A Note on the Journey: This is not a typical bio. It is an unvarnished account of personal and philosophical conflict that led to radical independence. This is also the short version as I am continuing the extended version while developing my writing skills.
Wesley grew up in the rainy Netherlands, a place of tall windmills almost as tall as himself, endless tulip fields, and mind-numbing bureaucracy that pretty much ruled everything. An environment that gave him discomfort at the pressure of trying to be molded into yet another cog for the machine. From the superficial perspective it would seem like a wonderful place, but only for those that enjoyed living under what he perceived as what he would later understand to be akin to an authoritarian leaning state.
He was the kind of kid who liked bending the rules and spotting the cracks others missed. A trait he developed from having an overly controlling and overbearing mother. Raised by her scrutiny, he learned early that every flicker of light was a gamble, authority’s shadow long and patient. The threat of ridicule and punishment hanging over him for every miniscule mistake possible. It made his skin thick, the mind hardened. While most people saw fences, Wesley saw borders waiting to be crossed, wondering what was next on his journey.
Growing up from the time that the internet and the digital world developed quickly, he too grew up with it, giving him endless opportunities for making interesting connections, testing ideas and developing skills. Technology became an obsession he could focus his attention on.
Hiding in his room with his computer systems and monitors that lit up his face in the darkness surrounding him. It wasn’t long before his bedroom had come to resemble a hacker hideout. Computers whirring. LEDs flickering. Cables hanging around connected to hubs and switches. Spare computer parts strewn on shelves and collected in organized containers. Monitors with shells scanning the wired for vulnerable systems ready to be exploited.
Countless hours in fun as well as sketchy IRC rooms, and subculture bulletin boards, he jumped on any opportunity that could scratch his itch for intellectual exploration. Joining hacking groups, warez forums, gaming clans, provided him with those intricate tasks and connections that fulfilled his thinker mindset needs. He didn't have any authority over the wider world, but in this wired enclave, he was sovereign, master of shell and system.
To his family he was just playing with his silly computers doing nonsense, but on the net he was making a name, recruited into more prominent hacking organizations, gaining access to better tools and code, feeling himself a techno-anarchist in the making, but perhaps just trying to find some control in an otherwise chaotic world.
From his high school years in a drab, uninspiring facility with outdated styles of education, Wesley’s young entrepreneurial spirit already began to shine, selling bootleg media to fellow students and staff. Not legal, but like a digital Robin Hood, he didn’t have ethical concerns. Besides, options for making money were limited at this young age, and with his already well established digital skillset it was only natural.
His technological prowess increased over time as he spent more time in the wired. Asian, mainly Japanese culture piqued his interest more and more. With his connections on the net he dived deep into anime and manga. New dreams unfolded, to one day move to such exotic lands, completely different from what he was brought up in. Trading the windmills for skyscrapers, the tulip fields for tropical mountains, and the stagnated Dutch people stuck in their ways for a society eager to grow, innovate and develop.
Visions of walking through rainy neon lit streets, exploring street food stands selling mystery meat type delicacies, high end bikes racing over the pavement through shallow puddles. How amazing would that be? Far away from the boring, oppressive and abusive environment that he was drowning in. Perhaps in such a land he could find himself to be more comfortable. No longer being stuck in the monotonous life that staying in Europe would bring him. Been there, done that, but still young it would have to wait for a while.
His media collection is growing exponentially. Buying writable CDs & DVDs by the spindles, for his own data-hoarding needs as well as reselling them for profit. With the money made investing it in better hardware for his little hacker den corner, the only place in his family home where he could find solace. Still, it was a space that would continue to be invaded by his overly-controlling mother that never respected his privacy and would rummage through his things any chance she got. Living there felt less like a home and more like a constant negotiation against private tyranny.
College to get an IT degree seemed like the logical next step, but the classes were boring as hell. The place was known more as a factory cranking out drones following checklists than a real learning spot. Months worth of homework and assignments were completed in single evenings. Lecture time was time browsing the wired for him, as the educators went on about this or that, Wesley was exploring his own interests. Internships were not much better.
