A Short History of...

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.

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 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.