I was depressed and unhealthy. Then I re-invented myself (my journey out of corporate America)

In this essay I’m going to share my journey which led me from being very depressed, out of shape, and firmly entrenched in the corporate rat race to doing much more purposeful work, being in the best shape I’ve ever been, and living a relatively peaceful and low-stress lifestyle here in Europe.

I’m sharing my story with you because I know for a fact that so many of you out there feel absolutely stuck in the corporate grind, completely checked out with no clear sense of direction or purpose, and just plain tired of the monotony that makes every day seem like the last day.

And I know that when everyone around you is content with being a slave to the system then it can feel difficult like there is no other path in life. So, I’m hoping that sharing my story will help you find motivation and clarity to take a different path that seems unconventional or risky but leaves you feeling like you’re living a more connected and authentic life.

And in my humble opinion, living authentically is the foundation for true peace, abundance, and lasting fulfillment.

I’m going to break my story up into 5 main phases, then in the end I’ll leave you with some advice that you can apply to your own situation if you’re also feeling like you’re stuck in the system and looking for an escape route.

I’ll start off with the first phase of my journey which I’ll basically call my social conditioning period.

When I was younger, just like every other kid, I took an interest in certain things. I really enjoyed drawing and building things and just being present in the creative process.  I also really liked to learn.  The process of discovering new things about the world was something that I was just naturally drawn to.

At a young age, I didn’t have any grand motives behind exploring my curiosities. I invested my time and energy into these things because I was naturally inclined to do so. In his book, Mastery, Robert Greene uses the term “primal inclinations” to describe these natural curiosities that we all have, so I’ll also use this term to keep things simple.

"You possess a kind of inner force that, in childhood, was clear to you. It directed you toward activities and subjects that fit your natural inclinations, that sparked a curiosity that was deep and primal.” – Robert Greene

Like most other people, I entered into a modern education system that really is just a mechanism for conditioning children and eventually funneling them into the workforce to be good employees. At the time it wasn’t obvious, but in hindsight I realized that the system was in direct conflict with my primal inclinations. In school I was taught the opposite, to stay in line, to not break the rules, to not question authority, and to accept whatever information I was fed as objective truth.

Our environments affect how we navigate through life, so living in the system of modern western society where money, and status, and items of convenience take priority, we inevitably become detached from our primal inclinations.

In the intervening years, the force tends to fade in and out as you listen more to parents and peers, to the daily anxieties that wear away at you." – Robert Greene

As I grew up, I started to focus more of my attention on things that society told me I needed to care about, rather than the things I naturally gravitated towards.

And it happens very subtly. I was subject to all of the messaging from family, from peers, from advertising, from society in general, and the message generally went something like this:

“A good life entails going to school. Making good grades. Getting a college degree. Landing a stable and high-paying job so you can spend money on a bunch of things that will make your life as happy and comfortable as possible. Getting married and having kids. And eventually retiring in your 60s when you’re prime years are already behind you.”

So, this is the path that I started on. I studied mechanical engineering in college with the expectation of landing a decently paying job, which would be the springboard toward a comfortable and prosperous life.

But little did I know how naïve I was to believe that following the socially accepted path would be a one-way ticket to a very depressing time period as a young male early in his career with no clear sense of purpose or direction.

This leads me to the next chapter which was roughly the first decade of my career.

After I graduated from college, I took my first full time job with the federal government, and I immediately realized that I hated work. Between office politics, and some bosses who were total narcissists, and spending so much of my life pretending that my work was important when it really wasn’t, I could not bring myself to any level of purpose or satisfaction in my work.

I remember one day my boss sat me down and told me that I’ll be spending the next 30 years of my life working at this organization, so I need to come up with a career roadmap. That freaked me out. I was genuinely perplexed how anyone could resign themselves to this fate.

I realize life is not perfect. Work is not perfect either. But I immediately knew that being in this kind of environment for the next several decades of my life would literally kill me on the inside. My soul would experience a slow and painful death.

After about 8 years, my sentiments didn’t change. It’s the same old stuff year in and year out. Performance reviews. Time sheets. Pointless meetings. And so on.

From all of this, I realized that the current path that I’m on is just not for me. I hated everything about getting up and going to work every day feeling completely detached from my job.

To make things worse, I was super unhealthy just like most of the people around me at work because all I did was care about working at the expense of basically everything else in my life. So, I was very out of shape, my mental health was in the trash, and I was always with low energy and anxiety, and depression.

At some point the pain became great enough that I knew I needed to do something big and life changing…..

Which leads me to the next stage of my journey. In this stage I was still bought into the societal conditioning, so I entrenched myself even deeper into the matrix.

