Burnt Out and Loving It
Why I quit my career to live life
I was living in Singapore for almost 5 years when I decided enough was enough. Single, overweight, a heavy smoker and drinker; life just started becoming less and less like what I wanted it to be.
Living Large
I had put on 35 kg in almost pure fat by the time the 4th year had finished. Stairs were getting hard, walking long distances (always an enjoyable hobby of mine) meant a complete drenching in sweat. Hell, even walking 10 minutes outside could often mean a soaked shirt and drenched hair. I liked to joke that these incidents¹ were my sweat showers whenever co-workers would point out the obvious.²
A typical night out, which became more and more frequent, involved heading either to a local hawker³ for several hours of cheap beer or to a Thai restaurant downtown that offered ridiculously cheap bottles of liquor with an outdoor venue to smoke. After a couple years of doing these nights, it wasn’t out of the norm for a typical evening for me and my friends to down 2 to 3 bottles of rum. Hangovers galore.
Changes Afoot
A Slovakian friend came to visit as part of a work trip from Taiwan in December 2018. It had been a while since I had seen him and he was quite amused at my weight gain. I was used to this by now as my group of friends had a few of us overweight expats, and we loved to riff on each other over this.
Singapore has an odd tendency to make some of the island-newbies put on a lot of weight if they don’t temper their habits quickly.
After having an afternoon of drinks and going to a Christmas⁴ party a short 15 minute walk away, he was astounded at my appearance. Heavy breathing, soaked from head to toe, my black shirt somehow a shade blacker.
He didn’t mention much that evening, but the next day he held an intervention of sorts. He didn’t really know it at the time, but the comments he gave me on the extremes of my unhealthiness lingered in my head for weeks.
I guess sometimes in life it takes an outside perspective to drive change. I’ll need to remember to look for that more often in the future.
What Came Next
After Christmas I became slightly more determined to ‘return’ to a healthy life and started trying my best to wake up and do 45 minutes of an elliptical machine at the gym downstairs. It helped a bit but was of course quite a struggle for a 120 kg dude like myself.
The real struggle was always with the battle of hangovers. Several days a week I’d wake up, pop half a caffeine pill and chug shitloads of water to get out of bed for it. This habit sort of stuck though and looking back I think it was a slow beginning of a proper change in my mindset.
I used to love taking long walks in the evening, a habit I formed in Taiwan. I should say long beer walks, being my typical self. I had several really good friends in Taiwan while at school that also partook in these, they often led to really good conversations — quite different from a normal drinking night around a bar table.
When I didn’t have a buddy to walk around with, I would trek out on my own. The routine was quite therapeutic as it gave me a chance to deescalate any thoughts going through my head. My own form of beerditation, if you will.
Healthy(ish) Habits?
I kept up this habit when I moved to Singapore, most often after work where it would be a roughly one hour walk home, with one or two cans of Tiger in hand.
Unfortunately, Singapore banned public consumption of alcohol after 10:30 pm⁵ in 2015, and my beer walks instantly faded away. I’d still keep up the after-work walks from time to time, but in general they slowly came to a stop.
Purely coincidentally my weight gain slowly went the opposite direction, who could’ve guessed?
Essentially, the amount of exercise I was doing on a daily basis became a pathetic amount by 2018, and seemingly was getting less and less by the month. Meanwhile in my working life, I had gotten two promotions over the first few years, and alongside that came extra stress. A lot of it.
Startup life can be extremely rewarding and extremely frustrating at the same time, but I’ll save that talk for another day.
Enough of Enough
Fast forward to 2019, now armed with my buddy’s sincere (and rude!) advice, as well as a new exercise habit slowly forming, I started looking at my daily life.
I wasn’t advancing anywhere, in both personal and work life. I hadn’t realized but for too long I had self-identified with my work. Whenever I wasn’t feeling great about my personal life, I could always turn to work. Whenever work wasn’t going great, I’d turn to party life.
These habits can catch up to us, but it really takes moments of hard reflection to dig through the layers of unhealthy habits. For me, I realized it was my whole situation.
I simply wasn’t happy and I was just coasting. Most weeks seemed to blend together to the point where I was repeatedly amazed at how much time had passed whenever I stopped to think about it. I suppose that happens in general as we get older, but this felt like an extreme.⁶
At some point in January (or maybe I knew it all along), I realized I needed a shift. I was too dependent on my job as my identity, and my personal life. Although it was filled with many great friends, at the end of the day it left me unfulfilled and feeling old.
After a week of deliberation, I planned on putting in my resignation at the end of February. But me being me, I became inpatient that I would chicken out and threw the bombshell on my boss in late January.
Relation Ships
Initially quite upset, he later relaxed when I told him I wasn’t leaving to a competitor. I was just simply quitting my career with absolutely no plan whatsoever as a backup!
I gotta say though, my relationship with my boss surprisingly improved quite a bit in the remaining two months. I did have an ever-present feeling of guilt however, as my workload got ever lighter and I had very little to do at work besides read the news. Normal people might enjoy that but I’ve always had a sense of requirement to be productive, so it was an uneasy feeling for me.
After I had cast off that weight hanging over me, I thought I’d be on easy street. Certainly I did have a large reduction in stress, but even that took a while to taper off.
For months, I couldn’t stop thinking about if I was screwing up my career, my resume, should I have taken a sabbatical instead? These feelings were quite frequent, almost panic-inducing at times.
