Awakening from the Trance of Success: Rediscovering Passion Through Art and Travel

There’s a moment in life, often too late, when you wake up. The symbols of success that once thrilled...the LinkedIn followers, the headcount, the numbers in the bank—suddenly lose their luster. You catch yourself, like Ryuji in Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, looking out at a horizon that was once boundless, but now feels suffocating. “For the sake of a paltry woman,” Mishima writes, “he had abandoned the sea.” Ryuji’s sea was his calling, his adventure, his romance. His realisation, tragic and piercing, is a sobering reminder that in the pursuit of material stability, we can abandon the wild and limitless part of ourselves that once soared...or had the potential to.

It’s easy to drift from one paycheck to the next , numbed by routines and the endless pursuit of “more.” And yet, somewhere deep within, there’s often an unspoken yearning for art, for travel, for something that fills the soul rather than the pockets. It’s a quiet rebellion, an impulse to step off the beaten path and create something beautiful, not just with brushes and canvases or passports and plane tickets, but with the very hours and minutes of life itself.

The Moment of Realisation

It may be that you are reading this on a flight, wearing tailored business attire, on your way to a conference. The glow of the success you've achieved is undeniable—respect, power, money, influence. And yet, there’s a small voice you’ve been ignoring, one that whispers about the dreams you shelved long ago. Perhaps you once imagined a life spent wandering through cities where you don’t speak the language, losing yourself in art galleries, or painting the sun setting on an unknown sea.

Haruki Murakami writes in Norwegian Wood:

“I want to live, to lead a proper life, to make my dreams come true. I can’t just sit here in this tiny world where nothing ever changes.”

How many of us have traded the infinite possibilities of youth for the “tiny world” of financial security? We are lulled by routine and expectation until one day, we realize that the world we’ve built is smaller than we ever intended.

It’s a hard reckoning—this moment when you realize that you have lived your life not for yourself, but for the accumulation of things. In No Longer Human, Osamu Dazai’s protagonist voices what so many feel but are too afraid to admit:

“I had become so skilled at this art of imitation that, at times, I almost believed it was real. But now, at the end, I understood that I had never lived a single day as myself. My life had been a charade.”

How many leaders, sitting atop their achievements, come to the same conclusion? That they have crafted lives so perfectly aligned with societal expectations, they forgot to ask if it was a life they truly wanted.

The False Comfort of Convention

We are sold the idea that wealth, status, and success are the ultimate goals. Yet those who have reached these pinnacles often discover, too late, that the reward is hollow. Like the characters in Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters, they realize that a life lived for convention is a life half-lived. One of the sisters reflects,

“At times, Yukiko wondered if she had wasted her best years following a path not entirely of her own choosing.”

The weight of unfulfilled desires is crushing, particularly when you realize how much time has slipped away.

In Park Wan-suh’s memoir Who Ate Up All the Shinga?, the protagonist reflects,

“Looking back, I wonder if I ever really lived for myself. I had dreams once—art, painting, travel. But I was swept along by responsibilities and what society expected of me.”

This sentiment is an echo we hear across generations, across cultures, as we come to grips with the subtle manipulations of success and security. We are praised for our discipline, for our sacrifices, but what are we sacrificing? The answer is often terrifying: our most vivid dreams, our unspoken passions.

The Call to Break Free

It’s never too late to wake up. The tide can turn if you are willing to listen to the quiet rebellion within your heart. In Kafka on the Shore, Murakami offers a simple, poignant truth:

“Run away from convention, break free from those invisible chains, and find the world that belongs to you alone.”

It sounds romantic, but perhaps it is the most pragmatic advice we can follow. The invisible chains of society’s expectations are heavier than they appear. They bind us to lives we don’t even recognize, lives that feel like imitations of real joy.

The question is, how do we begin to break those chains? How do we reawaken the part of us that dreams? The part that once burned for art, for music, for the thrill of seeing the world?

The answer, as always, lies in taking the first step. Book the trip. Pick up the paintbrush. Carve out time in your calendar not just for meetings, but for moments of stillness, reflection, and creation. Your passions are not lost—they are merely waiting for you to reclaim them. The sea Ryuji left behind is still there, beckoning.

The Art of Living

Art and travel are not just hobbies; they are ways of seeing the world and, more importantly, ways of seeing yourself. When you immerse yourself in the unfamiliar, you are forced to confront the parts of you that have been silenced by routine. As Murakami writes in Kafka on the Shore,

“If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets. What matters is living a life true to your own heart.”

It’s not the acclaim, the titles, or the applause that matter in the end. What matters is whether you can look back on your life and say you lived it fully, that you followed your own path rather than one that was mapped out for you.

There is a reason why artists and travelers seem ageless—there is a vitality that comes from living creatively. It’s not about abandoning responsibility, but about reclaiming ownership of your time and your choices. In a world that values productivity above all else, the greatest rebellion might be to simply stop and ask yourself: What do I truly want to create? Where do I want to go?

Embracing the Unknown

There’s a story that has been told countless times, in every language and every culture. Perhaps someone you loved has told this story to you. Perhaps you fear telling the story yourself. It is the story of the person who wakes up at the end of their life and realises they have been too afraid to follow their dreams. They lived a safe life, a successful life, but not the life they wanted.

“What overwhelmed me most,was the realization that I had been living a life completely out of step with my true self.”

Osamu Dazai writes.

The tragedy, of course, is not that the realization comes too late. The tragedy is that we ignore it, even when it comes early enough to change. A greater tragedy still is the case of the individual who hears their calling and responds, before falling in the wayside ditch because they let their doubts overwhelm them, and lacked kindred spirits to support them: The person who starts a dream business and folds it within a month because it didn't make enough money. The person who contemplates grappling with change, and buys a course, or downloads a podcast series, before rationalising to themselves that "I must provide for the kids" and knocking the whole idea on the head.

The corporate ladder may offer stability, but it does not offer meaning. Meaning is found in the moments when you lose yourself in the flow of creation, when you stand before a canvas or a city you’ve never seen before and feel the thrill of discovery.

Let your life be a masterpiece, not a carefully crafted résumé.