I decided to fight fire with fire. I made a similar decision as I think most people make when they are feeling unfulfilled with the corporate life.  I decided to invest even more time and energy into moving up the corporate ladder, because that would obviously be the solution.

With more money, I can live a more extravagant lifestyle. I’ll be able to buy a nicer home. I’ll be able to drive a nicer car and take nicer vacations. All of these things would provide validation, and approval from others… and of course my depression, my insecurities, and my overall lack of direction would vanish as a result.

Everything would be solved, and life would be amazing.

Of course I’m being facetious now, but that was my thought process at the time.

So, I eventually left my job to pursue my MBA as a full-time student at University of Michigan and this is where things really began to change for me because business school was a microcosm of not only corporate America, but also a large subset of American culture in general.

My classmates were really, and I do mean REALLY, stressing out over landing their “dream jobs” with certain companies.  People would spend so much of their energy caring about a lot of different things that, in the grand scheme of life that don’t matter that much.

I vividly remember seeing so many friends and classmates let their bodies, their peace of mind, and their overall health fall apart in the name of money and career advancement. This was very alarming to me, so I had to take a step back and ask myself, what is the purpose for all of this? What’s the end goal here?  What’s the point in making as much money as possible if it means letting my body deteriorate?  Seriously, what’s the benefit of it all?

This was a wakeup call that corporate America is basically like a simulation that drives people to do irrational things. I likened it to a drug addict who was so preoccupied with finding their next high that they let everything else in their life fall apart.  Except in this case, the drug of choice is money, status, and career… and the lifestyle is normalized.

I had a complete perspective shift, and I decided once and for all that my health was my most valuable asset, and my actions should reflect that. So, I dove head first into a health and wellness journey.  I promised myself that my body, my brain, and my overall psychological state will never take a back seat to participating in the corporate machine.

My two years of being a college student again, making no money, living very frugally was in a sense some of the best years of my life.  Because life was interesting. It was not monotonous. Sure, there were many challenges, but in a sense I had more freedom, and I also had some sense of clarity in that I at least know my health and wellness should take priority over money or career.

So, this set the stage for the next chapter of my life which I call the period of enlightenment.

Fast forward to after graduation. I moved to Chicago and took a few different corporate roles. And remember, I came from an engineering background, so now working in these consulting and corporate strategy roles placed me much deeper into the very system that I despised.

I was already skeptical about the corporate life after all of these experiences, but at the beginning of the pandemic I was laid off from my job and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

For the next 10 months, I was unemployed and searching for a new job.  And as you probably know, job searches are some of the most demoralizing and dehumanizing things a person can experience. They tell you to customize your resume for the role, you’d spend hours fine tuning it, only for some AI technology to scan it and send your application into the abyss where you’ll never hear from them again.

For job interviews you must put on a mask and act like the company is the best thing since sliced bread. It’s a song and dance that everybody knows deep down inside is all a performance. Everyone knows it’s fake, but we choose to play the part and ignore the reality.

I couldn’t help but think the normalization of willingly subjecting yourself to the time, the effort, the pain and suffering, the humiliation of a corporate job search only to entrench oneself into what is effectively a modern day indentured servitude, is a perverted way to go about life.

But that’s not even the worst of it.

I started to question the systems of modern employment from a health standpoint too.

Because spending so much time indoors, sitting down, staring at screens, being perpetually stressed and anxious is just not good for you.  I really started to embrace this notion that the human experience should be simple, and the typical corporate workplace offers the complete opposite of what I understood a healthy lifestyle to entail.

I started valuing getting plenty of sunlight every day and taking my time to enjoy well-prepared unprocessed food that would be nourishing to my mind and body.  I started to seek out quiet places and opportunities to live more slowly.  I made it a point to get daily movement.

This is when it became clear that to truly live this type of lifestyle, I need to exit the system altogether.  It’s cool to put in some lifestyle habits around your job, but the reality is that as long as I was in a corporate environment, I would always be the outsider.  I knew I needed to physically and mentally place myself into a different environment where prioritizing health, wellness, and inner peace is normalized.

And that meant leaving my corporate life behind and completely reinventing myself.

The last phase is when I finally decided to take decisive action to escape the matrix otherwise known as Corporate America.

After all the experiences I had leading up to this, I was already checked out. So, one day I decided that I’m going to leave the corporate world once and for all no matter what and at least try to build a completely different life that’s more aligned with my values.

