Free like a bear

Traveling is my passion

Traveling the world has been my passion for years. I like to think that it is what I am doing best! 🙂 I’ve been trying to use each single free day to plan a trip somewhere… either a short weekend in Europe or a longer trip in a country far away. I am away so often that many colleagues or friends have the impression that I never work and that I am never in Berlin! It’s not completely true but understandable since social media posts give a distorted impression.

Stressful short trips

What has always frustrated me is that I never had the chance to leave for longer than 3 weeks. And I learned to try very hard to optimize this little time to experience as much as possible. Thus, my trips have always been over-planned. I use to spend hours and hours reading about the best places or the best hostels in the countries I am visiting and the most time-efficient way to go from one place to another… pre-booking all the transports… all the accomodation… knowing in advance what I will do each day. It always worked out pretty fine and I came back home with thousands of pictures and impressions and did really a lot! However, I was more tired after the holiday than before… and with the feeling that I didn’t really experience the country, the people… just visiting many mass tourism places and rushing through them.

It’s been years that I’ve been dreaming of traveling for a longer time, but I never really allowed myself to even consider realizing this dream!

A performance-driven life

Many youngsters take a gap year after finishing their highschool or their studies and backpack for a while in Southeast Asia or do some work & travel in Australia or New Zealand. This is something I honestly never considered because I have always been driven by performance. I always wanted to be the best in whatever I did. To me, it was obvious that I had to start my studies immediately after highschool, my PhD after my studies and take a job directly after the PhD! I had a maximum of 2 months gap between all these life phases! I thought that having a break at this time of my life would be a failure. That’s how I ended up starting working at 26, which is quite young in Germany for a PhD graduated guy; and at this time, I was proud of it…

After entering into active life, the travel dream seemed even more impossible to realize. I had a satisfying and safe job with a permanent contract… I would be a fool to leave this comfort zone for something unforeseeable. But years after years, the frustration grew… I started feeling like a hamster in a wheel, and I was yearning for freedom!

2018, a key year

2018 was a life-changing year for me on many levels.

First, with terrible diseases affecting beloved relatives and friends, I became more and more aware that life can be very short, and that one should enjoy every day the better they can! I know it is a cliché, and I used to laugh about people saying this but I realized it is not as stupid as it sounds. Life can really change dramatically over night!

Than, one of the pillars in my life – my work – started seriously to collapse. I had been struggling with stressful and frustrating projects for years without really suffering because of it, but 2018 I started to feel what people might call burn-out symptoms. Both my body and my soul were often in pain and could barely stand the pressure and even less the absurdity around me! I considered quitting the job for months but again felt like it is something only cowards do… and that I had to fight to withstand the situation. The lack of perspective and growing depressive atmosphere around me were however slowly but surely affecting my mental health. And more importantly, I couldn’t find any meaning to what I was doing anymore. I was daily overwhelmed with questions like “Why are you doing this? Who cares about that? Does anybody need that? Why are you getting angry about this? Why are these people shouting and getting mad in meetings? What is all that good for?”…. All seemed to be more and more absurd!

A decisive step towards freedom…

I needed a little kick in the ass to free myself from this situation, and I got this kick in July 2018 after the company announced its plan to suppress positions. I immediately volunteered and was offered an agreement to terminate my contract. Thus, I felt less like a coward but more like a victim… and my travel plans would be financed by a termination pay 😉

I had the strong feeling that this was the right decision. And I was strong enough not to care about all the scared comments of my friends. It is crazy how people love projecting their own fears on you. Instead of being happy for me, many people reacted to the news by asking me thousands of questions I hadn’t thought about and didn’t care about. “Do you already know what you will do when you come back?”, “What will you do with your apartment?”, “You know you will need to work longer to get full-retirement insurance money?”, etc..

I know the motivation for my world tour is not very original, but I am so happy that I get the chance to realize my dream… or no… better said… I am happy that I give myself this chance!

And isn’t it great that I am doing this even before the mid-life crisis… or is this already the mid-life crisis? hahaha… a bit early though…!