Gadget – Traveling Mark

The Curse of Pleasing Others

Our life is an endless sequence of undying efforts we put forth in a struggle to please others. In other words – much of what we do, we do to please others. We modify our behavior to subconsciously please our friends and relatives, we also do it to please those we don’t know (nor do they know us) but come across in our day to day lives, and we also perpetually strive to please those we haven’t even (nor ever will) come into contact with:

Photo: Everything We Do Seems To Be Done to Please Others

we struggle to pay our bills on time to please credit rating agencies
we struggle to eat healthy so we can improve our physique because then we will be perceived as more attractive by others
we struggle to earn good money so we can live in a house, drive in a car, wear latest fashion that will make the heads of others turn
we struggle to write interesting blog posts, twitter updates, facebook profiles because we want others to subscribe, comment, follow, brown-nose, circle-jerk, or otherwise become parts of our network of admirers

Here’s the kicker – most people are so obsessed with pleasing others, they find little time to please themselves (and I’m not referring to sexual self-gratification). Dedication to pleasing others seems to have become the life’s mission of the many of us. It’s become an obsession, a purpose, a meaning of life. We are judged by and gain social status based on how many people we impress throughout our journeys through life. The “what would people say?” is the very question that, whether consciously or subconsciously, pops into our minds and becomes the determining factor of the course of our actions.

I could also put it this way: we live our lives by responding to external demands in an anticipation of external rewards, such as acceptance, status or security, all the while sacrificing our internal needs. Instead of striving to be the best we can be, we act in response to seemingly urgent demands from external sources. The time, that precious commodity we have only a limited supply of is thus taken away from us to belong to somebody else by our own doing.

1 – Take the First Step in Faith…

My journey to rejuvenated self awareness and self realization started when I reached my personal spiritual awakening and began to question the purpose of dedicating the best days of my life to work. The idea of working for the man while I’m young, strong, healthy and fit seemed as absurd as the idea of putting off the fun things this life has to offer until I retire – aka until I’m old and wrinkly and unable to do half the things I can do now. The latter became even more absurd when I realized that one may not even live long enough to reach their retirement age, in which case all they would have experienced during their journey on the planet Earth is work. Just how must it feel when your time to reap the benefits of lifetime dedication to work never comes to be?

2 – Don’t Stop After Your First Step…

I set myself free from the clutches of corporate slavery and started to roam the Earth a free man. But the journey didn’t end there. As I found out soon after, there was more to self realization than freedom from corporate lifestyle. A major next step in my personal growth came to be with a realization that I was a slave to gadgets. What is freedom from one set of shackles good for if you slip into a different set right after? The outcome is the same – you are a slave – only this time your shackles have cute paintings on them. The knowledge I have gained from this experience was – if it dictates your life – you’re enslaved to it, even if it’s something you enjoy and would voluntarily go for.

It was the same type of feeling I felt when I started hating photography even though I loved it my whole life. When surviving as a professional photographer became tough and I had to take gigs I did not enjoy, it was taking the fun away from the whole thing and I hated every minute of it. But as soon as I left pro photography and started taking pictures as a hobby, capturing only what I had genuine passion for, the love and joy for photography came instantly back.

3 – It Gets Worse

Then came the challenge from hell. I was able to set myself free from corporate slavery and gadget entrapment, but having gotten this far – further than most people do – I couldn’t just stop there. I had to poke where it really hurt. There was still one set of shackles and this set holds grip so tight and snug, its existence is not admitted to, not even by the most self realized individuals. It’s the internet.

We the generation of today are so addicted to the internet, it’s not an addiction anymore. It’s part of our daily lives. Everything is on the web, is controlled by the web and is determined by the web. It only gets worse if you’re a person like me who makes his living on the internet. When you’re at that point, then internet gets to decide your every next step. Running an online based business requires one to be constantly on line. Monitoring traffic, responding to online requests, moderating comments, looking for security holes, patching security holes, analyzing server logs, tweaking server settings to improve performance, optimizing database structures, upgrading to stay on top and writing fresh content are just a few of the daily tasks a webmaster has to go through on the daily basis. And that only scratches the surface. It’s the tip of the iceberg the highly competitive world of webmastering represents.

