaking I think I’ve gotten myself addicted to these new good habits because of that feel good dopamine hit.

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