Many people have found happiness in what I like to call the "job/car/family/house" system, and even I myself benefited from that system growing up. Before going in-depth about some ideas I've been mulling over for a while, I need to establish that everyone deserves the live the lifestyle he or she wants to live. I've spent the past year trying to extract myself from the consumerist economic system I was born into. If I say anything criticizing or condemning the lifestyle in the following paragraphs, I want to reiterate that it's in no way a judgment of anybody who choses to participate. It's merely a summation of my own personal experiences with the economic setup, and the thought processes that led me to the place where I am.
OK, let's get to it!
What’s the Matrix?
In the 1999 movie The Matrix, 99% of humanity is trapped inside a computer simulation. Their minds exist as avatars within the simulation, while meanwhile their physical bodies exist in machines that are harvesting their energy. The movie was so successful, "the matrix" came to be used as a metaphor for the illusory world systems that keep people trapped—the rat race, you might also call it.
And so the concept of “escaping the matrix” came about—extracting yourself from the grind of everyday life so you can live as a truly free individual in the real world.
People escape the matrix in lots of ways. Some people get into homesteading and energy self-sufficiency. Others use their keen business senses to become their own bosses and get ahead of the rat race. For a while, teaching English abroad was my way of escaping the matrix.
When I say the matrix, I don’t necessarily mean we’re actually living in a literal computer simulation, although I haven’t entirely ruled that out. My personal Matrix is the everyday structure of life in the 21st century—expensive education geared towards brainwashing, any kind of long-term debt (mortgage literally means “dead pledge”), sky-high rent, car payments, overly expensive restaurants, medical systems designed to keep us sick, and retirement funds that don't work. The prospect of participating in this system indefinitely, for me, is depressing.
People have told me before that I seem scared of commitment. They're absolutely correct, and I feel like that sentiment alone could warrant a whole other blog post. Commitment does seem to work for many people, but my own experience has been that it almost always leaves me in a rut.
Seasonal work kept me traveling during a pandemic
As a traveler, vagabond, and roamer, I’ve become really familiar with "The Rut" and can smell one a mile away. Ruts can develop in as quickly as six months, while others may take a good two years to set in. When I encountered a rut in the States back in 2016, I moved to Taiwan. And when I got into a rut there, I moved back home. So when I hit a rut for the third time in Maine, I knew what I had to do: Get back on the road.
But between vaccination requirements and mandatory quarantines, it would have made zero sense for me to try and go live abroad again. So I decided to take a domestic sabbatical, and spend some time exploring my own country. Thankfully the U.S. is pretty big, and by that time, state-to-state travel was no longer restricted.
And so I left Maine! The flexibility of seasonal work made it possible for me to see Alaska, the North Pole, California, Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, Chicago, and Utah all within about six months.
Seasonal work taught me gratitude
It's been hard re-adjusting to the American economy. In Asia I rented a two-story apartment for $500 a month and lived in a traditional market where I could buy cheap fruits and vegetables just by walking outside. But here in the States, people my age are spending most of their income just to break even.
Let’s face it, stateside life in this century is expensive. The cost of groceries is the highest it’s been in almost fifty years, and we're seeing the worst inflation since the 90's.
Big shocker: seasonal workers don’t make a whole lot of money! Over the past six months, I’ve learned how to make my means stretch. Here are a few examples of what I've learned.
Instead of spending a lot of money on groceries, you can learn how to forage. Dandelion greens, berries, and spruce tip tea are just three of the wonderful free vegetables you can find just by walking outside.
If you get a second job at a grocery store, you can take home slices of mistake ham from the deli, or bag up the oats that fall off of bread in the bakery for breakfast. You'd be surprised at what grocery stores just throw away!
Replace bread in your groceries with white rice. It's better for you and is a thousand times cheaper.
Only eat out on special occasions and when you’re with other people. Get used to being your own mom and telling yourself "We have food at home."
