Last October I landed in Taipei, Taiwan after a long 16+ hour flight. It was absolutely pouring rain, but that wasn’t going to stop me from exploring the city on foot. It was my first time in Asia, and I was eager to soak in the sights and sounds. I checked into my Airbnb, dropped off my luggage, and stepped out with no destination.

The rain against my umbrella became the soundtrack to my thoughts as I traversed the city. I quietly wondered:

“What am I searching for?”

This was the farthest I had ever been from home, and the novelty both energized and disoriented me in ways that few other things can. It had been 3 months since I quit my job, and I was noticing a shift taking place. The Dependable Survivalist within me, who had kept me on track throughout my academic and corporate career, was giving way to a new character: The Wanderer.

Whereas the Dependable Survivalist saw the world like a pragmatist, the Wanderer saw the world like a poet. Stability, trajectory, and future calculations were quickly giving way to novelty, exploration, and wonder. But where was the Wanderer going, and what did he hope to find when he got there?

‘Wanderer’ is technically defined as ‘a person who travels aimlessly,’ but there is no aimlessness to my Wanderer’s travels. He’s looking for something. Not a destination, or an item, or an achievement…or anything tangible at all. He’s looking for the source of the feelings he carries but cannot name. And the tricky thing is, he does not expect to find it.

You see, from the Wanderer’s perspective, if we can carry something as an idea or a feeling, but cannot fully access it as an object or an experience, then the idea or feeling itself is the end state. The fleeting and ethereal things we yearn for can only exist within us - as longing, as dreaming, or as an inscrutable nostalgia for moments we cannot fully recall. So when the wanderer reaches for these things, he is not actually searching to find them; he is searching to interact with the magic that lives solely within himself.

By the end of my walk around rainy Taipei, I understood: my longing was not a problem to solve, it was something to keep me company.

So, “What do you do when the thing you’re searching for…doesn’t exist?” Well, if you ask the Wanderer, he’d say “That’s the whole point.”

One Friday evening in June 2025, I wrote ‘Formal Resignation’ into the subject line of an e-mail addressed to my manager. I sat quietly in my dining room staring at the words I had written, and waited for the dependable survivalist within me to ring the alarm. After all, I had only been at the company for two months, it was the most senior position I had ever held, and I was making well into the six-figure range. Surely I’d come to my senses, delete the draft, and get back to work…right? But surprisingly, the dependable survivalist - who had gotten me into private school, and then to Yale, and then to Google, and then to Amazon - had no objections. And that was all the conviction I needed…to hit send.

You see, my experience in corporate was one of profound dissonance. From the very beginning of my career in 2016, I struggled to reconcile the wondrous, inconceivable nature of our existence with the relentless pursuit of the next dollar or the next promotion. Every time I caught myself thinking “I can’t believe I’m alive” I was met with the next client fire drill or looming deadline. The incongruousness became ever-present and created friction between my intuition and my responsibilities. But luckily for me, I had the dependable survivalist at my side. He’d remind me that I had an opportunity to amass generational wealth, or that my parents’ sacrifices had helped me succeed, or that there were countless people who wished to be in my position. At every point that my existential angst tempted me to drift off of the path, the survivalist countered to keep us on track.

So, where then was the dependable survivalist when it came to the biggest risk in my professional career? If he had always been there to make sure I acted in my best interests, then perhaps his lack of protest suggested not that he had disappeared, but that the criteria for survival were changing.

Maybe you’ve felt this shift too. At 20 years old, a 5-year plan is ambitious, exciting and self-serving. You might not reach it, but there is little doubt that you will still exist at the end of those 5 years. At 30+, that math changes a bit. “I could be a millionaire by 40” is quickly followed with with quieter questions: “Will I still have my health? Will my family still be around? Will I even make it there at all?” After enough of those moments, the present becomes meaningfully more load-bearing than any imagined future and the promises it might hold.

And so, I return us to the question that started this reflection: What if the wisest path…was the one only a fool would follow? Because, if you stay still just long enough, you’ll notice that so much of our decision making - the plans, the timelines, the hedging, the careful optimization - are all built upon one of the most tempting and foolish assumptions man can make: that he has time. Would I be more foolish to sacrifice my present sense of purpose for an imagined future version of myself? Or to bet it all on right now?

Michael Bernardez