Authenticity & Anthony Bourdain

Jake Summers Substack

What I learned from one of the best adventurers to ever live.

I was lying on a thin mattress in a shipping container in rural Cambodia, already sweating through my sheets at 4:30am. I got up to make coffee. Wearing a headlamp, I made a charcoal fire, boiled water, and mixed up a cup of instant coffee. That probably sounds like a POW camp to you. It was the life I chose.

Anthony Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential, “I wanted to be different, special. I wanted to be somebody.” In his story, he learns that he was already somebody. He just had to stop living the role that others had written for him.

He was a major inspiration for my move to Cambodia. He burned down his old world and left for whatever came next.

I wanted to be different. I needed to stop living the role I was supposed to want.

The Performance

Let me paint you a picture of my life in Philadelphia before I lived in that shipping container, my “successful” one.

I spent the day trading stocks and bonds, monitoring portfolios, talking with other investment managers. My boss loved me.

When people asked what I did, they always grinned when I answered, “I’m in finance.” That had to be a path to success, right?

I had a boutique investment firm job, a stable life in sobriety, a path to wealth. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the air in that office and the suit I was wearing was suffocating me. It felt like a path to misery.

I’d catch myself staring out the office window. I would lose myself in a daydream. What if I hadn’t gotten kicked out of West Point, and I was somewhere far away flying a helicopter? What if I had tried to go work in Asia?

I’d snap out of it. You’re sober now. Stability is what keeps you sober. Your thirst for adventure got you in trouble in the first place.

The Permission

My life changed when someone finally gave me permission. He saw me for me. He didn’t see me as someone who was one second away from burning his entire life down. I couldn’t fault my family for thinking that they had watched me do it with West Point.

My portfolio manager kept dropping these hints, “I think you are an entrepreneur…I think you don’t belong behind a desk…I think you need to do something a little crazy.”

As the years sober piled up, I finally stopped living in fear. I took his permission, and I acted on it. I decided I wasn’t daydreaming. My subconscious was telling me to be who I was.

I finally emailed that guy in Thailand and asked him if I could have a job. I was done performing the role of suit wearing finance bro.

This is the exact trap Bourdain wrote about. He spent years trying to be a serious chef, playing the game and climbing the ladder. Performing a part to secure his role in a world he didn’t belong.

Kitchen Confidential was him finally saying fuck it, here’s who I actually am. The book wasn’t just about restaurants. It was about the cost of being a version of yourself that looks good to others at the expense of authenticity.

The Farm

Fast forward a year. I’m living in that shipping container on a mango farm we’d just purchased.

This wasn’t glamorous. This wasn’t comfortable. Let me be very clear.

We had no running water for the first months. We showered using river water from a bucket. The solar system I’d attempted to install barely kept the AC running for an hour after the sun went down.

The nearest town was a few open-air shops and a bunch of locals that spoke no English.

We ate whatever the farmers caught in the river that day, cooked in a single pot stew over a charcoal fire. I slept in a metal bunk bed like I was on a WW2 battleship.

After I had my coffee, I flipped my hat backwards and climbed on my motorcycle and took off. I drove by rows of mango trees as the sun started to rise.

I would think to myself, there isn’t a single other person in the world doing what you are doing in this very moment. I felt special. Different.

I had never been happier in my entire life.

I finally understood what Bourdain knew. Authenticity isn’t about where you live or what you do. It’s about living a life that matches who you really are.

In Cambodia, I was just Jake. The kid who got kicked out of West Point. The guy who wanted to collect wild stories and tell them around a campfire.

I wasn’t performing anymore. I was living.

Bourdain wrote about how the kitchen was where he felt like himself. Not in the fancy restaurants he was supposed to want to run. It was in the chaos, the creativity, the raw humanity of doing the work he loved.

I found my kitchen in Southeast Asia.

For the first time since getting sober, I wasn’t managing my life to avoid relapse. I was living a life I actually wanted to wake up to.

The Scary Truth

Let me be honest. Being authentic is fucking terrifying.

When I told people I was moving to Cambodia to start a mango farm, they looked at me like I was insane. I kept hearing the same explanation of how I could put this on my resume and still find my way back to an investment firm.

Part of me wondered if they were right.

Here’s the scary truth. When you stop performing, you are no longer flying on the wind of validation.

What if the authentic version of me wasn’t as impressive as the manufactured one?

What if I failed spectacularly at this mango farm thing and heard “told you so” for the rest of my life?

What if leaving the herd gets lonely? What if I didn’t like it? What if I was wrong?

Bourdain faced this too. Kitchen Confidential was a massive risk. He exposed the underbelly of an industry, named names, admitted to drug use. He could have been blacklisted.

Instead, he became himself. And the world responded.

Not everyone will celebrate your authenticity. Some people are deeply invested in the version of you they’ve constructed. The one that feels safe. That’s their problem, not yours.

The Lesson

I don’t live in the shipping container anymore. Life happened. Relapses, business failures, family tragedies, the list goes on. I’m back in the States now.

But here’s what stayed with me. I know what it feels like to live authentically now.

The question I ask myself constantly is, “Am I building a life I want, or am I building a life that looks good to other people?”

Those are radically different things.

Bourdain spent years in the first category before he finally shifted to the second. He said the best decision he ever made was “stopping pretending I was anything other than what I was.”

There is no sure path to success and comfort when living an authentic life. But when you stop pretending, something magical happens. You start to find moments of pure joy. Your inner child starts to come out again.

I’ve failed at this even after I was a mango farmer. I’ve listened to the fear and started to perform again. I’ve lived for others. I’ve pursued stability to get sober and start a family, but each time I woke up and took action to get the hell back on my path.

I’m doing it again with writing. Talk about a career path with low odds of success! I quit a six-figure job at a start-up to get my first book published, just like Bourdain did.

You don’t need to move to Cambodia. You don’t need to quit your job. You don’t need a shipping container.

But you do need to answer this question honestly

What’s the thing that you wish you were doing, if the world didn’t tell you otherwise?

That’s your Mango Farm. Everything else is just a performance.

Some Tips 

• Try to talk about work less with your community. Talk about your interests, what makes you happy (if thats work, then fine) but we as a culture talk about our jobs too much. 

• Build a community of people that know you outside of your job. People that see you as something other than the role at work. The version of yourself that isn’t playing a part, YOU.

• Get outside of your head. If you have that little voice that keeps telling you something is off, don’t bury it away. Talk about it! Friends, loved ones, therapists, mentors, they help us determine if an idea is irrational or doesn’t sound like us. 

• An idea that is never expressed, will never happen. Don’t be ashamed to feel like you don’t fit somewhere (job, relationship). 

• Trust your gut more.

• I jumped into the deep end, because that’s part of what authentic looks like to me. The key is ACTION. If you are risk averse and don’t feel comfortable making massive changes, make small ones. Sign up for a painting class or a writing one. 

• Write or journal! Writing is a safe space to let ideas out before you bring them to people. There are an infinite amount of prompts on exploring your inner self

Jake