It’s amazing how time flies! It has been ten years since I quit my relatively well-paid, quite comfortable and supposedly lifelong job at a Taiwanese government agency.
The precondition for that life-changing decision was that I had obtained my permanent residency permit for Taiwan in October 2010, after five years of continuous employment on the island.
Following a year of intensive weighing up the pros and cons, in April 2012 I finally submitted my resignation to my employers, who were rather reluctant to accept it.
But I had made up my mind and no attempts to cajole me into changing it were successful. My direct superior even asked me three times if I really wanted to go ahead, warning me that there would be no turning back.
The reasons why I did it are manifold. The working atmosphere had declined considerably, as more and more people were interfering with my job just because they were above me in the internal pecking order.
They simply failed to show me the respect that I deserved and needed to keep going at a high level. Most of all, they would have never dared to treat a local senior advisor so poorly.
Also, due to a silly einvironmental concept pushed by then Taiwan President Ma Ying-Jeou (born 1950), the air conditioning system in most of the building would only be switched on if the temperature exceeded 28 °C.
Anyone who has experienced such heat combined with high humidity can easily imagine how it affects one’s performance. From April to October, I was all in a sweat after just half an hour in the building.
It was particularly annoying because I used to go to the gym before staring my working day and showered in the basement, to arrive fresh as a daisy at the office.
Quite a few of my later projects failed, though disappointments are a significant part of life! I think that I have learned from some of my many mistakes, and currently there seems to be a new interesting window of opportunity opening in the gastronomy business.
I sometimes regret the financial aspect of the freedom that I have enjoyed since then, but all in all I’m still quite happy that I managed to get out of an very unhealthy environment.
Let’s hope that the year 2022 brings the long expected breakthrough and a decent regular income once again. On the other hand, the pandemic hasn’t made things any easier.
As the old saying goes, haste brings waste! The base for a complete new lifestyle was established a decade ago, so it seems that I just have to be a little more patient!