Since working seasonally, I’ve finally been finishing everything in my fridge and using up dry ingredients like rice and noodles. I’ve finally found the middle of the venn diagram between healthy, cost-effective, and enjoyable, and seasonal work helped me find that. Living on reduced means has taught me a level of gratitude for food that I don't think I'll ever lose.
P.S. I feel like I need to point out for any concerned readers that I'm neither poor nor starving. I get enough to eat, I'm just trying to make my money stretch in an economy with 7% inflation.
Seasonal work taught me it's OK to quit
I've had lots of good to say about seasonal work, but it's not a magic elixir.
Between December and January, I had a rotten seasonal work experience. spent six weeks in Idaho shoveling snow at a ski resort. When it snowed and I finally started working, the hours were long and the pay was abominable—I would have made more money at McDonald's, and flipping burgers doesn't mean harnessing up to push snow off a roof at six in the morning. A couple weeks in I told myself I wasn’t out there in the cold to be just breaking even, so I ended up getting a second job at a grocery store.
Four days a week I was waking up at five and going to bed at ten, then two days a week I was working all afternoon into the evening at the deli. When my timecard hit sixty hours in one week, I started getting sick, and developed a fever so bad I spent most of my time in bed. I called out of both jobs twice. (It was omicron, by the way.)
About four weeks in, I was exhausted, lonely, and miserable. And some good advice from a friend helped me realize that if the situation was irredeemably bleak, there was no law mandating I stay. If I hated it there, I had every right to just leave. So I gave a two week notice, and said “peace out, homies.”
Our go-go-go culture trains us to never give up on anything. And if I had caved into pressure years ago and got car payments, a mortgage, and university debt, I may not have had the luxury of just up and quitting. Any seven year old can virtuously quote the aphorism “Never give up,” but is that a good one-size-fits-all rule to have in life? Sometimes giving up is good. Sometimes a bad stock just need to be sold, a junker car needs to be traded in, and a toxic relationship has to come to an end. The mentality that you can never quit anything, ever, is just one more thing that keeps people in the matrix.
What’s important to me is people
If you go somewhere crazy, you’ll meet equally crazy people.
I always thought that if a way to travel between parallel universes was discovered, I would probably end up meeting all my parallel selves in a pocket dimension, because if they’re identical to me, then we would all have the same idea to get in touch with each other.
The purpose of that weird word picture is to illustrate a rule I’ve learned during my travels: when you go somewhere that most people wouldn’t go, you end up meeting other people like you who’ve had the same idea. The weirdness of the place acts as a bottleneck.
I met great people in Taiwan who all shared the desire to get out of their bubble, shake up their life, and learn new things. And I met great people in Alaska who wanted the same things out of life that I did.
There may not be a lot of money in it, or any kind of corporate ladder to climb, but there are a lot of weird people who are all on the same weird journey. People you won’t meet in a chess club, or in a dull pink office building, or at a singles club under fluorescent lights in an American Legion hall. When Neo left the Matrix, he met a handful of other people who shared his passions. But why were there so few of them? Because at the end of the day you can only escape the matrix if you really, really want to.
Seasonal work provides a practical way out
The fact of the matter is that we’re all slaves to basic needs. You can’t rage against the machine so passionately that you transcend the need to eat or to find someplace to live. You don't just log out of the matrix.
The draw of seasonal work is that covers your basic needs so you can focus on other things. Many seasonal jobs include on-site housing, and some especially coveted positions even cover food and airfare. When I'm doing seasonal work, I don't have to worry about signing an apartment lease or even buying a car.
Not worrying about my basic needs means I'm able to spend time hiking, making friends, going on adventures, climbing glaciers, jumping in the ocean, and making art.
I’m not one of those people who's gonna film a “Live your dream, babe,” video from my million-dollar beach house in the Maldives. The truth of my vagabond life is far less luxurious. I don’t have a car. I don’t have a house. I don’t even have my own Netflix account. I don’t have a lot in savings, and what I have has been impacted greatly by the Inflation Adventures of the Federal Reserve. But I am happy, which is an asset you won't find rewarded in the Matrix.
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