Work Hard/Play Hard: The Life of a Ronin Chef
When I look back at the past 15 years of my life as a cook, from the first day that I stepped into a professional kitchen until now, it’s tough to say whether I’m extremely lucky, extremely masochistic, or just a guy who makes a lot of bad decisions.
So many people I know from different parts of my life have settled into a 9-5 existence where they acquire assets and shoot out spawn. They live fairly consistent lives of 8 hour workdays and two weeks of paid time off. Even though I spent 5 years of my life in a corporate American cubicle wearing button down shirts and flat front khakis, I can’t even fathom what that’s like. Part of me looks at them and thinks, “Man, that must be great… the short hours, the consistency, the weekends and national holidays off, the ability to meet up with people because they too have a roughly 9-5 job with weekends off.” There’s another part of me that would be looking for the nearest bridge to throw myself off.
My life over the past fifteen years has been one of perpetual motion. For months or years at a time, I’ll work. Yeah. I know. Everyone works for months or years at a time. No, I don’t quite mean like that. When I say work, I mean like 12 hour work days, 6 days a week, for at least 3-4 months at a time. At times it has been working for other people. At times it has been helming a kitchen of my own. But when I say work, I mean work. There’s not a lot of socializing. I live like a factory worker. Wake up, go to work, come home, veg out, go to sleep, and wake up to do it all over again.
When I’m not working that crazy life, that’s when I tend to exist a little bit more. Since I started cooking, I discovered my love for long term traveling. It started in 2005 with a 1 month backpacking trip through Europe. There was a two and a half month trip through southeast Asia in 2009, a two month trip through China in 2010, a month long trip back to Thailand and Singapore in 2018, and most recently a 3 week trip between Bangkok Thailand, Siem Reap, Cambodia, and Kathmandu, Nepal this past February. Some of these trips have been paid time off, and others have been time in between jobs where I had saved up enough money to get up and go.
Regardless of whether it’s paid time off or a break between jobs, all of my travel is done with intention. It’s never a situation do “Oh, I have this time… what will I do with it?” I work so I can GTFO (If you really need the explanation, it stands for Get The Fuck Out).
Of course, we all work to exist, to eat, to pay the bills… What I think is different in my brain, is that where so many people I know work to do all of those things, the money I use to travel, they have other, more practical priorities for, such as acquiring assets, building families, and paying for gym memberships. There are definitely times where I wonder what my life would look like if I actually changed my priorities. Could I even do it? I’ve never been good at waking up in the morning, so it seems like being a 9-5er is already out.
Thinking about it, though, I exist more to the world where I meet people, experience life, and eat delicious new things in far off lands, I still don’t necessarily exist in the place that I call “home.” I’m a better, more open, version of myself out on the trail with my backpack and passport. I talk to more people, see more sunlight, go further distances (Lately, just because I’m getting in my 10,000 steps doesn’t mean I’m going anywhere… . it just means I keep forgetting to get things from the walk-in), look at more art…. There are definitely times I wonder how to bring the me that’s on the trail into the me that’s at home. Occasionally, it will seep out when I’m talking to regulars in the dining room, or when properly engaged by someone else, but it is really difficult to find that guy when I’m in work mode.
So, whereas a lot of people choose to find work/life balance or choose to work hard and play hard in everyday life, I tend to zoom way far out, working insanely hard for ridiculous amounts of time just so that I can take more time off than most Americans do in a week. It’s by no means easy, but I think it’s the only way I know how to live here in America.
Therein may be solution though. It’s what I’m working towards right now.
When I first took a job down on Nantucket in the spring of 2008, I thought to myself, “Hey, I’ll go get a job in a vacation destination and maybe my life will be more vacation-ly.” I was incredibly wrong about that. It was even harder work than I had been doing up in Boston, but with fewer available cosmopolitain amenities, such as IMAX movie theaters for summer blockbusters or ethnic food, and more beaches. Thinking back to that naive decision, maybe it wasn’t so far off as it seems. By that I mean that, maybe the thought process was sound, but the place wasn’t what I needed. This is why I want to try to work in Bangkok, Thailand.
I have been to Bangkok three separate times, and have staged during one of those visits. I loved it. The city has everything I could ever want in a city, great public transit, great cheap and high end food, a lindy hop scene if I get bored, clean, well-lighted places to write, inexpensive cost of living, and friendly people. I think I have to give it a try and see if I can bring my lifestyle of binge working and binge traveling to a more sane amount of working and maybe living in the place I would want to travel to, or maybe living in an area of the world that makes it cheaper to get to the other places in the world that I would want to travel to.
So, right now I’m in work mode, trying to figure out my way to Thailand to see if I can make a run at a work/life balance there. Goals, goals, goals…