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.