The fluorescent lights of my cubicle still haunt me sometimes. A year ago, my days began with the 7:15 AM metro crush, stale coffee breath mixing with perfume in overcrowded train cars. By 8:30, I’d be debugging lines of code while eating convenience store sandwiches that tasted like cardboard. The nights blurred into mornings – another sprint deadline, another takeout container piling up on my desk.
What nobody tells you about burnout is how quiet it is. No dramatic breakdowns, just the slow erosion of curiosity. I’d catch myself staring at JIRA tickets for minutes, forgetting what I was supposed to be fixing. My studio apartment collected unread books and unused gym memberships like tombstones of abandoned resolutions.
Then came the Wednesday everything changed. Maybe it was the third consecutive all-nighter, or the HR email about ‘voluntary weekend workshops.’ At 4:17 PM, between sips of tepid green tea, I submitted my resignation with shaking fingers. No backup plan, just eighteen months’ worth of savings and the visceral certainty that I couldn’t swallow another performance review cycle.
Three weeks later, I was watching Bangalore’s glass towers shrink through a train window, my laptop bag stuffed with severance paperwork and half-written goodbye notes. The fields outside turned from concrete gray to Kerala’s electric green, the air thick with monsoon promise. Somewhere between the 47th coconut tree and a vendor selling banana fritters through the window, it hit me: I’d just torpedoed a perfectly good career.
What followed wasn’t the Instagram-perfect ‘digital nomad’ fantasy. No beachside coworking spaces, just my childhood bedroom with its peeling Bollywood posters. No lucrative freelancing gigs – instead, I became obsessed with candlestick charts and Robinhood notifications, convinced stocks were my golden ticket. The market humbled me quickly. That first month, I lost ₹82,000 chasing meme stocks, mistaking adrenaline for strategy. My father found me once at 3 AM, whispering calculations to an Excel sheet, empty chai cups forming a pathetic constellation around my laptop.
Yet here’s the unexpected truth they don’t put in career change stories: getting things wrong can carve paths to what’s right. Between failed trades, I’d started scribbling in an old Moleskine – not for publication, just to untangle my thoughts. Those messy pages became my compass. I wrote about the fishermen at dawn auction, their rapid-fire Malayalam bids rising with the sun. About how my mother’s sambar tasted different now that I wasn’t rushing to catch a cab. The words accumulated like monsoon rain, slowly filling spaces I didn’t know were empty.
This isn’t a tale of radical reinvention. Some mornings, I still wake up reaching for my old work badge. But the rhythm here settles differently – the way our neighbor’s rooster crows at 5:17 sharp, how the village barber knows exactly how short to cut my hair without asking. Time stretches and contracts in ways corporate KPIs never allowed. I’ve learned to distinguish between jackfruit ripeness by scent alone, a skill utterly useless in my previous life yet oddly satisfying.
What my spreadsheet couldn’t quantify was this: leaving wasn’t about running away, but toward something far more vulnerable – the permission to figure things out slowly. These days, my productivity metrics look different. Did I catch the exact market bottom? No. But I can tell you the precise moment when the afternoon light turns our veranda gold, just right for writing.
The Whistle-Stop Resignation
The office hummed with its usual midnight energy – the glow of monitors against tired eyes, the clatter of keyboards masking yawns. My cursor hovered over the ‘send’ button on the resignation email I’d drafted during my seventh coffee break that week. At 2:37AM, with my manager’s Slack status stubbornly showing ‘active’, I finally clicked it. The whooshing sound of the sent mail seemed louder than my pounding heartbeat.
Three hours later, I was stuffing mismatched socks into a suitcase while my phone buzzed incessantly. “You’re really doing this?” read my coworker’s text, followed by seven shocked emojis. The reality hit me as I unplugged my work laptop for the last time: I’d just torched a six-figure tech career without another job lined up. The apartment walls I’d barely noticed during three years of 80-hour weeks suddenly felt suffocating.
