Real talk, guys: 2017 was not the best year for this blog.
The 5th year of Frugal Frolicker was actually the first year that website traffic didn’t increase. Worse than that, I just felt disconnected from the blog most of the time, which often made it difficult to write.
OH MY GOSH I can’t believe I’m actually making some new year’s resolutions!
I’ve been very anti-that for basically ever, but for some reason I’m feeling super inspired and motivated at the start of 2018 to make some moves and get shit done.
Welp, this year-in-review post looks a bit different from the ones I’ve done the last couple years when I was a nomad.
That’s because 2017 was all about getting grounded and making a new home for myself in Sydney, rather than country hopping.
On December 12th, 2014, I arrived in Sydney with my life a freshly blank slate (read: big giant question mark). I’d just quit a job I enjoyed, moved out of an apartment that had been my home for 5 years, sold/stored 95% of my belongings, and booked a one-way ticket to Australia without a plan.
Those subscribed to my newsletter or follow my Facebook page have already heard the news, but for everyone else out there…
After over a year of constant stress, document chasing, and other administrative bullcrap, my Aussie visa process is finally over.
As usual, I didn’t make any concrete New Years resolutions for 2016. That’s why it’s a little funny that it sort of ended up being a year in which I unintentionally experienced a whole lot of new things.
If 2015 was the year of the nomad, then 2016 was definitely the year of the digital nomad.
Rather than aimlessly wandering around Australia for a second year, I decided to travel more slowly so that I actually had time to work and thoroughly enjoy my surroundings.
So, I originally wrote a long-winded intro to this post while on my flight from Sydney to Manila. Then I devoured Mark Mansons’s new book and decided it was way too whiny and that I should give less f*cks than I let on in it.
“How was your weekend?”, asks every king and queen of Small Talk who happens to engage me in a conversation on a Sunday night or Monday.
Weekends have meant nothing to me since I left the corporate world 1.5 years ago, so I don’t know how to answer this question anymore.
I’ve had this aching feeling ever since I entered the professional workforce 9 years ago that the typical 9-5 office job just wasn’t for me. Committing to spending my weekday daylight hours at a desk surrounded by others who have agreed to the same sentence feels completely unnatural and inefficient to me.