Alleviating The Discontented Mind

The answers you're looking for is within you

Hey Friends,

Two of my friends are about to fly to Thailand to try out the digital nomad life and I feel a tad envious.

I miss that life. As I sit at my desk here in the UK, I can’t help but think of all the other places I could be in this world. Or rather, more accurately, all the places I’d rather be in.

I reminisce about the exciting night markets of Thailand. The novelty of landing in Singapore for the first time. Or the experiences that are foreign yet familiar in Vietnam. I dream of feeling the grains of sand between my toes on the beaches of Nha Trang. Or ascending up the Empire State building and marvelling at the hustle and bustle of New York City below me.

Earth is a playground waiting to be explored, filled with sources of awe, adventure and wonderment. Or so I think.

In early 2017 I felt stuck and thought travelling was the answer to my problems. My daily routine was to wake up at some ungodly hour in the late afternoon, get ready after doom-scrolling for 2 hours, either head to the casino to play poker or play online, order tzatziki chicken for ‘breakfast’, grind out my soul til 6 AM, get McDonald’s breakfast for dinner, go to sleep and then wake up to repeat it all over again.

My life now is much different to back then. But it still consists of daily repetition: wake up, make coffee, meditate, read, journal, write, lunch, write, business, dinner, gym or climb, shower, read and go to bed.

I know as a creative professional this repetition is vital to move me towards my goals. Yet I can’t help but dreamingly gaze towards the prospects of an exciting future and say I’ve “made it” again. My current day-to-day situation is okay and perfectly liveable. But my future is where all my hope resides.

Since much of what we desire lies in the future, we make it our mission to push our present closer to our future. We hope that once we’ve achieved our desires, it will change our daily life.

But from past experience I know that the result is always fleeting. I’ll always desire more.

In 2012 I moved into a two-bedroom apartment with a poker friend. I was in university at the time and was playing micro stakes poker. I vividly remember gazing at all the mid-high stakes tables that filled up my friend’s 30” Dell monitor and thinking to myself, that will be me one day. Reaching mid-high stakes ($2/$5+) became the object of intense desire for me.

So I put my head down and grinded my way through the stakes. Five years later, I remember sitting in my one-bedroom studio in Shoreditch and telling my then-girlfriend, “Hey S, I made it, I’m finally playing $2/$5 online, and I can’t believe I’m doing so.”

Trembling with excitement and desire frothing from the corner of my mouth, I told everyone. I felt like a kid on Christmas day as I shamefully bragged about how much I was winning online. After all those years of late nights and long grinds, I got what I wanted. I thought now that I had reached this level, it would change my life.

But while I was happy to be playing mid-stakes and above online, as each day passed, I wasn’t as excited as the day I played my first hand at $2/$5. As the months passed by, playing mid-stakes became a part of my daily experience, and I began to feel restless again. I thought perhaps the answer to my restlessness was in travelling and playing higher stakes. So I broke up with my girlfriend and booked a ticket to Los Angeles.

Here’s the interesting thing: You can replace poker with any other noun — a new house, job, relationship, lifestyle — and the same pattern will repeat. Swapping the contents of your daily experience may offer you some form of excitement, but in the end, these things will become mundane again.

I thought the answers I was looking for was in the orange and purple sunsets on Malibu beach, the VIP booths of Las Vegas nightclubs, or in the iconic harbour of Sydney. Every time I moved to a new place, the excitement was electrifying. I could immerse myself in a new culture and have the time to explore the cracks and crevices of each city. I could live as if I belonged there.

I made new friends in foreign lands, and they would invite me to eat awesome food. They would invite others, and next thing you know, I had a crew of friends to hang out with. They were fun, entertaining and filled with stories. Every hangout session was a new lesson in life.

But no matter where you are, time moves in one direction: forward. Over a long enough period, time reveals the truth. Time tests whether your desires are intrinsically motivated or fleeting desires. And when it comes to travelling, the test of time reveals how truly fleeting your desires are.

As my days in a foreign country turned into weeks and then months, experiences began to occur with a familiar regularity. The sticky mango rice I chowed down when I first arrived has now become my regular after-dinner snack. The friends I made are now people I see every week, and on top of that, we always hang out at the same bars. The tourist sites I initially paid to go see become backdrops to life. Life abroad begins to feel like home again. The daily experiences back at home I so desperately tried to escape became a familiar sequence.

Perhaps the answers I’m looking for is in another place? So I pack my bags, book another one-way ticket to somewhere, anywhere, and start the cycle all over again.

I don’t regret travelling, and I recommend everybody do it whilst they can. But here’s the thing: You will struggle to find yourself. Regardless of wherever you go, changing your environment won’t fill what is missing in your life. There was a common denominator every time I changed my environment — Me.

I was so focused on changing my external environment that I disregarded my internal environment: my mind. I struggled to be at ease with myself and hated being alone. As I hopped to from country to country, I still felt the same gnawing angst and restlessness . Even though novelty delayed the feelings, regardless of wherever I was, I always felt uneasy. All the unresolved issues I had followed me wherever I went: A sense of purposelessness in my career, low self-esteem, and anxiety. It sounds obvious now that I look back but the answer to all my problems wasn’t at the bottom of a pina colada on a beach in Bali.

While travelling is a fantastic way to cure you of your ignorance of other cultures, but it’s not a cure for the discontentment of the mind.

Instead, to find meaning and peace, we have to travel inwards. Instead of wanting to escape our reality, it’s realising that our daily life is truly worth holding on to. It’s taking the time to inspect your life with mindfulness and finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. It’s finding joy in the first sip of your morning coffee, the glowing sun falling asleep over the city skyline, or the way a hot shower gently massages away your frustrations after a bad day.

And the best way I’ve discovered to alleviate such discontentment is practising gratitude and learning to take joy in the ordinary things. Gratitude allows you to feel wonderment about your day-to-day life. It makes you marvel at the fact that you are this lump of atoms, cells, neurons, organs and skin. Gratitude stops you from taking your friends and family for granted. It allows you to realise that everyone you know and love also happens to be a collection of atoms assembled at this precise point in time. The alignment of our ancestors, the fact that all our forebears were healthy and attractive enough to keep reproducing until you were finally born. Your presence on this earth today is a black swan event, and I can’t help but be amazed and grateful to spend my time writing to you.

Practising gratitude has allowed meaning and purpose to blossom into my life. It gives me an endless list of things that I have going for myself, and I don’t need to change my location to see that list grow. It’s easy for me to book a ticket to Thailand but I know if I do that I’m running away from my problems and not towards it.

The difficult thing about life is that it often ends up feeling like a monotonous grind. But if we are able to soften this grind and find reasons to be grateful, we begin to see our lives with more clarity. Which in turn becomes a constant source of curiosity and adventure. We become more inquisitive and captivated again by the people closest to us.

And while travelling does expand and stretch the horizons of your mind, but it does not give you the answer you may be looking for. The answers you’re looking for are inside of you. They’ve always been and always will be. To cure one’s restlessness is to embrace what one already has and to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. To become present. To be in the now.

“Yesterday is history, Tomorrow is a mystery, but Today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.” — Master Oogway, Kung Fu Panda

— Jason Vu Nguyen