Doing this comes with major risks and challenges, so before I took any action I spent a couple of years making sure I was ironclad about my vision for life. I realize this might seem like a small step in the process, but if there is one thing that you absolutely must do when making such a major life transformation, it is spending a lot of time locking in on your purpose, your vision, and your values… Because you will inevitably experience many challenges in life, and having clarity behind your motivations, as well as unshakable determination guiding your vision will guide you through.

I won’t get into the specifics here because it’ll make this essay way longer than it already is, but I do have a full process for finding my purpose, then using anti-visioning to create my life vision and to build a set of values around that vision. If you’re struggling to find your purpose and create your vision for life then you can grab a copy of the self-reinvention cheat-code, or you can book some time with me and I’ll walk you through my process step-by-step so when you’re done you will have no doubts about the direction you want to take your life along with your reason for doing so.

My vision entailed living a much simpler life that is free of unnecessary stress and waking up to slow and peaceful mornings without having to rush off to work. I envisioned spending more time training calisthenics and being in a state of flow while pushing my body to the limits of its capabilities. I envisioned spending my time learning new things and doing work that I actually think is important.

I locked in on my vision and since I was very clear about what I wanted out of life, I was able to get extremely focused, and to confidently take specific actions to begin designing my ideal lifestyle.

When I use the term “focus” I’m not using it loosely. I really mean focusing by doing what I need to do to prevent my life energy from being scattered and channeling it into the things that I knew would drive transformational change. 

I did my best to cut out or minimize all unnecessary distractions and expenses, or anything else that wasn’t aligned with my desired lifestyle. That includes habits, relationships, and even very lucrative employment opportunities that were misaligned with my vision.

This is actually really important because, yes I have enjoyed relative financial abundance, but I have never been anything close to wealthy by conventional standards, and my path to breaking out of the golden handcuffs and enjoying a more free and autonomous life did not necessitate becoming financially rich.  I feel like a lot of people focus on the wealth aspect and end up missing the forest for the trees because that’s not necessarily going to translate to peace, or freedom, or health, or autonomy. So, my focus was not financial wealth per se.

I focused intensely on reducing my cost of living to be as low as possible without sacrificing basic necessities or general well-being. I sold or gave away 99% of my material possessions and put my home in Chicago on the market.

I redirected discretionary income into real estate and crypto investments.

I started searching for geographies that would not only offer my preferred lifestyle for far less money than I was paying to live a suboptimal life in Chicago. So, I ended up choosing Portugal which has a much slower pace of life, and plenty of nature, sunshine, and beaches, all for about 60% of the average cost of living in the US.

I basically took a full inventory of my life, and I aggressively cut whatever wasn’t aligned with my vision. I put myself in a position where I was comfortable that savings and investments that I had would afford me several years of time to build my business, or work on my calisthenics, to learn a new language, or just to slow down, be present, and appreciate life.

Then I came up with some mitigation plans in the case of things going south or taking an unexpected turn. Basically, just running through some worst case scenarios and the course of action I would take if I needed to.  And what this did was give me perspective that helped me overcome the fear of uncertainty or failure because I could see that the outcomes were not all that bad, and it also gave me confidence in knowing that I’ve previously thought through different scenarios so I wouldn’t be caught off guard no matter what happened.

I never felt “ready” to make the move. But since I had put so much effort into solidifying my vision for life, reducing my financial burdens, simplifying my lifestyle to its most basic components, and mentally working through different scenarios, I knew that I had everything I needed to leave the corporate world once and for all.

So that’s what I did in 2024. I put my plan into action. In March of 2024 I traveled to Portugal to find an apartment. In April I handed in my two-week notice at work. And in May I officially moved and started a new life.

It’s certainly not without its challenges, but I can unequivocally say that exiting the rat race is one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my life.

I think it’s because I have reclaimed my time, and time is the real currency of life. 

I have time to slow down and do nothing when I need to. I have time to work on projects that I’m deeply passionate about. I have time to make sure my mind and body are in the best condition possible. I have time to cultivate deep and genuine relationships. At least for me, in having this experience I can say without a doubt that there is no amount of money that makes up for feeling stuck in the corporate hamster wheel with no other alternatives.

I realize that while you may also want to leave corporate and create a completely different life for yourself, you may struggle finding the clarity or confidence to do so. That’s why I’m now creating a premium coaching program that’ll give you the keys to releasing yourself from the golden handcuffs and living life as a free man or woman who says no to the rat race.  It’s called The Escape Algorithm.  It’s by invitation only, and it’s a cohort model so you’ll not only work with me, but you’ll also have a group of like-minded people who are in their own journeys as well.

So, give it a look and fill out an application if you are serious about reclaiming your life.

Aside from that, I’ve got plenty of other free and paid resources that you might find useful, so go ahead and check them out as well at The Focus Algorithm.