For quite some time, between the end of the Depression and the late 1970s, the American story went something like this: You got a job and worked hard and moved up through the ranks and bought a house and raised a family and put the kids through college and saved up for retirement at 55 after which you were able to drive around the country checking national parks off the list. This was the 20th-century American story. Never mind, of course, that this kind of life wasn’t available to everyone and may not even have been all that desirable. It was a story a lot of folks could get behind. And it was the story I was raised on, despite it being by then the 80s and 90s and it becoming increasingly clear that things had changed dramatically. 

These are, of course, broad strokes.

The American story of the 21st century looks more like this: Work multiple demeaning jobs, often two or three at the same time because you need the hours—this is called, quaintly, underemployment—where you will be constantly humiliated by the managers and business owners, unable to ever earn enough money to keep up with the exorbitant rent or even to think about starting to pay down your enormous and crippling student loan debt or buy a house, because who has that kinda jack to put down? You pray your car doesn’t break down and that you don’t get sick or ever need to go to the dentist, ever, because you don’t have health insurance and you certainly don’t have a dental plan. And so you live at like 10 different addresses in your hometown—one of which was a trailer in Suitcase City—in just five years in your early 20s with a pretty wide range of roommates and girlfriends with neither plan nor hope that things will get better. None of this has anything to do with avocado toast. 

But they do get better. A miracle happens and you’re able to get out, move to the big city, and go to a very good college on scholarship. Things start to happen for you. Not for any good reason that has to with bootstraps, but because you have some native intelligence, the gift of gab, and you are a handsome devil, indeed. And you’re lucky. You meet people who want to open doors for you. And you say, “Yes, please,” because saying yes to life is working out far better for you than saying, “No, thank you.” And your life improves dramatically. You get to have all those teeth you had pulled—because the inevitable cavities you got when you didn’t have dental insurance got worse and when the really excruciating infection was too much to stand anymore you went to the dentist and had them just take them out because root canals cost a fortune—you get to have them replaced with fake teeth. You no longer have to worry about being evicted for not paying the exorbitant rent or having the lights shut off or having your car break down because that Honda CRV out front is brand new. You get some options in terms of employment. You get to resolve to never tolerate being humiliated at work again. 

You learn that there’s another story: the 21st-century middle-class American story. 

This one goes like this: You work hard and, although you may switch jobs sometimes, you do so strategically, the idea being to move up in terms of salary and prestige. You earn the kind of salary that will lead the lower classes to believe that you’re rich, which you know not to be true because you bought a house with a totally outsized mortgage, which you restructure multiple times to try to do something about your massive credit card debt. The credit card debt is a problem, but at least you were able to send the kids to private school and summer camp and to take nice family vacations. The student loan debt is not a problem because you don’t have any. And so you work hard and strategically move up in terms of prestige and salary and have saved enough for the kids to go to college and even grad school debt-free and you’ve got yourself a pretty decent 401K going, enough to lead the lower classes to think you would be set for retirement, clearly, except that you know this not to be true because of inflation and the rapid increase in cost of living, and you know that you’re likely to live a long time, indeed, because you’re relatively wealthy and have health insurance, and so you need to keep working and saving as long as possible. 

But then you get to be in your early 50s and you get a call from your boss who you’ve worked for most of your life and you’re being fired with a little compensation, which is a miracle, but you will no longer have health and dental insurance, and that compensation ain’t gonna last considering the cost of living these days, and so you need to find another job stat. Only problem is that you will never, ever, earn the kind of outsized salary you were earning again, and this salary was the only thing your soul-crushing job had going for it, and the job options that are available to you are depressing. This problem is compounded by the fact that even if you do get another job you won’t be able to keep up with the cost of living in your town, and the homeowners insurance and property taxes on the modest dream house you own are, frankly exorbitant, and you have a while yet before you can touch your 401k without penalties, and you don’t know how you’ll ever keep up with it all.

Depression and hopelessness are key factors in deteriorating health, of course, and although you’ve eaten lots of avocado toast and lived a healthy lifestyle you get sick and at this point it’s maybe better that you die a death of despair in your trailer in Suitcase City while you’re still relatively young, except that this won’t happen because you don’t smoke and you’ve lived a healthy lifestyle and eaten lots of avocados and the medicine today is amazing and so if you make it to 65 and get to enjoy the benefits of Medicare you will be kept alive a long time, indeed. 

