Chapter 3. "The New Old Life"

To start with a new life, we had to deal with some spending procedures. After spending a few thousand dollars, we found ourselves in a completely new country, which we had never been to and which was 8,000 km away, if you count the distance as a straight line. Our journey was 11,000 km long. By the way, my wife and me have a child and a cat, which we consider a full-fledged member of the family, so there was no question of taking him with us too.

Our new old life began. New means a lot: we do not know the local language (this is not English), everything for us is new and unusual, a different mentality of the population and different rules. There were a lot of new things in everyday life. For instance, the schedule of hospitals, pharmacies and stores – everything is different from what it used to be. It is not a problem of course and it is not difficult, but you still need to get used to it. The child has difficulty in communication because of the language barriers. Don’t consider my story as a complaint, I am not writing this to say that there is something bad. There are pros and cons, and of course we were aware of that and were ready for it. I'm writing this to state the fact that if it was possible to stay in Russia, we probably would have stayed. Nonetheless, everything that was happening there, made Russia and the Russian society completely unfit for our life.

This new life with all its difficulties and unknown issues was much better than life in the "motherland".

I also call this New Life the Old Life because nothing changes fundamentally, no matter where you live. You still have to work, and most of your time is spent on working.

This is what Robert Kiyosaki wrote about and what he called “the rat race”. You work endlessly just so your family has something to live on, and once in a while you allow yourself a break and spend time with family or friends.

You have necessary strength and desire to work again. It goes round and round, day after day, month after month, year after year. At this point, many people have probably wondered how you work without knowing the language. It's impossible to work even in the simplest jobs such as a taxi driver or longshoreman, even there, the first thing you need is a language. Thus, you had to use the savings you were traveling with. These people would be right - it's hard to call it savings because we had a total of $10,000. This money covered our tickets, document’s arrangement, the apartment rent for a few months and a residence permit in the new country. After these expenses, almost nothing was left (around 2000 dollars). This is all the money we had for the life of our family.

Here it is worth talking about what we did in our "homeland". My wife was a party and event planner, a host and a decorator. I was a builder. That is, I graduated the Institute and obtained a higher Russian education in industrial and civil construction. I had my own small company, which was specialized in doing waterproofing roofs of residential, commercial and industrial buildings. We were arranging monolithic works, we were doing exterior utilities. When my wife and I were at work, the child often stayed with my grandmother. We were financially well and could continue to live like that if we had not paid attention to what was going on around us as most Russians do.

So what did we get in the new country as a result of our choices? My wife does not work (although she tries hard), for the reason that, as you have probably guessed, she lacks the most essential part of her job - communication with locals. There is a complete lack of knowledge of the local language. To add, now there's no one to leave the baby with. And of course, we should not forget to add that we received a tourist visa, which is generally prohibited to work in the country. It’s the same story about me - I do not know the language, proven people are needed for the construction company. Understanding of the local market turns out to be challenging because you need all the things I do not have here now. Also, it turns out that we are here with 2000 dollars with no way to work and with a complete lack of understanding of what to do next. The fact is that in Russia, I had a hobby, about 3 years ago, I bought a drone (DJI Mavic 2 Zoom) and began to fly it on some of our trips, in beautiful places, as well as occasionally used it for photo and video reports at work. That hobby of mine turned into a new one - editing all the video I shot. Then, I started getting even more interested in color grading, post production, compositing, 3d animation, chroma key, and everything related to that. Naturally, it wasn't a quick development. I had a job, hard and not easy, with a huge responsibility to the customers. Just a family needs a lot of time that’s why I had very little time for my hobby. Sometimes I could not give even a minute for 2-3 months and forgot what I had learned. This went on for about 3 years.

And then we come back to February 24th and the next few weeks. That's when I decided that I was going to use what I had learned and be able to make money from it by working remotely by all means. I heard about Fiverr, Upwork - people from all over the world can work there and I decided that if someone can do it, then I can do it too. Hope in our new life was only for that, although before I moved, I had never worked on those sites and I could not say for sure that I would be able to do something, I had no experience in working for someone else. Today, we are living for 8 months in our new location, besides, I am working remotely and developing my skills. I can not say that I earn a lot, but enough for a modest life. Why am I telling you all this?

There are several reasons.

The first is that we have never really planned such a move and have never prepared for anything like this. But if a person really wants something, there is no need to be afraid. It is necessary to use any available skills, knowledge, to give up fear and go forward even if it is completely unfamiliar, new, scary. Life is one, and the worst is that you will not do what your heart truly wants like betraying your desires, impulses, yourself. And then the opportunities and determination will pass, and you will spend the rest of your life thinking that you haven't done something you really wanted to. I have had such moments in my life when I have had many failures in different spheres, and I can honestly say, without deceiving myself, that I would rather fail dozens of times than not do something that I really wanted to do.

Because there's nothing more painful than remembering something and realizing that you chickened out of doing it.

That's my philosophy, that's what I've come to in 32 years. I mean to say that everybody has to live this way, I don't think everybody has to live a certain way at all. Any kind of limits and restrictions are wrong in today's civilized world.

The second reason is that I want to use my own example to show that it is great to try to be a versatile person, to be open to new information and new knowledge, to have hobbies. Therefore, you try to develop your life and not to stand still, because stability in life is quite a big illusion, which can be changed at any moment. What allowed a person to live and earn money may become unclaimed at some point. Circumstances will be such that it will be necessary to change your life in a short time, as it happened to us. You can also think of Covid19 and how many people all over the world lost their jobs then. This is where the skills that you have, in addition to the basic ones, can come in handy.

And the third is how the idea that follows came about. The idea that I spent a lot of time and effort on, and for the sake of which I wrote this entire post. If it hadn't been for all the things I'm talking about now, if it hadn't happened, I would probably still be in my comfort zone in my former "homeland”. I would not have done any of the things that I have done and continue to do now. Yes, I would also dislike everything I write about, but I think that all that habitual life would just go on.