The farmer's eyes: when success stopped meaning what I thought

I was at the office. I had a stable job, a salary, a path laid out. And one day, flipping through a newspaper, I saw a photo of a man who must have been from Vietnam or Cambodia. He was a farmer. And when I saw that man's eyes I said to myself: that's who I want to be when I grow old.

What I saw in the corporate world

It wasn't just that the job didn't fulfil me. It was what I saw around me. Nobody respected the body. It was always the women, the vices, the affairs, the addictions. People earning good money and living disconnected from everything that matters. Wrecked bodies, broken relationships, nights that led nowhere.

One day, a poker champion told me something that stuck: that the goal in life was to discover your passion. He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. And I knew my passion wasn't in that office.

The massage school

I enrolled in a massage school in Barcelona. Mondays and Wednesdays, 7:30 to 9:30 pm. After the workday, I crossed the city to learn how to touch. While my classmates did between one and three practice sessions outside of class, I did ninety-seven. For me it was something very serious. It wasn't a hobby or a plan B. It was what I had to do.

The real price of change

Tuition was 18,000 euros. But the real cost was something else: roughly 50,000 euros in opportunity cost from leaving my career. My parents thought I had joined a cult. They didn't understand. They couldn't. They watched their son abandon a safe path to study massage at night.

But I had seen the farmer's eyes. And I knew that what I was looking for wasn't in an office. It was in the hands, in the body, in something I couldn't name yet but that was already moving me.