Hi Aaron, we don’t know each other but I’ve followed you for ages. I have a question and I’m just going to say it flat out: how did you get your job and how do I get that job too? Writing and scuba diving in Thailand and traveling? Basically I want your life. How?
Hey queen, this was such a funny question to open my inbox to. And I'll give you a full answer, because it's not as complicated as I would have thought before I did it.
So, my lifestyle is definitely unusual, and I think the first thing I would say is that I worked for pretty much my whole 20s to be able to cultivate the way I live. Which is not to say that I saved up heaps of money and I now live off my savings, but just more to say that I went through a lot of trial and error as to what works for me.
If you want a beginners guide to getting my life, the first thing you will need is a fully remote job. One thing I did develop in my 20s was a bank of freelance clients, for whom I was initially a copywriter, and then a brand strategist and creative director. I took an in-house job for three years from the start of the pandemic (when freelance work dried up overnight) until I left for Thailand, where I was Head of Brand for a tech start up.
Now I do around 20-30 hours a week freelance work in that field (my niche is that I do a lot of crowdfunding campaign strategy and I have a good contact who is an account manager at Crowdcube - a crowdfunding platform - who recommends me to his clients). It's important that it's freelance, not salaried or contracted because legally, that gives me the freedom to live and work abroad. I couldn't have a full-time, salaried job in the UK and live outside of the UK.
Because I spend a lot of my time in countries with a comparatively lower cost of living than the UK, I can live comfortably on 20 hours a week worth of pay - I wouldn't be able to in London. That gives me the freedom to travel, to dive, and to do the things I love to do.
I will also say, I just recently qualified as a diving instructor, so I want to start phasing out the amount of work I do for clients in the UK and US and start trying to work towards my next goals - which are to open and own my own dive centre.
The way that I live isn't for everyone, and the most stressful part of it for me is that there can be uncertainty around finance - last year, I moved back to the UK for 6 months, did a 6 month full time FTC at a big insurance company and banked all the money I made so I would have a good buffer to keep me stable if freelance dries up (which it does on occasion).
But I genuinely find the collapse of society that's happening in the west existentially hard to deal with, and the state of the world has a really significant impact on my mental health. By excluding myself from that, I find a lot of peace. It's harder to worry about the rise of right wing nationalism when you're 28m under water.
