Backpacking Over 30 | How I Decided To Take A Career Break

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to take a career break and travel long term in your 30s? I’m about to depart on a mid-to-late thirties career break, and this blog is all about how it started. It’s a little unorthodox, far from the traditional, and certainly not what I thought my life would look like at this age – but I can’t wait.

BACKPACKING OVER 30: HOW IT STARTED

So why am I taking a career break at this big age? Except for ‘why not?’, you mean?

To be honest, I’m bored.

I had a brilliant first half of my 30s. I love being in my 30s; it’s everything I hoped it would be – more confidence, knowing myself really well, liking myself.

But when I reached 35 I realised I didn’t want the next 5 years to be the same as the first. And that meant I would have to change something, so I started thinking about taking a career break seriously for the first time.

The fact is that life looks a lot different now than it did five years ago. Friends have moved out of London, they’ve had kids. There have been weddings and family homes with guest bedrooms have been purchased. But for the most part I’ve stayed still. Content, but still. Not a bad thing, but not exactly the stoking the flames of excitement either.

Friends with commitments and the rising cost of living has put an end to regular midweek dinners at London’s newest restaurants, long gone are the days of the impromptu swift drink after work. That’s the way life goes: it’s understandable that priorities change – they have to. I miss how things used to be but I don’t resent things changing; I’m just a little bit behind everyone else. I’m single and my career has pretty much reached the limit of where it can go. I have built a wonderful life, but sometimes I feel stuck and often I feel bored, like I’m watching things change around me in a passive way.

Don’t get me wrong; to be bored can be considered a privilege in many ways. There are times in life you’d kill to simply be bored, for that to be the biggest frustration in your life. But boredom can also make me feel like I’m going insane. It’s something that boils up inside me, a rage filled exasperation. I hate it.

Then in March last year something happened to me, rather than around me. A group of us at work were told one of our roles would be made redundant. First came the shock, then the anger, then a couple of glasses into the emergency picpoul we shared at our work local, a kind of clarity started to form.

This could be my early ticket to the freedom I so desperately craved. I’d had rough plans to save and finally go on my long awaited third backpacking trip, but this could bring things forward significantly.

By lunchtime the next day, I had volunteered to take redundancy, and a week later I left the place I loved to work for so long.

To me it oddly feels easier to do something big to shake things up at this point in my life. Something big like leaving your job of five years on a whim. Something big like packing most of your life into a storage unit and whatever’s left into a backpack. Something big like handing the keys over to your flat and not knowing for sure when you’ll be back to collect them again.

I think at first this trip was simply about doing something that I love again: the freedom to travel slowly, experiencing cultures and places more adventurous than those I would likely spend my 28 days annual leave on. In the year since I took redundancy, it’s become a lot more than that.

Now, with my ticket to India booked, things are truly exciting for the first time in a long time. The world is suddenly full of the opportunity it felt like it was when I left on my first round the world trip at 22. I’m making sure that life doesn’t look the same as the first half of my thirties: I’m changing things, I’ve taken charge on my terms.

This ticket isn’t just a ticket away from the grind of the corporate world and a chance to see places that I’ve dreamt of seeing for the past two decades, it’s a chance to change the trajectory of my life instead of letting things happen around me.

There’s a joy in not knowing what life will look like in 12 or 18 months from now. Maybe I’ll want to come back to London; to my lovely flat and my secure-but-boring career. Maybe it’ll be the last thing I want to do. Maybe I’ll meet someone who will change the course of things, who will add to my life in a way that makes it better. Maybe things will stay mostly the same bar the pages of my passport, my camera roll and a fresh outlook on the world.

Who knows? But I do know one thing for sure: getting there certainly won’t be boring.

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