Bali Broke Something Open
I’ve been to five countries this year. Malta, Turkey, Bali, Sweden, Tunisia. Each one taught me something different about food, about pace, about what I actually want from a trip. But Bali is the one that won’t leave me alone.
I planned it as a birthday trip. Sixteen people, two weeks (ish), a spreadsheet that became a living document. Villas, drivers, itineraries, group chats that never stopped pinging. I thought the challenge would be logistics. I didn’t expect the challenge to be coming home.
The Promise We Were Sold
Growing up, the formula was simple. Work hard. Do well in school. Graduate. Get a good job. Then you’re set.
Except that’s not how it worked out.
People I know are still fighting, months to years after graduation, trying to crack into job markets for degrees they were told would open doors. Some of us have been in our careers for nearly a decade and are still fighting tooth and nail just to progress. And at what cost? Burnout. Anxiety. The constant low hum of never feeling like you’re doing enough.
What are we fighting so hard for when the reward seems so far away and so seldom comes?
Then the fear factor enters. If I don’t work, I don’t earn. If I don’t earn, I can’t pay rent. I can’t cover living costs. And so we keep going, trapped in a cycle that was supposed to lead somewhere better but instead just keeps us in place.
I knew all of this before Bali. But knowing something and feeling it are different. Bali made me feel it.
The Freedom Problem
I hate saying a place is “cheap” because it flattens something more complicated into a transaction. But the truth is, the exchange rate in Bali favours travellers like me. And that favourability unlocked something I hadn’t experienced before: a level of service, comfort, and ease that would cost three times as much in the UK, if it existed at all.
We ate well. Not just well, but incredibly. Every meal felt considered. The villas had staff with a personal service like no other, always on top of making sure everything went the extra mile. The spas cost less than a meal out. And everywhere, Gojeks or Grabs waiting to take you wherever you wanted to go for almost nothing. Motorbikes you summon with an app, ready in minutes.
Some of the group brought their laptops and actually worked. They’d find a café in the morning, open their emails, and stay until lunch. The cafés had lockers for your belongings so you could spend the afternoon at the beach and come back for your bag later. It sounds small, but it’s a whole infrastructure built around a different way of living. Work, then swim. Emails, then sunset. No commute. No fluorescent lights. Cafés full of remote workers and travellers enjoying a freedom most of us only dream about at home.
That freedom was visible everywhere. Not free in the “quit your job and find yourself” way that travel content loves to sell. Free in a more uncomfortable way. Free enough to notice how unfree I am at home.
Can you really compare a five star villa in Bali to one in the UK at the same price? You can’t. And once you see that, you can’t unsee it. You start doing the maths on what you could actually live on, what you could get by on. And then you’re left wondering why you’re working this hard for a life that affords you so little of what actually feels good.
What Bali Made Obvious
The pace of life there is slower, like most places outside the West. Days stretch. Mornings don’t rush you out the door. You eat breakfast like it matters, because it does, and because you have time. Even the takeaway food felt fresh, a reminder of how much processed convenience we’ve normalised in the West.
Sixteen of us travelled together, and we all experienced Bali differently. Same adventures, same beaches, same excursions, but different conversations with strangers who became friends by the end of the trip. And yet we came back with the same conclusion:
There is freedom elsewhere.
But here’s the complication: even if you moved there tomorrow without a plan, without a job, you’d be relying on the strength of a UK wage you no longer have. The freedom isn’t free. It’s subsidised by an economy that pays you more than local workers earn. It’s a vicious cycle, and romanticising it doesn’t help anyone.
I met Africans, Americans, Australians, Europeans. People who had made Bali their home. Not on trust funds. On remote salaries, small businesses, freelance work. They’d done the maths and decided: this is where my money buys me a life, not just survival. But they had leverage most people don’t have. I’m not pretending otherwise. Still, seeing it was enough to crack something open. If not Bali, then somewhere. If not now, then eventually. The question was no longer “is this possible?” It was “what’s stopping me?”
The Contradictions
I’m not going to pretend Bali is uncomplicated.
You can stay in a villa with a private pool and step outside to see a very different reality. The contrast is sharp. A few months back, there was a whole discourse on TikTok about “the truth behind Bali,” and some of it was fair. The wealth that tourists bring doesn’t distribute evenly. The infrastructure strains under the weight of visitors. The version of Bali we experience as travellers is not the version most Balinese live.
But here’s what I also know: Bali’s economy runs on tourism. It’s what provides jobs, income, and opportunity. The contradictions are real, but they’re not unique to Bali. Any country with a significant tourism industry has them. The question isn’t whether to visit. It’s how to visit with your eyes open. To spend locally where you can. To recognise that the ease you’re enjoying is someone else’s labour. To hold both the beauty and the complexity without collapsing one into the other. That tension followed me home.
Coming Home
Coming home sobered me.
I looked at my finances. Really looked. At how much I was wasting, thinking I needed to be paying that much for things that didn’t matter. A meal out didn’t make sense for ages. Even now, months later, I question the “luxuries” we indulge in without thinking. The subscriptions. The convenience of spending. The slow bleed of money towards things that don’t actually make life better.
Bali didn’t make me want to run away. It made me want to take control.
I’ve decided to clear my debt. All of it. Because why should I be a slave to interest payments and minimum balances? That’s not freedom. That’s a leash dressed up as lifestyle.
I want actual freedom. The kind where I’m not one missed paycheque away from panic. The kind where travel isn’t an escape from my life but an extension of it. And if that means saving aggressively, living differently, making choices that look boring from the outside, then that’s what I’ll do.
Not every trip carries this weight. But the ones we save for, the ones we build spreadsheets around and count down to, they’re shaped by the lives we live at home. The money we have. The time we’re given. The headspace we’re working with. Bali asked me to look at my life differently. I’m still figuring out what that means. But I’m done pretending the question doesn’t exist.
Because no one talks about the mental weight of just keeping going. The Sunday scaries that start on Friday. The guilt when you rest. The way your chest tightens when you open your bank app. We’ve normalised being stretched thin and called it ambition. Bali didn’t fix any of that. But it gave me enough distance to see it clearly. And once you see it, you have to decide: keep carrying it, or put something down.
What Comes Next
I came home charged. That’s a story for another time. Plenty more happened on this trip but amongst it all, a transformation took place. It’s the question I can’t stop asking: What am I working towards?
A deposit on a flat I’ll be paying off for thirty years? A career that trades my time for money I’ll spend recovering from the stress of earning it? A life that looks successful on paper but feels like running in place?
Or something else. Something that looks more like those two weeks felt.
I don’t have the answers yet. But I know I’m not going back to pretending the question doesn’t exist.
This is People, Culture & Sound, where we share the stories behind how we travel, why we travel, and what we’re looking for out there. If this resonated, we’d love to hear from you: what has travel revealed about your life at home?
Contributor: @ohitskerr