Because of that, despite my apparent freedom from corporate slavery and gadget entrapment, I could not consider freeing myself from the internet as my whole life depended on it. Worse yet, the idea that the internet could be a set of shackles I have not identified yet was not even admitted in my mind. Afterall, how could internet, a tool that makes our lives what they are, be ever considered a tool of enslavement?

Yet that is exactly what it is. For example – while on my tour through Asia, I could not consider a trip to Myanmar because of scarce availability of the internet and heavy censorship throughout the country. If I found myself unable to access any of my sites, I would be unable to monitor them. As a result, if there was a malicious activity on any of the sites, I would be unable to respond before it wreaked complete havoc on the server. And the stress of living with the possibility that there could be something undesired going on with my sites while I’m unable to check and see whether my concerns are founded or not would drive me insane. Hence, a trip to Myanmar was a no option.

Willing to admit to it or not, considering how far I got with my journey of self awareness, it was only a question of time before the shackles the internet represented were identified and ultimately admitted to as such. I’m still not free from this set, but success to every mission begins with giving the problem a name, calling it for what it really is, admitting that it is in fact a problem regardless of how difficult this admission is to make, and if you’re able to do just that, you’re off to a good start. The rest is about putting thoughts into actions but action is what would never come to be unless you square up with it on the mental level first.

The Curse of Pleasing Others

It took me two years to thoroughly identify and admit to each of these sets of shackles. Two I was able to successfully shake off, third I’m still dealing with and as the struggle rages on, I came to understand what really was behind all this. It’s the struggle to please others. It’s the very thing I mentioned right at the beginning of this article. This constant struggle to please others so we can feel relevant is what makes us so selfish. It’s what destroyed true community spirits and replaced them with faux community life we know today.

One would have to visit remote tribes that live far away from civilization to see what community spirits mean. Elsewhere it has long been dead. When you see the hunters leaving the village for a day to hunt, gatherers leaving for a different part of the forest to gather wild edibles, those who are sick or injured staying in the village along with those who look after the fire, bake bread or weave baskets that would be traded off with other tribes. At the end of the day, each bit of food the village as a whole produced is put together so everybody can eat. Hunters don’t just hunt for themselves and their families. They hunt for the village. Bakers don’t just bake for themselves and their families, they bake for the village. Everything is shared – work and food. And when whole village is fed, they gather round to celebrate another day of good life together – as a community.

In cases like these, where real community spirits still exist, people don’t do things to please others. Hunters don’t go hunting to show off that the buck they took down was bigger than one their neighbor got. They don’t put fragrant aftershave on to appeal to women late at night. They don’t need to build their house taller than their neighbors’ – because they are a community. They don’t do things to please others, they do it to survive. Their way of life may seem savage to us, but when you get past this narrowminded point of view (most people never get there in their whole lives), you’ll see that they make far more sense than us.

Granted, one could bring up an argument that without the struggle to please others, we would not have progressed as a civilization. And it is true. People train to be good at sports to show off, and they invent things for the same very purpose. If it wasn’t for this insatiable greed and selfishness, people would retain the community spirit and with it, would lose the desire to get more admiration than their neighbor. Nothing pisses an individual off more than success of their neighbor. The hatred this feeling evokes drives a desire to steal that spotlight off for themselves. Some do it by getting more creative, some by backstabbing, but they all have the same common denominators – zero community spirit with surplus of greed.

It is also important to distinguish between a real community spirit and fake community involvement as we see in modern societies today. People get rewards for their “community involvement” – you could even find lawyers who offer legal advice “pro bono” yet the real reason why these people got involved in the community in the first place was… out of selfish greed. It’s because they knew people were watching and they knew it would be noticed, hence they did it. It was once again a case of doing things to please others. In other words, it’s an engagement in activities one would not do if there was absolutely nobody to see them.

Are You Living to Please Others?

