I quit drinking at 30, went plant-based at 40, and converted my home office into a creative studio. Every time I remove something that used to define me, I find a person underneath who was waiting very quietly to be allowed to exist.

Last spring, I dragged my desk—the big one, the "serious entrepreneur" desk with the dual monitor setup—out of my home office and into the hallway of my Singapore apartment. It took me about an hour, a lot of awkward maneuvering, and a conversation with myself that went something like: You are a grown man dismantling a perfectly good workspace in a room where you haven't done meaningful work in months.

It was true. I hadn't really used that room—not properly—since I started doing most of my writing and calls from the kitchen table, where the natural light is better and I could look out the window between thoughts. The office had become a storage surface for books I'd already read, old notebooks, cables for devices I no longer owned, and a slow accumulation of things I was keeping because getting rid of them felt like admitting something I wasn't ready to admit.

But I was ready. I'd been ready for a while.

By the end of that weekend, I'd set up an easel, reorganized some supplies into jars on the shelf, and tacked a sheet of clear plastic over the wall near the window to protect it from splatter. My partner walked in while I was rearranging things. She said, "You got rid of the office?" Like I'd demolished a load-bearing wall. Like a room with a desk in it was structural.

I told her I didn't get rid of anything. I made room.

The first removal: the bottle

I quit drinking at 30. We've written about this before—about how the hardest part wasn't the craving but discovering that every social tradition in my world ran through a bottle—and I'll probably write about it again because that was the first time I understood something I've spent the rest of my life learning: you cannot separate who you are from what you do every day, and if what you do every day is slowly killing you, the person underneath has no air.

At 30, I was a young entrepreneur in the media world, building Ideapod, hustling through the kind of startup culture where drinks weren't optional—they were infrastructure. Networking drinks. Celebration drinks. Commiseration drinks. I was the guy who'd crack open a beer at the end of a fourteen-hour day and say, "This pairs well with a failed product launch." People loved that version of me. He was easy to be around. He asked nothing of anyone except that they laugh.

When I stopped drinking, I didn't just lose the habit. I lost the personality I'd built around the habit. The jokes didn't land the same way sober. The after-work sessions felt interminable without the thing that made them bearable. People said, "You're so different now," and they didn't mean it as a compliment. They meant: I liked the other one better.

Research backs this up in ways I didn't have language for at the time. A 2019 study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that people react negatively to others who make identity-consistent moral changes—like quitting drinking or changing their diet—because those changes implicitly threaten the observer's own self-concept. In other words, it wasn't that my friends and colleagues were cruel. It was that my sobriety held up a mirror they hadn't asked for.

But here's the thing nobody tells you about removing a defining feature of your identity: there's a lag. A gap. You take the bottle away and there's just—space. And the space is terrifying because you don't yet know who fills it.

For about a year after I quit, I felt like I was walking around with a hole in the middle of my chest where a personality used to be.

The person who eventually showed up in that space was quieter. He was also more honest, which made him harder to have at networking events but easier to live with at 3 a.m.

The second removal: the meat, the dairy, the story I told about both

I went plant-based at 40, after a period where I'd been reading deeply about the gut-brain connection, inflammation, and the psychology of habitual behavior. I don't claim to have had some single dramatic catalyst. What I had was a growing awareness—sharpened by years of writing about psychology and behavioral science—that the story I'd been telling myself about food was exactly that: a story. And it wasn't even my story. It was inherited.

I grew up in Australia in a culture where meat was identity. Barbecues weren't meals—they were rituals. You didn't question what was on the grill any more than you questioned the weather. In that world, food was not something you had feelings about. Food was something you ate so you could do the other things.

Going plant-based meant dismantling that story. It meant admitting that food is something I do have feelings about, and that those feelings matter, and that choosing differently isn't a luxury—it's a form of attention. Attention to my body, to what I now understand about inflammation and cognitive function, to the research I'd been reading for years but hadn't yet been willing to apply to my own plate.

A 2023 review in Frontiers in Nutrition examined the links between plant-based dietary patterns and reduced risk of neurodegenerative diseases—and while I'm not naïve enough to think a bowl of lentils is a miracle cure, I am honest enough to say: I wish more of us had this conversation earlier. I wish it was on the table alongside the other conversations we have about longevity and mental sharpness.