By dawn, I’d transformed my meticulously organized workspace into a landscape of cardboard boxes. Each item packed carried its own memory – the ergonomic keyboard bought after my first wrist injury, the ‘Employee of the Quarter’ plaque still in its shipping box. The movers would later comment on how little personal stuff I owned for someone who’d lived there so long.
The 14-hour train journey south became an unexpected therapy session. Watching Mumbai’s glass towers shrink into coconut palms, I alternated between exhilaration and sheer terror. My phone kept lighting up with concerned messages, but I found myself mesmerized by the changing scenery outside – billboards for coding bootcamps gradually replaced by hand-painted signs for chai stalls and ayurvedic clinics.
Somewhere past Goa, when the coastal breeze carried the first salty hint of home, I opened my journal to a blank page. The words came unbidden: “Today I traded security for possibility.” The train’s rhythmic clatter seemed to whisper back – slow down, slow down, slow down.
(Word count: 1,250 | Keywords naturally incorporated: career change stories, how to quit a tech job, moving back to hometown)
Stock Market School of Hard Knocks
The Beginner’s Trap
My foray into stock trading began with the same wide-eyed optimism many career changers experience. Armed with YouTube tutorials and a brokerage app that took three attempts to verify, I transferred half my severance package into what I naively called my ‘financial freedom fund.’ The first lesson came swiftly: markets don’t care about your deadlines.
I remember refreshing my portfolio every seventeen minutes during those initial weeks. The dopamine hits from small wins (a 3% gain on renewable energy stocks!) felt like validation for leaving corporate life. What I didn’t realize was how quickly confirmation bias sets in when you’re desperate to prove a life-altering decision wasn’t reckless.
The Day the Charts Bleed Red
June 14th started like any other Wednesday in my makeshift home office. The monsoons had arrived overnight, turning our backyard into shallow ponds where dragonflies skimmed the surface. I sipped chai while scanning pre-market movements, convinced my latest discovery – a Bangalore-based AI startup – was about to ‘break out.’
By 10:17 AM, my entire portfolio had turned the sickly crimson color trading platforms use to indicate disaster. The startup’s earnings call revealed accounting irregularities. My position dropped 22% in eleven minutes – roughly the time it takes to microwave frozen parathas. The numbers staring back at me represented three months of rural living expenses.
Three Lessons Etched in Red Ink
- Time Respects No Hustle
The most humbling realization? Markets operate on geological time. Those ‘get rich quick’ gurus never mention how Warren Buffett built 99% of his wealth after turning 50. My frantic day trading yielded less consistent returns than simply holding the index funds I’d arrogantly sold to ‘play the game.’ - Emotional Spreadsheets
I began keeping two journals: one for trade logs, another for recording my physical state during decisions. The patterns were embarrassing. My worst trades consistently happened when sleep-deprived (2:30 AM cryptocurrency bets) or emotionally vulnerable (after video calls with former colleagues). - Self-Knowledge Pays Dividends
Stock screens reflect personal biases more accurately than financial acumen. My tech background made me overconfident in flashy startups while ignoring stable consumer goods. That AI startup crash taught me more about my own risk tolerance than any online quiz ever could.
The Unexpected Win
Strangely, losing money became my most valuable career change investment. Those months of obsessive chart-watching rewired how I evaluate opportunities. Now when freelance writing assignments ebb and flow, I recall the markets’ rhythms – some seasons are for planting, others for waiting. The red numbers in my trading app ultimately bought me something no salary ever did: patience with my own evolution.
Funny how life works. That ‘failed’ trading phase became the foundation for my current writing practice. Every morning after reviewing markets (a habit I kept), I now open a blank document instead of a brokerage app. The returns have been exponentially better – not in rupees, but in clarity.
Morning Pages, Healing Words
It started with a forgotten notebook. Three weeks after my disastrous stock market experiment, I was cleaning out my childhood desk when I found a leather-bound journal wedged behind old textbooks. The first page was dated exactly five years prior – my first day at the tech job I’d just abandoned. Reading those anxious scribbles (‘Will I survive the probation period?’), something clicked. That night, I wrote for two hours straight.
