Tag: happiness

The $2,000 Exile (A Life Snippet)

Photo Credit: abdullah ali (a stock photo, not the person in question for the sake of privacy)

Today’s Life Snippet is about a US military veteran from Indiana who ended up homeless and is now traveling the world. 

He is 23-years old. He was in the Air Force to work in cybersecurity and cyberwarfare but injured his feet. He struggled to pass the physical clearance to be considered “combat ready.” After the fifth attempt, he tried to force himself to run a 14-minute despite his feet already being swollen from his previous attempts. Trying to do this run caused several hundred tiny fractures in his feet, and they are still injured to this day. Walking and standing is incredibly painful for him. 

The military wanted to discharge him, but he forced them to keep him for two more years. They assigned him various desk jobs because of his injury. Sometimes they intentionally gave him menial tasks to degrade him and convince him to want to leave, such as telling him to digitize a room full of paper documents. He said he spent six weeks pulling staplers out of the stacks of papers, something he found mind-numbingly boring. Eventually after two years, the military forced him out. 

Because of his injury, the military will give him $2,000 a month for the rest of his life. That is not enough to live on in the US. He tried to settle in Florida and tried to find a job there but ended up cycling between awful jobs that did not work for him. Some jobs, such as a waitressing job and construction job, required too much standing for his disability. He then worked in IT, but he felt like they belittled him by acting as if he didn’t understand computers when he had two years of experience doing advanced computing with the military. They bought him a car that he was supposed to pay back in installments through deductions in his paycheck, but when he quit, he simply kept the car anyways. 

Overall, he said the military was the best place he worked. He loved someone telling him what to do, finding comfort in the structure that produced. He never found this comfort or satisfaction again in any of his future employers. None of them offered the stability and sense of meaning and purpose that the military provided him. 

His mom offered to have him stay with her back home in Indiana while he found a new job and got on his feet. He went back home, but soon afterwards, she kicked him out of her house, because she was getting married to a new husband. Their stated reason was that the new husband had teenage daughters, and the daughters were not safe with him around. He had no interest in these girls (who were prepubescent, the oldest being 13), finding the insulation that he would want to be involved with a bunch of minors gross and offensive.

Nonetheless, she kicked him out of the house, and he ended up homeless in Indiana. He said you needed a car to go anywhere or do anything. He spent his remaining money to buy a ticket to Thailand at the end of 2025, arriving here with no money. $2,000 a month is not enough to live in the US, but it is here in Thailand and in Southeast Asia in general it is fine, so he wants to carve out his life here. 

He is enrolling in a self-paced online university to study cybersecurity. They told him they don’t accept students not in the US, but through VPNs, he pretends he is in the US.  They said they didn’t want to deal with the time zone shift of someone from another part of the world, but he sees that as his problem. He can meet for classes and stuff during their time zone and deal with that himself. That’s his decision. 

More broadly, he said he doesn’t connect emotionally with people, like normal people seem to. When he talks to people, he doesn’t really feel like people seem to when they connect. Many people also only have superficial conversations anyways. He doesn’t really have an effective alternative way to deal with emotions. Instead dark thoughts often roll around inside of him, particularly anxiety and depression. He has found therapy really helpful, though. 

How to Survive as a Young Adult: What You Can Do to Live A Satisfied Life during Your 20s and 30s

As someone in my early thirties, these are the aspects of life that I have found useful to feeling satisfied and fulfilled during this stage in life. If you are unhappy, feel free to think about whether you lack any of these and then determine the best ways to cultivate it. Be patient with yourself as you do; it can take months to grow them, and you have done nothing wrong if you are missing some of these; you are not a failure. 

1) Intellectual growth: Are there things you are learning in your life: new skills, new perspectives, new things about the world, etc.? That can range from formal education to more informal methods like reading books, watching insightful videos that teach you something (all over Youtube or Netflix), or stimulating conversations with others. It can also range from learning about abstract academic subjects like philosophy to drawing to studying ants (because why not). Everyone has their own thing. For some, learning communities like book groups or other meetups where you learn with others help keep them accountable and encourage them to think about the topic in a new way. 

