Ask HN: Those who quit their jobs to travel the world, how did it go?

I left my last office job in 2017, spent the first year and a half or so traveling, and then started working remotely, making more money than I was at my office job in high cost of living city. Had the time of my life, met a lot of people, learned a lot about the world, myself, etc.

Now living as a digital nomad for over a year now I'm used to it so it's not really a big deal anymore. I care more about the people I surround myself with than the specific location. Once you've been to major cities around the world, the city/country itself stops mattering as much. I'd love to do some more exotic travel, going to really remote locations, but then you don't have usable Wifi, and even if you did the last thing you'd probably want to be doing is sitting in front of your laptop all day.

I could definitely never go back to an office job. My current employer has a small office so I've gone back every now and then for "fun", but after working remotely I don't see how anyone can go back to office life. It's not just that I don't enjoy offices, I don't think they're time efficient since there's no incentive to complete your work faster since you know you have to be there until 5:30pm or however late everyone stays. When I work out of a coffee shop, I want to be as time efficient as possible and finish my work quickly because I want to get the hell out of there and go live life.

The biggest downside of the digital nomad lifestyle I'd say is that loneliness can be a real problem, all the more compounded by government COVID restrictions (eg. limited social gatherings, curfews, etc). That's still something I don't have a great system for. Of course there are language barriers too - I'm currently in a South American country where most people don't speak any English, so as someone with very bad Spanish it's a lot harder to meet people (obviously I knew this flying here, the tradeoff for the perfect weather was worth it for me). And that being said, I definitely don't consider offices as any cure to loneliness, in fact quite the opposite.

Basically being incredibly particular about my physical living environment and having a fear of it getting messed up or having issues with it.

Understood.

Well, you might mean "destroyed" from the point of view of someone who wants to advocate for Hong Kong independence from China.

Or destroyed from the point of view of someone wanting to publish certain news articles criticizing China. Or whether your university/school teachers are allowed to even mention Hong Kong independence.

Or from the point of view of investors worried about the independence of the financial system from interference / controls in the longer term. Or that they might be extradited to China for financial crimes (or even political reasons) that previously weren't a concern.

Obviously, I'm not unaware of those points of view and situations.

On the other hand, for someone running a business in Hong Kong, working a 9-to-5 job, or even at a typical multinational corporation, or growing up going to school, or settling in for retirement, or traveling to/from the city, life shows no hour-by-hour or day-to-day difference for the vast majority of people.

Whether on balance, these factors would lead someone to declare that a city (or the idea of a city) has been "destroyed" overall is I guess what we're debating.

I take the point of view that jumping without further clarification to say that Hong Kong has been destroyed, is just a bit of a fashionable hyperbolic opinion to put out there -- an opinion that heavily overweights the concerns (even legitimate concerns) of a, let's call it 1%, special subset of the population. Are you one of that group / are you from Hong Kong? If not, how did you join the concerns of the group for whom the city appears to have been destroyed, rather than the rest of the city for whom it continues with no perceptible change in daily life?

To get a feel of what it's like to cycle through vast swaths of empty land, I highly suggest "A bivvy, a phone and a drone: cycling home from China." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mmdxs_0yYwc

This man literally rode through Eurasia up to the UK, sleeping on the side of the road. I stumbled upon it recently and found it quite endearing.

Haha, like I said - to each their own. To be honest I'm starting to miss winter a little bit too.