Being given braindead tasks, while tucked away in some dimly lit basement or windowless office, he would find ways to quickly ease the workload, writing scripts to automate the few tedious tasks that were handed to him. They thought he was just another intern, yet he was more a ghost in the machine, quietly bending efficiency to his whim while they counted on his obedience. Time to see what else this corp had on the network for him to play around with.
He understood that it was better to let them keep thinking he was performing like the rest, another drone buzzing around. Completing the work early just meant they would throw him another crappy task to complete. Much of the time ended up wandering around the corporate grounds exploring facilities for his own pleasure waiting for the internships to come to an end. The internships feel akin to being in purgatory.
By the time Wesley graduated, along with some peers in a similar situation, had hacked the school system multiple times over. Not to do anything malicious, they weren’t bad kids, but just for the fun of it and see what they could do and discover. Not just that, it was the idiot sysadmin of the place that was such a fool he didn’t keep his servers patched or up-to-date in the slightest, it was like he was asking to get his systems owned. It would have been harder taking candy from a baby.
With his degree in hand, from an institution that taught him little he hadn’t already picked up from his own personal studies tinkering, he left home for those faraway lands he had desired for so long to build his own paradise, escaping the toxic grasp of his mother and useless Dutch society, a journey that he knew would take a daring and diligent attitude.
Wesley landed in Taiwan, arriving empty of possessions, rich in escape from recent pasts demanding control, and brimming with excitement about opportunities he may find starting the new chapter of his life.
Finding an IT job was tough without the language skills, so he switched gears, teaching English and studying at a local university with a lively campus that fired up his love for learning again as if a bright ray of sunshine broke through the covered sky, reminding him not to let his previous educational experiences cloud his judgement.
A whole new culture opened up, with values that felt closer to his own than back in the Netherlands. He loved sampling street food at busy night markets and riding his motorcycle through streets and tall mountains, it was a fresh kind of freedom. Not to mention that the people were still driven to make it on their own. Unlike back in the Netherlands where everyone went along like sheep, taking little to no responsibility to rely on themselves due to that silly idea of socialism and welfare systems. But that world was now in his past and he was glad for it.
His hacker days had come to an end at this point, his mind no longer set on conquering the wired. New challenges kept him busy, trying to make his own ends meet consumed his time and energy. He felt much better being away from the toxic environment he had left behind, but new struggles emerged. Rent payments, tuition fees, always such a hassle but at least he was doing it on his own, not that he had much support in his past but this was still a new kind of self-reliance.
Meeting new people came easy enough, but lasting, trusting relationships were hard to come by in a place where everyone is different even if they had the same skin color. Spending many evenings and nights at the local expat bars was all good fun, but as the booze flowed in, his money drained out. It wasn’t something he had to worry about too much, still young and a whole life ahead of him.
Having achieved his vision of moving abroad, as we all do, he had to have a new goal. With work leaving him rather dissatisfied, the idea of retirement became the new thing to focus towards. The costly nights spent at the bars and clubs went away soon when he started chasing the coveted ideal of finding financial independence and retirement at a young age. What was the use of these tedious loose women and silly drunkards anyway, short term memories that fade away into the fog as quickly as they were made.
The pressures of life did not relent, growing heavier on his shoulders. He found himself engineering a system of self-medication with the bottle as his tool. It was easy for him to let himself go once in a while. What started as a weekly ritual of relief morphed into a bi-weekly event, then a daily occurrence, a constant chase of numbness over his hardships of both past and present. It was a bad habit, and he was aware of the toxic nature, yet he allowed its grasp to persist for years to come.
It was around this time that Wesley found himself getting married. He never had much experience with relationships, never having been taught by his family what a supportive and loving relationship was like. The feeling his partner brought him seemed familiar and comfortable enough that he felt safe tying that knot, after all that was what someone is supposed to do anyway to move on in life, right? He had misunderstood conformity for compatibility, a lesson that would only become clear as time went on.
