I don't entirely disagree, but the first thing that this article brought to mind is the old cliche "wherever you go, there you are". I'm 34, lots of ex girlfriends and lots of past cities. There's a fine line between breaking out of the status quo hamster wheel and running away from your baggage.
Moving cities, or relationships, or jobs isn't worth as much if you aren't simultaneously working on yourself
> Do you suppose that you alone have had this experience? Are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.
Seneca, 2000 years ago
More people should read the classics, lots of wisdom you can speed run instead of discovering you fucked up the better part of your youth chasing ghosts
Also, changing the people around you can solve a surprising large number of problems.
It's not so much that people can't understand it, it's that it's wrong enough times for people to think it can apply to them. (Kinda like playing on the lottery; you won't win, but you have plenty of evidence to think you will.)
It seems real wisdom has a prerequisite: actually seeing/witnessing other people's mistakes.
It is hard to see other people's real mistakes, both clearly and with all the context.
I remember reading about one common parenting mistake: fighting with their spouse quietly away from their kids. Or maybe fighting happens, but resolving does not.
The idea is that kids can't learn how their parents fight, discuss and then resolve issues because they don't ever see everything start to finish.
Not necessarily. "Inner wisdom", wisdom about yourself and who you are, usually can only come from your own experiences (both mistakes/failures and successes/victories).
You can learn a lot about yourself by "blowing up" your life. (And you don't have to go to the extremes the article describes.)
It depends. Nothing teaches better than failure. Of course I don't need to try heroin to know it's bad, but there are many other things that are worth trying and learning from.
To tie it to HN, the vast majority of new companies fail. Wisdom would say don't waste time on a new company, yet many of us do just that.
I think this is fairly myopic. Surely you’ve experienced firsthand someone telling you something, you not “getting it” or believing them, only to be like “oh shit this person was totally right” later on? Or maybe you can like, imagine that this is a fairly normal interaction other people have?
It takes a while to get there… most people need to experience the pain of a few real mistakes of their own before they recognize the value of paying attention to other people’s.
The worst is seeing someone making a mistake, warning them, and then they do it anyway.
Thanks for replying- I completely agree. Which writing is that quote from and/or any goods tips for where to start with Seneca for someone who didn't study the classics in college?
That specific quote is from letter 28 "On travel as a cure for discontent"
Seneca is always a good intro, easy to read and pretty low level, as in scenarios that you would face in your everyday life instead of more metaphysical topics.
It sounds like this author believes in going really big. They didn't move cities, they moved continents. They didn't date and break up, they married and divorced.
I think there is something to be said for getting some big experiences. Moving from Pittsburgh to Cleveland might be a waste of energy. Moving from Pittsburgh to Paris is a guaranteed adventure.
I don't know if I agree or not, but it is interesting to think about.
It’s interesting that a lot of people don’t like big changes, because I’m generally the exact opposite. If I haven’t had a big change in a few years, I start feeling really anxious—like I’m letting life pass me by. Most people crave constancy and routine; I seem to crave novelty and adventure.
To your example, I moved from North Carolina to Paris when I was 3, and ever since then have wanted to go more places. It’s a bit different when you have other people who depend on you though. We moved from the southeast to the Bay Area a while back, and the experienced rattled my wife a lot, as she had lived in the same small hometown for 30 years. I suppose it is her turn for now; with remote work we moved right back to her small hometown next to her parents while our children are young. But two years into this and I’m already itching to move to Norway or Tokyo...
I think maybe it has to do with self confidence, or childhood trauma? I had a very unstable childhood and things quite often didn’t “just work out”. Adults in my life literally got stabbed and died when “interesting” new things happened. “Hi nice to meet you”, “oh he’s dead now”. “Time to go live in the women’s shelter! Hey now we live in a trailer in the middle of nowhere!” Change was scary and often not for the better. Major change was what you happened when you crawled out the window to escape dad beating mom every night.
I feel I stumbled into the stability I have and want to do everything I can to hang on to it. It doesn’t feel like something I should expect, but something I’m extraordinarily lucky to have. Moving or any other big shake up feels like a very real potential to invite chaos back into my life and destroy the small oasis of calm with my family I’ve spent years building.
I definitely found myself in what you're describing.
Especially the feeling extraordinarily lucky to have it part.
Chaos gives me anxiety. I know the general state of things IS chaos, change is the only constant, ecc. ecc., but I guess the schopenhauerian minimization of suffering is the only mantra I can entertain.
It’s just life. But I mean I definitely understand the other side of the coin. To me when things get really really bad it’s time for a really really big change.
It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective that my ancestors who voluntarily got on a boat for weeks and came to the USA sight unseen had a similar wild hare. Maybe things were really bad in Denmark at the time or maybe they just really had wanderlust. No idea.
I think things we call “disorders” like manic depressive episodes partially serve this function and there’s potentially huge rewards for venturing off into the great unknown. Manic episodes are the rocket fuel to take big risks and potentially get big rewards. Obviously enough people hit the big rewards (by having more land, having lots of kids, getting rich) that it has an impact on our genetics and our personalities. But at the same time, the dead men at the bottom of the Mediterranean who were looking for adventure don’t tell us their tales of failure.
I been on great adventures throughout my life, and the result is that I learned I'm happy right where I'm at. The place where I grew up, left a few times, returned to every time (gladly, every time), and still call home. Could just be that different people are different.
I spent years having solo adventures only to realize I'd been missing out on shared adventures with a long term partner. With the right person, your adventures can be much bigger, at least for me. Your mileage may vary.
While moving from Pittsburgh to Paris to Hong Kong to Singapore to Berlin to Cape Town is more likely a waste of energy again and risks burning you (not mentioning the planet) out. It's a lot easier to turn the adventure-o-meter up than to turn it down.
Agreed. This brand of self-aggrandizing “I did it my way” advice adverts always exemplify a special brand of narcissism; the speaker is unaware that they aren’t the center of their own life. The truth is that “blowing up your life” isn’t usually good or laudable: if you regularly find yourself in situations where you think it’s best to hard reset you’re probably very confused about what you want and need and, ironically, would probably benefit more from figuring out how to renegotiate an undesirable situation than eternally storming between grand schemes.
But also to the contrary this is the exact line of thinking that causes the large majority of people to sleep walk through life, as the author says. It is a hard truth of life that the large majority of people (80+% I would say) do not take any real risks in their entire long life.
You can obviously over-do it, and yes it probably feels good to follow the herd and stay in the "okay" relationship and the "okay" job with the same old things because you feel like that's what everyone does. But... there is much more outside that world. The walls you think are there are in fact not there at all. There is room for risk within reason in life.
So what? Why take risks? Merely to say “look I took a risk and it paid off”? I get that risk-taking can result in wealth, fame, etc. but (and I think this is where opinions like OP’s break down for a lot of people) a lot of people struggle to get through the “sleepwalking” life - going to college, finding an apartment, getting your first car, etc. can be huge risks if you lack some generational wealth to back you up in case things go sideways. I mean, hell, most Americans have like $500 in their bank account. Going to the grocery store is a life-or-death (or eternal medically induced poverty) is right around the corner.
And I guess that leads me to what I really turn my nose up at OP’s line of reasoning. Sure, he can move to Thailand and become whatever kind of journo-grifter. I have a wife and kids! I can’t/don’t want to blow it up just to say “I took a risk” and leave them destitute. Which maybe that’s all to say there’s a big difference between gambling with someone else’s money and gambling with your own.
"Taking a risk" by definition means things may improve for you, but they can also get worse. Most people aren't in that great of a position in the first place, they don't want to fall even lower. Esp. since the lows are really low and the highs aren't really as high, and have a diminishing returns quality to them. As Jordan Peterson put it "you can only be so happy, but you can be 100% dead".
