There’s a particular feeling that’s hard to describe unless you’ve lived inside it: the sense that you’re existing on the wrong timeline.
Not just unhappy.
Not just bored.
Off.
Wrong career. Wrong city. Wrong relationship. Wrong version of yourself moving through days that don’t quite belong to you. You can function there. You can even succeed there. But everything feels like swimming upstream with a calm face while your body quietly exhausts itself.
And the strange part is this: most people don’t arrive on the wrong path accidentally.
It usually takes years of effort to get there.
Yet, we stay because we convince ourselves it’s easier. Change feels catastrophic. Staying feels survivable. So we tolerate monotony. We tolerate dull despair. Sometimes we tolerate outright self-destruction, because at least it’s familiar.
I stayed for a long time.
Looking back now, I can’t recall a single major decision I made earlier in life—career, geography, relationships—that was truly mine. Not because I was being manipulated, exactly. It was subtler than that. I didn’t want to create disruption in someone else’s life. I didn’t want to cause a ripple.
I was willing to absorb the consequences myself.
I’d already developed a kind of numbness to adversity. I believed I could muscle through whatever fallout came my way. What I couldn’t tolerate was the idea of causing pain or instability for someone else. So I chose paths that kept other people comfortable and quietly fractured my own life instead.
What I didn’t understand at the time was that this doesn’t eliminate damage. It redistributes it.
The ripple always comes. It just spreads wider.
Family. Friends. Business partners. People I loved. All affected by a version of me who was living downstream from his own decisions, trying to keep the water calm for everyone else while creating years of compounded damage in the process.
By the time I saw it clearly, the sum total of my life felt maddening: well-intentioned decisions I never wanted to make, followed by years spent living inside their consequences.
Then came Thailand.
Ending up here was not part of a plan. I didn’t seek it out. I didn’t romanticize it. I landed here through a chain of events that still defy clean explanation, and what followed made it unmistakably clear that I was meant to stay.
Not in a metaphorical sense. In a literal one.
Since arriving, circumstances have unfolded with a precision that feel cosmically engineered. Doors opened that shouldn’t have. Exits closed that normally would have been available. The message was not subtle. It was insistent. Almost confrontational.
It was time to stop living as a diluted version of myself.
Not a “better” self.
A truer one.
We like to believe we’re mostly authentic, most of the time. Some people are. Many aren’t, especially in the Western world, where identity is often negotiated rather than inhabited. I thought I was living honestly. I wasn’t even close.
That realization didn’t arrive gently.
Choosing to step fully into the life that fits you is not inspirational. It’s destabilizing. You disappoint people. You confuse people. You risk isolation. You risk being misunderstood by those who love you most. They may feel abandoned. In some ways, they are.
There’s no clean version of that.
For me, the risk was enormous. I was already standing on unstable ground—emotionally, spiritually, financially. I watched peers move into retirement paths laid decades earlier while I stepped onto something with no precedent, no credentials, no reputation to fall back on.
In a country I had never been to.
Ten thousand miles from everything familiar.
On its face it was absurd.
And it wasn’t optional.
What Thailand revealed—slowly, then all at once—is that my authentic life has two undeniable centers.
The first is here. Rural Thailand. Deep Isaan. Not the idea of it, the lived reality. The rhythm, the Buddhism, the community, the simplicity, the cultural joy that doesn’t announce itself. I didn’t “adapt” to this place. I recognized it. The drift inside my bones stopped immediately. This is where I was always headed, apparently.
The second is the work.
This project. The writing. The book. The sequel. The films. The radio show. This blog.
The thing that eventually took the name Oscar Slamp. It is the only work I have ever done that made me feel whole. It doesn’t require justification or performance. It healed something that had been broken for a very long time. It created a fire in my belly that I can't remember the last time I felt.There is no financial fairy tale attached to it. Not yet. Maybe never.
I’ve sold out to it anyway.
Some things are larger than revenue. Some commitments don’t ask for certainty, they ask for allegiance.
I will die on this hill.
As Elvis put it: you gotta keep on goin’, on that road to nowhere ... just keep movin' down the line...
There it is. If this is a road to nowhere, then nowhere is where I’ll be.