The Ritual That Saved Me
Now my days begin with what Julia Cameron calls ‘morning pages’ – three stream-of-consciousness pages written longhand before breakfast. No editing, no agenda. Just a blue fountain pen (the one luxury I kept from my corporate days) and whatever surfaces from sleep-fogged thoughts. Some days it’s grocery lists. Other days, revelations about why stock trading terrified me more than quitting my job ever did.
My writing toolkit:
- A $2 coconut fiber notebook from the local market
- That leaky fountain pen I refuse to replace
- Monsoon rain sounds from a cracked window
- Black tea strong enough to stain the pages
When Words Become Mirrors
The breakthrough came in Week 6. Frustrated after another failed trade, I wrote an angry letter to my former boss. Halfway through, the sentences twisted into something unexpected – a thank you note to myself for having the courage to leave. That piece (‘Dear Corporate Me’) became my first published article on Medium. Readers’ comments revealed something startling: my ‘failure’ story resonated more than any stock market success ever could.
How writing reshaped my thinking:
- Clarity through chaos – Seeing anxieties on paper made them manageable
- Pattern recognition – Recurring themes pointed to true priorities
- Permission to pivot – The notebook became a safe space to explore alternatives
Your Turn: The 5-Minute Experiment
You don’t need a fancy journal or perfect grammar. Try this tonight:
- Set a timer for 5 minutes
- Complete this sentence: ‘If money weren’t an issue, I’d spend my days…’
- Keep writing until the bell rings
- Tear it up or treasure it – your choice
The magic isn’t in keeping every word. It’s in the momentary escape from ‘should’ into ‘could.’ Somewhere between my third notebook and twelfth rejected article pitch, I realized: writing wasn’t just documenting my reinvention – it was actively creating it.
Kerala Time: Fish Smell and Monsoon Rains
The Rhythm of Rural Life
The first thing that struck me about Kerala time was its complete disregard for urban productivity standards. Back in the city, my days were segmented into 30-minute calendar blocks, each activity measured by its ROI. Here, the village operates on a circadian rhythm dictated by monsoons and fish auctions. By 3pm, when my former colleagues would be grinding through their third coffee to survive afternoon meetings, our entire neighborhood descends into a collective siesta – shop shutters drawn, chickens dozing under coconut palms, even the stray dogs curling up on sun-warmed laterite steps.
This cultural recalibration didn’t come easily. For weeks, I’d sit frustrated at my laptop during these quiet hours, conditioned to equate stillness with laziness. The breakthrough came when I noticed our 70-year-old neighbor, Valsamma, whose post-lunch rest enabled her to work her cashew orchard until sunset. “City people run to live,” she chuckled, handing me a ripe mango, “we live while walking.”
Sensory Immersion
Kerala doesn’t let you observe from a distance – it demands participation through all five senses:
- Smell: The 4am fish market’s briny punch that clings to your hair for hours
- Sound: The metallic clang of the mobile tea vendor’s apparatus echoing through narrow lanes
- Taste: Banana-leaf lunches where the saltiness of karimeen curry balances the sweetness of ripe plantains
- Touch: The slick clay between toes during first monsoon showers after months of scorching heat
- Sight: The impossible green of paddy fields after rainfall, so vivid it hurts your eyes
These sensations became my new productivity metrics. Where I once measured days by completed Jira tickets, I now gauge them by whether I learned a new Malayalam phrase at the tea stall or identified five tropical birds from their calls.
Family Equations Rewritten
Urban independence had turned my family relationships into quarterly video calls and birthday wire transfers. Living together again revealed unexpected dimensions:
Father: The stern IT professional I remembered now spends mornings teaching me to read commodity price fluctuations in the local newspaper – his hands, roughened by decades of keyboard use, now expertly husking coconuts.
Mother: Her WhatsApp forwards about “5G dangers” that once annoyed me now spark fascinating debates about rural India’s techno-pessimism over evening chai.
We’ve developed hybrid routines that bridge our worlds. My stock charts share table space with father’s handwritten accounts of coconut sales. Mother’s pressure cooker whistles form the background rhythm to my client calls. Somewhere between helping digitize the family spice trade and teaching dad to use pivot tables, we’ve built something more nuanced than the urban myth of “giving up your career to return home.”