Some would argue the human experience is inherently social, with other humans and the lack of stable community (putting down roots amongst friends, family and a hyperlocal community) isn't realizing said experience to the fullest. To each their own though.
I disagree, and I want to try to say this in the least cringey and New Age-y way possible, bear with me. Your limited sensory experience indicates you are the “center of your life” - that you are some spirit in your head, inhabiting a body that bumps into other bodies, etc. When you grow up you gain an awareness of other people having this experience alongside you. Sometimes it’s possible to reorient your understanding of this experience away from “I” and towards “we” and to broaden the scope of what “your” life is about. This would mean things like considering your family or community the “center of your life” which I think is considerably better happiness wise than the naive egoism that we take as the (Very American) default setting for life.
Going big and blowing it up - what is there not to like? Going big requires investments and while there is a sunk cost fallacy there is also compound interest. Most larger endeavors have investments from more than one participant - and it often needs just one person to blow it all up. Last but not least: All big investment require taking on risk and you ability to stomach those may decline over time - there is survivor bias in the tale of heroes.
There are long term consequences and without discussing how they relate to rewards of blowing big things up this feels a shallow self promoting piece to me.
Alan Watts was the one that was always saying, "the you that is trying to be better is the same you that needs improving." Try breaking out of that trap!
To some degree if you are going to change yourself for the better, you will already be doing it. It is a bit defeatist but also a little bit of truth.
It is like how some folks try desperately to learn an instrument or get better are writing or whatever. They have this grim determination that it is something that needs to be done. To some degree you need that push through but for many it is just the process of getting to the goal, not a means of self improvement.
What I mean by that is, look at those that just took to playing musical instruments as a child. It wasn't necessarily because they were forced to do so but because they had an innate drive to do it. The lessons and practice was just a means to improve on something they were already trying to do.
All the Gibbs brothers in The BeeGee's (and Andy) took to instruments before the age of 3, they didn't do it to be better, it was just something they did.
In creativity, unless you are a savant it takes grinding to increase your ability to match your taste.
If you started very young, then bravo, the grinding is out of the way and you were likely to be able to focus on the fun parts and have fewer distractions.
If you're starting as an adult, then it's gonna take some grit to get to a level you're satisfied with.
It isn't so much that it is hard, it is a case of how much you are put off by the potential hard work. How much drive you have regardless of the challenge.
It is some religious monasteries or teachers they use this to weed out those that they figure might not be up to it. They come to the student and say "You know if you are to get this, it will take over a decade or more before you will even begin to get the ideas we are working with!". If the student is not worried about this and see it as merely what needs to be done to get to their goal - then they will be a good student. The barriers are not seen as a problem but a process.
Blowing up your life is exactly that, a big frikin mistake.
I've made several decisions that later revealed themselves as life blowing. It's not worth it.
In youth it's easy to imagine that you have infinite tries to get it right. This is totally wrong. Decisions that set your life back years can only be overcome so many times, and never completely.
So, instead of blowing it up, add it up slowly year by year, increasing your traction and equity....
I was in the perfect place to do it at 48. I had no dependents, a stable marriage and a wife who was excited to go along for the ride with me and I had built up assets to take chances. Now that I think about it, it really wasn’t that risky. Remote was a thing and I figured worse case, someone would hire me as a consultant.
Blowing up your life in the sense of the article would have involved leaving your wife. I imagine that or similar extreme changes is what the parent meant.
A lot of people in this thread think selling all their furniture is a life explosion.
>There's a fine line between breaking out of the status quo hamster wheel and running away from your baggage.
Absolutely. I've had the urge to move from my hometown to escape baggage, mainly relationships. I've been close to pulling the trigger many times. But things got in the way and now I look back and I'm happy I didn't move. At least for that reason of escaping baggage. Odds are you'll have baggage anywhere you live if you live there long enough. Learning to grow and live with that baggage is part of being a human.
In certain contexts this is called “doing a geographic”. Notorious trap for people who look solely for external causes of their discontent and ignore internal.
There's an equivalent in personal finance where people think that a payrise will solve their money woes. Their habits remain, their discretionary spending scales up, and they usually continue on with the same problems.
It is fascinating to see old friends fall into this trap. Things seem great for the first few months but eventually the same old issues arise with time.
There is a stereo type in Australia that the British complain about the country once here. A big part of this is believed to be that they leave their country to start over in a place that looks completely different, start a new job and meet new people only to find that they fall into all the same issues. Rather than realize the issues are just a part of the society, they can tend to blame the country instead.
That said I used to work with someone from Nigeria, very smart fella, they had a lot of issues with the country but also understood why they left their country. All they said was "Different country, similar poison. Just pick your flavor." They fundamentally got the issue at hand.
"People travel to change themselves, but they only manage to change the scenery." (Not my quote, alas, and my memory has butchered it enough that I can't find the original.)
Except that traveling is already requiring change in a person, opposed to being stationary. You have to face new situations all the time - requiring a different state of alertness and consciousness.
And new sceneries have different people, climate etc. also literally changing people (microbiome for example).
So yes, some people travel to run away from problems they never dare to solve, but some people just like to be on the move, like our nomadic ancestors.
Yes, this is very true. But there are new nomadic tribes forming right now.
Some actually very close bonded and always together like in the original tribal meaning, some very loose and casual. Just like minded people, who like to be on the move, but not alone.
Encountering a foreign culture, with foreign ways of thinking and behaving, can stretch and change you by forcing you to encounter assumptions and habits you didn't even know you had.
I’ve mentioned the last year of my life on HN where my wife and I decided to get rid of everything we own that wouldn’t fit in four suitcases including our cars and we became “hybrid digital nomads”. We fly to different cities across the US and stay in midrange extended stay hotels and stay in our own “Condotel”[1] the other six months in Florida.
What I haven’t talked about is what got us to this point. I grew up in a small town in southwest GA, moved to metro Atlanta in 1996 and stayed there until last year.
We had a house built in 2016 in the northern burbs and thought we had our “forever home”. All the time from 1996 -2020 I bumped around between 7 jobs as a journeymen “enterprise dev”.
My wife had lived in metro Atlanta all of her life. We got married in 2012 (both on our second marriage).
Everything changed in 2020. Our youngest son (my stepson) graduated from high school, Covid happened (didn’t fatally affect anyone in our inner or outer circle) and I fell into a remote job at BigTech.
When things got back to normal around 2021, we both realized that life is short and we wanted a change. That’s what caused us to blow up our life and we are both happier now that we really can’t acquire “stuff”.
When we left our condo in March to start our six month trip, we put it in the rental pool, it gets professional managed like a hotel room and we get half the rent to cover our mortgage.
We don’t own a car. We take Uber for six months once we hit a city and we have a Sixt subscription and we rent a car by the month when we are at home.
I've done this on a smaller, temporary scale and it wasn't for me. You end up spending a lot of your time planning, packing, unpacking and generally working around all the things you never have to think about when you just live where you want to live and do some traveling. Our life became meaningless chores that just ate away at all the interesting things we could be doing or wanted to be doing.
We’ve figured most of those things out. We always travel on Sunday. We unpack our clothes. Do an instacart order. Find the laundry facilities, gym and pool at the hotel and find something to do on the weekends. My wife takes care of the washing and folding clothes and she hangs out during the week with people in one of her fitness organizations (she’s a hobbyists fitness instructor), she will organize a playlist and be a “special guest instructor”.
We usually stay at an extended stay with a full kitchen. Finding things to do is part of the fun. I book hotels ouf a year in advance since you don’t pay until check out.
surely that doesn't apply to extended stays? don't they want some money like... after 2 weeks or a month or something? what prevents people from sleep-and-dashing? i guess that's why they have a CC on file but they don't know if it'll go through.
