In my early twenties I left a finance job in Dublin. I looked at the people ten and fifteen years ahead of me and did not want to become them. So I did the obvious thing. I planned a year of travel. I read the whole leave-the-corporate-job canon, the Tim Ferriss version of the escape, and I basically scripted my exit from it. The plane was going to fix things.
Some of it did shift, and I will get to that. But years later, a lot of what I was trying to leave behind had got on the plane with me. The restlessness. The sense that the good version of my life was somewhere I had not arrived yet. I had changed the map without changing the person reading it.
I am not a psychologist, and this is a piece of reading and reflection rather than advice. The research I touch on below describes patterns across groups of people, not settled rules about your life or mine.
Roughly two thousand years ago, the Roman Stoic Seneca was writing to his friend Lucilius, who seems to have been complaining that a change of scene had not lifted his mood. Seneca’s reply, in Letter 28, has one of those lines that lands harder than it should for something this old. In Richard Mott Gummere’s translation, Seneca argues that “You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.”
His explanation of why the travel had not worked is the part I keep coming back to. He puts it as a question and its answer: “Do you ask why such flight does not help you? It is because you flee along with yourself.” You pack the thing you were trying to escape. Our faults, he says, “will follow you whithersoever you travel.”
His advice follows from that. Seneca tells him that “You must lay aside the burdens of the mind; until you do this, no place will satisfy you.” This is one Stoic’s argument to one restless friend, not a proven law of the mind. But the shape of it survives translation and twenty centuries, which is more than most advice manages.
Perhaps a move is so tempting because it is the most visible lever in the room. We can ‘start over’ in a new city, a new job, a new country. These are things you can actually do this month. They feel like decisive action in a way that sitting with your own head never does.
Booking a flight is a story you can tell people. Changing how you relate to your own restlessness is not a story at all, at least not one with a departure gate.
The modern idea psychologists reach for here is hedonic adaptation, sometimes called the hedonic treadmill. Psychology Today’s editors describe it as the tendency for the emotional lift or drop from a big life event to fade over time. People drift back toward their own usual level of happiness. The new thing becomes the normal thing, and the feeling it was supposed to fix comes back to sit where it sat before.
The evidence for the drift is real. In a fifteen-year study of more than 24,000 people, Lucas, Clark, Georgellis and Diener tracked how life satisfaction moved around big changes in marital status. On average, people reacted and then drifted back toward where they had started. The same authors flag substantial individual differences, with some people still nowhere near their old baseline years later. So the treadmill names a common pull, though plenty of people never drift all the way back to where they began.
What eventually helped me was not the moving. It was the staying.
I ended up in Vietnam and stayed a long time, and that gave me a clearer sense of myself than all the moving around had. For me, the novelty of a new place wore off around two months. The real reflection, the kind you cannot outrun with a bus ticket, did not start until around six. Living somewhere you do not speak the language puts a low, constant stress on ordinary days. That stress shows you to yourself in a way a good holiday never will. You see how you handle being confused, being dependent, being wrong in public.
What it did not do was hand me a truer self that had been waiting underneath the whole time. I think this is the fantasy in the escape story, that the real you is trapped by circumstance and freedom will set him loose. Freedom abroad mostly just gave me more time alone with the same guy. The change, such as it was, came from sitting with him, not from where the sitting happened. Which is, more or less, Seneca’s whole point. He holds that “The person you are matters more than the place to which you go.”
My own settled view is that the shape of the finance job really was the problem for me. Not my attitude to it, not my sleep, not my step count. No amount of yoga or kale or 10,000 steps was going to change the shape of the job. In that case, leaving was not fleeing myself. It was correctly reading a situation that did not fit.
Hold that loosely, because it was right for me and probably a bad call for plenty of other people in the same building who were perfectly suited to a life I could not stand.
Telling those two cases apart is the whole trick, and I do not think there is a clean test for it. Seneca warns Lucilius that “you are not journeying; you are drifting and being driven, only exchanging one place for another.” Drifting is the failure mode. But sometimes the room really is on fire and the right move is to walk out of it. The hard part is being honest about which one you are in, and we are not neutral judges of our own reasons.
So when I feel the pull to leave now, and I still feel it, the question I try to ask is not where to go next. It is what I would be carrying either way, and whether the place I am blaming is really the thing that needs to move.
If any of this is landing closer to home than it is interesting, and the restlessness feels like more than a mood, a good therapist is worth more than any old letter or any article.
