The roads not taken

Tis the damn season, write this down

Quitting a safe job in an investment bank to work for a YouTuber was not on my 2025 bingo card. But after years of eyeing the content creation road from my side-view mirror, I decided to give it some proper thought.

I spent loads of time questioning myself. Am I just looking at the new road because it’s interesting, because writing for self-development just seems sexier than writing about the economy? What if the grass just looks greener, and when I step onto the actual path, I realise it’s an even duller shade of sage and I wanted to go back? Am I even cut out for that new path when I don’t have any skills for it?

All rational reasons point to staying in the bank. Yet, my gut niggled at me to look at the road not taken. That road and my road were going to coincide in a junction up ahead. I wouldn’t know where it led, and I didn’t have anything else to guide me onto it besides my gut. That and the enticing promise of a more aligned life.

The road not taken looks real good.

I took a hard left and went for it.

It felt reckless. I quit four months ahead of bonus season. I was on track for a promotion in two years. I left a lot of money on the table.

Big Life Decisions are scary because, well, they’re Big Life Decisions. There’s not a right or wrong answer for most of them. Veering off the road could be an equally good decision as staying on the path.

This happened more than once this year.

One of those times was moving into a brand new flat.

I was really terrified to. I knew my area well. I had regular spots to get tempe, shrimp, basil leaves. I even had existing relationships with the shop owners. I was outgrowing the neighbourhood, but I hesitated anyway.

My mom used to tell me: kamu punya kebiasaan untuk ninggalin orang yang ga sejalan dengan kamu. You have a habit of getting rid of people that don’t align with you.

Was I now that kind of person now? The kind who chews an opportunity up and spits it out once I sucked out all of its flavour? First the job, now this. What else will I leave behind with reckless abandon?

At the same time, life is really dang short. I could spend it on the safe road, or I could be adventurous and step into the unknown. And at the end of my life, would I look back and be glad that I had a predictable future? Or would I be glad that I trusted my gut and lived a more adventurous life?

The road not taken looks real good again.

I took a hard left and went for it.

It’s becoming an uneasy pattern.

Other roads not taken that I’m pulled towards

It’s the end of the year, so naturally I’m starting to daydream of what future paths could look like.

One that has always been a “wow wouldn’t it be so cool if I could do this” dream is to spend a whole year just reading.

This has been a dream of mine since childhood, embedded so far back into my life that it’s more a regular fleeting thought than a formal dream. When Hermione Granger discovered the Time Turner, I wondered how many more books I could read in a year with that device. When I learned that the Cullens don’t need sleep, I felt jealous of all the hypothetical books they could ingest in their extra eight hours a day.

This, of course, seems indulgent and highly unrealistic. Surely I must work to pay rent. I don’t exactly have the luxury of having my family bankroll my life, especially since I’m living abroad, alone.

But honestly, after seven full years of working in content, I’m feeling jaded by the pace of it all. I need a break for myself soon.

The ridiculous pace of news part of what veered me away from journalism. So I stepped away for two years, only to land back in the content space where a YouTube video needs to be uploaded twice a week. The videos are so good, surely people don’t need to be told what to do with their lives every single week? (This is another essay though).

When I think of the pace of it all, I want to convulse. A lot of the internet is giving me the ick.

I yearn for longer time horizons, for thoughts that have longer shelf lives, for output quantity to matter less than quality. I sometimes wonder if I was born in the wrong era. Would I have thrived better in a slower-paced world?

How much of a snowflake am I to fizzle out after just seven years? When people say “kids have it so easy nowadays and they’re so entitled to breaks,” am I who they’re referring to?

I look in the side-view mirror again. Is there a road at all where I could be pace-agnostic, where I don’t have to keep up with the hamster wheel of the world?

But to do that, I need to nourish myself. And specifically, nourish myself with wisdom from the past.

I’m turning 30 next year, and I’ve become increasingly cognizant of my own shortsightedness. I grew up with modern television and books, with my information diet skewed heavily towards content published within this millenium. I tried to fix this, so for a period of time I even included a “looking back in history” section in my Substack posts to highlight some cool historical thing that is more than 50 years old.

Perhaps this reading year isn’t about books at all.

Perhaps this year is about taking an intentional beat to disassociate from everything the world considers the norm: work, corporate ladders, promotions, more money, lack of rest, perpetual motion.

Crucially, that year could only work if I don’t. It feels almost impossible to work in this decade without being tethered to current affairs and industry trends that change by the millisecond. The ideal version of this year involves completely disconnecting, burying my nose in books, and a fuckton of writing.

The road not taken looks real good now.

I can’t make a hard turn just yet. But if I start to press on the brakes and angle the steering wheel ever so slightly, I could make that pivot in a few years.

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Update log:

• 🎧 Listening to 1929: The Inside Story of The Greatest Crash in Wall Street History by Andrew Ross Sorkin. Despite going to business school, this is the first detailed account I’ve read on the 1929 crash. How cool is it that we get this information just so readily available by great journalists?!

• 📹 This video from MKBHD about the scale of M5 chips is really dang cool

• 🎞️ Created a b-roll library for the first time

• 🏃🏻‍♀️ Since the last week, I’ve ran 2x 10ks, and 1x 6.5k. I love how casual I can throw this around now

• 🪩 Watching The End of an Era, the new Taylor Swift docuseries. What a great mega production of a great mega production

• 📙 Finished reading The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion. Don is so precious. He reminds me of Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory

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