I wrote this while living in Koh Samui for three months. The story behind the Instagram photos. I don't do workations anymore — I know now that staying in one place suits me better. But the discomfort in this essay is the kind you can only know by living through it.

My stomach twisted. Food poisoning again. Lamb from the Koh Samui supermarket — gone bad. Fourth time this week. Lying on the bathroom floor, I thought about my friends back home telling me how romantic my life was. How jealous they were. The Korean expression came to mind — buying your own suffering — and I thought, yes, that's exactly what this is.

Workation, coliving, digital nomad — these words conjure freedom. Laptop open on the beach. Coworking spaces full of international creatives. A new city every month.

The reality is more like this.

When it rains, the WiFi vanishes. When the power cuts, you can't flush the toilet. In the middle of a client meeting: "Sorry, the rain might knock out my connection." Your business partner in a first-world country stares at you through the screen like you've lost your mind.

Most gyms don't have air conditioning. The meat section at the market has no refrigeration. You get home and there's a hawk circling your roof and thirty lizards are permanent residents in your kitchen.

This is daily life in "paradise."

Travel teaches discomfort. A workation is the intensive course.

For someone raised in Korea — this environment is shock. We're used to 24-hour convenience stores, ultra-fast WiFi, same-day delivery. Working in a place where none of that infrastructure exists means spending more energy fighting the environment than doing actual work.

Coliving is its own problem. Sharing space with strangers is — for an introvert — daily social labor. Every time you walk into the shared kitchen, you have to smile, make small talk, answer the script: "Where are you from?" "What do you do?" "How long are you staying?" Every day. With every new person.

There's a psychological discomfort too.

In places like Koh Samui, Bali, Koh Phangan — you find people who were misfits or low earners back home, now living like kings on Southeast Asian prices. They preach spiritual awakening and freedom like a slogan, but what it often looks like, up close, is the final stop of a long escape from reality.

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Stay inside that community long enough and your frame of reference starts to warp. What's freedom and what's avoidance. What's experimentation and what's giving up. The line is thinner than you'd think.

I walked that line too. Remote work's freedom is also the freedom to self-destruct. A workation just puts an exotic backdrop behind it.

And yet — I don't regret it. The discomfort taught me something.

When you're surrounded by convenience, you don't know what you actually need. Live in a place where everything is scarce and the essentials surface: reliable WiFi, safe food, a quiet room. That was it. That was the whole list.

And you only realize how extraordinary Korea's infrastructure is once you've lived in the jungle.

What do you think is on the other side of the "free life" you're imagining? Can you handle that side too?

Thread: The Lost
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I write about freedom, healing, and building alone. The full archive is at soulin.co.