Imagine a scenario from a cataclysmic movie comes true and whole civilization is wiped out with you being the sole survivor. Imagine you look out of the window and there is absolutely nobody out there. You walk outside and keep walking for days on end and there is no one but you. Would you bother putting a make up on and dying your hair before heading out? How about this scenario:

Being a girl and the only survivor of a major cataclysmic event you stumble across a chest. You are happy to have found it cause you could use some clothes and shoes before cold of the night takes over and blisters on your feet get too painful. In one of the compartments you find really sexy high heels, shiny latex miniskirt and ripped up tank top held together with safety pins. In another you find manly looking coveralls, rubber boots and checkered flannel work shirt. Which set would you take to keep fed and hydrated? Which set would you take if no catastrophic event took place and there would be people out there the same way they are now?

One more time with the catastrophic event scenario – if you found a notepad and a pen and decided to keep a journal, would your journal entries be the same as your facebook updates today? Go back to your facebook, twitter, blog or whatever else you use and read the last 5 entries you’ve made. Read them now after you have just read my article about the curse of pleasing other and see if you can reflect on yourself and find yourself in it. Have you written them in a way so as to earn extra brownie points from your peers you anticipated to read it? It takes a strong person to see forest for the trees. Are you her or him?

Do not confuse genuine compassion of one human being towards another with selfish desire to drive up one’s ego by pleasing others. They are not the same thing. They are only parts of the same spectrum, but are at exact opposites of it.

Conclusion

We, the men and women of the 21st century grow up completely disconnected from our inner selves. We have lost the ability to speak to our souls and understand what dwells within us. Instead of looking for our place on the planet Earth, we look for attention. Instead of discovering our purpose in life, we live to show off. We dedicate more time and effort establishing our social status than we do anything else. What we choose to wear, what we choose to say, what we choose to write about, where we choose to go or what we choose to do – we do it, admittedly or not, with foremost interest in boosting our own image in the eyes of others.

It is all about the struggle to please the society, because we have come to believe that the society will reward us by recognizing our “contribution” to it. We want admirers, we want fans, we want our name to be in a newspaper or on a TV screen. We want people to talk about us and most of all – we want them to envy us. We are not interested in things that may advance us independently, on a personal level, unless we get a chance to show it off and gain media coverage while we’re at it.

You don’t see people retracting to the wilderness to live as hermits in order to gain closeness with nature and a better understanding of their place in the awareness. You only sometimes hear about them because if they do something like that, they do it as an attempt to gain fame. To them, albeit claimed as a primary reason of their move, the potential of inner personal development by taking the step is secondary to the social status a “sacrifice” of this type would reward them with.

Finding someone who wouldn’t desire the public to gasp for the air when they hear their story is nigh impossible in this day and age. Those who take steps that appear to have been taken with intentions to grow as individuals take them with loud announcements to the world via internet or other media. I truly find it hard to accept that a person who keeps posting Twitter updates once every hour about his journey to self discovery is merely interested in finding his place in life.

To rephrase – all we seem to care about is our social status. We do things to please others and want everything we do to be seen. Screw inner growth if we can’t brag about what it took us to get where we are and how we struggled to pull it off. We desire nothing more than to be envied. We want it so much we determine the steps we take based on the likelihood and the amount of envy we get in return. We want a job others will envy, we want to drive a car others will envy, we want to have a body others will envy, we want to have done something others would wish to have done before us. It’s falsehood in disguise. We think we are advancing in lives, but all we’re doing is pleasing others. By doing so, we’re letting others to dictate our lives as the directions we choose, we choose based on what social status they would reward us with. We have lost touch with our inner selves and become, in simple terms, strangers to our own souls.

This is what pleasing others, disguised as a journey to self discovery looks like.

iPad for Travel – In-Depth Personal Review

I recently paid a visit to my friend who travels with an iPad (an Apple product). I simply asked him if I could check up on my sites on his laptop to make sure nothing was falling apart since it looked like I was not gonna make it back home for a good while. He handed me his iPad and told me to take as much time as I need. Since I’ve been traveling with what I consider to be the best laptop for travelers, near whole day of iPad use gave me a chance to compare the two and thoroughly review the latest gadget that seems to get so much attention. Is iPad good for travelling or not? Is it better than a laptop or does it lag behind? Read on to find out all about it. This is my in-depth personal review of the Apple iPad with special focus on use by the travelers on the road.

Unfortunately, because it was my friend’s iPad that I got to use (and am reviewing here) and I used it while visiting his place, I do not have any pictures of it. I did not go to visit him to review the iPad, it just so happened that he had one. However given how popular this gadget is, I believe everybody has already seen one or knows how to look up the pictures of it.