You’re right. I was more referring to the fact that we can book hotels s year in advance without having to PDT up front. Unlike with flights where you have to pay upfront.
Right, so the "secret" to blowing up your life is just to have massive savings, income and rental property, so that instead of owning your possessions, you can just rent them for 2x the cost of ownership while being a digital nomad.
But my former home is rented to our son at a discount to its market value to help him out and it offsets most of the holding cost. But I still lose money. That’s the only thing that the extra money is going to - offset the mortgage.
Honestly, my fixed costs are actually lower than they were before I started working for BigTech when I was working as a journeyman CRUD developer making less than a returning intern got at my current company.
I was making $120K when I had my house built in the burbs in 2016 and paid 3.5% down with an FHA mortgage. I was the only one on the mortgage.
If I had still been making that, I would have sold my house that doubled in value over the past six years and paid cash for my place in Florida.
My total expenses including mortgage and all utilities is less than $3000 where I live now. I was paying more for my mortgage, utilities, maintenance.
Even without that, my 1250 square foot condo I bought in 2022 was the same price I paid to have my 3200 square foot house built in 2016.
The amount we pay for Uber or SixT is about the same as we paid for one car note + maintenance on an older car + car insurance.
It's not like OP said "Anyone can do it just like this!". It's just what they did. Is it really so shocking to you that richer people have more opportunities in their lives than poorer people?
My budget is lower than it was when I was making $135K (the median college educated couple in the US makes that much) when I had my house built in 2016.
The only thing different that I’m doing based on my income now is subsidizing the rent for my younger son instead of selling my old house and paying cash for the Condotel I bought. It was the same price in 2022 as what I bought in 2016.
It's not just about income, but also your assets. From your description, I don't think it is wrong to call you rich, or at least above average net worth and income. Also, you making $135k solo is a much better situation than you+partner making $135k combined as might happen with the median college couple. You doing it solo means your partner can put all their time into...well..whatever they want.
I don't really see anything wrong with your reply, I was mostly replying to the person who was whining that you have to be rich to do it. But I do think, if you had less income and fewer assets you would need to go about doing what you did in a different way.
Yes, I realize in the grand scheme of things, even $135K puts me in the top quintile of income. But this is HN full of tech people. In 2016, any average CRUD “full stack developer” could get that much in any major metropolitan area in the US with 5-7 years of experience. An FHA loan that we used to get our house built was 3.5% down or around $12K.
On the other side of tech compensation, that’s less than a returning intern I mentored got when they came back - and not as a software developer as a junior consultant at BigTech working remotely where we make 10% less than software devs at the same level
I still posit that it is more about priorities (and lack of dependents) for your average mid careers professionals.
There are people making less who choose the RV life or AirBnbs and cars.
> It’s even more nuanced. Airlines don’t make money on main cabin for the most part. They make money from business class
No, it's not. Where they make their money is completely orthogonal to how demand for flights is generated.
All passengers generate flight demand, so yes, they are just as responsible for CO2 emissions as the airline (you can argue about the proportions and degrees, but they still are) The airline is additionally responsible by not pricing in externality costs of CO2 emissions.
That’s just the thing, if main cabin demand went down, the airlines would just increase the prices of the price insensitive business travelers using other peoples money.
When I fly personally, I’m much more price sensitive than when I’m booking travel in the travel portal for my trillion dollar market cap employer who is flying me out to see a client to work on a deal. I’ve flown out with a couple of days notice plenty of times at prices I would never pay personally. If every single none business traveler stopped flying from SEA, I can guarantee you that they wouldn’t cut flights drastically.
There is a reason that the SEA airport has a special line for check in for Amazon and Microsoft.
Won't this get kinda boring after a little while? I guess I've been on enough business trips that constantly traveling to me seems stressful and boring. I liked looking forward to meeting coworkers though, so having some people like distant family or friends in these areas makes life more enjoyable. I guess I've also been somewhat forced/or I guess blessed to live in a different state for a while. You won't really get a good understanding of a place until you've lived there maybe 2-3 years and have driven all over and met different types of people in that culture. The first year I think is mostly adapting to the differences and handling culture shock if you move across the country.
I work during the week and my wife is a hobbyist fitness instructor and trains other instructors. She reaches out to people online before we go and goes to different gyms while I work and we do the normal “date night” things on the weekend finding interesting things to do in the city we are in. She makes friends everywhere and flies to conferences without me. I also travel for work (cloud consulting) occasionally.
Because $Life, we haven’t really traveled that much until last year.
The end game is to sell our house in Atlanta after our son moves out (he pays rent with two of his friends). Because I never want to be a traditional landlord again. I did that a decade ago, pay off our Condotel and it will be cash flow positive without a mortgage and then find some place to live the other six months. It will be another tax free state just to keep taxes simple. We are thinking about either Las Vegas or some place in Tennessee.
Packing and unpacking isn’t that bad once every three or four weeks. I have one suitcase that never gets unpacked except when I travel for work.
My girlfriend is an oncology social worker and sees patients who lament that they waited until retirement to fulfill all their dreams of travel, etc. and then got cancer and realized there's a big chance they will never achieve almost any of them.
For this reason we decided not to wait to live life and moved onto an RV two years ago and have visited 20 states and two Canadian provinces while I work full time and she works part time, both remotely, often over Starlink (as I type this now from a small RV park in the Yukon).
You're paying half your rent to property managers?! Stop this insanity. There is no such thing as a rental pool, unless it's literally a pool that is rented. What service are you using?
It literally is 300-400 units in a resort “hotel” and they rent out your unit as part of a pool of units. They do all of the marketing, replenishment of supplies for the kitchen, maintenance, payments etc. The units are rented out by the night just like a hotel when you aren’t there.
But you don’t understand the other part. I’ve done the landlord thing before. I would rather get an anal probe with a cactus than ever be a landlord again. The entire purpose of it was never to make money. But to have a place to stay for six months, a legal residence in a state that didn’t charge taxes, and for it to pay for itself when we are not there.
When we leave every year, we pay a one time $110 cleaning fee and don’t think about the place again until we come back in six months. The income comes in the same account where the mortgage is paid automatically.
The numbers don’t work at all for most people. It only works because we live there during off season as our only “home”.
Even then considering that we did a HELOC on our primary home (which is now rented out) , we still lose $12K a year that is only offset by moving to a state with no income taxes.
We also didn’t live in a state that thinks they have the right to tax you on all of your RSU grants that you got when you lived there even if you moved by the time the RSU’s vested.
I can’t recommend it for most people. It’s a horrible “investment” by any sort of analysis. We barely break even and that’s only because we stay there during low season.
We also had to pay 30% down since it is considered a commercial property. But you buy it just like you would any other commercial unit through a bank. On top of that, we took a HELOC on what was our primary home to get the 30%, just as interest rates were rising. We rent our home out to our grown son and two of his friends that we have known forever.
The HELOC isn’t covered by either rental income and that only makes sense because it is offset by the state taxes we don’t pay.
The only time this makes sense for most people is if their primary home is paid off and as a vacation home and for retired snowbirders.
Also people do it to avoid taxes on real estate sales using a 1031 Exchange.
Even knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t do it under any other circumstances besides what we are doing now or as part of 1031 exchange if had taxable real estate capital gains.
"Rental revenue is shared with the management company, and owners typically pay no upfront fees for management, which includes the marketing and reservation of the units.[citation needed] Typical monthly fees for units in the rental pool include FF&E (Furniture, Fixtures and Equipment) reserve and resort fee(s). Although the revenue splits between owner and management company do vary from project to project, most hover around 50 percent."
Exactly. A hotel-like 1-bedroom unit that might rent for $270/night is almost certainly going to rent by the month for far below (270*30.5)=$8235. Even assuming 30% vacancy, $270/night is $5764, vs. maybe $$2500/mo for a long term lease.