What surprised me about going plant-based wasn't the food itself—I've always enjoyed cooking, and Singapore has more plant-based options than most people imagine. Hawker centres, markets, the incredible diversity of Southeast Asian cuisine—it's a plant-forward paradise if you're paying attention. What surprised me was the social cost. Not hostility, exactly. More like—a kind of quiet withdrawal. Mates back in Australia started making preemptive jokes before meals. Business dinners became slightly more complicated. People stopped suggesting restaurants and started suggesting walks instead.

The loneliest moment isn't being alone—it's being surrounded by people who only know the version of you that made their life easier, and realizing you helped build that version yourself.

But again: underneath the loss, something was waiting. The man who experiments with turmeric and black pepper and cashew cream, who eats alone at hawker centres without apology, who brings his own food to meetings without making a speech about it—that man was always there. He just needed the other one to step aside.

The third removal: the room that said "serious professional"

The home office was the last thing to go, and in some ways it was the hardest, because it wasn't a substance or a diet. It was a symbol.

A home office with dual monitors and a standing desk says: I am a person who builds things. I am a person with a career that looks a certain way. I have arrived at an arrangement that works.

Except it didn't work. It hadn't worked in years. I was sketching ideas on scraps of paper at the kitchen table, journaling in notebooks balanced on my knee, doing my actual creative thinking anywhere but that room—while an entire space sat ten feet away doing nothing but signaling productivity to no one.

The absurdity of that only hit me after I deepened my meditation practice and realized how much of my life was organized around preserving spaces I didn't actually use—physical, emotional, relational.

Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by psychologists at UC Davis found that adults who actively engage in identity-consistent activities—hobbies, creative pursuits, practices that reflect who they are now rather than who they used to be—report significantly higher well-being and sense of purpose. The study calls this "self-concordance," but I call it something simpler: letting go of what you've been holding onto years longer than you should.

My creative studio is not impressive. I want to be clear about that. My watercolors look like what they are—the work of someone who started recently and paints because it's the only hour of the day when his mind goes completely silent. The easel was cheap. The lighting is imperfect. There is a paint stain on the floor that I've stopped trying to clean because it looks—to me—like evidence that someone lives here. Really lives here. Not just maintains an apartment that looks like a life.

What the removals taught me

Here is the pattern I didn't see until I'd done it three times: every identity I've let go of was, at the time I formed it, a survival strategy.

Drinking was how I socialized in a world that didn't know what to do with a young entrepreneur who was also terrified he was making it all up as he went along. Eating whatever was convenient was how I kept moving through fourteen-hour days building companies. Maintaining a "proper" home office was how I signaled to myself and everyone else that I had made it—that the kid from Australia who started an online platform had arrived at something legitimate.

Each of those strategies worked. Until it didn't. And the not-working always came quietly, not with a crash but with a growing sense of wearing a coat that no longer fit but that I kept putting on every morning because I'd forgotten I was allowed to take it off.

Research on identity transition suggests that people who successfully navigate major identity shifts tend to have one thing in common: they interpret loss of a former self not as diminishment but as clarification. Not "I am less." But "I am more specifically myself."

That's as close as I can get to describing it.

The person who was waiting

He paints badly and eats well. He lives in Singapore in an apartment that smells like linseed oil and ginger. He goes to bed at a reasonable hour and wakes up early to write before the day's demands begin. He doesn't drink, doesn't explain his food choices at restaurants, and doesn't own a desk with dual monitors anymore.

He also doesn't apologize for any of it.

Which is, I think, the real removal—the one that made all the others possible. Not the alcohol, not the animal products, not the furniture. The apology. The constant, low-grade performance of being okay with things that weren't okay, so that other people could remain comfortable.

My partner came into the studio the other evening. She stood in the doorway, looked at the paint jars and the half-finished landscapes and the stain on the floor, and said, "This is the best room in the apartment."

She wasn't being polite. She was being accurate.

It's the room where nobody is pretending.

I spent most of my adult life building identities that would protect me—from failure, from judgment, from the particular vulnerability of being someone who builds things in public and puts his ideas out into the world. And those identities did protect me. They kept me productive and networked and socially fluent and very, very tired.

Every time I remove one, the tiredness lifts a little. And underneath it—quiet, patient, unsurprised—there he is. Whoever he's been this whole time.

Holding a paintbrush. Waiting for the room.