Using iPad – First Impressions

Using iPad is no different from using any other Apple product. Nothing is where you would naturally anticipate it to be. Granted, human being is a highly adaptable creature so I eventually get used to everything working backwards, but I still think it’s just plain weird that everything would be set up to go against intuition.

Second thing you also notice right away is the awkwardness of use. This is also something that could be anticipated as iPad was stripped of all the useful things (such as a keyboard) so typing and working with text, or otherwise using any of the features is a major pain (on top of being unnatural as mentioned in a paragraph above).

Photo: Smart Travelers Travel with a Netbook, Not an iPad

The immediately noticeable positive thing is a crisp and sharp screen with very nice picture. That is also something I would call typical of Apple as usability and functionality have never been strong features of any Apple product. Instead of proper engineering, Apple clearly puts maximum focus on cute design. Regardless of how unusable a gadget is, for as long as it looks cool and has a cool screen, it seems to be enough to trick many people into buying.

How Design Overrides Quality

In the section of this blog which I used to introduce myself, I wrote a post about my past work life where I briefly mention my enterpreneurial life running a photography business. Since part of the business also focused on retail, people could buy cameras from me, but being a photographer, I never offered brands I would never buy myself.

I know really darn well that this was a poor business decision, but my personal and professional conscience made me put the business second. A good example were SONY cameras. They had these cute little buttons and really attractive designs, but while both were strong selling points, one thing hidden from a customer looking to buy a camera was quality of pictures they’d take.

Being a small retailer who had to offer added value to his products in order to survive in the shade of the big box stores, I educated all of the people who came to buy a camera from me on what they could anticipate in terms of image quality from each of the cameras. I explained to them what they would be gaining and losing if they opted for this model as opposed to that one. Being a professional photographer at the time, I had the real life expertise sales people from big box stores did not have and that was the reason many people came to buy their cameras from me.

Many however bought their cameras elsewhere and then came to ask me, whom they knew of being an expert on photography, to explain why their pictures look like crap. Often times, by mere looking at pictures I had but one question to ask – is it a SONY camera you have? More often than not, the answer was “Yes”. After brief introduction, the customer would realize that buying a camera from a big box store instead of from a photographer was a mistake and that deciding which one to take based on what the camera looked like was the main reason why important images did not work out.

Still, despite poor picture quality, SONY cameras counted among the best selling ones among the people who did not buy theirs from me. That only confirmed the fact that people are visual creatures and will side with more attractive looks rather than quality output when making purchasing decisions.

It is the same with Apple products. Ipad could be the most useless gadget to be released in centuries, but thanks to its polished black surface and shiny, sharp-pictured screen, it sees millions sold worldwide. I have seen people’s shopping decisions influenced by attractive looks before, so it does not surprise me with iPads at all.

As a brief disclaimer I would simply state that I closed my photography business down in 2005. I have not kept an eye on SONY cameras since and what I talk about above simply reflects on the knowledge I acquired while I was running said business. Things may have (and likely have) changed since. But let’s get back to iPad and its use as a gadget for travelers.

Cost of the iPad

The biggest drawback of iPads is their high cost. These underpowered, limited use calculators with movie playback capabilities (but without a DVD player) are way too expensive for what they offer. I bought my laptop for $379 Canadian and at the time, Apple iPads were available for $499 Canadian (basic version). Had I been delusional and bought an iPad instead of my Samsung N150, I would have spent more money but got far more limited device which would disallow me from being efficient and productive. This could potentially jeopardise my income to a point that I could entirely lose it. As a businessman who earns his living on a computer, an iPad could never be an option.

Yet despite its extremely limited use, it costs significantly more to buy than my small netbook with which I can do absolutely anything. In a year since the purchase, my N150 was my sole tool I used for all video editing, dozens of photo manipulations done each day, graphics design for high end customers, daily web programming and maintenance of high traffic server serving 3 million unique readers a month.

Ridiculously enough, despite being superbly overpriced to begin with, the functionality of this overpriced product is so limited, you will be stuck having to spend more money to buy various applications to actually have at least any use of your new gadget. Yet even if you were to spend thousands of dollars on aps, you still won’t get the functionality of even the cheapest, crappiest laptop available.