The other option, something like AirBnB, will result in lower overall fees but almost certainly higher vacancy than having the hotel manage everything and allow people to book it on e.g. Hilton.com or Expedia just like nay other hotel room.
Your math is spot on. Our unit is two bed/two bath, living room, full kitchen with a washer and dryer. Three pools , three restaurateurs on site, a well stocked convenience store, a running trail and a lake.
It’s Florida so it’s very seasonal. But we live there during low season.
Are you documenting/journaling your interactions and experiences in the various cities that you visit with a view to drawing any conclusions? Or just enjoying the ride?
A developer creates a standard resort hotel and then sells individual units out as condos.
You can (and most people do) use the onsite property management company. All of the individual owners make their units available as inventory to the property management company when they are not staying there. The property manager should have an algorithm to ensure units are occupied equitably.
My price at home for mortgage and utilities at home is $3K. One fee pays all utilities.
I keep my monthly hotel stays around the same amount since my mortgage is covered e-bike we are traveling. I stay at more expensive places to “vacation” by using hotel loyalty points earned.
I also don’t have a separate “vacation budget” like most people. It’s spread out for six months. My goal was always to keep my budget to the same as it was when I was just a regular old “enterprise Dev”.
I had the same thought -- " yet another writing by someone who's advice is 'do what I did' without any consideration beyond their own limited experience". This is especially frustrating when it comes from someone 20, 30, 40 years younger who doesn't have the life experience, much less can speak to your own life and how it should be managed. It worked for you, great, but don't assume to proselytize as if you're spouting truth.
Reminds me of a colleague in her 20s giving advices on how to raise children, without having on her own. I promptly put her on my ignore list.
Parenting advices are the worst type, I never listen to them. Each family and child is different, you cannot attribute any result to anything, and we all have differing values.
Elder people have a lot to say and some (not all) have a lot of wisdom. However I agree that whatever advice you take and follow, you will end up making mistake in other areas, so at the end of the day you have to live your own life, realise your own mistake and correct them.
Let's say it is interesting to hear their advice as they have more life experience. I would however not follow everything said as the context has probably changed, but I try to take out the useful information I could reuse
I am in my mid-30s and highly resistant to change; the article resonates. I'm not ready to leave my job (I have two more years of RSUs to collect), but I am moving houses within my city solely for the change of scenery and pattern. I expect in the next few years, unless I meet someone life-changing, that I will leave my city or even take a multi-year sabbatical until I feel the urge or need to go back to my profession.
Notable quotes:
>But for the relatively sane, by the time you’re mostly ready to leave a job, or a city, or a relationship, you probably have good reason to.
>At any given time, your motion is being constrained by an agglomeration of previous decisions made by a previous you, decisions that might have little to do with your current wants.
I think these are good points to consider if one is the kind of person who accumulates "stuff" or has existential anxiety.
This was a categorical statement about 20-somethings and as such isn't ad hominem. I would still say that if their advice was just as eloquently stated opposite.
My Latin is rusty, then it is perhaps "ad populum", attacking the people. In any case, you're not addressing the message.
"Ceterus paribus" yes, older people are more wise due to experience, but I have met 28 year olds which are much wiser than millions of old, insular, dumb 50-80 year olds.
Sometimes you have to address the merits of large groups of people however, no other way doing that. "Childless advice on parenting is dubious" in the sister comment for example. And come on, every one of us was in their 20s some time.
It is interesting as the later I get into my 50s, I start thinking more and more how I should never listen to what people over 50 say.
Life is non-ergodic and the older you get the more you are over fit to a time that no longer exists.
At least youthful ignorance has a chance of actually being right. There is a pseudo-wisdom that comes with age that is almost always wrong going forward.
This may be an artifact of our current times, which change so quickly that the wisdom older people accumulated through their life experiences may no longer be applicable to the current reality. But, throught history, older people often really were treasure troves of wisdom.
Enjoying the moment. The excitement of new experiences. Saying what you want without filters. And literally covering your ears, if there is too much noise, opposed to smiling and accepting all unpleasant things.
I love articles like this. The writer seems to have no idea they're revealing severe psychological trauma to the readers, and despite it they try to pass it off as sage life advice. Like telling everyone you spit in the soup at work but it helps strengthen people's immune systems so everyone should be unsanitary.
Severe trauma? Really? Didn’t see any mention of violence, sexual assault, prison time, or the like. These seem like totally prosaic life choices that more or less worked out fine for him in the end. Maybe the language is a bit overwrought but that could just be to punch things up for the reader.
He was unable to make and keep connections that he found valuable enough to preserve. He wrote a post about blowing up your life and barely concentrated on the biggest reason not to, to preserve your social connections and proximity to the people you love to spend time with.
I would be very surprised if this person did not have an "avoidant" attachment type.
I think you underestimate how severe the trauma of feeling disconnected from other humans can be.
I think the authors blog post conveys that he hasn't come to terms with the idea that "Wherever you go, there you are."
This is off topic but your original comment is from May and super old. I just wanted to say thanks for mentioning Running on Empty back then. It made me get a copy and it explained a lot for me, and I'm really grateful to have found it.
You can preserve connections after leaving a place or changing a relationship. Most people are capable of this. It sounds like the author was as well, since he mentions having an amicable conversation with his ex-wife after his divorce.
Social alienation is very bad, but is not severe trauma. Severe trauma would be something like being held in solitary confinement for months.
The problem with trauma as an explanatory model is is that if you dig deep enough, pretty much anyone has had life experiences that may be characterized as traumatic. And even if you find someone who hasn't, they've clearly lead such a sheltered life that it's a sort of trauma on its own.
Because of this, childhood trauma is a sort of universal explanation that will explain things even outside of psychology, everything from wheat allergy to male pattern baldness. You bet there's trauma in there somewhere causing it.
Surely divorcing your wife, randomly moving to Thailand and telling people they should do the same to get happier isn't a normal behavior. Call it what you want
Normal, perhaps not. But at the same time, if you've been living your life according to what's considered normal and expected of you with no regard for your own wants and needs, then it may be healthy indeed.
Also, if you spend just a few days in Thailand talking to foreigners, you quickly realize that there are tens of thousands of people who moved to Thailand on a whim.
Many of them flame out in tragic (or tragicomic) fashion, some succeed and settle down, others move on to the next thing with some more life experience under their belt, like the author did.
His path is a typical one among young Westerners who move to Thailand. “Normal” is all relative.
If you're living in a place in which you are not happy, with people you don't like, then leaving may be absolutely what you should do. You don't have to put up with relationships that aren't working.
> If you're living in a place in which you are not happy, with people you don't like,
The epiphany happens when you realize it's probably not the place or the people who are making you unhappy, but yourself and your beliefs.
That's what "wherever you go, there you are" means. It means you can't escape your self and you have to confront who you are no matter where you physically are.
This person is avoidant. That means when his wife did things rather than having an "us vs the problem" mindset, he is looking for the door. That means the woman over time will come to understand that she's not good enough, or there's an expiration on their time together. This raises the stakes for even small disagreements and creates a self fulfilling prophecy that ends the relationship.
So he hurt her by not being attached, and she acted in ways that made him unhappy as a result.
It was him ultimately that created his own unhappiness.
> Before psychedelics, I was intensely commitment-phobic, and assumed that either I wouldn’t settle down with anyone, or that I’d be in an open relationship for the rest of my life. I thought this was a philosophical position, based on principled arguments about the drawbacks of monogamy, rather than an emotional defense.
> This didn’t, like, permanently cure my loneliness and alienation, but it did make me appreciate how difficult it is to be a person, for me and for everyone. I felt less alone, certainly.
