I don't know where I'll be in 12 months

brb freaking out

“I don’t know what my plans are,” my voice trails, admitting the truth to a recruiter calling in from Lebanon, who is asking where I will be after my notice period for my current job is over.

It’s 6:30PM and I’m taking a call for a full-time position I really did not want to take. But I am here because people always say it’s worth a conversation and here I am trying to converse that I don’t want a full-time gig.

But I also want some sort of gig. Because money is what gives me some sort of leeway to make decisions and not have to choose out of scarcity. I had a panic moment about this on the short 1h30min flight between Taipei and Hong Kong. And the universe sent me a double signal, because right upon landing, I get two emails. One is a potential client I talked to months ago asking if I’m still available for hire. The other is a job interview for a company I’ve admired and followed really closely for a year.

Two weeks ago I voiced these concerns over dinner. Paul Millerd said “You are a force of nature. You can make any amount of money you want.” Bhav Sharma said “You can do nothing and will comfortably make $1-2k”, a baseline I now am starting to be aware of.

Money is a weird thing to panic about, but gets me to the core nonetheless. I had spent three decades seeing and working full-time jobs. That an alternative to living exists, one that doesn’t put income-driven work first, is still a concept I’m wrapping my head around.

And it’s not just the money. I don’t want to atrophy. The world is changing so fast. Avant-garde skills are becoming obsolete with every tiny update Claude ships. If I don’t continuously sharpen my axe, I have no chance of cutting through the wood. A full-time job would give me income but cost me the hours I need to keep up.

Two nights ago I made a decision I had been sitting on since mid-March: when I no longer have a full-time income in Hong Kong, do I leave?

And the decision was made literally in the middle of the night because I made it in a dream. I was offered another job in Hong Kong with a 30% salary bump. The catch was that it was in-person and I had to be in some semblance of an office five days a week. I turned the job down in my dream.

I woke up and instantly knew that my decision is made.

Because the consequences of not having a full-time income is that I will have to vacate my flat in Hong Kong. The city is too expensive for anyone to live in without a full-time income. And the consequences of that is that I have to figure out what to do with my belongings - do I ship them to my parents, do I put them in storage, do I put them on a cargo ship and have it sail elsewhere?

And what do I do about documents? I am without a job and therefore it would be hard for me to do any sort of residency in any country without a plausible reason (yay for third-world country passports!).

I didn’t want to make a fanfare of this decision to move out of Hong Kong but I knew what would trail this choice. It means saying goodbye to the friends and chosen family I have built for the last dozen years in the city. It means rehoming myself into a new gym, a new community, a new pace that is most definitely going to be slower than Hong Kong’s hustle. It means plucking myself out of an infrastructure that has cradled me towards adulthood.

It means moving further away from my family.

When I mentioned to a few friends that I may be leaving Hong Kong by midyear to go hop around the world, they said, “Woah you finally get to live your digital nomad dream!”

Has that always been a dream of mine? Did I womanifest that subconsciously?

Some other writers on Substack shrug when they found out I am departing my full-time role: “It was kind of inevitable that you were going to do your own thing.”

Everyone makes it sound so breezy. Like this was always the plan.

But my parents don’t know yet.

My parents and I are treacherously amicable. They make one quip about how my not telling them about my life makes them feel like I don’t acknowledge their existence and guilt will drive me to overshare about my days, which makes me feel nauseous for the yearning for validation at freaking thirty years old. They say something mildly disagreeable about gay couples and I stop talking to them for weeks.

But the tension is in the air and it hangs between Hong Kong and Jakarta. My parents’ eldest is about to move a whole continent away from where she was born, and she hasn’t told them yet.

There have been many decisions made that my parents didn’t know about, a deliberate distancing dancing over many decisions. It started off small, like hiding a blouse that my mom bought but I didn’t like. Then it became bigger, like taking a job interview without their knowing. Then it’s moving in with a partner. Then it’s travelling to Spain. Then it’s quitting a corporate job to work for a YouTuber.

Then it’s moving out of Hong Kong.

A huge part of not telling my parents about my decision is because I am so uncertain of it myself.

My heart of hearts feels that moving out is the right move. But that’s just the general direction that I’m sure about. All the peripheral details - where is my income going to come from, what’s the plan for settling down, how often will I fly back to Indonesia - are a complete blur and I have no way of knowing what those outcomes will be.

Which is fine for sojourners writing about sabbaticals across Substack but geez try explaining that to a couple of Asian parents.

And the truth is I’m terrified. I know I will be okay. I know that I’m making the right decision and I will end up on the other side more than fine. That life is a box of chocolates and they will all taste sweet no matter which one I go for.

But the thought of the change feels so overwhelming at times, especially when it wells up out of nowhere and grips me whole.

It’s easier to admit truths about ourselves to strangers. Perhaps not all of it. But some parts of the scariest, deepest parts that may come with judgement, or emotional baggage, or even preconceptions.

Because “doing your own thing” involves figuring out a lot of stuff that society has pre-figured out for us. Yes, having a job is no fun because we have to be somewhere at a certain time forty hours a week, boohoo, but there is a standardised happy meal package that comes along with it: a home base, a set of colleagues, a stable income.

And now that I have given up the full-time job in Hong Kong, I am finding out quickly that it was the Jenga piece that is causing all the other blocks to tumble.

And I sit here among the scattered pieces, trying to make sense of this all.

*

The recruiter is unfazed by my response. “This job is remote, the hours are flexible, so really it’s not a concern if you will be travelling. I also know that my client would love to talk to you this week. Would you be open to that?”

Everything is worth a conversation. But this time around, instead of LARPing my way through job interviews to say how excited I am for the role, I am going to be honest.

Yes, the job scope is within my capabilities. YouTube channel management, project coordination, marketing campaigns… you name it.

No, a full-time job isn’t what I have in mind. At the pace that AI is growing, I feel that the most valuable thing I can do is actually spend 2-3 days a week actively hitting token limits and building fun and cool shit. A full-time job will actually detract from that growth by virtue of taking time away from vibing with LLMs.

But yes I do have some capacity to work with new clients.

No, I don’t think I’ll be interested in growing into a full-time role.

Yes, I’ll chat with your client.

No, I don’t really know where I’ll be in twelve months, actually.

The recruiter sets up a follow-up meeting between me and her client and the call ends. I unplug my earphones and process the conversation while cracking salt into a pot of boiling water for pasta.

Settling into a new home base is going to be a big adjustment.

But for now I’m making a familiar bowl of carbonara and will sit in my familiar chair in my familiar apartment. And I’m going to soak it all in.

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Update log:

• 👩🏻‍💻 Hosted an Intro to Claude Code session for Small Creator Big World

• 😭 Wrote this piece at 1AM also after sobbing while reading Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness. Is this normal?!

• 🍺 Celebrated my birthday by popping open some beer bottles with chopsticks (a fun party trick!)

• 📺 Watched Kabhi Khushi Khabie Gham and I haven’t stopped singing Bole Chudiyan since

• 🤸‍♂️ I’ve been staying behind gym classes to stretch for ~5-ish mins. I need to get more flexible.

• ☀️ The weather is getting warmer in Hong Kong BUUUT the perk is the sun comes up earlier too

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