Tom Slater was staying in a hut on the dreamy white sands of a beach in Ko Pha Ngan Thailand with no plans for the day, no responsibilities and no commitments.
He had friends around him and the sun was shining. But even so, he could feel the black fog descending yet again.
‘I was in paradise. The biggest choice I had to make that day was what I was eating for lunch, and I just felt empty and unfulfilled,’ Tom remembers.
The 52-year-old had spent his life travelling from continent to continent, disconnecting from the digital world while taking opportunities as they arose and making money where he could. But the lifestyle left him thoroughly depressed.
‘I was dogged by this constant sense of unease. I wasn’t happy and I didn’t know why,’ the online coach and mentor, tells Metro.
Growing up in St Andrews, Scotland, Tom often got into trouble and clashed with his father, who was a successful academic. So he dropped out of school at 17 with just a handful of qualifications to his name and a plane ticket.
‘I didn’t have any money so my dad bought me a one-way trip to Australia with £150 and said: “Go and become a man”. I think he was just desperate. He didn’t know what to do with me,’ he remembers.
Tom was both terrified and hungry for adventure, but when he got off the plane and headed for the job centre, he was dismayed to find that the nation was in the grip of the hottest winter on record and the farming jobs he’d assumed he could get, were posted as being ‘not for foreigners’.
Tom got a grant with the World Wildlife Fund with a botanist friend and started traveling with the Iban tribe as they travelled through the rainforest collecting medicinal plants – even discovering one unknown to western science.
‘I was living in the jungle hunting and eating bush animals having this big initiation. It was incredible; like travelling back in time. I matured a lot. We were eating deer, snake and monkey, which are pretty horrible. Very chewy; sinewy and muscly. We caught them with a poisoned dart and blowpipe.’
But for the first time, Tom was happy. ‘I had this romantic idea that I could just vanish into the jungle and be involved in a really simple culture where I didn’t have to get a job or be berated about not going to university,’ he remembers.
After a few years of travelling across the globe, Tom thought it was time to come home and join the rat race back in Scotland.
‘At 22, I got a job in an office pushing a trolley around handing out photocopies, getting files and distributing pencils and Tippex. I had to wear a suit and I f***ing hated it. We had to go to these stupid team meetings once a week where we were given these motivational speeches. There were posters on the wall that said “Team Work Makes the Dream Work.” It was soul destroying. I hated it. I left after two months.’
Tom was one of the earliest digital nomads; people who travel through most of the year while working remotely. He would come home for months at a time before heading off again, funding himself through job in call centres, scuba diving and film making.
Using his earnings, Tom went searching for adventure again and spent his 20s and 30s travelling the world, settling in Egypt, Malaysia, Indonesia, Honduras, Thailand, Guatemala, Mexico, India and other far-flung spots, following the hippy trail and making new friends.
But despite these dazzling locations and life-changing experiences, dark shadows followed Tom. He would find himself bored and gloomy even though he was scuba diving all day every day.
‘There were periods where I literally didn’t get out of bed for three months, apart from to eat. That was a real struggle,’ he remembers. ‘There was just exhaustion in the body, you can’t move – the curtains are shut.’
On one trip back to see family in Scotland Tom asked for help from his GP who suggested medication – but he didn’t want pills, he wanted to fix what was eating at him.
At the same time he started to see commercial success. In Varanasi, India, he worked with street kids and discovered a bank run by children for children. The bank manager was eight and the security guard was five – so he started to pitch a documentary idea. Film executives loved it and money came rolling in from production companies across the world; he’d amassed approximately £110,000 to make his movie.
‘I thought I’d found my thing. Everyone was saying how talented I was. But I just felt so much stress’, he recalls. He’d also witnessed friends in the industry feeling unhappy despite achieving amazing things – like his friend Malik Bendjelloul, a Swedish filmmaker who won a host of prizes, including an Oscar, and went on to end his own life.
