I first moved to Thailand at the advisement of a friend who was working here who thought I would really like it. This all came about because I had just graduated from college and wasn't very pleased with the employment opportunities that were available to me as a fresh Finance graduate and the whole work environment was just depressing as hell. I didn't enjoy the idea of slowly climbing the corporate ladder just to make a decent wage sometime 10 years from now, which is kind of the way that things work in America unfortunately.
So when I came to visit him I had no idea what to expect but I didn't think that I would be so impressed that I would actually end up quitting my job and moving here, and that is precisely what I did.
Coming from Texas to visit my friend who at that point lived in the south of Thailand and seeing the beaches for teh first time was something truly awe-inspiring. We have a coastline in Texas but let me tell you, it isn't very impressive. There's a reason why you never hear about people going to wonderful Texas beach resorts. Not only was this beach the most impressive that I had ever seen, but it also wasn't completely overrun with people either. I was simply awestruck.
When I visited my friend's house, it was a simple house, but functional. After a few days I really started to envy his life even though compared to the salary that I was making back in the USA, he was making peanuts. It took me about a week of wandering around with this guy and meeting his friends and seeing their own lifestyles to realize that maybe I had my priorities all wrong. Maybe making money isn't really the path to happiness.
I had to return to my job in the US after just a few weeks of visiting but the entire time I was back at my cubicle job that I absolutely hated, the only thing I kept thinking about was how this friend of mine had so much better quality of life than I did even though he was making 1/5 the amount of money that I do. This would occur to me constantly when I was stuck in traffic to and from work, surrounded by tens of thousands of other lemmings that were all doing exactly the same thing.
When the above is 5 days a week of your life and it is really all you have ever known, maybe you don't hate it so much because it is just normal. I know that it is the way that I treated it as I kept having a routine of a coffee in the car and some commute radio shows that I found entertaining. It was what me and everyone else that I knew simply JUST DID and none of us complained about it too much because well, it's what everyone does, right?
Seeing the other side of things as far as my friend's life in Thailand was concerned seriously opened my eyes about what is really important in life. I started to see that money, and therefore the acquisition of "stuff" isn't really the pathway to happiness. I remember sitting on plastic chairs outside of his simple home in southern Thailand and having a BBQ on a grill that just sat on the ground and probably cost a couple of dollars. I recall a makeshift chest of beers with ice that we had purchased from one of the mom and pop shops that was just down the road as well. I remembered his very basic motorbike that was his only method of transportation and how unlike me, he didn't dread when he had to get on that bike and go somewhere. He didn't LOVE his job, but he also didn't hate it and he certainly didn't have to sit in traffic for an hour or more in both directions to his "office."
After being back at my corporate job for a while, I made a decision that I was going to move as well. I put a photo of the iconic beach on my fridge and it was my motivation to both continue going to work and also to save as much money as possible in preparation for the trip. It took me the better part of a year to feel confident enough to actually go and in that time I went to visit an additional time before fully "pulling the trigger."
At this point my friend had moved to Phuket and I was just blown away by the fact that this place, and the beaches, was even better than the first place he lived when I first visited.
Not only was the water that perfect green/blue that everyone loves, but they also had year-round waves that were just the right size for someone like me that has never done much surfing to have a go at it. It is now one of my favorite things to do on earth.
Because of my ability to work only in very specific fields, I ended up needing to move to Chiang Mai in the north, which has no beach but no worries mate, getting to the beach is just over an hour on a direct flight from there to many beaches this country has to offer.
It's hard to believe now, looking back, that there was a time when I was considering going back to USA to "make more money" and if you read my stuff, you have probably seen me advise people to do exactly that. I started to talk like this because at that point in time, the only work you could do here was teach English for around $1000 a month, which even though this is a cheap country, isn't nearly enough money to have any sort of financial planning for the future. It was the college boy in me that was talking but I've had a change of heart since then.
These days, with the options of teaching online being what they are, if you properly work, you can bank (put into savings) likely MORE money than you would be able to accomplish if you were living in most of the United States. Things are just so damn expensive there and it is hard for me to look at those situations and not feel as though it is by design. Why would the exact same products be 3-5 times as expensive in USA compared to here?
My first thoughts when I was living here was "this is amazing, I have no commute, I have little stress, I have so much freedom" but the thought was always in the back of my head that I wasn't saving very much money and this could be a very big problem for me 10-20 years from now.
Things have changed with technology though and these days I am putting more money away than I ever was with my near entry-level job back in Texas. Things just kind of happened to fall into place by sheer luck because when I first got here, teaching English online wasn't really a thing, let alone a thing that can pay a bunch of money.
I won't ever get rich from doing that, but then again, I realized after my first trip to visit this part of the world that money and the acquisition of things isn't happiness anyway. I have evolved since coming here and now, I'm kind of working towards never having to leave.
This ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would be so I am going to separate it into two pieces so that it isn't so long that nobody reads it. If you made it this far, I think you for reading