Our Habits Follow Us
Often when I’d lay awake in bed in the mornings worried about this — but now I had the new exercise habit to get rid of that! It certainly did work, every time after an hour of crunching out sweat, I had completely forgotten about the worries for another day.
The next two months of February and March involved some much needed planning on what to do and where to go next. I had a lot of talks with business mentors and friends about possibly doing a startup, an idea that quite excited me. Many ideas were discussed and I had planned to start working on those projects after leaving Singapore (spoiler — I didn’t do shit).⁷
By the time April rolled around(the month I left the country), I had had my fill of drinking. The last month in Singapore was a true marathon of drinking, if only I could’ve competed in a real race. After 5 years in Singapore, I could genuinely say it had left me with a huge amount of friends from a huge variety of countries (one of the cool things about being an expat in Asia!).
With a vague plan of the next 5 months of my life, I jetted off to an amazingly quiet and beautiful island in Thailand called Koh Lanta:
Chillax to the Max
These two weeks of relaxing and chilling by the ocean I think has been the most relaxing experience I’ve had in my adult life. Highly recommend it if anyone is interested. One odd side effect did linger with me though, a perturbed need for stress.
I’d sometimes find myself reading a book in the middle of the afternoon, chilling in a bean bag, relaxed as can be, when BAM, I’d have an incessant feeling of a need to go do something. Nothing in particular, just something. I know some might think this is just normal anxiety, but I jotted it down to living my daily life by a fully packed schedule for the last 7 years.
For the first time in forever, I would be wandering around and not realize what day of the week it was, let alone what date. This feeling was really unusual for me and I’m guessing that was the little battle in my head — a war between absolute freedom and absolute scheduling.
Fortunately, that feeling did slowly taper off and by the next month I didn’t have these pangs of panic any longer. What didn’t completely stop was another unhealthy phenomenon I had let develop over the years, mind-wandering flashbacks of the more disruptive events at work. I still have these from time to time even though its June now, but they are lessening.
Stress Isn’t Easy to Beat
I’m sure these were strongly related to the level of stress at the workplace. Myself and other co-workers would sometimes recount how we would wake up in the middle of the night, soaked in sweat, having had nightmares about work and particular projects.
The first time I mentioned these not-uncommon incidents to my drinking buddies they reacted with a ‘what the hell?!” kind of face. They thought it was insane for that to happen and certainly hadn’t experienced it themselves. I was actually quite surprised, I hadn’t realized how fucked up something like that really is.
The past two months have been really eye opening for myself. I celebrated the water festival Songkran⁸ in Koh Lanta, went to a bachelor party in Phuket, went to a concert where the singers sang in 5 languages, and generally relaxed and enjoyed my time in Thailand and Taiwan.
I’m currently chilling in Uluwatu, Bali, Indonesia and its been a fantastic few days so far. Incredible views and incredible people, I find myself waking up at very early hours (for me) and wandering about the coastal cliffs with not a person in sight. Its really quite inspiring and great for having thoughts about life and what we do in it. Also, I’m down about 15 kg to boot, so that’s an added plus.
Freedom at Last
But I do find myself missing work a bit; a solo country-hopping life style can be a bit of a burden on the bank accounts with no active income. It weighs on me a bit, but for now I’m postponing that worry to next month, after all, I set aside a travel/sabbatical budget for a reason — might as well use most of it before panicking!
I hope you enjoyed the read so far, I guess I had too much shit in my head that I wanted to get down on paper. Thanks to a couple of my friends for recommending this site, I now have a medium (ha!) to get my thoughts out.
I always wanted to explore being more creative in my adulthood, so this felt like a nice way to get started. I’ll wrap it up now with a request that I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments for future posts!
Onward and upward, thanks for reading!
J. J.
(Originally written in June 2019, updated in October)
Feel free to catch up with my more recent pursuits below:
Footnotes:
- Is it still called an ‘incident’ if its every day?
- Singapore is renowned for its heat and humidity, and 2018 was one of the hottest on record. Average daily high temperatures are about 30°, year-round!
- A ‘hawker’ is a type of open walled eatery in Singapore and other parts of South East Asia, where many single proprietors offer up their food and drink for customers, usually at a much cheaper price than restaurants
4. Christmas near the equator in Asia can be quite a different experience. In places like Philippines, its heavily celebrated as its a mainly Catholic country. In other countries like Indonesia and Singapore, not so much. You mostly see decorations only at malls and in stores, it can leave expats pretty homesick sometimes.
5. When I first moved to Singapore, I had a crazy work mentality instilled in me from my years in Taiwan where I worked at a startup, had a side tutoring business and went to school 20 hours a week — very healthy for a 29 year old
6. Perhaps another reason for this feeling; Singapore doesn’t have seasons per se. There’s only rainy months and non-rainy months. But even those timings change each year. I had several instances of me saying “back in the Fall” or “next Summer” only to have many local friends stare at me blankly. It hadn’t occurred to me that seasons weren’t used as a reference of time in every country!
7. I had discussed way too many different startup ideas to count but the main contenders were:
- A series of English learning books in a new style that combined different methods
- Creating with a buddy some old iphone/android games that I had designed years ago but stopped working on
- A very ambitious hardware/platform idea for bars and restaurants
- Opening up a simplistic, user friendly/focused gym in Taiwan
8. Songkran is the Thailand New Year. Celebrated in many areas by drenching everyone in water as much as possible. Its a blast and cool to see if you have the chance to go in person!
Feel free to check out my other stuff on Medium and follow me here. Thanks for reading and have a great day/dia/dina/deň/روز/journée/день/天/jaj!