Paying more money to be able to do less makes no sense. As a result, buying iPad – whether for travel or anything else makes no sense. None whatsoever.

Review of iPad’s Usability by Travelers

I frequently use my laptop while standing up. Being a rigorous traveler, I often get caught in need of an immediate information and need to get on the internet to look it up. It frequently happens when I can’t find the guesthouse I want to stay in in a city I just got to. When that happens, I walk around in search of unsecured WiFi signals and get on my laptop wherever I can find it. Oftentimes there is nowhere to sit, or it could be raining so I’d be just hiding under whatever piece of roof I could find and as a result, I’m forced to use my laptop while standing up.

Using a conventional laptop standing up is not a problem. But trying that with an iPad became a major nightmare. You basically can’t use the iPad while standing up comfortably. You would either have to twist your wrist into an unnatural position to be able to type, or band your back and neck too much making for a very uncomfortable use. This thing alone makes the iPad unusable for travel.

But usability suffers in all other aspects as well. As a busy traveler, after a long day of trekking, when you’re really tired but need to check your emails and whatever else you use online, you’d like to just lay on bed with pillow folded up below your upper back to keep the upper body up so you can both relax and do your computer work, but if you have an iPad, you can’t. Putting your laptop on top of your thighs and using it while in near laying position is easy and I do it often while traveling, but it’s impossible to do with an iPad.

In order to use it, you’d have to sit up, which would require you to sit on the age of your bed because as a traveler, you won’t see many guesthouses that also have armchairs in their rooms. Sitting on the edge of the bed means that you have nothing to lean your back against and if you’re tired after a busy day, this can be a real issue. Furthermore, even if you do have an armchair or other seat in your room, because you have to lay the iPod flat on your lap, you will be forced to arch your back till it hurts which will make you feel even more tired and will significantly reduce productivity if you’re like me and earn your money on line. The only alternative to it is to hold the iPad with one hand to have it under comfortable angle but this way you will only be able to use one hand for actual work cause the other one will be stuck holding the darn thing.

As for sheer usability during traveling, iPad is completely and utterly unusable.

Review of iPad’s Functionality for Travel

Aside from being more expensive than significantly superior rivals, completely unusable by travelers and non travelers alike, iPad also lacks in basic functionality to a point that it’s ridiculous.

The iPad I tried had only one web browser on it – Safari (Apple operating systems are rather limited and not user oriented so I wouldn’t be surprised if there was no option to add a different browser to it, but I don’t know that for sure). Using Safari by travelers is beyond destructive. Let’s say that like me, you have a travel blog and you’re writing a new post. Your entry includes something you have previously talked about so you want to link that page. You open another tab and navigate through your blog to get to that page so you can copy its URL and paste it into your new entry. With the URL in your clipboard, you come back to the tab where you had your work in progress only to find out that switching tabs in Safari refreshes the pages so you will have lost all you have worked on. Imagine the frustration!

Typing using iPad is a whole new level of frustration all together. If you are responding to something, you won’t be able to see the text because it will be covered by the keyboard buttons. The iPad I used had an external keyboard (yet another expense) which made typing a little easier, but made the whole thing clunky and disorderly. As a traveler, packing and transporting a laptop is easy. But having an iPad and a separate keyboard requires extra space and makes storage and transportation more challenging. The bulk of stuff and cables turns the use of it on the road into a major headache.

Without an external keyboard, the typing is tough. There is no tab key and no arrow keys which makes navigation through text (especially if you’re trying to write something longer than a couple of sentences) a nightmare. If you need to edit a sentence two paragraphs up, you’ll be up for a major task. Many other tasks which take no time and effort on a laptop are also a major nightmare on an iPad with that touch screen – trying to edit the URL in the address bar for example is nothing short of a complete horror.

Photo editing is impossible for images larger than 2,000 pixels on any side. In other words, unless your camera is 10 years old, forget about editing your photos, even if you shelled out for the camera connection kit. Speaking of photo editing, using any of the intuitive, user friendly applications you are used to using, such as Adobe Photoshop or ULead PhotoImpact would be impossible on an iPad. You would be stuck using weird looking and functioning PhotoGene.