You need a plan. 

Those of you who know us will see that the life trajectories outlined, in broad strokes, of course, above are mine and Gina’s, respectively. But I believe these stories are pretty relatable. 

After more than ten years of zero raises, the steady diminution of bonuses, a one third cut to her salary, uncertainty over what her job even was anymore, and pretty constant dread of being fired, Gina got the call. Ostensibly, the problem was the optics of a high-level exec in the company running a side hustle selling ice cream. It didn’t look good. Everyone in the company knows this is total bullshit, but the owner has to tell himself something to justify firing a person who’s worked an ungodly number of hours each week, making countless sacrifices in terms of her personal life, over the more than 30 years she’s worked for him. To make himself feel better, the owner did generously give her some compensation, which wasn’t going to be enough to keep up with cost of living in Tampa, which used to be one of the most affordable cities in the country, but which is now pretty pricey. 

For myself, the teaching gigs had dried up mid-pandemic, even before we had steady access to vaccines, and they never paid anything to speak of anyway because teachers are wildly undervalued in our society. The side hustle ice cream shop we’d worked on for about three years, and which had been subsidized by Gina’s salary, was not even breaking even on a week-to-week basis and was never going to make money ever because the suits at corporate had wildly overstated the cost of buildout and rent the business could sustain. The cash-flow problem had nothing to do with payroll being too high and sales being too low as the suits constantly repeated, like a mantra of stupidity. By the time we finally threw in the towel, we could have doubled our sales and fired everyone on the staff and still not broken even because the rent on our prime end-cap location was too high and we never, ever, should have spent a half million dollars on the buildout and opening expenses. Much of that half million, by the way, came from an SBA loan which we had to stake our modest dream house against and for which the interest rate had steadily increased to 11%. When Gina asked our banker at Seacoast about making an arrangement to get out of this loan with our shirts, he laughed. Literally. The rent on the prime end cap location the suits insisted we needed isn’t going anywhere for ten years because the totally absentee landlord shows no signs of making an effort to find another tenant and that rent will add up to another half million dollars over the remaining nine years of the lease. 

I could work as an adjunct professor by day and bartender by night, but this wouldn’t bring in enough to cover day-to-day living expenses and the homeowners insurance and extortionate property taxes, and it sure as shit wasn’t gonna help with the SBA loan and rent, not to mention my crippling student loan debt. Laurie Hayes gave Gina a lead on a decent job with the City of Temple Terrace (Amazing City since 1922) that wouldn’t pay even close to her previous salary and the prospect of doing this kind of administrative work was instantly depressing and sure to lead to the kinds of illness and death of despair I mentioned above. 

We needed a plan. 

The plan came to us one morning in our hotel room in New Orleans. We’d booked this trip before Gina was fired and we knew we’d have to shut down the side hustle and so when all that shit hit the fan there was no point in not going and enjoying ourselves. In our room in New Orleans we did a kind of inventory of our lives. We charted where we’d been, where we were at the moment, and where we still wanted to go. We both wanted pretty much the same things: Gina wanted financial security and I wanted to be wealthier, which I think amounts to the same thing, and we both wanted to travel and see the world and have as many experiences as we could while we were still able. The stuff we’d acquired in life—amazing trucks and motorcycles, luxury watches, great guitars, even the modest dream house in Old Seminole Heights (this is obviously my list)—didn’t come into it at all. None of that stuff was important to either of us. And even though our lives in Tampa were great by pretty much any metric—great friends, great house, great marriage—there didn’t seem to be much chance of our lives evolving very much, and we’re pretty dynamic people who thrive when we’re having new experiences and evolving. It was pretty clear that we weren’t going to be able to sustain our home life and travel and see the world and have new experiences unless we made some pretty drastic changes. So we started to devise what was then called the Vietnam Escape Plan. Because although the US had always been very, very expensive relative to other places in the world, the cost of living in the US has clearly gone over the edge since the 70s, and if you’ve been other places in the world, you might seriously doubt whether the expense is worth it.  

