The farmhouse environment and peace had a wonderful impact on my mental health. I started gaining my senses back ; slowly, then less slowly, like a machine restarting after a long power cut.
The past year’s vagabond life had deteriorated my physical health too. Farmhouse food, nutritious and organic, put me back into shape. The body, at least, is relatively straightforward to repair.
By the end of August 2024, I was fairly recovered and decided to move back to the city ; at least temporarily, to test the water. Saigon. The high-rises, the noise, the traffic, the 3 AM coffee shops. I had unfinished business there.
It was this decision which finally put me on the streets.
Let me explain that. Not immediately ; the streets came later. But the return to the city was the moment when the financial reality, which had been quietly accumulating while I was recovering in the farmhouse, finally presented itself for inspection.
During my hypermania phases of 2021–2022, I had spent a huge amount of money. I had been seed-funding all the Impact startups myself : DisBorder, TellUntold, and a procession of others whose names I won’t burden this chapter with. I don’t remember the exact count. No less than 50.
Fifty startups, self-seeded, in approximately two years, by one man in a hypermania phase. The Nobel Committee for Economic Destruction, had such a thing existed, would have been impressed.
None of them survived more than a year. Not because of lack of funds ; the funds were there, until they weren’t. But because I had bitten off considerably more than I could chew, and was possibly micromanaging, and was certainly operating on the assumption that enthusiasm was a substitute for bandwidth. It isn’t.
Whatever the reason, the aftereffects that started appearing in 2024 hit hard. I suddenly realised I had almost depleted all my funds. Completely. The number that I had assumed was a floor turned out to have been a ceiling for some time already.
I had no significant source of income except my shares in the ancestral estate. So I again started the process of remotely selling off some high-value pieces of the estate’s land ; the same reliable engine I had been running since 2018.
This time, however, the engine had watchers.
The other shareholders got the sale stopped through court. The details of that particular family drama are not of any importance to me ; what mattered was the effect. The source was closed. The tap was off.
Though devastating, it didn’t blow me off completely. I still had enough shares left in the estate to survive ; or so I told myself. That was false consolation, as it turned out.
A lot of other restrictions imposed by the other shareholders made my financial income dry up further. By the end of 2024, I was really struggling.
A small leased apartment in the suburbs ; cheap rent, minimal existence , was all that remained between me and nothing.
I didn’t fully understand yet how thin that margin was.