Major Technological Drawbacks of iPads for Travel

No Multitasking – what more needs to be added? I’m a busy webmaster. When I get on my laptop, even though it only has 1GB RAM memory, I have several windows open at the same time because I need them at the same time to do my daily tasks. This is impossible with an iPad. As such, iPad is unusable. If you are a traveler, it is quite likely you have some form of presence on the internet. If that’s the case, then lack of multitasking will make the iPad unusable while you travel. But if you make your living on the internet, then iPad is an absolute NO. Yet even if you don’t, surely you would like to have an MSN Messenger or Skype running in the background while you’re on line so when some of your friends log in, you can step in for a chat. Unfortunately, on an iPad, you can’t.

No USB Ports – If you want to be able to download pictures from your camera onto your iPad, you’d have to buy (yep, more money spending) a camera connection kit which is nothing short of ridiculous.

No Flash – this paralyzes more than you would imagine. WordPress image uploader is flash powered for example. If you run a WP powered blog, tough luck! The uploader is not the only WP feature that doesn’t work on an iPad, though. Some sites use login popup splash screens powered by Flash so if you’re a member of such and visit them on an iPad, you won’t be able to log in. Similarly, many online forms will be difficult or impossible to fill in. If they use flash, they won’t work at all, but because the keyboard doesn’t have arrows, even if it wasn’t a flash powered form, you won’t be able to navigate through it, which makes filling them up an insanity of an effort. Complete nightmare!

There is also no DVD player on an iPad, but that’s not a drawback in my mind. DVD players are a major battery wasters and are a more or less an obsolete technology so they’re not anything I’d expect to be on a portable computer anyway. With flash drives growing in size and becoming excessively popular, DVDs have no place on computers anymore. It’s much faster and more convenient to put data on a USB stick than it is to burn them on a DVD disc.

Statement iPod Ownership Makes

There is absolutely nothing that an iPad can do, what a netbook can not. On the other hand, an iPad can do no more than 5% of what an average netbook can. Yet an iPad costs significantly more than an average netbook. As such, anyone who travels with an iPad makes an undeniable statement that they got to 5 trying to add 2 and 2.

iPad – The Good

Looks nice
Crisp screen
Battery life seems decent

iPad – The Bad

Overpriced and underperforming
Requires additional purchases to achieve basic (yet still limited) functionality
Unintuitive usability
Impossible to use comfortably
Can’t use it comfortably while standing up
Can’t use it comfortably while laying in bed
Can’t use it comfortably while sitting without a desk
Safari is a default (and only) web browser
Typing is very challenging and tiring
Text editing is either difficult or impossible
No arrows or a tab key for normal navigability
Limited photo editing capabilities
Impossible to edit images over 2,000 pixels
No multitasking
No USB ports
No flash
No camera
Limited and difficult file management
Slow web browsing (web pages always load very slowly)
Touch screen picks up fingerprints and dust too easily
Made by Apple (fanboys are just plain irritating)

Review of iPad for Travel – Conclusion

Using an iPad for travel would make absolutely no sense. Even if you don’t need to do any type of computer work and only need a machine to check emails and watch YouTube videos, iPad would prove to be a major headache since even the simplest tasks (typing URLs for example) are a tiring and challenging. If however your use of the internet goes beyond email checking, then iPad is a complete No No. Yet even though iPad is nothing more than a limited use calculator with video playback capabilities, the price tag for that thing is unreasonably high which makes a consideration to buy it a sign of limited wits. The fact that so many people did pay to own it only proves how backwards much of the society is.

Motorcycle Riding, Gadgets and Traveling Mark

You may have noticed that there has not been as many updates to Traveling Mark as there used to be in the past. There is a very good reason for that. It started several months ago during my stay in Pakse, Laos. Something happened during that stay that made me have a different outlook on the way I do things and subsequent events set me off on a whole new adventure. It all started with my initiation to motorcycle riding.

Learning to Ride a Motorcycle

I have vast car driving experience and have not had trouble staying safe on the road even in countries where driving chaos is nothing short of anarchy. I am also an experienced mountain bike rider having used my awesome Specialized bike as my main means of transportation back in Edmonton since 2007. I love bike riding and I enjoy driving when exploring new areas, but up until my visit to Pakse, I have never ridden a motorcycle.

