The real prize

  I was re-reading an blog I posted five months ago.  I was well-pleased with what I wrote, and decided to re-post a long excerpt from that blog today:

When I lived in Australia, I did many many years of working, saving, supporting, growing. It didn’t make me happy.

In Bangkok I’ve found a life of relative ease, regular sex with beautiful young women and little stress. I think that the fool’s gold is the dream of wealth, security and stability that I chased in my previous life.

If my current lifestyle doesn’t make me live longer, it will at least ensure that I enjoy the remaining years to the maximum.

In Oz, I owned my own business, drove a very nice Saab, had a wife, a house with a view over the bay, and a pair of great danes roaming the yard and the living room. I achieved the dream. Seven years ago I had my portfolio of shares, three investment properties with tenants and money invested in property developments. I wasn’t rich, but I was solidly upper-middle class. My wife had the slender body and lovely face of a fashion model. I was completely faithful, and never fooled around.

I was, for the most part, unhappy every day.

One day, for no particular reason, the wife and I had a fight. She lost her cool, threw a few household objects at my head and told me she wanted me to pack up & get out of the house, which I did. She called an hour later and begged me to come back home, but she was 60 minutes too late. I’d already started to wonder how I could be put out of my own house when I’d done nothing wrong, and exactly what my future would hold.

In those 60 minutes I started to dream of other jobs, other countries, other girls and freedom from all that seemed to shackle me.

It took me four more years, but I got rid of the wife (and she got more than her fair share of the assets), sold my business, liquidated what I had left, and went on holiday to Asia.

The amazing thing is that I didn’t know what was available in Thailand until after I arrived. I just wanted to see the temples and buy a few souvenirs.

I realized, once I was here for a couple of months, that I was happy for the first time in nearly twenty years. I decided to stay. Like so many others, my greatest regret was that I hadn’t ‘discovered’ Bangkok twenty years earlier.

Now, I’m self-employed. I have a few steady clients, and I work about 30 hours per week. I earn most of my income in US dollars, and I have a middle-class income by Thai standards.

I live simply; one room, laptop computer, TV, refrigerator, some clothes. No car, no stock portfolio, no dogs and no wife. I avoid drugs, read a lot of books, shoot pool, drink a few pints of beer every week, and travel regularly to different parts of Thailand and SE Asia. My Thai language skills have never developed to a high degree, but I make the effort. I have sex nearly every day with very pretty girls who are generally about half my age.

Life feels pretty good. Certainly a hell of a lot better than it did when I was driving my Saab to my office every day.

I have been here long enough that I’m counting in years, not months. I probably won’t stay in Bangkok forever, but I don’t think I’ll ever regret the decision to come live here. When I think of the happiest days of my adult life, most of them have been here.

In my opinion, what destroys punters in Thailand isn’t the girls; those who lose the plot are usually undone by alcohol or drugs. When you stop living life, and substitute a drug or alcohol induced haze, then you have lost. You stop working, exercising and thinking. You give yourself up to something outside yourself, and you lose the prize.

I spent decades living on the philosophy that the real prizes in life have to be earned and finding it empty. As I close in on my 50th birthday, here’s what I now think:

The real prize IS life, and it has to be lived.