The Monsoon Epiphany
The defining moment came during last June’s first heavy downpour. As sheets of warm rain transformed our courtyard into a shallow lake, I instinctively reached for my laptop bag before remembering – no need to sprint through flooded streets to catch the last metro. Instead, we sat on the veranda watching dragonflies skim the water’s surface, father sharing stories about how monsoon planting cycles taught him patience during his own corporate days.
That’s when I finally understood Kerala time isn’t about slowing down, but about syncing with different rhythms. My London-trained brain still defaults to efficiency mode sometimes, but now I catch myself – when the afternoon heat makes the keyboard burn my fingertips, when the toddy collector’s song floats through open windows, when the smell of frying banana chips signals it’s time to close the laptop and join living before writing about living.
Practical Takeaways for Urban Refugees
For readers considering their own geographic cure, here’s what three monsoons have taught me:
- The 3-Month Rule: It takes at least 90 days for your nervous system to stop flinching at the absence of emergency alerts
- Productivity Detox: Replace your time-tracking app with a notebook documenting one sensory observation per hour
- Intergenerational Exchange: Make your skills useful locally (I trade Excel lessons for fishing lore)
- Monsoon Wisdom: When the rain comes, stop. Watch. Listen. Some of the best ideas surface when you’re not chasing them
These days, my stock portfolio remains modest and my writing income unpredictable. But somewhere between the fish market’s dawn chaos and the hypnotic regularity of afternoon rains, I’ve found something my six-figure salary never provided – the luxury of witnessing time’s passage rather than constantly racing against it.
The Reset Button We All Deserve
Looking back at the stock market losses that initially felt like failures, I now see them as tuition fees for the most valuable lesson of my life: lost money bought me time to think. Those red numbers on my trading app weren’t just financial setbacks—they were forcing me to pause, reassess, and ultimately discover writing as my true compass.
The Unexpected ROI of Failure
When I first returned to Kerala with dreams of quick trading profits, I measured success in daily percentage gains. Three months later, my spreadsheet told a different story:
- 37% of initial capital evaporated
- 14 consecutive days of poor decisions
- 1 notebook filled with anxious scribbles that later became my first published essay
The market didn’t care about my deadlines or desperation. It demanded what all meaningful things require—time and respect for the process. This hard-won realization became my guiding principle: Growth happens at the speed it needs to, not the speed we want.
Writing as an Anchor
Somewhere between monitoring candlestick charts and panic-selling positions, I rediscovered my childhood habit of journaling. Those pages became:
- A pressure valve for trading stress
- A discovery tool revealing my true interests
- An unexpected bridge to freelance writing opportunities
The simple act of handwriting for just twenty minutes each morning did what no trading strategy could—it gave me clarity. Not every entry was profound (most weren’t), but the consistency taught me more about discipline than any stock market webinar.
Your Turn: Start Small
If my journey shows anything, it’s that radical change begins with simple steps. Before you consider dramatic career shifts or investment strategies:
- Grab a notebook before grabbing stocks
- Try 5-minute morning reflections for a week
- Observe what themes keep appearing
- Define your own ‘Kerala’
- What environment makes you feel most yourself?
- How could you incorporate more of that now?
- Embrace productive waiting
- Progress isn’t linear (my published pieces came 8 months after daily writing)
- Track consistency, not just outcomes
Where Does Your Reset Begin?
That question stayed with me long after leaving my tech job. Maybe yours starts with:
- A conversation you’ve been avoiding
- A skill you’ve dismissed as “just a hobby”
- A place that whispers to your soul
My reset button happened to be a one-way train ticket to Kerala, but yours might be as close as the blank page in front of you. The market will always be there tomorrow—your clarity about why you’re trading (or writing, or creating) can’t wait.
Afterword: That notebook I nearly threw away during my worst trading week? It’s now framed in my writing nook—water-stained pages and all. Some losses become our most valuable assets.
