The Lost Decade?

The term “Lost Decade” originated as a description of the 1990’s in Japan, which was a period of economic stagnation following the bursting of the country’s out-of-control asset bubbles of the 1980’s.

Perhaps you remember back in the 80’s when the prevailing message was that “The Japanese are buying our country!” because incredibly rich Japanese companies were acquiring high profile US assets, including marquee skyscrapers like the Rockefeller Center in New York and the famed Pebble Beach Golf Course in California. It kind of did seem like they were buying our whole country. That was the bubble. You may not have noticed that at some point those purchases – and that fear – disappeared, and little by little the assets were sold off by their heavily indebted Japanese owners, putting them back into American hands.

The Japanese stagnation of the 90’s continued to grind on throughout the 2000’s, so there were really a couple of lost decades. And in my opinion the 2010’s were yet another decade of economic stagnation – in Japan as well as in the west – despite what the silly fools in the US government and the Fed try to tell us with their phony statistics about how great everything is. Unprecedented manipulation of interest rates does not create true financial prosperity. But try telling that to a bureaucrat, or any politician who has been in power over the past ten years, and see how much agreement you get.

It’s been funny, because as we approached the end of 2019, and even since the start of 2020, there was a lot of talk about “the end of the decade,” meaning the end of the 2010’s. But it meant a lot more than that to me, because I was simultaneously approaching the end of my own “lost decade” of sorts. And here we are: today is the 10th anniversary of that day, way back in 2010, when I began a vagabonding lifestyle that has continued right up until today. I certainly had no expectation that it would last this long, and I have a hard time believing it has. But you can’t argue with the facts – unless you’re a politician, that is.

What I can say for sure, though, is that when I started very early on that morning in late February 2010, I was definitely not conjuring up a vision of myself being back in a “normal” life after taking an extended “walkabout.” No, I didn’t have any idea where it was all headed for me. But I certainly was not looking ahead saying, “Well, if everything goes right, then ten years from now this period of my life will still be going on.” I had barely gotten used to it being the year 2010 – the start of a new calendar decade that has now passed – so forget about the idea that I might have been pondering the year 2020. And in any case, living like a homeless vagabond for ten years wasn’t one of the possibilities I was even capable of considering.

A NEW new decade is here now, both in my life and on the calendar, whether I like it or not. The world has changed a lot over the past ten years – sadly, it seems mostly for the worse – and as I look back over it all, it’s hard for me to imagine all the places I’ve been, miles I’ve traveled, experiences I’ve had, and people I’ve met. Also, like all of us, I’m ten years older than I was when this all started. Yes, things have changed.

Despite all the things the decade HAS included, there are plenty of things it has not. In that sense, you could call it a lost decade for me. One way of interpreting “lost decade” is that I have been lost in a literal sense, meaning that I was “off the grid.” And though I almost always have had internet access, in many ways I have been off the grid. I consider that to be a very positive aspect of the decade.

In the more Japanese (economic) sense of being a lost decade, I have talked about what I could have been doing professionally, despite choosing not to do so. And there’s no doubt that if I had done such work, I would have been able to earn a large quantity of money. But of course, that would have required me to work a lot more than I have, possibly in positions I didn’t really want to be in.

On the more personal side, though I have been in and out of several romantic relationships during these ten years, I have also made no progress on that front either. I generally don’t mind this, as I’ve never felt any urgent need to get tied together with someone. But at this point, ten years older and a lot more weary of continuous motion, I would like to have perhaps accomplished something more in that regard during these past ten years, because, while I have plenty of confidence in myself, it’s true that I’m not getting any younger.

Yes, I could be a lot richer had I spent the past decade differently. And I might be in a relationship that I would be happy with. But it’s hard to imagine I would have had more incredible and unusual experiences than I have had. The physicist in me notes that we all make decisions every instant of our lives about what path we will follow through spacetime. (i.e., a decision about what we are going to do in the next instant.) And each one of those decisions then leads to an infinity of other options in the next instant.

Compound just a few instants of your life, and the difference between the outcome of one set of decisions and any other could be dramatic. So who really knows what would have transpired had I not made so many of my decisions in favor of vagabonding? “What might have been” is unknowable.

At the moment my vagabonding life is still ongoing, so that’s one thing that has not yet been altered. But I can assure you that is in the process of changing. You’ve heard me talk about wanting to stop vagabonding for several years. You’ve even heard me talk about having talked about wanting to stop vagabonding for quite a while. That’s a lot of talk, and for those of you who don’t believe me (like the boy who cried “wolf”), I don’t blame you. But this time I’m serious.

The details are up in the air, and there have been a few hiccups, but I can assure you that I’ve set things up for me to experiment with being, at least temporarily, in one place. I view the idea of settling back down in much the same way I viewed embarking upon this journey: I have no image of what my future life will look like (not ten years from now, not one year from now.) But this time around I have a general idea of how I might like it to be. And I don’t see it being without plenty of travel and hopefully multiple “home” locations. But the future is always unknown, no matter how much we want to control it.

Here are a couple of pictures of me from the very beginning of my “lost decade,” in Indonesia.

On the Beach – You Can See Gili Meno Island Behind Me and Lombok Behind That

Schoolgirls With Nametags, Numbers…and Stylish Headwear

And here I am in recent months, from the end of the decade, in Peru.

High up in the Andes of Peru, with my buddy Andrei

I look like I’m cold, but I don’t think I was.

I look back on the decade with mixed and even bittersweet emotions; but more sweet than bitter. This has been an incredible ride. As I’ve said, none of us knows what the upcoming decade holds – hell, we don’t know what the next day will bring – but I’m excited to live it as fully as I have the past decade.