I resonate with this so much!!! I do wish I could say writing was my profession, though. Eventually... I envy that, even though writing often feels like the most effective way to go insane sometimes. (I think I stole that from someone else and tweaked it a little to make it my own.)
I also, for the most part, enjoy my work I do now, even more so the freedom that comes with it (but not the poverty with the dry spells that accompany that freedom), and yes, that tends to make people think the work is easy. Is any work easy? Would it be work if it was? Whoever coined the expression "find a job you love and you never work a day in your life" probably never had a job they loved, or a job at all.
And the travel part, fist bump. Travel can be done very cheaply and, in my opinion, is much more gratifying without the fancy expenses. Some of my greatest travel experiences involved freezing my ass off in my car or freaking out about whatever was stomping around in the woods beyond the nylon walls of my tent.
Exactly. It's a means to an end, except so many of us are somehow tricked into making it the actual end. Weird.
Yess! I admit I haven't been so nature-y in a second, but completely relate to this. I loved dingy apartments and discovering random places outside of the "ten museums to see in wherever-the-fuck" guidebook :D
Sometimes a cafe or bar can be the best contemporary cultural museum there is!