We Traded Stability For Freedom
“You do not need to spend your whole life waiting for permission to start living differently.”
During my travels, I’ve met people from all kinds of backgrounds whose lives changed quietly somewhere between leaving home and learning how to slow down.
For this four-part Community series, I asked long-term travelers one simple question:
If you could send a postcard back to yourself before you started traveling, what would it say?
This is the fourth, and final, postcard in the series.
I met Min-jun and Hye-ri during a trip to Busan, South Korea, shortly before they left Asia for the first time to begin long-term travel.
After years building a successful catering business in Seoul, the couple — aged 52 and 50 — sold almost everything they owned, despite living a stable and financially comfortable life.
“We realised we had spent years building a life we barely had time to enjoy,” Hye-ri told me.
Inspired partly by the travel videos they had watched on YouTube, they decided to leave routine behind, embrace uncertainty, and see where curiosity would take them next.
Before we parted ways, they agreed to send over a postcard for this series. A few days later, it arrived in my inbox.
Dear Old Us,
You spent years believing success meant building more.
More money.
More property.
More security.
More things to maintain.
And while none of those things were bad, somewhere along the way life started feeling smaller instead of bigger.
The business was successful.
People respected what you had built.
Every year looked better financially than the last.
But quietly, without fully admitting it to yourselves, you had both started feeling restless.
You kept telling yourselves there would eventually be time to enjoy everything you had worked for.
Later to travel properly.
Later to slow down.
Later to experience the world outside routines you had followed for decades.
But the strange thing was, the more financially comfortable life became, the less free your time actually felt.
You were making more money than ever before, yet barely had space to enjoy any of it together.
You had spent so much of life planning, working, organising, building, and maintaining that you forgot how important curiosity once felt.
And deep down, both of you already knew it.
That’s why those travel videos stayed in your minds for so long.
Watching people explore unfamiliar countries, speak to strangers, live more simply, and step into the unknown reminded you that life could still surprise you.
It reminded you how big the world really is beyond Seoul, routines, schedules, and responsibilities.
The truth is, you were never searching for luxury.
You were searching for space.
Space to think.
Space to breathe.
Space to slow down.
Space to wake up without immediately feeling rushed into another day.
And eventually, you realised something important:
You did not need more possessions.
You needed more life.
Selling everything felt terrifying at first.
The properties.
The business.
The cars.
The routines that had defined who you were for years.
But strangely, once everything was gone, you both felt lighter than you had in decades.
Now everything you own fits into bags beside you.
And instead of feeling unstable, life finally feels open.
You still do not have everything figured out.
You do not know exactly where this path will lead.
South America still feels exciting and intimidating all at once.
Some days the uncertainty feels overwhelming.
Some days it feels freeing.
But for the first time in years, you are allowing yourselves to learn as you go instead of trying to control every outcome before it happens.
That alone has changed everything.
You are fifty years old and stepping into a completely unfamiliar chapter of life, and somehow that feels more exciting than frightening now.
You are curious again.
Curious about cultures different from your own.
Curious about conversations with strangers.
Curious about discomfort, spontaneity, and the possibility that life can still completely surprise you.
And perhaps the biggest lesson of all:
You do not need to spend your whole life waiting for permission to start living differently.
The unknown will always exist.
But so will freedom.
— Min-jun & Hye-ri
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