I used to have a good job. I got paid well, I didn’t have to do much, I worked with some cool people and it didn’t interfere with my social life. The super was good, my health insurance was good and both were investments in keeping my life good.

The problem was, with everything being good, I was bored. Consider my situation if the scales were tipped in either direction.

If things were bad, I would have a cause to live for. I could wage a war against the evil forces opposing me, gather recruits to my cause and gain allies for the conflict. I would also have a conversation starter and sympathisers in everyone else out there who hated their job, was downtrodden or unappreciated by their boss or locked in a battle with colleagues. And, let’s face it, I would have a safe conversation topic with my Mum, one that steered away from my other bad habits: lack of savings and random boyfriends.

On the other hand, if my job was great, then I would hardly need the moral support of my equally downtrodden friends and family. In this scenario, I would be enthralled and inspired by the breadth and depth of my work. I would be motivated out of bed each day, drawn to my projects and caught up in the wonderful creative outlet I had chosen for a career. In fact, I would be an inspiration for everyone out there who wasn’t fulfilling their life purpose in their career.

And so, I was trapped. I found myself caught between the highs and the lows on a long plateau of bleak mediocrity. Looking up from my book on the train one day, I realised I was not alone. I saw recognition of a this fact in every glazed eye and nodding head in the carriage around me. My fellow commuters and I were bound together in an unspoken pact to be good.

In a rally against the disease of mediocrity, I began to strive for excellence in my life. I wrote myself a mission statement, paid my recruitment agent a visit and mapped out a future of success through the corporate world. I decided to replace all of the old, dour trappings of my life with shiny, new objects that would ensure my life looked and felt great.

Luckily, before this frenzy got out of hand, fate intervened. A certain, afore-mentioned man, asked me to do the absolutely unthinkable. He was moving to Byron Bay, and he would love for me to go with him.

The shiny, illusionary bauble that I had been polishing, popped. And in the silence that followed his offer, I began to reconsider my life.

“Byron? What the f*k am I going to do in Byron? I was thinking New York or Hong Kong or London. Not Byron…”

But the seed was sown, and it only took one more commute home for me to remember the death-by-boredom that awaited me at work.

So, I took a tentative step out of ‘good’ and like Alice, entered the rabbit hole. I staked my whole ‘good’ life at the risk of a “very bad” outcome. Leaping out of the known and into an adventure into everything that I did not.