My real answer to “why aren’t you working harder?” is ugly, and I figured it out this week on a sleeper train from Chiang Mai to Bangkok: I only hustle hard when I’m broke.
It’s not laziness, and it’s not burnout. I’ve been hustling online for over 15 years. I know how to grind. But I’ve built a life that costs under $1,500 a month in Southeast Asia, and a life that cheap takes away the one thing that used to force me to the laptop every morning: fear of the bank account.
For years I told myself I don’t care about money. That’s half true. I don’t care about money the way most people do. I don’t want a Lambo or a penthouse. But look at how I actually live, the cheap flights, the budget apartments, the things I’ve done for money over the years, and the truth is I do care. It just doesn’t push me. And when nothing pushes you, you drift. This post covers what I figured out about that drift and what I’m replacing it with.
Why does a low cost of living kill your motivation?
Here’s what nobody tells you about getting your monthly costs down to a few hundred bucks: the pressure goes with them.
Back when I was paying American rent, missing a sales month meant real consequences. That fear got me out of bed. Now a slow month means nothing changes. I still have a roof, the gym, food, wifi. My survival is basically handled by default.
So my brain found a loophole. It started building backup plans. Go back to working on a cruise ship. Go work in Australia in 2028. Take the low cost of living and coast. Every one of those plans sounds reasonable on paper. Every one of them has the same hidden assumption underneath: I don’t think I have the discipline to build a successful business on my own.
That was the real sentence I had to write down this week. The backup plans aren’t really plans. They’re insurance against a version of me I’m scared I’ll never become.
And that flipped the question for me. What if I finally did unlock that discipline? What would life look like then? I’m not asking that as a motivational poster. I’m asking it as an actual question about what I’d do if the thing I’m scared I lack showed up.
Most digital nomads I talk to are in some version of this trap. You escape the expensive city, costs drop by half or more, and then you wonder why the fire went out. The fire went out because a lot of it was fear, and you moved somewhere cheap enough that the fear couldn’t follow you.
What happens when you remove the option instead of fighting the urge?
The biggest shift of my week didn’t come from willpower. It came from losing an option.
I’ve been fighting a distraction habit for months. You know the type: the thing you reach for when the work gets hard, the little hit that eats three hours of your day before you notice. I cut it off on a couple of apps, and the habit just moved to other apps. Same urge, new door.
Then one of those doors got shut for me, completely, not by my choice. And the next morning I woke up feeling like a brand new person. Mentally clear for the first time in weeks. The urge didn’t get weaker because I got stronger. It got weaker because the option wasn’t there anymore.
I lasted two days before I found a new door, which is honest and a little embarrassing, but those two days taught me more than the last two months of trying to “be disciplined.” When the option exists, I spend energy resisting it all day. When the option is gone, that energy goes back into work.
Same story with nicotine. I told myself I was done, and a few days later I paid $8 for a pack anyway. Willpower lost to convenience again, because the shop was right there.
The lesson I keep landing on, the same one I learned when I quit drinking: don’t rely on resisting the thing. Make the thing unavailable. Sobriety didn’t work for me because I became a superhuman who could sit next to a beer and not want it. It worked because I stopped putting myself in rooms where the beer was the point.
If your motivation problem is really a distraction problem, don’t try to out-discipline it. Delete it, block it, move away from it. Your future self won’t have to win the fight if you take away the ring.
How do you find motivation when money isn’t enough?
This is the part I’m still working out, so I’ll give you where I’m at instead of pretending I have the final answer.
If fear of being broke doesn’t push me anymore, and more money doesn’t excite me, then I need a different engine. Friday I wrote in my journal that my North Star probably isn’t money at all. It’s building something of real value. Something people actually thank me for. A free accountability group for people like me, where the payoff is someone messaging me three months later saying it changed how they work.
Saturday I noticed something that backs this up. Building in public, teaching others, having people value what you make, all of that releases the same dopamine I’ve been chasing in the wrong places. It’s the same chemical. The source is just a lot better.
Then Sunday it got more personal. I want to make a name for myself. I want people to know the name Erkl. I’ve lived a crazy story: over 20 countries, flight attendant, cruise ship, sobriety, more money made and lost than I like to admit, building businesses from a laptop in places most people can’t find on a map. One day I want to tell that story and have people actually listen. And for people to listen, I need to be successful first. Nobody wants the life story of the guy who almost did it.
That’s a motivation money can’t give me. It’s not “I need $10k a month.” It’s “I want the story to end the right way.”
A few other things from the week that fit the pattern:
- Bungy jumping was fine. I did sit-ups while dangling upside down. It was a small rush, not a big one. That goes on the list of adventures that are “nothing too crazy” now. Thrills stopped doing it for me a while ago, which is more proof the next level of excitement has to come from building.
- Discomfort is a skill. I got my teeth whitened Monday and it hurt a little, and I caught myself thinking: if I can’t sit through 30 minutes of mild discomfort, how am I going to handle the hard stuff in business? Tolerance for discomfort is trained, same as a muscle.
- Nobody fixes you on a call. I had a few coaching calls this past week. None of them “fixed” anything, and they weren’t supposed to. I’m the one who has to want the change.
The real answer
If you’re living cheap, working remote, and wondering why you can’t get yourself to grind like you used to, here’s the honest answer: your old motivation was probably fear, and you built a life that fear can’t reach. That’s not a failure. That’s the whole point of the lifestyle.
But it means you need to replace fear with something. For me it’s not money. It’s building something people value, and making my name mean something when I finally tell the whole story.
I don’t have the discipline piece fully figured out. I lasted two days on my last reset. But I know the backup plans are fear, I know removing options beats resisting urges, and I know what I’m building toward now.
That’s a better starting point than being broke ever was.