I've Been to The Mountain Top(s)
The Promised Land Is Right Where You Are
Ship life, the power of new, and the long apprenticeship of becoming a multinational soul.
Consecrated by the Oceans
If I wanted to become a multinational soul and monetise my best asset—myself—I could not do it by remaining inside New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, or Paris. I needed the ocean to consecrate the idea.
It is a wonderful thing to leave everything behind and go somewhere nobody knows you—where God’s one and only voice is silence.
Ship / Shift Happens
Living on a ship might be summed up as monotony tinged with hysteria. It is not real life. It is an alibi: going out of your mind every day in order to come to your senses.
If your ship does not come in, swim out to it. Success does not arrive at your door. You go toward it. It is not easy getting a gig on a ship. The only easy day on board was yesterday.
After ten ships—yes, ten—I no longer wanted to cast doubt on perfection. “It is not about the money” is the lesser-known version of “I do not have a dream.”
The Greeks invented nemesis to show how a virtue, stubbornly maintained, becomes a destructive vice. A vague love for everyone and everything has its moments. Eventually, the better life demands fidelity to concrete people, relationships, institutions, and places.
Fire in the Belly
I had seen success become a drug of choice. Success without fulfilment is failure—yet that kind of failure often gives you your best material.
Choosing experiences and travel adventures over working away your life for material things is what college is supposed to teach. Why stop there?
I am still happier when I spend money on experiences instead of material goods.
As an Art Director and World Cruise Coordinator, life at sea turned my cant’s into cans. It replaced missing resources with resourcefulness and turned dreams into serendipity: a thousand unseen helping hands.
As I wrote in my YouTube channel bio, no matter how low the budget bar gets, I manage to limbo underneath it: 300 ports in 38 months.
Money is not the root of all evil. Boredom is—a spiritual anorexia, the despairing refusal to become oneself.
We live in a storytelling economy and get paid for the stories we tell. I kept writing and rewriting my autobiography in the blog—paid more in attention than cash.
Kidnapped into Entrepreneurship
Being born in America can feel like being kidnapped and sold into entrepreneurship.
- The shared hallucination of consumption and materialism becomes a mask that eventually eats the face.
- Citizenship can also feel like winning the lottery: a currency to spend well rather than merely possess.
- We value material proof and ignore emotional truth. To serve the country honestly, I sometimes had to betray its assumptions.
If you follow your bliss, you place yourself on a track that has been waiting for you all along.
The blue-chip lie was the disease of more: complexity in a world already overflowing. The opposite of pleasure was not pain. It was boredom.
I was willing to risk culture shock to make a boring life interesting—to reframe travel as a verb rather than a noun. You have to do it: a one-man National Geographic on the everywhere trip.
To move from tourist to traveller, I had to adapt. Otherwise the journey would become karaoke travel—a cheap imitation of the best yet to come. Without risk, faith is impossible. My leap of faith was curiosity.
The Power of New
There was nothing conventionally ethical about the shipboard work ethic. I was paid in cash, visited beautiful places, had a hotel room, and received six all-you-can-eat meals a day.
I no longer needed PowerPoint to explain my job. The question became: what was I worth outside the W-2 world of nine to five?
I was a time millionaire. The answer had to be resourcefulness, not resources.
The sea was never exactly friendly. At best it became the accomplice of my restlessness. There was no cure for the curiosity.
Television was an eraser. YouTube and Blogger became paintbrushes. Going to sea meant recreation, re-creation, and reinvention.
Cruise life also carried a warning. Everything was arranged: formal nights, shore excursions, shopping, bottled water, the painted line. You could mistake shelter for living and discover you had been hibernating in motion.
Perpetually Cruising
When you are perpetually cruising, you are what you are right there and then. Nobody has your past to hold against you. There is no yes in yesterday on the road.
I knew both sides because I was both sides: a tourist who did not know where he had been and a traveller who did not know where he was going.
College once felt like the longest vacation I had ever taken. This graduate-school seamester became study abroad in Nomadic Pursuits.
I meet, therefore I am: a multinational soul. The countries I inhabited for six hours or three daze were as eclectic and restless as the ports themselves.
I became a product of a movable feast: a transit lounger forever heading back toward the all-aboard gangway by 6 p.m.
I am one of the privileged homeless. Is a new kind of person being created by a new kind of life?
The Promised Land
The promised land was never waiting beyond the next border. It appeared whenever curiosity, risk, resourcefulness, and attention made the place beneath my feet fully alive.