Marriage was less about love and more a strategic alliance, comfort’s predictable flavor in a life still negotiating chaos. It brought him good benefits, mostly financial. Residency visa, avoiding costs on doing visa runs, wealthy in-laws that provided a house. House being an understatement, more like a mansion, six large bedrooms each could be a studio apartment on their own. Gated community. Decent living for someone in his mid twenties. A comfortable after work hideout where he had his personal home office from which to restart technological exploration.
Wesley’s rebellious nature often clashed with the local work culture. Teaching English had become his main skill, having given up trying to find work in other fields. The pay from teaching for a foreigner far outweighed what other jobs were willing to compensate, and those that he tried were nothing but headaches and not worth the money to put more effort into.
Independent and freelance work became the only options for Wesley, which worked well for his own personality and entrepreneurial mindset. Taking on website design contracts here and there, building high-end custom hardware setups for small businesses and his more affluent connections, providing cloud services as he explored any opportunity he could to support himself.
He had given up his little hacker corner that he had back in the Netherlands, but still loving technology he slowly built up a proper homelab inside his home office. Before long the homelab had turned into a professional setup. No longer were cables messily thrown around the room and LEDs flickering in the dark from random spots in the background, now had an organized rack. Cables tied neatly with velcro straps, all systems lined up creating a smooth flowing wall of blinking lights.
From a makeshift hacker den in his youth, he had now built up a mature tech stack, one that could rival the infrastructure of small enterprises. The exuberance and thrill of control that he once had from his youth came back when working on these projects, yet again feeling a master over his self-built digital kingdom, now with added expertise and higher end hardware affordable from his disposable income.
The hum of the fans whispering around the clock. A dedicated firewall stood guard at the entrance, flanked by his private array of servers. Behind them, drives spun like the wheels on his motorcycle going top speed, thirty‑six terabytes of raw storage, hoarding countless hours of media consumed over the years while trying to forget the past.
He’d even tried turning it into a business, long before anyone thought to stream their libraries for profit. Before Netflix was a giant, he tried selling streams to those connected to him. The idea failed, society not ready to understand the power of streaming media at the time, but the machinery still ran, obedient and beautiful, answering to no one but him. That alone was a source of achievement.
Wesley didn’t just do IT services though. Cooking and baking were passions that started off as a little hobby. Not finding the kind of bread he truly enjoyed in Taiwan he tried his hand at making his own. From there that grew into a small made-to-order home bakery, although what was getting him paid most from this was crafting some of the best edibles around. Small projects like this also didn’t make him large profits afterall, and what he did earn often went back into consuming his own products with great delight.
As a white foreigner in an Asian country his English language skills were still considered his strongest asset. Always frustrated by the lackluster private education system and the way that management would mess around with clients and workers alike, he founded his own language center, adding on STEAM-based teaching concepts with great success!
Transforming a small room in his home into a full-fledged classroom, also known in Taiwan as a ‘jia-jia-ban’ (a type of private, home-based tutoring center) he recruited his private tutoring students into his center. Word got out quick, and a handful of students from the start had turned to a dozen within a quarter, and kept going from then on.
Despite making progress in building systems and frameworks for his life, he maintained a struggle to fix the one inside his mind. He continued to self-medicate, finding a flawed comfort in the bottle for him to cope with the emptiness lingering in his void.
He maintained a distant correspondence with his family, a duty performed despite past hardships, while passively observing news from the Netherlands. From afar, what he saw was a nation in decay, which only confirmed his decision to leave that world of overzealous bureaucracy behind.
It didn’t anger him, only a strange, bitter satisfaction. He’d warned them but his distrust was always dismissed as youthful cynicism. The official justifications were always the same, “the people’s benefit” in one way or another, it was all eerily familiar. It was the same logic his mother had used to frame control as care, her private tyranny masquerading as benevolent guidance.
He had learned young to distrust those who promise freedom by adding another lock to the door.He had escaped one system of quiet submission only to find, with grim affirmation, that its patterns were everywhere.
Something was still missing from his life, always having some kind of void inside himself that couldn’t be filled. He was making good money, achieving goals, and exploring business ventures. Yet, there was a bottle waiting for him at the end of each day to ease his discomfort. A darkness still itching him, a deeper feeling that there was something more than whatever it was that he was doing with his life at the time.