What you are learning about can be useful for your career or completely separate, but developing wholly unrelated skills can teach you something new about yourself. Follow passions beyond what is “useful” or can be applied to your daily life: it helps you grow as a person. For your career, it may even give you inspiring new ideas about what you want to do with your career. That and it can be a lot of fun, helping fulfill you in ways you did not realize you needed. 

2) Creativity: Are you producing anything cool? That could be art, writing stories or poetry, wood carving, drawing comics, dancing, or whatever you love in life. For example, my friend and I write a haiku a day (a small three-lined poem) and over the last few months, we started writing one short story or essay a day (like 300-500 words or a half page). Writing is my form of creativity and art, but you can also do supposedly “logical” activities not just artistic ones, like solving math puzzles that interest you (which I have done from time to time; I’m that kind of nerd and love it), conducting science experiments, programing a computer game, or building a computer from scratch. 

For some people, their intellectual growth and creative activities are the same: they learn about a topic area as they produce things in that space. But, it is important to determine whether you are exploring each one adequately. Some people who combine them into one activity lean towards one and do less of the second without realizing it, leaving them unfulfilled. If that is you, you could develop whichever one you are lacking through another fun activity. 

3) Introspection: Exploring who you are, what gifts you offer the world, what you need in life, and what you want in life. In my experience, too many people just “go with the flow” in life and follow what society or others suggest they do, become, or value. 

Instead, it’s important to think about what you value in life, what makes you happy, and how you can use your gifts to help make the world a better place. What do you offer the world? What have the opportunities in your life offered you (your job, your family, your group of friends, etc.), and to what extent have they helped meet your needs and allowed you to become all that you can be? Finally, to what extent have you been able to offer your gifts and abilities to the world? 

If any of these spaces you inhabit are lacking, it can be okay to advocate for yourself to make sure they meet your needs, find supplemental communities in your life that add the aspects that these communities lack, or leave any of those communities entirely. (Which one is best in any given situation is an incredibly complex judgment call to make, but when you are lacking what you need from the environments you are a part of, it is usually some combination of these three responses that ends up resolving the issue.) No one knows what you need better than yourself. 

A helpful way to start thinking about what you offer the world is to list the jobs, courses, projects, programs, and other things you have done in your life (both fulfilling and unfulfilling) and list what about them has given you life (aka motivated you) and what about them have frustrated you or otherwise stifled your life. List what impact you made in that setting that you are proud of as well. Then look for common patterns across these lists: What common patterns emerge about what inspires you, and what about what frustrates you? This can help determine both what types of skills you offer and also what kinds of communities to look for that might best incorporate and cultivate your skills. 

4) Mentoring and leadership: Do you have the ability to grow, teach, or inspire others? Examples of this can range from parents raising children to mentoring or teaching others to managing a team of employees who you help grow and become all they can be. Many psychological studies show that people tend to feel most satisfied in life when they have both mentees then can mentor and coaches/mentors who can, in turn, mentor them. 

In addition to learning, we become more fulfilled when we feel like giving back to others in our community. Some people do this through their careers, either in their official job description or by informally helping others in their workplace. Not every job gives people the opportunity to do that, though, so others do in other communities of life: within their family, their religious communities, within their groups of friends, in clubs or social groups they are a part of, etc. If you are lacking this, think about how within your current social network, you might be able to mentor or lead others, and if there are no such opportunities, brainstorm how you can branch out and do it in other ways. These can range from volunteering to workplace mentorship programs to help youth with their homework to hanging out with your lonely neighbor when you have the time. 

If none exist, think about what skills you can offer and help others through. You can use Recommendations 1 through 3 to try to come up with a few ideas on how, and if none of those work for you, brainstorm how you can branch out and do it in other ways. These can range from volunteering to workplace mentorship programs to help youth with their homework to hanging out with your lonely neighbor when you have the time. If you think creatively about this, you can make it happen, and you will almost certainly love the result. 

5) Relationships: Community matters. I find in this stage of life, this can be hard. Studies show that in the United States at least, the 20s and early 30s in the United States are on average the second loneliest time in people’s lives (after one’s elderly years) where people have some of the least strong relational connections. High school and college are times when you are surrounded by peers, and after graduating, we are thrust into the world without yet having built the alternative communities that those who are older end up relying on. 

Thus, you must be intentional and sometimes creative to form community. You may have to put yourself out there. Don’t let shyness defeat you.