I Quit My Job and Traveled the World… Best and Worst Decision I Ever Made

A little over a year ago I had just submitted and published an article with Elite Daily called, “6 Reasons Why Not Quitting Your Job to Travel the World is a Waste of Your Life”. At the time I was living in Melbourne, Australia in a little beach town called St. Kilda. I was making new friends from all over the world and having the time of my life. Everything I put in that article I truly believed at the time.

Well, that article went viral, at an unprecedented and totally ridiculous pace, to the point where within a week of it’s posting it had garnered over 1 million views and 160K likes and shares. It was my third or fourth article with Elite at the time, none of which had even broken the thousand likes mark, let alone 100’s of thousands. I was flooded with emails from people all over the world telling me how inspiring I was and what a great moment and push it was for them. It was incredible that something so simple could impact so many people.

Flash forward a year. I’m back home in the U.S. Nashville specifically, and all those things I wanted to change with travel have now returned to normal. I’m back to doing what I did before I left, I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up (I’m 28, but still barely an adult) and I found now that I’ve traveled and come home, I’m even more confused and depressed than I was when I was inspired to drop everything in the first place.

This is a pretty common story from people who have decided to drop everything and leave, especially if they don’t have a plan past that initial “drop everything” part. I thought the hardest part about moving and seeing the world would be letting go of the reality I knew. In fact that’s the easy part, the hard part is if you don’t have a plan and you return to square one, with fantastic friends and memories that seem like another life, but you know you lived. I don’t think anyone should treat life as, you work, you pay rent, you die. But when you’ve traveled and garnered stories and life lessons and then you return to the monotony of “normal life”, those things that once seemed like walls are now prison cells.

I’m currently in the process of digging myself out of post-travel depression, and I’ve been back for almost six months. I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, I’m starting to realize that having a career doesn’t mean resigning to monotony, it means taking a step. I’m starting to understand that really all we can do in life is keep moving forward, keep garnering experiences and until we find what we love and what inspires us, sometimes we just need to pay the bills in the meantime. This doesn’t mean settle, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bother traveling or making a drastic change in your life, it just means I’ve learned something very important. Doing something drastic will not change you, it will not help you find what your calling is, taking charge of your life and your dreams is the only way to do that.

Really what traveling taught me is that you can find just as much inspiration from a shitty desk job in Iowa as you can from a waterfall in Thailand. I was looking, but I wasn’t seeing. Until you open your eyes to the world and truly determine to find your passion, it doesn’t matter where you go or what cool pictures you Instagram. Finding your calling has nothing to do with a destination, but everything to do with the journey, wherever that might take you.