Turning 30
Running payroll, iguanas eating ants, and my lower back is fine
The hotel staff guy could tell I was angry. But he didn’t speak a sentence of English. And my Spanglish wasn’t cutting it.
In my little hotel room in Costa Rica, the power went out twice in a quiet surf town with maybe four beachfront hotels. On the second night - with no power and no restaurants open, I devoured two small cans of Pringles chips in the mini-fridge for dinner. The worst part was that they cost $3 each.
But it wasn’t this guy’s fault. He was just the night shift dude. His job was to make sure we felt safe in a foreign country. Albeit he was doing so by lounging sideways in a chair in the outdoor lobby while watching an endless stream of TikTok content.
I wondered if this is really the life he wanted to live. Angry digital surf nomads shouting at him “No me gusta! Tengo hambre!”
But I had a right to be mad. Technically I was paying around $100/day for a bed, A/C and supposedly stable wifi.
And by me staying in a room for a week, it was enough for him to get through life. At $8/hr, was this good enough to feed his kids? To pay rent for a likely multigenerational family shack in the jungle? I guess it’s fine if you believe in capitalism. Which I do. But given how he showed up for work every night - I’m guessing he was willing to make the trade. And I was too - even if I was angry for a bit.
The morning before I dropped two tabs of acid, I made sure to run payroll for my business first. At least I confirmed it with my Filipino virtual assistant that it got done. She also makes around $10/hour, but she definitely does not lounge around watching TikToks all day.
Banking and ACH automates most of it. But for part-time hourly contractors, it does require a responsible human being to wake up on the 1st of the month, enter some numbers into a spreadsheet, and confirm that digital bits from one server made it to the other side of the world. And I don’t know this for sure, but I think most of my employees are happy that the person responsible for payroll is not the one that impulsively decides he’d rather surf mid-way through the work day.
I just turned 30 years old. And other people actually depend on me.
Ants depend on me too.
There are 600 different species of ants in Costa Rica. At their worst, they would slowly climb all over my board shorts, grabbing any pieces of leftover ocean salt that dried up. I would follow their trail one day as they carried leftover Pringle crumbs and salt back across the pool where they face a line of iguanas basking in the sun.
The iguanas are like the chickens of Costa Rica. You’re not supposed to feed them because they’re supposed to eat the ants. And yet they behave with a nature of high anxiety towards predators like me.
And so in a way, my $3 were went well spent. Some ants made it back to their queen. And some iguanas ate some mediocre ants, while avoiding the rather unhealthy highly processed carbohydrates.
Daily life in Costa Rica. Wake up. Do some work. Then head out to a glorious sunset surf. If you told me in high school that this would be my life, I think he’d be nodding his head proudly.
If you told high school Jay that at age 30, he would spend 40+ hours working, thinking, analyzing data, and staring at spreadsheets, I think he’d be aghast.
High School Jay: “What?! And no one is forcing me to do these things?”
30 Year Old Jay: “Yeah - you like it too! You sick fuck!”
But it’s even better than that. Random strangers in economies across the globe need me to continue living my life. They depend on my judgement or addiction to business building to pay their rent. And likewise some of those people are hotel staff in tropical places that need me to continue to ditch work and go surfing.
But it’s not like I don’t take from the world as well. I patiently took the waves from mother nature. I ate the food and service from the hard labor of the local chefs and farmers. And I was granted the kindness from the people around me that welcomed me into their country.
The real fact of adulting isn’t learning to just pay your taxes and do your laundry. To me I’m slowly seeing more glimpses into how these symbiotic relationships change as I get older. I took a lot from people and the world from ages 1 to 18. And realized that as more things shifted towards people needing things from me, it’s not zero sum. There’s plenty that goes around.
It’s easier to do harder things, to take on more responsibility, because you can indeed handle more than you ever think.
I’m really happy to understand that more and more at this age. Yes, I did wake up with lower back pain last week. But whatever, I’ll get over it.