The Story of My Life - Age 17

The East Asian Odyssey

“Simplify, simplify, simplify.” -Henry David Thoreau

I had assembled a 60 page document of my favorite quotes, and I took Thoreau’s words in particular to heart.  I began eliminating every distraction until I had hours a day to stare at the wall and think about how to find a reason to live, but instead found an increasing awareness that I did not have one. At the time, a friend of mine underwent a similar disillusionment. In our calls I tried to encourage him only to find him slipping deeper into physical isolation and videogames as a refuge. He had an entire apartment to himself, something the people I met in the Dominican Republic perhaps would never experience, yet he appeared to feel far worse. Materialism and unshared comforts seemed the enemy of joy and connection.

At some point as I spent my usual hours sitting cross legged before my blank wall, these decisions emerged, and I leapt to my feet. F*ck it. If I’m going to die from despair it’ll be like Icharus flying too close to the sun, not from drifting down into the Marianas trench. It became a race to find a new purpose or to keep escalating more wild attempts at feeling alive until it killed me. I decided that meaning was found in movement.

Hanging out with Buddhists seemed as good a place as any to start, so I found a $600 round trip to Singapore with half a year between departure and return. Since I started working at the age of ten, when my friends ate out, I would hope for leftovers to scrape off of their plates or else skip the meal in order to save in preparation for a moment exactly like this. I didn’t know what the moment would be, but I knew I had to be ready.

Over the last year I had synthesized my notebooks into a variety of themes and distilled the stories into one main lesson: the most important thing in life isn’t a thing at all, it’s relationships.

So naturally, I decided to remove myself from everyone and everything I had ever known and wander on the other side of the world. Cartesian reasoning and first principles appealed to me, and I wondered if I might discover my identity by converting every constant from my life into a variable until the only constant remaining was myself. Big surprise, this only accentuated my sense of derealization.

During my wandering, whether street performing in Hong Kong (juggling compilation video) for cash after going hungry for a couple days or blacking out drunk in Korea before somehow waking up in Japan, my theories shifted to focus more on community and belonging. My writing morphed to indicate that meaning only exists in the filaments between nodes in the human network and the material world serves as nothing more than a medium for relationships, and therefore policies and actions should only be chosen in terms of how it builds healthier relationships between people.

Wearing samurai armor in Japan

Perhaps removing myself from every consistent relationship contributed to this focus. I had never felt this lack as viscerally as when I wandered through Japan. Whether the day consisted of romantic excursions, miserable times spent sick and alone, or wandering through a city populated with tame deer, by the time my head hit the pillow in whatever hostel I stayed in, it might as well have never happened. Everything felt like a dream, and the tiny scientist in the study room behind my eyes took over a greater proportion of my week until the moments when I felt present in my body became rare glimpses of reality. I became a videogame character to propel around the map. But it was better to be an NPC afflicted with the dull ache of nihilism than a person dunked into a despair with no answer in sight beyond the hope of one day rediscovering hope.

In the moments when I sat still, I felt that I wanted to find a cause worth dying for so I could have an excuse to get it over with already. I tried not to have any minutes where I stayed still.

"Where you from?" 

"Israel."

"Oh, nice! How much longer are you in Japan for?"

"We leave in 6 hours to Cebu."

"Really? Me, too! I bought a flight this morning."

"Want to go together? We're gonna go swimming with whale sharks!"

Ten hours after that ten second conversation with two Israeli girls on military leave in a karaoke bar in Osaka, we were swimming with whale sharks together in the Philippines. A few days later I watched thousands of lanterns rise into the air like a man-made constellation of fire in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I lived the life that so many people dream of with wild adventures, total freedom, and even a beautiful girlfriend who I met along the way. It may have been the best weeks of my life or the most miserable, but best of all, I had no time to rest and figure it out. By the time I hit Vietnam, nothing mattered to me and the scientist was cackling and dancing a manic jig in the ruins of my mind. I had arrived in Asia with the vague intention of hanging out with monks and instead ended up learning how to get wasted with random Germans. In all this time, there was one person who I talked with regularly. When she had told me about her mother dying, unlike all the other times I had heard similar stories, I broke out of my dissociative disorder and felt a sense of empathy. She became perhaps the first person who I ever opened up to. When we reunited in Singapore, I felt content in her presence in a way that I had forgotten was possible. I had never felt as close with anyone before, and I began to feel my need to hide melt away. I told her about my two-week "girlfriend" who I had met along the way. She told me that she hadn't hurt that bad since her mother died. I returned to the USA realizing that I had fallen in love for the first time. I decided to not do that again.

Thankfully, upon returning to LA I spent time recuperating with my uncle, aunt, and little cousins. I spent the days recovering from intense burnout and talking with them and wrestling with my cousins. A friend who manages the Caio Terra Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Association messaged me saying I had a place to stay one morning, so I booked the next bus to San Jose and spent the subsequent week eating spaghetti and training BJJ. I had chatted with someone on the plane ride to the west coast half a year ago, and he remembered me when I messaged him and invited me to visit his office in Silicon Valley. On the uber ride (the only purchase I made during my whole two weeks in California after buying one taco and seeing the receipt for $14 and deciding buying things in California wasn’t worth it. Except for pasta sauce. I’m pretty sure the place I stayed already had pasta but I had to buy pasta sauce) out of the high-tech office, the Uber driver asked “hey, do you know what this beeping sound on my phone means?” I told him that it meant someone was asking to be picked up. “Oh, thanks. Can you show me how to do that? I don’t use phones much. I prefer backpacking in the wild in places like Yosemite.”

“Oh really? I’m a backpacker, too, and been meaning to visit Yosemite.”

“Oh yeah? Let me write down your email and maybe we can go sometime.”

A couple days later I received an email saying he could pick me up in ten minutes if I felt like going. That’s when my fifteen minute uber drive turned into three day road trip. Before arriving to Yosemite, I felt like I never felt the desire to travel again. But as I munched on a bologna sandwich on top of a mountain with an eagle soaring through the valley below us, I felt rejuvenated. 

With the welcome of my family, the invitation from a friend, and time in the mountains, I began to find some healing.