Traveling the World

Someone asked me a question tonight that is stuck in my head: “What do you REALLY want to do with the rest of your life?” It’s a question I’ve heard before, and one I’ve contemplated often, but it wasn’t until this specific person asked me that question that I really stopped and went, “crap.. what DO I want?”

I always looked at other people and thought: “It’s a shame that these people aren’t living their lives the way they want to. Most people get stuck in a place they don’t want to be because life kinda screwed them over, or they just happened to be in this situation.” But, now I’m coming to realize that for many people, it’s not their fault, but rather that life is just so long for humans that we don’t know what to do with all the time.

There are many things I want in life, and one of those things is money to be comfortable. The barrier to satisfying that is that the only things I see myself doing either don’t make much money, or requires me to give up other ideas to attain it (being a teacher vs running my own business). If I were to go back to being a teacher, I could maintain the easy lifestyle I have, but at some point you look at your life and go, I’m being lazy and not living up to my potential. Or rather, do other people say these things about you out of jealousy instead of shame/embarrassment?

Sometimes I agree that I’m being lazy. I think there are other people who are much more ambitious and who make a lot more money, but at the same time, they wish they could live in other countries and travel like I have. Looking at it from my eyes though, these people have good jobs that pay well and those jobs are most likely part of a career path with benefits and promotions. Teaching has none of that, and the pay isn’t all too good. I have only a little bit of experience running a business, but no engineering degree, business degree, culinary arts training.. my point is, I have no career skills (and I really have no desire to go back to school as a student). All I know how to do is dream big, teach English/Psychology, and travel.

If my only ambition in life was to marry a Chinese girl, have one or two mixed blood babies, and teach English and life a calm, peaceful lifestyle, then I’d be super happy. Those aren’t my goals. I’d love to have my own business, and I keep a list with all my ideas in it, but none of them are ones that I can attain at this stage of my life (be it that I don’t have the skillset to begin, or the money to hire someone to do it for me). I love writing and am working on my book, but being a life-long writer (and a well-paid, famous, prolific one at that) is very difficult to attain). Running a charity and traveling the world helping undeveloped/underdeveloped/developing countries sounds amazing too, but again you need money (in these times, getting money from strangers for anything is next to impossible).

Now, getting down to the nitty gritty, if you need money to help those in need (start a charity), and you can show people from around the world those people you want to help (funding the charity), then all you would need to do is start an adventure travel company (have your own business) revolving around the countries you want to help (make money and help people at the same time, booyah!)

Here comes the hard part: you need money to do it, so this isn’t a short-term goal. The short-term goal is to make money and save it. How I do that is what I’m working on now, be it through writing novels, or teaching English, or starting a pizza restaurant.