He came across some videos on philosophy and got intrigued. He started watching more and feeling his interest grow in wanting to grasp these ideas of unlocking life’s mysteries and understanding society he began ordering books off Amazon, having them shipped across the globe from the states to Taiwan. Finding a good selection of English books in Asia was difficult enough as it is, let alone on the topic of philosophy, something most people seem to hold little value in although they tend to claim the opposite.
There he went, beginning his journey to find the meaning of life and wanted to achieve some form of enlightenment. Picking up books and watching lectures online on every type of philosophy, ancient Greeks, the Roman Stoics, the German existentialists. Living in Taiwan, getting involved with Daoism also came flowing along smoothly as he attempted picking up the Way.
It all held great significance to him and the ideas that were provided made his mind spark with new realizations. Past events became more clear, his current situation made more sense, and goals for the future were easier to accomplish. Finally he had found the teachers he was looking for all his life, giving him the mental tools that his parents and community failed to provide him while also understanding why he was not provided said tools in the first place.
With each problem solved, and obstacles overcome, the growth did come at a price. The more he learned and grew, the bigger the distance the relationship with his partner became. As time went on and things got colder, appreciation got lost, efforts to rekindle were met with silence. The quote from Socrates rang true, “Go ahead and get married, if you find a good wife you will be happy, if you find a bad one you will become a philosopher.” Things were becoming clearer every day.
With each problem solved through his newfound revelations, fresh ones would keep propping up. His void remained unfulfilled, the daily self-medication with booze persisted. His abusive relationship with the bottle was clear as day, yet he couldn’t let go of the habit that had a grasp over him for over a decade. The hold of alcohol, an echo of the other toxic holds that he had allowed in his life.
At least one of the grasps that kept him down for so long did come to an end, and although Wesley wanted to keep trying at reigniting the affection in his marriage, it takes two people to make an effort to keep things together. Eventually giving up, finding that it would be better to move on and spend his time and energy elsewhere, his marriage turned to divorce. Slowly, part of the heavy weight that was on his shoulders became less severe and new opportunities for growth emerged out of the wreckage.
He tried to remain in Taiwan, this country had now become his homeland, much more so than he ever thought of the Netherlands. For several years he moved about, trying new relationships with various women, and continuing his diligent studies in philosophy and other closely related topics that would help him scratch that itch and lessen that void that he once found within himself.
With earnings from his businesses saved, Wesley started to become more interested in being smarter with his money. That dream of financial independence and retiring young was still on his mind after all, and feeling more at ease with himself and the world around him through his previous studies he was ready to jump into something new.
At this time the world was at the frontier of a new major situation, the 2020 pandemic started to bubble up. Governments around the world started the money printers and it was easy to forecast inflation spiking. With that in mind the pursuit of protecting his wealth became even more of a priority. For a while books and lectures on philosophy were replaced with those of economics, finance and trading strategies.
Coming across Bitcoin once again, of course he had heard of it many times before over the years but always dismissed it as too risky and uncertain, he took a closer look and found it to be a breath of fresh air. Not just fresh air, but wonderfully scented, like the smell of fresh laundry just out of the dryer. It was weird that he dismissed it for so long, how could he have?
It was the convergence of everything he had ever been: the hacker finding a backdoor in the global financial system, the philosopher recognizing an ancient principle of sound money, and the digital nomad seeing a protocol for true sovereign freedom. It wasn't just an investment; it was the logical, elegant endpoint of his financial journey.
And so the rollercoaster ride of investments started, bulls and bears came and went. Portfolio up a hundred percent, then being down fifty percent, it didn’t matter, keep going, keep stacking, keep learning, it will pay off in the end.
Though personal troubles also had to come and go, having had a mixup in Taiwan during the pandemic that caused him to accidentally overstay his visa he ended up getting a short ban from reentering the country. No big deal, all things have to come to an end is what he had learned over the course of his life. As a result, after many fulfilling years in Taiwan, Wesley’s content chapter there came to a close.