I think you're being a bit hyperbolic, but I agree with your general sentiment. Talk to some older people who have lived a very satisfying life and ask them what the secret is. I don't think you'll find that it's tearing down their life every few years. That's what tends to happen when you make a bunch of bad decisions and go too far down one leg of the maze before realizing you're now lost.
I think happiness comes from listening carefully to your inner intuition. Some unconscious part of your mind already knows what path you should go down. The more you align your conscious experience with that part of your mind, the less you'll find the need to blow up your life to reset.
This is just my empirical evidence - let me know if you disagree and have contrary information - but psychological traumas like this are increasing everywhere I look. In my local community, local country, globally, it's the same story basically: burnout, a need for a life blowup. I think it's clearly a growing trend, the old world just isn't working.
Alternatively, never blow up your life! Live near your family and lifelong friends, establish hardcore roots with your community, always be surrounded by love. A road less taken by the educated elites, but a happy and fulfilling road nonetheless.
"One doesn't realize in early life that the price of freedom is loneliness. To be happy one must be tied." ~ CS Lewis
I don't know the context of the quote and I know next to nothing about CS Lewis, but having blown my life up at one point and experienced freedom on a level few on this planet could achieve (health, money, time, and will) the quote rang very true for me.
I think some people grow up in a community and are rooted within that community, but those people are also subject to that community and there is no guarantee that that "community that surrounds you with love" is a good community.
"Always be surrounded by love..." unless you are gay. Gay, trans, atheist, feminist, brown, an opioid addict, a questioner of authority, or otherwise different.
I can't speak for racism or being an addict, but in the English speaking world I think lots of these issues are overplayed.
It's not uncommon for members of the trans community to recommend cutting off family members for acts as minor as accidental misgendering, while ignoring the very real harms of social isolation.
As a trans person who's lived in a multi-generational household where only one other member knew I was trans. I can personally attest that even being closeted can be a good tradeoff for many people.
Obviously in cases of violent queerphobia the calculus will be different, but I think people chronically underweigh community and make their own lives worse for it.
There's a reason for the modern resurgence of communes, and it's not just rent. After decades of increasing social isolation we're finally coming back to the realisation that we're social monkeys.
>"community that surrounds you with love"
This hurts a bit for those who broke out of a toxic or at least not so loving community. I love your comment and I will add this citation to my favorites but it assumes that the ties and relationships are full of love, which I think is not the case for everyone.
> "Always be surrounded by love..." unless you are gay. Gay, trans, atheist, feminist, brown, an opioid addict, a questioner of authority, or otherwise different.
Comparing the suicide rate of those groups with middle aged white men (adjusted for the population size) is a bit silly. Some sources point to 40% of trans people having attempted suicide, and I don't think 40% of middle aged men have attempted suicide.
In absolute numbers the suicide rate among men is an epidemic, but it's not fair to equate the two populations...
Uh. Ok so one groups rate of successful suicide is more important than the others. Gotcha. At least we can agree that it is an epidemic among white middle aged men.
Comparing rate of suicide to frequency of suicide attempts is dishonest. Histrionics grossly inflate the "attempt" rate. The most-dramatic demographic (teenagers) only succeeds 15% of the time, with 12.4% of teenaged girls attempting (5.3% for boys). Anything qualifies!
I've got one who "attempted" suicide as a fucking negotiation tactic-- literally, "give me what I want or I'll kill myself." She's not trans, just Karen incarnate, and had no problems appropriating their "life-affirming care" argument to secure concessions for herself.
Small wonder these numbers are so high-- it's a bullshit metric.
Middle aged white men can be almost any of those things I listed.
It floors me that you aren't flagged.
Not because you mentioned middle aged white men (which I am), but because I am talking about reasons people get kicked out of the usually conservative communities they grow up in. Being a middle aged white man is not one of those reasons.
Middle aged white men can choose their community. Being an atheist I was kicked out of mine.
There's a difference between not choosing a community and not being welcome in it.
Your response reeks of "white lives matter" to me.
Well, sure. Still, a middle aged white man probably has other kinds of privileges than a black transsexual woman. That's kinda my point. I'm not saying that white males don't have it hard but as a white male I never really had to face any kind of discrimination for being who I am. And if it happened it was mostly done by white, heterosexual men.
I wonder why nobody is mentioning the reasons that these suicides happen and instead just talks about the raw numbers.
Given what we know demographically about middle age white males (that they're relatively richer, more powerful e.t.c. than their peers) you can make some useful inferences about what doesn't work to decrease suicide risk.
While there are probably many reasons for this a personal theory of mine (without any firm backing) is that Borderline Personality disorder is underdiagnosed in males.
People with BPD are at a significantly higher risk of suicide, but very effective treatments exist namely dialectical behavioural therapy: a collection of emotional management and mindfulness exercises designed by a psychologists with BPD. The diagnostic criteria for BPD however, are heavily weighed towards symptoms associated with female socialisation. Even the treatment materials assume a female patient, which while not making them less effective is probably a hard sell to males in a sexist society.
We should not compare the magnitude of suffering based on race, sex or sexual orientation. That is how you divide people. That is how you alienate them. Telling those depressed white middle aged men that by default they have it easier because of history or because people at the top are usually white male might be one of main reasons they commit suicide the most.
The difference is that most white men who kill themselves probably don't do it because they're white, heterosexual men. They do it because other aspects of their life, which is tragic in itself.
On the other hand, people with other sexualities or non-cis people are being treated unfairly for who they are.
That's why I didn't understand why you felt the need to mention white male suicides. It's pretty obvious that non-white, non-hetero people are being treated differently by default in our western societies.
That quote is a great counter balance from the one in Fight Club, "Only when you have nothing, can you do anything."
One issue I have with the CS Lewis quote is I have been happy at both extremes. Tied down when I was younger was not for me, but now that I'm older I deeply appreciate all the ties I have. I'm not sure I would have gained this appreciation without taking the path it took to get here.
> "Always be surrounded by love..." unless you are gay. Gay, trans, atheist, feminist, brown, an opioid addict, a questioner of authority, or otherwise different.
Questioner of authority doesn't belong on that list. All the others are mainstream things with media and political advocacy behind them. The last is a "denier" or "conspiracy theorist".
30 years ago they all might have belonged together (expect we had less racism), 15 years ago I understand why people clung to the idea, today it doesn't make any sense.
Communities have authority structures and questioning the basic assumptions of communities (should we allow gay people into our church?) is definitely ostracize-able behavior.
When you are socially underdeveloped, the strange sheep, the sightly bullied, the not-taken seriously, well it’s not so bad to go twice around the globe a few years and come back.
There’s debate. I’ve lost a lot of social fabric. I’m workaholic because I don’t have enough friends. But I’m millionaire, own my startup, own my house, and I can get advice on how to manage at work, get a psychologist, etc.
It’s not ideal, and ideally people would have recognized talent at home and/or just included me because I was a living person, but they didn’t seem to have this ethics. Travelling the world taught me what was necessary to give me the social chances that everyone had at home. Now I have weight. I’m not sure I’d have anyone’s respect without money and travels.
So: When home is broken anyway, do follow some dream, yours or not, travelling wasn’t even a dream for me, it will make you a broken soul with broken social fabric, but with more experience.
Completely agree with your perspective. Life is about making choices, and sometimes breaking out requires sacrificing certain aspects of our lives to gain momentum. When you dare to think and act differently, you become the odd one out, and your community may not accept you. But if you do break out and succeed, you reap the rewards you deserve, such as wealth and a home. However, it's often impossible to go back to the roots you left behind without even realizing it during the breakout. Personal growth happens along the way, even if others fail to see or understand it. Ultimately, it's crucial to trust your instincts and listen to your gut when deciding whether to break out or not. Thank you for this interesting discussion - inspiring.