You would be forgiven for assuming the Vietnam Escape Plan was all my idea, but you would be dead wrong. You can tell it wasn’t my idea because the initial plan was to join the Peace Corps and travel that way, which if you know me at all you know that sharing a bunkbed with a dreadlocked hippy who uses natural deodorant in a hostel without AC so I can earn a pittance in a 3rd world country ain’t gonna be my idea. Not a chance, baby. The second idea was to teach English in Vietnam, working long hours every day for a pittance. This is where Vietnam really started to get a lot of play, idea-wise, in the Vietnam Escape Plan. You can tell this wasn’t really my idea either, if you know anything about me.  

But Gina’s plan was only half bad. And because like Rocky and Adrian we’re good together because we fill gaps, we worked together to rethink the bad ideas that involved working for pittances in 3rd world countries and to come up with better ideas that would involve leveraging our assets in intelligent ways that would allow us to become free people in Southeast Asia. And so the Vietnam Escape Plan became the Southeast Asia Escape Plan. 

Here’s how the plan shaped up: First, we sold or gave away just about everything we own. This included a pretty premium collection of musical equipment, motorcycles, trucks, including the totally badass Bronco with the Sasquatch package that we waited two years for because of supply-chain problems, guns just in case of zombies, furniture, electronics, kitchen tools and dining ware, clothing, kayaks, house plants, camping gear, the whole lot. We dispatched all the good wine and whiskey with friends. The sale of all this stuff—which we sold at bargain prices because we’re not in the business of selling our stuff, really, and because we sold a lot of it to friends who could really use and would appreciate having the stuff—will fund two years of travel in Southeast Asia. This includes airfare, decent AirBnBs, food, drinks, and health and dental care for both of us. The shoes and clothing we fit into two suitcases will last two years, easy, because the clothing we get in the States lasts forever compared to what they get in Southeast Asia. This is ironic because the clothing we get in the States is produced in Southeast Asian sweatshops. 

The Vietnam Escape Plan turned into the Southeast Asia Escape plan because we realized that as long as we stayed away from the expensive places like Tokyo and Beijing and Macau, we could afford to travel to a new country with a totally different culture every 30 days, which works out in terms of the visa situation. No Vietnam Visa Run necessary. We also discovered that if we played our cards right itinerary-wise, we could avoid the ungodly heat and torrential rain of the low season and pretty much live in glorious 80 degree weather full time after our initial tour in country. So in the weeks leading up to our departure from real life we’d wake up and over coffee look at the Google map of Southeast Asia and Weather.com and work out where we wanted to go. Ho Chi Minh City, which is basically the Vietnamese equivalent to NYC? Beach paradise in Thailand? How about mountain views that are so beautiful you want to cry, and which the photos you take don’t do justice to, except that this doesn’t matter because you are fucking there? This particular corner of the world was and is our oyster. 

We decided to rent out our house because that’d give our friends some hope that we were planning to come back, and the Southeast Asia Escape Plan was already quite a shock. Plus, this would bring in a little bit of traveling money. Gina’s two-year compensation for being fired would cover the SBA loan until we could figure out how to deal with that. Fuck the rent on the prime end-cap commercial space. The 401k which we rolled over into an IRA is doing pretty well again despite how a lot of people feel about Joe Biden. And after we sell the house in two years and invest that money, we’ll be pretty much set for life on the ROI so long as we stay in Southeast Asia. When Gina’s able to draw the interest from her IRA a couple years after that, we will be living large, indeed. None of this would be possible if we stayed in the States. 

We may find a place to serve as a longer-term home base, and I suspect this will be in Hanoi. We’ll buy a couple of motorbikes and continue to travel and write and have new experiences and maybe even teach a little English. I’ll take courses in Vietnamese because I like the language and I like taking courses because the people you meet in language courses are interesting and dynamic and open to new experiences 100%. We will fly out our friends and family to visit for month-long trips of a lifetime. We will surely grow old and die eventually, but these will not be deaths of despair because we will have truly lived. 

This is the Southeast Asia Escape Plan.