He embraced the new freedoms gained through his newfound financial independence and with a bit of diligent & strategic trading prepared for the next phase of his journey. He visited the Netherlands for a bit, but as always feeling much out of place. Not that he was uncomfortable there, he just didn’t feel that that place had anything to offer him of value, the same feeling he had all his life.
Arguments and drama quickly ensued with his family. One problem led to the other, which intensified the first and caused more trouble which sparked another set of issues. Misery upon misery. Certainly there were those good and pleasant moments, sometimes longer, often short, before a dispute would prop itself up yet again, shadows showing themselves unannounced.
They were a large part of him choosing not to be living there in the first place for a reason, and this was yet another example. He found himself an escape hatch, one that would help him go cold turkey with those from his past once and for all. It wasn’t the best way to handle things, but given the situation he felt it was the best that he could do. The emotional toil was hard to manage, it is quite against our nature to leave family behind.
Making new plans to make a fresh start where he could find a life with more comfort and peace, he was off to another distant land for him to figure out if it could be his paradise, or what he would now call, his ‘Epicurean Garden’.
Having done some research for his next destination, Wesley landed in a sunny beach town in Vietnam. Here he found a slower pace, some peace, and beautiful nature. With his freedom back and his ‘inner kingdom’ steady, he felt his long-awaited paradise was coming closer, but as is the uncaring universe, bringing him new struggles and troubles in return. At least there is always something happening to keep his life interesting in that way.
Vietnam felt like a strange echo of his first arrival in Asia. The raw energy of a nation in motion, the focus on immediate gain, the superficial gloss that hid a deeper, more desperate hustle, it was all eerily familiar.
But he was not the same man who had landed in Taiwan with nothing but naive dreams. This time, he arrived with the quiet weight of experience. The lessons from his past had forged a kind of armor. A sword of discernment to cut through deception and a shield of cynicism to deflect manipulation. It made navigating the world easier. He saw the patterns, the red flags, the subtle tells of exploitation he had once been blind to.
Yet, the armor was heavy. It kept the abusers out, but it also kept the world at a distance. Genuine connection became a calculated risk, a guarded negotiation rather than a spontaneous opening. This was the paradox of his newfound peace. A kingdom of one, well-defended but profoundly solitary. The 'fresh start' was not a return to innocence, but the beginning of learning to live wisely within his own self-built fortress.
And within this fortress a profound change occurred. With external pressures gone, the old coping mechanism became obsolete. He found his endless desire for booze waned. The bottle, which had been a flawed comfort for over a decade, lost its grip entirely. Having found his independence, his inner systems were being satisfied by humming along in the peace of quiet existence. There were occasional pitfalls, regressions to old habits, but they were no longer catastrophic failures. They were minor system errors, easily identified and patched, remaining master over his own sovereign domain.
Today, Wesley continues to wander the borderlands between technology and philosophy, chasing the same flicker of light that once danced on the screens of his hacker den. The battles against external control have been replaced by the quiet maintenance of his inner kingdom, the 'Epicurean Garden' earned through years of wrestling with the abyss.
He can be found moving freely across Asia, an independent soul anchored by a Kindle full of classics and a laptop open to the world’s markets. While he educates the younger generation and strategically manages his portfolio for long-term independence, his true occupation remains the pursuit of becoming an ‘ubermensch’ of understanding.
Often found having a relaxing coffee, by the beach or in a local café, he enjoys making new authentic connections with those of similar mindsets. His life is not a final destination, but a continuous, unyielding practice of freedom, proving that the only true abundance is the joy found within a self-mastered life.
His journey, marked by hard-won lessons in career, relationships, and self-control, now pivots from personal mastery to shared enlightenment. Having built his fortress of financial and philosophical freedom, Wesley’s next chapter is dedicated to guiding others to their own 'Epicurean Garden.' He applies the systems-thinking of a technologist and the foundational wisdom of a philosopher to cut through the chaos of modern life, offering a blueprint for those ready to trade their self-medication for self-mastery. His story is intended as a guiding tool for those looking to overcome their own struggles, whether in their career, relationships, or personal development. If you are seeking to unlock radical independence and forge a life unburdened by past pressures, his method is your path forward.