> It’s not ideal, and ideally people would have recognized talent at home and/or just included me because I was a living person, but they didn’t seem to have this ethics.
What an egotistical thing to say. You're not entitled to have people waste time trying to "be friends with you" just because you're financially successful
> I’m workaholic because I don’t have enough friends.
You don't make friends and are workaholic because of it.
I think you misunderstand GP's post on a low level, words-and-their-definitions level. The story has a timeline to it, and during the hometown portion they were not wealthy and not discussing wealth yet. Read it more carefully.
He said people did not like him, because he was different. Did not recognized his talents. Considered him worthless.
With him building up a succesful startup he clearly proofed he has talents. But it sounds like he would have traded some of that working time to get money, to spend time with friends instead. But he seems burned from his childhood experiences.
I traveled around the world for over a year because I wanted to experience more cultures - I found the same problems of humanity basically everywhere just in different shades. Anyway, a hack for you - if you want immediate respect, gain some muscles. It's possible your current presence is non-threatening and people subconsciously undervalue you due to the first impression.
> When you are socially underdeveloped, the strange sheep, the sightly bullied, the not-taken seriously, well it’s not so bad to go twice around the globe a few years and come back.
Being someone who has the odd combination of seeing problems everywhere and yet willing to take risks, it was great for me to do so and break out of my cycle/neighbourhood/city and do things nobody in my family (and extended family) bothered to do. Some things spectacularly failed and left scars that will last a lifetime but taking those risks brought me to places/experiences and gave me a life radically different from my peers in my school/family/background. Its not radical as in taking war time photos as a profession and volunteering for UN between projects, but, sufficiently different from what most people back home are doing.
The trick is to take risks that you have thought about and are convinced about; so even when they don't work out, you are not cursing yourself that you did something you were not 100% willing to do.
Ouch, that… is a good point. I really needed one at some point because I had an infinite-loop on negativity, but I need to try to emancipate from that.
Travelling will make you a broken soul? Then we must have been doing a very different kind of travelling around the world, for me it was the exact opposite. Literally the most enlighting experiences in my life, tons of personal growth.
And you meet tons of people even if you don't want to, do some cool extreme shit with them which can form bonds much stronger than years of just sitting next to each other in some cubicle/open space.
Also notably that onion article was published over 10 years ago in 2013. At least by 2020 (before remote work) that seemed impossible to fulfill given the increasingly competitive global capitalist system creating massive uncertainty (and causing taking pills and overdose) to everyone especially rural and those back home
I don't follow what relationship these two stories have with each other -- the first is on living in community and putting down roots, and the latter is on far-right cultural atavism.
It depends if one interprets "trad wife" to mean "far-right cultural atavism" or "traditional wife." I try to listen to those who subscribe to the movement, and they report the latter, every time. It seems those who interpret it as "far-right cultural atavism" refuse to actually listen to the women who find meaning in the lifestyle. Inasmuch, I see these articles strongly linked, and I find the juxtaposition really interesting.
"Trad wife" AKA people subscribing to traditional Christian ideas of marriage are very much "far-right cultural activists" from the feminist perspective.
Traditional Christian ideas about marriage (i.e. stay-at-home mom, breadwinner husband, the wife willingly submitting to her husband's authority, the husband willingly sacrificing his own ambitions for the good of his family, etc.) are very much not in line with feminism. While these people won't call themselves "far right cultural activists" they do have to reject feminism in order to have a consistent worldview, and feminists would definitely call them something along the lines of far-right.
I do agree that far-right is a misnomer, "religious right" or "socially conservative" might be a better fit. My point is that "far-right cultural atavism" and "traditional wife" are the same thing from different perspectives.
An "activist" is someone who "use direct, often confrontational action, such as a demonstration or strike, in opposition to or support of a cause.". Whereas these people are not activists, they merely live according to their values.
You are right. However, that doesn't stop others from calling them activists. If you are on the so called "far right," then merely living out your values seem like activism to those who are opposed to you.
Thank you for sharing that article. I had a good laugh reading it. It's essentially the life I'm trying to live, except I work remotely and earn a "city wage" while living in my rural home town.
Do you mean by being uprooted to different places as a child? This happened to me but I put down new roots and made long-term friends as an adult. I'd think the advice for people lacking roots would be the same as for anyone who lacks friends and/or has lost connections? There are also people who lived in an area all their life but maybe friends moved away etc and they found themselves lonely. Seems to me an answer is get involved with things - volunteering, sports, arts, music etc, and for those religious faith, get involved with that, church or otherwise, as long as its a diverse inclusive tolerant supportive community.
While it might be hard to grow roots, it is not impossible. IMO, you should start doing serious work on growing roots when you are in your late 20s.
Growing roots include:
- Getting married
- Having kids
- Settling down to live in one place
- Finding out how you can participate in the local community, and the actively participate
You will find that people are remarkably open to people who willingly contribute to other's well-being. This is how friends are made, this is how roots are grown.
I "blew my life up" twice. Both times I was looking to start over and settle, i.e. grow roots, but in a different place.
It failed both times. People are incredibly difficult to accept outsiders within their circle. I did get married, but wife wants no kids :( ... which makes the marriage a little... fragile. Without close family/friends holding me here (I am and feel like a complete stranger here, 10 years on, and my wife is not local either), it seems I could just go at any time.
However, blowing my life up a third time seems futile. It may work for some people, but after failing twice, doing it a third time seems stupid.
Same here. I moved to Australia from London via a 9 year stint in Dublin.
The Irish accepted me, despite the English connection. I made some very good friends but now have lost contact with all but one.
I moved to Brighton in Melbourne 10 years ago and it's a much harder nut to crack. The people here went to prep, primary, secondary school together. Probably university too. I'm an outsider looking in despite volunteering and doing all the rest.
"Blowing up" and moving back to the UK or Ireland is tempting but I would need to start it all again.
I think I'll stay. Maybe I'll crack these nuts one day and have roots.
As someone who grew up in the area (mid 20s atm), there is a well known phrase amongst locals (at least my mates), the "Brighton Bubble." Also yes you're spot on about keeping ties through all levels of education, at least in my case. It was funny living in Sydney for a year, and returning to Melbourne, and when dating one of the first questions you'd be asked is what school you went to. At least, that's my experience, with a couple of people.
But it's not all gloom and doom, the closer you get to the CBD the more opportunities for connection open up. More activities to do in general, more people who are new to the city and are less likely to have ossified social circles, more public funding for that kind of thing. Melbourne has a rich variety of cultures and perspectives to immerse yourself in if you can align your life along the same axes that nurture those cultures and perspectives. Out in the burbs, particularly in the Bubble, less so. Doesn't help that Brighton and its surrounds are skewed to preserve the lifestyles of the people who grew up in the area (this is the politest possible way I can describe it). Speaking from experience there are plenty of people who left the insular communities of their youth around here, because they never felt like they belonged, and never looked back.
Also worth remembering the lockdowns didn't help. I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for in terms of social connection but my point is, please keep plugging away.
"However, blowing my life up a third time seems futile. "
Unless you do it different this time.
There are places that welcome outsiders. And there are places where everyone is living as an outsider to different degree, even those who were born there, with only shallow bands formed out of habit. You can never feel at home in those places.
I have to agree. For those people who have loving families that they can work with - realizing that EVERYONE has differences of opinion - staying near family is the single best thing you can do. You can have kids. Those kids can be around your parents and siblings and other relatives. Honestly it is true living. All else gravitates towards being too self centered.
I moved continents 12 years ago. I'm now happily married with a kid and have a life I love in my new home country. But I've only recently recognized the price I've paid in moving so far from my parents and siblings and what my daughter will miss out on because of it too.
Before you take Sasha Chapin's advice to blow up your life seriously, ask yourself whether you envy the life he's living.
