Bali is as close to paradise as you can get. Lush green jungle, an abundance of beautiful temples. The whole place is steeped in local culture. Everybody I meet is nice. God made up for creating assholes by populating Bali with the least entitled people on Earth.

This trip was supposed to be a reset. I arrived hung over and at the tail end of an exhausting period in my life, broke, divorced and in desperate need of a break. In my alcohol-infused daze the night before, I hurriedly and carelessly packed my carry-on without thinking. As a consequence, I now walk around Bali with in a long-sleeved blue dress shirts and grey slacks, looking like a lost businessman. I think the locals call me "The Accountant" behind my back, which is fine. At the organic coffee shop next to my hotel, the owner, a bearded Australian with a man-bun, tries to sell me a musty tie dye shirt, but I decline. I will be an accountant for now.

The resort next door is for Russians only: all signage are in Cyrillic and the menu for tonight features borscht. After a brief assessment of my nationality, I am told there are no vacancies for the next ten years. The road into Ubut is gridlocked with foreigners on scooters. Walking past the honking and fuming mayhem I am nearly run over by two yogis on an off-road Yamaha who flip me the finger as they pass. Namaste, motherfucker.

Downtown Ubut is madness. Vegan chill-out bars and sunset Buddha lounges. Duck-faced influencers are posturing in the middle of the street, making bedroom eyes at their ring-lighted phone cameras. Well-tattooed topless men with Ray-Bans roar past on rented motorcycles with their loot on the back: tall and toned models with inflated lips like tube tires and raccoon eyes. How the good people of Bali find the grace to tolerate – let alone welcome – this infestation is beyond me.

It is easy to romanticize Bali. In spite of my numb state, I am captivated. Quaint cobbled streets lead to ancient, gated compounds, and baskets bearing floral gifts, food offerings and burning incense are thoughtfully placed near the doorways to placate the spirits. Chanting rises in the evening air. The spirituality is rich and infuses the air around me. How tempting, I think, to believe we can borrow all this and make it our own. How easy it looks to take this religion, this deep culture that has been rooted here for millennia and mold it onto our own newly acquired spirituality. How tempting to think we belong here after all.

My mental reset is still pending. At the end of my first day, I feel exhausted, confused and strangely cut off from the world around me. If anything, I feel jealousy of the Balinese who find beauty and grace in everything that surrounds them, seemingly absorbing the foreign invasion as yet another hardship imposed by the spirits.

I seek refuge in the café, drinking a late soy-milk cappuccino with no sugar because that is all the bearded Australian Tie-die man-bun has to offer.

The sun sets behind the palm trees surrounding the flat green lawn in front of the town hall and a stillness descends. This afternoon, the lawn doubled as a football pitch for an impromptu soccer match between local kids and digital nomad offsprings, but now, in the rapidly approaching dusk, it is quiet and abandoned. Australian Tie-die's dog, a large yellow Labrador with a fashionable blue hair dye streak all along its back and a pirate bandana around its neck, wanders onto the deserted field. It squats, squinting at the flagpole where the Indonesian bicolor listlessly flops in the sunset breeze, and squeezes out a chalk-white vegan turd, right in the middle on the football pitch.

Somehow, I cannot help but feel that this moment captures it all.