Number of other backpackers I met in Pakse were renting motorcycles to explore Bolaven Plateau, a nearby stretch of land with beautiful waterfalls and traditional villages. The whole plateau is too large to cover on foot, there is no convenient bus connection and hiring a taxi for the whole day (whole day is definitely necessary to cover such vast area) would add up to being rather costly.

In this case, renting a motorcycle was the most economical means to explore the plateau (despite rentals being unreasonably expensive in Laos). However, it was also the most fun way to explore the area as with a motorcycle you could do it at your own pace and stop where you want and for how long you want without anyone pressuring you or charging you more. It was clear beyond all doubt that renting a motorcycle was the way to go, but how could I possibly consider it, never have ridden one in my life before.

I was encouraged by other backpackers who said that if I could ride a bicycle, then I could ride a motorcycle. Everybody assured me in striking unison that it was easy and that they never used to ride either and learned it in much more dangerous places, such as Vietnam where roads are congested and bike riders speed by default. Despite all that, I felt extremely apprehensive about renting a motorcycle, but continued to relentlessly search for reasons why I should put my fears behind and do it.

One of the best reasons to “learn how to ride a motorcycle now” was that I was in Laos. Unlike many surrounding countries, Laos is not overpopulated so not even in its capital city of Vientiane are the roads congested to a point that it takes you 15 minutes to cross the road. Furthermore, Laos has a reputation for being laid back which is also evident in the way they drive – nobody rushes it on the road so the conditions for one’s first motorcycle ride were perfect: slow moving traffic with nobody minding if you are excessively slow yourself, plus there is not that much traffic to begin with so if you screw up, chances are you won’t cause a jam.

It was clear to me that if I am to try to ride the motorcycle for the first time in my life, I need to do it in Laos. And if Vientiane is not that traffic heavy, then Pakse is ditto not traffic heavy. And when one passes the borders of the city and gets on the highway encircling Bolaven Plateau, the roads become literally empty with only a few vehicles passing by you every now and again. I wanted to do it – I wanted to learn how to ride a motorcycle and I wanted to explore the plateau riding. Motorcycle was without doubt the only feasible way to do it and I knew that there will not be a better opportunity for my virgin bike ride than now. Yet still I felt very apprehensive about giving it a try.

The breakpoint came when I met two American travellers who overheard me asking around about how it was riding a motorcycle for the first time and joined the conversation stating that they had never done it before either but would like to try. We started talking together and this feeling of being on the same boat, each of us having zero experience riding motorcycles but understanding that this was the right place and time to change it, generated feeling that if we do it together, we could support one another and successfully do it.

I think that up to this point, my main issues were that I only had two options I could choose from – either go on a bike ride alone and struggle along with all the challenges a first time rider faces on my own, or join a group of already experienced bikers and feel like an idiot who hinders the group and causes other needless troubles. But if I joined the two guys who were as new to it as myself, I knew that we each would be equally inexperienced and equally slow until we get the hang of it. On our own, each of us would be lost, but together – together we could not only offer moral support to each other, we could also share tips and “how to” tricks should any of us find something difficult. We were the rookies, but we could be there for one another if there was such need. The apprehension suddenly diminished.

So we went to rent a motorcycle each. The beginnings were shaky. First few meters were downright dangerous and didn’t go without mess-ups however nothing major had happened. We made a few slow circles around a block, got a hang of it and proceeded towards the outskirts of the city, riding at a very slow pace but steadily increasing the speed.

By the time we left Pakse, we felt comfortable enough to ride at a speed exceeding 40 km/h and eventually made our first stop where we parked and went to admire beautiful waterfalls. From that point on it was sheer excitement. We got a pretty decent hang of it and rode along passing one another, shouting out of our lungs as we were savouring that feeling of air against our flesh.

By the time we were half way across, we already felt pretty comfortable on the bikes and had no issue handling any traffic situation. We paused to have a meal in the countryside, got off the main road to do some off road riding towards more remote villages and it was all so exciting, the day ended up being one of the best adventures I’ve ever had. By the time we started heading back to Pakse, we were the kings of the road. We owned it, we owned the world and were not afraid to give into it. It was amazing.