> My existence really started getting good when I started blowing up my life more regularly, with a substantial eruption every couple of years. I quit my job and moved to Thailand without doing any research about the country, figuring that I could be a bartender again somewhere if it all went south. That ended up becoming the material for my first book. My current professional chapter began when I said “fuck it” to journalism when I couldn’t take the constant ethical compromises and the bullshit of pretending to care about the news cycle. After some flailing, I now make a lot more money and am a lot happier. Blowing up my first marriage was the most difficult one of all, but it was an obviously correct decision, for which my ex-wife later thanked me—we were locked in a pattern that was hurting both of us, and if one of us didn’t walk away, we would’ve eventually been one of those unhappy old couples who constantly radiate bitterness.
...because he switched careers and had a divorce? Not exactly a sign of a failed life, IMO. As a software engineer I feel damn lucky that I chose a career that I really like AND pays well; most people can't say the same. As for the divorce, you could get rich in a day if you knew how to reliably spot one of those coming early in a relationship.
In my case, I blew up my life every couple of years for the past 10 years or so; changing jobs and country. It gave me a good sense of what's out there and how things work on a global scale but it's been a roller-coaster experience without any net gains in the long run.
I'm like a bird floating in the updrafts to conserve energy but every time the wind changes suddenly, I have to start flapping my wings again and it feels harder each time.
Kind of shit advice really. No real data just, "well it worked for me". How many people blow up their life and end up homeless? How many actually improve their situation? How many end up back with their parents? Nothing other than I think it's good and it worked for me.
Here another way to look at this advice:
Everyday I run across the road without looking. It's exhilarating! It makes me feel ALIVE! I know all you naysayers say that I should look before crossing the road. I just rip off the band aid and fucking yolo it. I haven't been ran over by a car yet!
Really stupid. My advice is don't listen to this advice. If you are getting itchy feet go on a fucking holiday for a few weeks.
> Really stupid. My advice is don't listen to this advice. If you are getting itchy feet go on a fucking holiday for a few weeks.
You could also call this quite myopic. How do you know what is out there without trying it yourself? Sitting in your little world and poo poo'ing those who are willing to take a chance. Because yes, from their vantage point, OP is right.
There really is a world out there that few can find but it's worth looking for if you have good reasons to take a chance and put down new roots. Most don't make it because accepting any culture outside of the one of your birth is a very difficult task, and you will never have any true change until you accept a new culture: their customs, their values, their belief systems.
Because really there is quite a lot of variation in those things, and in all the travels I have had, I have only met a few who truly made it. And there is of course a loneliness that comes along with the change, at least for a while. That doesn't mean it isn't worth trying, and if you bit off more than you can chew, just go back home. You obviously need resources to do that, but it's not really as scary as you make it out to be.
Moved to a bigger/better city this year. Was a bit of a daunting task as some friends and family advised against it and I had just bought my apartment a year ago. But it ended up being the best thing I ever did, completely changed everything about my life and I'm loving everything.
I didn't go as extreme as the author and just jump in without any research, but I feel the benefits were the same without many risks. My life from 1-2 years ago is almost unrecognizable now, and I had no idea how much it sucked back then despite on paper seeming pretty good.
I've been contemplating doing this for a while now. I'm definitely ready to move on from my current city.
But what holds me back is, frankly, that I'm scared of not having any friends. I don't want to have to rebuild my social circles. It takes a lot of effort just maintaining my current friendships (as we all get older, get busy, drift apart, etc.), but at least they're there already.
I usually start in a new place with the expat groups in FB, Meetup, etc. Any desirable location you might be considering is nearly guaranteed to have them. Go to a few events and meet people, there's usually locals too. Another great option is group clases like crossfit, salsa dancing, etc.
My life blew up involuntarily a year ago when my relationship broke down. I wanted to do all sorts of things at the time - sell the (unfinished) house, change my job, move to a different city etc. I read some articles on how to deal with it and one thing addressed the point of moving - you are you no matter where you are. Banal, I know.
Since then I took a slightly different path and I've been working on my life steadily. I'm taking care of my physical health, I've been doing work on the house and I try to socialise more. I think I still want to move eventually (as I don't have family/many friends in the city anyway), but I'm happy I didn't do it straight away. I think there's a big risk in blowing up your life and trying to change everything at once, it might be overwhelming.
"you are you no matter where you are. Banal, I know." -- I agree that it is banal, in the sense that it is a common and popular message, but I also think it is wrong.
The environment, the context, all have a profound effect on people. When I played a certain sport competitively, towards the end of their career they would come and play with us former high-level professionals. Almost invariably, and it was the same for other people on other teams, they would start playing the way they used to play (well), but very soon they were seen approaching the average performance of their team members. The athletic director thought that their presence might "pull up" the attitude, performance and skills of their teammates, but the opposite always happened: the gravitational pull of lazy, unskilled and less professional teammates was too strong to resist.
The same happens in many other contexts. I used to work in a dynamic company full of brilliant innovators (FAANG). Now I work in a legacy technology company full of lazy, semi-incompetent, ball-dropping, half-asleep colleagues, and I am delivering 20 percent of what I could and used to deliver. There is no tide lifting all boats. "But if you really wanted to...," says those who believe in the inevitability of the affirmation of spirit. But this is a myopic view of life; we are largely shaped by the context in which we live, in which we work, by the people we spend time with, at least as much as by our personality.
This is the advice of someone who has lived the lifestyle for a short time and is on the honeymoon phase, which is when you're ready to tell everyone they're wasting their lifes if they don't do the same.
I'm 15+ years in and would be very wary of giving advice like this. It can work, and I wouldn't trade what I've lived for anything, but it can also be extremely taxing for your mental strength. I've read in the comments a quote to the effect of "freedom is very lonely" and it can't be more true. I've lived in many places and had all kinds of relationships and it's extremely hard to make anything last, for a myriad of reasons.
I think it takes a particular personality type to do this, for me I always had the urge and left very young. I still have all my friends and family back home and visit yearly which brings me great joy, though I seem to be unable to stay there for extended periods. On the other hand, I've finally found a place I love where I'm settling down, and I consider myself very lucky to have been able to choose where I want to be. So there are also great rewards for those who are committed.
This is particularly true when it comes to your place of residence. Moving constantly means you never "lock in" a level of expenses and will always have to earn more to keep up with inflation of housing prices (be it rent or purchase price). At least in Europe it is common to have indefinite rental contracts with a clause saying they can never raise the rent more than LOW_SINGLE_DIGIT% per year or even only for 10 years and not after.
On the other hand, moving cities/countries/continents for a salary boost can compound over your career and be probably the best financial decision you'll ever make.
I think it all comes down to what you want in life. Some people are happy with making their nest early and switching to cruise control. Others want to get out and experience as much of the world as they can. It's trite, but different strokes and all that.
That's only true in specific parts of Europe. Where I am renting is like the wild west. Last year a friend's landlord put up their rent by €100, after 2 months of their 1 year contract...
But your point still stands, here you would typically buy a property when you get stable in life, locking in a monthly payment with a mortgage. Towards the end of the mortgage the payments will feel a lot more affordable due to inflation and / or a higher salary from career growth. If you keep moving to different places that's going to be complicated.
Feels a bit like a 'hill climbing algorithm'. Sometimes staying in the same place and climbing the hill works out well - but sometimes a big jump can move you to a bigger hill.
I hope to blow my life up in a few within a the year sometime. Maybe not as drastic as others, but my life has been at a pretty low state. Finally have managed to crawl myself out of a nasty burnout/depressive period, and things are finally starting to work out. In the end, I do not have much to lose that I haven't lost already. I have no momentum or anything really.
What's the saying?
"When you hit rock bottom there is no where to go but up."
I guess my whole point is that blowing up one's life isn't always blowing up a "good life" so to speak.
