Farnaz Chavoushi, 38, from Amsterdam, did a lot of things right in her life, but it felt wrong.
She studied at Harvard, signed with McKinsey, and was responsible for $200 million projects.
She worked hard, earned a lot, and went up quickly.
How it works when you're "on track," as she puts it.
But in quiet moments, she felt empty, busy, and under pressure.
And then, two years ago, Chavoushi did what most people only talk about from time to time but never dare to do.
She moved to an island.
Chavoushi says she has never been as good as she has been in the past two years.
A remarkable sentence, because it's about the two years in which, with the pandemic, climate crisis, war news, pretty much the whole rest of the world asked itself at regular intervals how much longer the madness can be endured.
The island that Chavoushi moved to is called Koh Phangan and is located in the Gulf of Thailand, across from Koh Samui, which is the island of package tourists.
Phangan can be reached by boat in 40 minutes.
It is a place of narrow bays and rocky sandy beaches.
They frame a hilly dark green jungle from which white haze rises in the evening, almost as if the Lion King had made a small fire.
The island is divided into two parts.
The south, where backpackers party all night long at full moon parties.
And the north, where the yoga studios are and the seminars for a more conscious life.
Where street signs say "You are Everything" and where in the cafés, all of which are called Pure Vegan Heaven by twist, food is served from bowls without salt.
The destinations of long-term travelers and dropouts were sometimes called Goa or Bali.
Now very often Koh Phangan.
Farnaz Chavoushi, layered brown curls, gold bracelets, dress tied at the back, lives there in a bungalow with a terrace overlooking the bay.
Here she sits and talks, from the front.
She says she's lived her life by this resolution: "You are what you achieve." Hence the elite university, the job in the important-sounding company, the important-sounding job title.
Her peer group, as Chavoushi puts it, the people around her, loved working late just as much as she did.
Because everyone knew: Whoever is in the baddest mood gets the promotion first.
A self-sustaining system.
Chavoushi says: »I always thought: How do people classify me, what do they think of me?
I've become unhappier all the time.«
Then Chavoushi goes to a dance festival and meets a guy.
Who lives according to completely different rules than they do: only earn money occasionally, work a lot on yourself.
Not just having a relationship, not just loving one person, but many.
The two have been in an open relationship for a year.
Shortly before the corona crisis, he convinces Chavoushi to leave everything in Amsterdam for a while and to go travelling.
She took three weeks off, she says, and landed on Koh Phangan.
She never went away.
At first she thought she would stay a few months and then reorient herself, in Europe, with her friends, with her family in Amsterdam.
She pushed the flight further and further backwards.
It's now two years and three months.
She gave notice of her apartment, she called her boss and said she wasn't coming back.
What did she find?
»People are much more open here, they support me on my way.
I can learn from them.
I never found anything like that at home.
Everyone there has their heads on their work, on their dogs, on their kids, on their families, on their high school exams.”
She says: »I used to be very skeptical about anything spiritual.
But here on the island I met people who have a deeper understanding of the world.
Here is another energy.
Everything is exciting.
Everyone treated me with love, everyone understood why I felt empty.«
If you assume that in the end everyone wants the same thing, namely to live a bit in peace, then you have to say: It is not surprising that people find this condition easier on Koh Phangan than in a noisy urban area full of concrete.
Everything here is designed for that: there are inner walks, mediations, detox courses, singing bowl therapies, magnetic field therapies and transformative tantra seminars.
You can go to techno parties in bamboo huts on the edge of the jungle, with the Black Sea crashing against the rocks right next to it.
There are dance floors serving cocoa and tropical fruits;
on which to dance in ecstasy;
where women in linen pants and crop tops move to the rhythm and men with no tops and hairdos like Jesus.
There is a lot of talk about healing and letting go, about loving yourself, getting healthy and accepting your own body.
You can talk about magic here and you don't have to be embarrassed.
An island decoupled from all suffering and stress, from everything you have left behind.
It's so outrageously easy here to shut out the world.
Much of what is Koh Phangan today has its origins in the late 1960s and 1970s, when a few dropouts who had taken the hippie trail via Turkey, Iran, Nepal, India and Thailand built the first small bungalows on the island based.
At the end of the 1990s, the island became better and better known, first for the parties under the full moon, then one yoga studio after the other opened.
Tells Brian Gruber, a Californian who has lived on the island for eleven years and has just written a book about the place.
He says: »Koh Phangan has great nature, a great infrastructure, but no airport.
That protects the island from the tourist crowds, that's what makes it special.«
Gruber says people have always come here whose life was okay in the west, but who were looking for a deeper meaning.
There is everything here, gurus, mushrooms, watermelon shakes.
"You can't put it into words," he says, "but something is different here than anywhere else in the world."
More than a hundred new people have moved to the island in the pandemic.
Those who initially wanted to escape masks, vaccinations and quarantine.
Many who sought refuge in very troubled times.
If you talk to them, they say that during the Corona period they realized that they had to change their lives and throw something away.
All that junk you pick up.
There are those who now think: that first of all you have to be able to afford to do pirouettes around yourself all day long and look at the turquoise water.
And is it allowed?
In such a terrible time?
Farnaz Chavoushi often hears these accusations: that reinventing yourself in paradise is a very selfish and elitist thing.
Her old friends from Amsterdam keep telling her that.
And it's true: you're financing your new life with the savings from your old high-performance job.
The time that others have to spend in front of the computer, she spends discovering herself.
But she also knows people who come to the island with almost nothing.
You can eat decently for two or three euros a day.
There is always an odd job somewhere.
The community sticks together.
Making it here depends less on money than on having the courage to break away from your old life.
Sometimes, says Chavoushi, she does have the feeling that she has to do more to make the world a better place.
To use more of what she has learned, what she is good at.
But then she says: »So much suffering in the world comes from people being disconnected, from misunderstandings, from hatred and anger.
If everyone started to see through this, the world would be a different place.
I wish more people would embark on the journey I have taken.” Real change in the world, says Chavoushi, starts with yourself.
The alternative to staying is that she goes back and continues to have it just as bad as everyone else.
Chavoushi is planning to fly to Amsterdam for a few weeks soon, for the first time since she left.
She wants to meet her niece who was recently born.
Otherwise there is no reason to return.
Your life, that is now on the island.
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