Giving Yourself in to the Moment

As we sat in an Indian restaurant back in Pakse after returning the motorcycles, we munched on the food still in awe from how amazing a day it was. Later we realized one thing – we never took a single picture of ourselves with the bikes. We never took a picture riding. We never spent any time focusing on photography because we were so much in the moment, enjoying what we had at the time to a point that pulling out a camera and setting it up would have been a distraction. The enjoyment of giving ourselves into the moment and enjoying it to the fullest was so empowering, there was nothing that could distract us from taking it all in.

And as I reflected on this experience later on, I came to realize that many a time before I focused too much on photography, on setting up a camera and walking away from everything to get that perfect shot, that I may have missed out on opportunities to interact with interesting people, pausing to breathe in the scents of the surroundings, feeling the touch of grass around my feet, living a moment that could have become the best experience of my life. I may have missed out on it because I was too pre-occupied with my camera. Too keen to take a pictures so I put everyone and everything around me on ignore. It took this bike riding experience with two other guys to realize how putting your gadgets aside to enjoy the basics of life can be more fulfilling and enriching.

Slaves to the Gadgets

When I realized this, I took an even bolder step of taking the same look at spending too much time on a computer to blog about everything I did. Keeping the blog updated takes a lot of time – you do it too – and it’s just that time during which something incredibly awesome could be happening in your neighbourhood, but you will not have that experience because you spent that time on a computer. We who grew up in an information age got so used to our little electronic gadgets, we make it part of our every day life, literally robbing ourselves of amazing experiences we could be having interacting with other people. It took me a while to realize that, but I eventually did and now I live my life differently.

I no longer live to take pictures or to blog. I live to enjoy life. It started with my bike trip in Pakse and the experience has grown more and more empowering. I have been though many countries since but made each day an experience, instead of dedicating a good chunk of it to blogging. I took bold steps to set myself free from the rat race of corporate life only to catch myself in a trap of the gadgetry I carried around with me. It’s a different type of rat race, but it’s just as enslaving.

That was and will be the primary reason why updates to this blog have been slow and coming. I’ve known this for many months, I just never got a chance to explain. Now you know. There is one other thing I grew to realize over the months since my Pakse bike trip – money won’t buy you happiness, but not having enough money doesn’t make it any better.

More Money = More Fun

I was a budget traveller for many months and enjoyed it. However I missed out on many experiences because I simply didn’t have enough money. For example, I couldn’t afford to pay for a plane ride over HaLong Bay, or I could not afford to have an experience of swimming in a pool on top of Marina Bay Sands resort in Singapore because it is reserved to their hotel guests and at the time of my visit, such stay was too expensive for me. So I’ve focused a bit more on increasing my passive income and made my financial situation a bit better.

I still enjoy travelling on a budget, but it is much better to travel frugally because you choose to, rather than because you have no other option. I now occasionally treat myself to a stay in a fancy hotel, such as Shangri-La in Putrajaya, Malaysia to keep the joy of being able to afford it alive, or pay for a full body spa treatment to rejuvenate my physical form.

I achieved that by pausing for a few weeks after a time of intensive travelling and focusing on work a little. I returned to Thailand twice and rented a place to focus on work so I can increase my income. It got much better but now I’m still in the process of revamping my bigger site to make it more advertiser friendly and focus on direct ad sales so the revenue gets into super high numbers. It will also make revenue far more stable as I won’t be reliant on third parties but rather have everything under my own control.

I know where my future lies. Life is good and I’m gonna enjoy it to the fullest as I continue my quest of self sophistication through interaction with people from different cultures and backgrounds. I will also focus on growing my passive income and strengthening my financial position to complete independence. Being financially secure is an important part of living an abundant life.

Man Created God in His Own Image

While I know where MY future lies, I do not know where the future of this blog will be. I will make a post here and there, but it won’t be nothing like it used to. If I’m gonna spend the time on a computer, I will spend it by doing the most productive thing I can to reach my goals. And one of the important goals is to have things run on autopilot. To withdraw myself from the equation so I have more time to do things that matter. Life is short, don’t waste it.

My great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom is well underway (Carpe Diem). How is yours?