Hi. My name is Phil and I’ve learned that if you put your age in a bio then it quickly goes out of date. Anyway, at the time of writing, I’m 31. Seven years ago I headed out to travel around South America and started this blog to keep friends and family up to date. At the end of that trip I moved to New York and lived there for 3 years, before again summoning the courage and energy to head out traveling permanently. I bought a hatchback and a tent and road tripped around the US, hiking a ton in national parks and abusing the hospitality of family and friends. I ended up in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, for a few months, and discovered a new passion/obsession/vocation in the form of freediving (diving while holding your breath—ask me about it, I dare you). I was all set to continue the vagrant lifestyle and head abroad to explore various freediving-focused tropical paradises when the pandemic started.

My friends in San Diego generously offered to have me as a roommate until things settled down, and I ended up living in San Diego for about 2 years. In September 2022 I got back on the road, and I don’t have plans to settle down and live somewhere any time too soon. It’s interesting reading the original introduction to this blog—that was 7 years ago, and I have to say that broadly speaking I still feel the exact same way. For whatever reason it seems that just living in a place and turning the crank on a job is not for me. It could be that thus far I’ve largely just considered office jobs, and that I am in fact a person who needs to be outside and moving and using my body, to be satisfied. That’s the hypothesis at least. I’ve just spent 6 months freediving in the Philippines and Bali and then hiking and living in a van in New Zealand. Next stop is Australia for a year, where I plan to connect with family, try out teaching freediving, and spend some more time living in a vehicle. After that… who knows.

Original introduction, preserved for posterity

Hi. My name is Phil and I’m 24 years old. I just quit my job as a Software Developer at Microsoft after 3 years to pack a backpack, give away all my stuff, and buy a ticket to Bogota to start a trip around South America. I want to go all over the continent and I imagine that I’ll be traveling for around a year, give or take 6 months. When I was packing up my apartment to leave I found a journal entry, written soon after I got to Seattle to work, which touches on several things that were still true several years later and that motivated this trip.

I think that I have still not fully adjusted to life after college. I think that nothing in my life is bringing me meaningful satisfaction, pride, and happiness. School gave me lots of different subjects to keep me interested and grades to make me feel good about myself and proud – work is giving me neither. I need to make work into something I can be proud of, even just within my own scope. I need to manufacture a sense of urgency.

I need to snap out of my lethargy and meet people, just for the sake of sharing other people’s experiences, which I love.

I need to dedicate myself to a project and forgive myself for abandoning others: right now there are a bunch of things I would like to do and I’m doing none of them. I need single-mindedness. I need to stop floating. I need to hold myself accountable for my own happiness and stop feeling sorry for myself. I need to decide what I want and then act on it. I need purpose. The minutiae of daily life keep me feeling busy but I am not actually doing anything.

Forgive me the amateur psychology and the drama of depression – it was a bit of a trying time. After 3 years at Microsoft some of those feelings had changed – I do feel like I’ve adjusted to life after college, and I eventually got a good hold on my work and did some things that I was proud of. Overall, though, the feelings of dissatisfaction, of cruising, of not doing anything meaningful, of being terrified that life was just passing me right by, lingered. When I was bored at work, daydreaming, I would ask myself, “Why don’t you just drop everything and buy a one way ticket to South America? Do you have a real reason not to or is it just a vague fear of straying off the marked path?”. I eventually realized it was the latter, so after a quick job search didn’t turn up anything that really grabbed me I decided I needed to go for it. I gave away everything I had except half a duffel bag’s worth of mementos, sold my car, and bought a ticket to start the trip. I’m not exactly sure what I’m trying to get out of this; I want to meet interesting people, eat delicious food, perfect my Spanish and Portuguese, see some natural wonders, and get out of my comfort zone, among other things. I hope to be a tourist in some places and settle down a bit more in others. I want to volunteer, do some programming projects, teach English, and see what else I can find. A big motivator for this trip is to see how much I can let go and be adaptable so I’m far from having everything figured out, but I’ll be updating here along the way. Thanks for reading!