Finding Purpose (Part 3)

Before I tell you how we found purpose, let me share a quick story.

A couple of weeks ago, we were sitting in a favorite restaurant in Bangkok with our Japanese friend we first met while traveling last year in Australia. During our conversation, she told us that before leaving Japan for New Zealand, her mother struggled to understand why she wanted to go.

Her mother kept saying:

“You need a purpose to leave!”

When she told me this, I said that I would have disagreed with her mother.

Because she did have a purpose.

She wanted to travel, learn English, experience life outside Japan, and become more independent. During that journey, she grew into a more confident person, continued on to a working holiday in Australia, met new people, and even found the person who became her partner.

Her purpose may not have looked like a traditional plan, but it was there.

That conversation stayed with me because it reminded me that purpose doesn’t always arrive as a clear destination or a carefully written blueprint. Sometimes you begin with nothing more than curiosity and only understand the meaning of the journey once you are already living it.

There is no single right way to build a life, and we should be careful about judging someone simply because their decisions don’t fit the path we would have chosen for them.

When we started traveling, we didn’t have a grand purpose either.

We knew why we had left our old lives behind. We wanted to be together and see the world. But beyond that, we had no clear idea what we were building or where any of it would lead.

Before I tell you how we eventually found our purpose, it’s important to understand that, in the beginning, we were still searching for it, and I can honestly say that it made traveling infinitely more meaningful.

If you’re interested in the full story of how we discovered sound recording and how Free To Use Sounds came to life, I’ll dedicate an entire article to that because it’s a journey all on its own.

For now, I’ll start with one simple moment.

In 2017, standing beside a construction site in Siem Reap, Cambodia, I pressed record on a little Zoom H1 for the very first time.

I had no business plan.

No audience.

No expectations.

But I remember feeling something I hadn’t felt in a long time.

Excitement.

Not the excitement of visiting another country, but the excitement of creating something.

That single recording quietly changed the direction of our lives.

Without realizing it, we had found something worth dedicating ourselves to. What began as curiosity slowly turned into an obsession. We happily spent countless hours recording, editing, organizing, learning, making mistakes, and starting again. There were months when we probably worked a hundred hours without even noticing because it never felt like work.

Finding that purpose changed far more than our careers.

Instead of planning our days around famous landmarks or ticking another destination off a map, we began looking and, more importantly, listening to the world differently. We slowed down naturally, stayed longer, explored places more deeply, and started seeing every destination not just as somewhere to visit, but as somewhere to discover.

Purpose didn’t just give us a career. It gave meaning to the way we traveled.

Remember how, in this article, I talked about rushing through countries in our old camper van, always feeling like we had to keep moving?

Since then, we’ve rented camper vans in Iceland and Japan again, driven cars through Croatia, Turkey, Georgia, Malta, Sri Lanka, Reunion Island, South Korea, Thailand, and the United States, and even bought a four-wheel drive with a rooftop tent to explore Australia.

On the surface, it probably looked like we were doing exactly the same thing.

But we weren’t.

This time, our audio gear came with us.

Instead of asking, “What’s the next attraction?” we found ourselves asking, “What can we record here?”

Sometimes that meant driving all day just to spend an hour recording the evening ambience of a tiny village. Other times it meant waiting three hours beside a railway line for a single passing train, or sitting quietly next to a bush because one cricket sounded unlike anything we’d ever heard before.

Years ago, I would have thought that sitting beside a bush for an hour to record a single cricket was a complete waste of time.

The funny thing is, those sounds had always been there.

I’d walked past them my entire life without ever really noticing them.

Today, I’d happily spend an afternoon waiting for that one perfect recording rather than rushing between ten tourist attractions.

It didn’t just change what we did.

It changed the way we saw the world.

Suddenly, a single passing train, an evening thunderstorm, or one tiny cricket hidden in the grass became worth traveling across the world for.

We didn’t slow down because we decided to travel differently.

We slowed down because we finally had a reason to.