The past few months, almost 6 months now, my fiance and I have been traveling around Asia. We stayed in Japan for 3 months, staying with and helping out my grandma. Then went to Vietnam, Philippines, and now back in Vietnam. It's been quite the adventure, visiting two countries that we've never been to before (Vietnam and Philippines), eating all kinds of delicious food, meeting her family that we've both never met before, seeing and feeling differences in culture, and overall just expanding our consciousness.

But the last few weeks especially since returning to Vietnam, I began feeling a bit blue. Kind of empty inside even though I'm staying at a nice hotel with my love, waking up to an amazing array of food for breakfast, having access to a pool, the beach being a 5 minute walk, not having to work since we're living off savings at the moment, literally nothing to complain about. I mean I've also been going on a bit of ego death, mild existential crisis period but that's a story for another time. Maybe it's because I'm home sick but I've been away from home for similar periods of time already so it's not really that.

What I have realized as the cause of these recent blues stems from my main form of interaction with where ever I am, and that is me trading fiat currency in exchange for some good or service from the local people. Fiat is worthless, it's valueless, it's life and freedom killing, it's a parasite, and yet this has been my main way of contributing to the places I have traveled because that is what tourists do. They "add" to the travel destination by dumping useless fiat into the economy and boost it, whoop tee doo. But that's exactly what I've been doing, just being another tourist only contributing with his fiat, not adding anything of value or contributing or showing gratitude by giving back in any meaningful way. And this has been eating away at me slowly, because the Universe demands balance, if I receive energy say through food from a vendor, me giving the vendor back fiat is not at all a fair, natural, balance maintaining exchange. I'm essentially stealing or scamming the vendor and killing the natural circle of life.

But I digress.

The fiat blues as I'll refer to it now. Feeling down because the majority of my "contribution" to the places I've traveled to have come from getting rid of fiat in return for delicious food, housing, transportation, and many more beautiful experiences. But the last week or so after having this realization I've put in a conscious effort to actually contribute or give back in some way besides paying in fiat. I pick up trash and clean up the beach when there. Today my fiance and I ate at our favorite bahn mi place and I used Google translate not only to thank the lady who runs the place but also make sure she knew it has been our favorite place to eat and her food is always so delicious. I've been giving fruit scraps to the ants outside our hotel room as my small act of giving back to the circle of life. It's also the main reason for my return to SN.

So yeah, fiat sucks as we all know. It sucks for the user, the spender, the saver, basically for all that come in contact with it. But through this lesson that came from having the fiat blues, I have learned the fix is simple. Give back beyond just spending fiat. Give back in any positive form, and all of a sudden that void is filled. At least that has been the case for me.