Probably not for everyone, but having some of this is good, I think.
Something I would add: try and also have some stable points that you don't blow up. I have enjoyed moving to different countries and places, but am really, really fortunate to have married someone who will do that with me. She's a keeper! Having a few stable points of reference makes it easier to change other things.
It gets harder with kids - you can't give up, let them down, or run around and desert them. But I think some novelty is healthy for them, too. Ours were quite successful when we moved from Europe to the US.
I have a theory that this is the Monty hall problem effect in practice [1]. When you blow up your life you are opening an unknown door... But after you have narrowed your options, so the outcomes are likely to be better than your status quo.
I think the difference is in the Monty Hall problem a 3rd party who knows one of the options to be a dud, reveals it to be so. In real life you're still just as likely to pick the dud. (One of many)
No your life experiences narrow the choices. You don't randomly emigrate. While the reasoning is wonky, there is , in reality, only a small pool of choices under consideration. Life is the 3rd party that reveals duds.
Yeah sure. But that's not Monty hall. "Life" is something you experience, not something that you know like "no car behind that door". You know after the fact.
Experience shifts your beliefs in a Bayesian information thoeretic way. It's the same thing of extra information entering the system but with more diffused probability distributions compared to hard knowledge like "the prize is not in that door". But the overall effect that the fuzzy information improves your outcomes holds
With an almost infinite number of doors though, and with all of them containing something that might or might not be the prize depending on your point of view. And your opinion of what counts as a prize changing after every opening of a door.
I don't think it really affects anything if the prize is decided after opening the door.
The analogy only really fails if your internal value system values predictability... Which for some people is true.
But for others who have a vague feeling of dissatisfaction then the chances are that the unknown door picked from a shortlist of options will yield better results than staying put with the option given to you via external factors
If I'm being honest, a lot of people in this TPOT community fail at the things that normal people just absolutely master naturally. Like, this guy, if I recall was all about sensitivity and understanding and all that shit and then got married and divorced for exactly the things that, had he succeeded at the things he talked so much about, he wouldn't have had any trouble with. Ultimately, it's better if you don't learn how to read from the illiterate.
The reality of life is that the people who talk the most about basic things are often those who have found greatest difficulty with them. Sometimes this is because they are thinking about them at a deep level. Other times, perhaps more often, it's because they are unable to penetrate the shallowest of surfaces.
You'll see this with all of these TPOT and TPOT-adjacent posters: they will claim to be renegades and say the most mundane things, claim to be empaths and find themselves unable to understand or be understood, claim to be makers and doers unlike those who only say and yet produce nothing of significance but blog posts.
This isn't to disparage them, but perhaps there is a reason blowing up their lives leads to happiness. And perhaps that is the tool they should use. I would, perhaps, even recommend that everyone in TPOT should use that tool for the betterment of their selves.
Not because it's a good tool in general but, sometimes, the local maximum you found is actually an anthill at the bottom of a well, and the rest of humanity is standing at ground level, and God and Nature have conspired to hand you only two tools: a heavy metal plate with dynamite at the bottom, and bones and flesh strong enough to withstand the upward acceleration.
This is part survivorship bias in my opinion and probably not very good life advice.
You can and should only do this if you have enough money to sustain at least one year without income. His example is very risky as no income was guaranteed, if you can continue to work in another place why not.
It is true that people get accustomed and complacent to their life situation, jobs, etc. And a change in country or job can shake them out of it. However, success and progress in a lot of things require constand effort over time and this is usually easier if you have a consistent routine. Completely changing your life requires you to find a new routine somewhere else which sets you back at least a month in my experience.
I say this from experience as I quit my job and am working on my own project in another country. It is challenging to do only work and experience less docial interaction as your social network is still in the old place.
I was tempted to delete my previous comment about how I “blew up my life” because I realized that I really wasn’t as bold as I thought I was.
I kept my above average paying job working at BigTech where I was able to work remotely. I only officially moved one state away where I stay half the year while traveling the other half, and I had assets to fall back on.
I didn’t sell my other house, I rented out to my son and two of his friends we had known forever. I had assets. I didn’t “burn the boats”.
"Blowing up your life" can mean completely different things for different people. And your experience reflects a good way to do it I think. No need to burn the boats in my opinion. We are in a quite privileged position to do this as we both have some assets to afford it. In case I run out of money I still have some support network at home and should relatively easy get a new job in theory.
In practice it will need some work and will be probably be stressful to look for a new place and work at the same time.
Some people that are pushed to move due to less opportunities in their home country and immigrate to another place have probably much more stress. They completely change their life for a better future.
I know that intellectual charity is a virtue one should practice, but I can't resist to think that the text is mainly in favor of very dangerous gambling with the added argument that "sometimes, you can win, like I did".
To be slightly more charitable, the argument is that big changes come off better than random chance would indicate, because the psychology of status-quo-bias/loss-avoidance makes people stick in bad situations too long.
On balance I believe people who are impulsive catapult themselves into worse outcomes. This article could be dangerous advice for people with poor impulse control. I'd phrase the most workable advice as something like, 'If you are loss-averse and tend to stick at things, blowing up your life to do something new could be a good choice'.
I don’t think it really counts as “blowing up your life” if you don’t go through a period (say, longer than a few months) of regret. You need to do enough damage that it hurts without a clear safety net. Otherwise what you did was “moving” or “quitting” or “breaking up”. I mostly agree with the premise though. Pass the dynamite, I think I might be due…
I’ve experienced both. We’re ultimately a lot more adaptable than we give ourselves credit for. We adapt to regret that never really went away but fades in terms of not being a point of daily focus. We adapt to the new place and call it “better” even when sometimes it isn’t.
>
The neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has suggested that “When you get up in the morning, you think about status. You think about where you are in relation to your peers.”
This is far off from my own experience. :-(
> Left to your own devices, with no task demanding your immediate concentration, you tend to spend a good deal of time thinking about other people—your judgments of them; their evaluations of you.
Honestly, in such situations I typically rather tend to think about mathematics or programming problems (or at least something somewhat similar to this).
---
Yes, I am somewhat of the lone wolf archetype - which is in my opinion not uncommon among programmers.
I blew up my life when I moved to Denmark for an MSc studies.
I moved to a new country, amidst covid, without a social support system, without speaking the language, without having financial security.
I was terrified of doing that … but it was around the time in 2020 when r/WSB was growing, and saw people “yolo ing” more money than I ever had. So I said yolo.
I barely made it through; got super depressed due to isolation, lived on the brink of poverty, but some how (thanks GME) I survived. Though I did take a break for a semester.
When I “returned home”, 2 years later, i found myself a stranger, a foreigner. All my friends had moved on, almost everything had changed, and so had I.
Would I do it again? Absolutely. A bit differently; sure. But I’d do it again without hesitation.
And then I did.. I moved to $currentlocation, barely any money, didn’t speak the language. All because I got a job at FAANG because I found an email from some recruiter in my junk folder and responded back. I finished my MSc, leading a project and aiming for promotion.
In about a year or so, I will do it again; almost as if it is becoming a habit.
It is very lonely, I am not going to lie about this, but it is also an adventure.
Get a metro card or a bike asap. Note that the bikers in Copenhagen are quite fast so you better brush up your skills.
When you register your residency, your municipality is obliged to provide Danish lessons to you in some way. Take advantage of this. It’s a good way to meet new people.
Be prepared for the weather. Besides darkness, Denmark also exports rain, so have something to wear at all times.
Make sure that your curtains or blinds are actually good. In the summer months, the sun is shining for almost 18 hours, and even after sunset and before sunrise there’s quite a bit of light. The quality of your sleep will deteriorate if you are bombarded with sun and don’t get enough of it.
If you are a student, know that life can be expensive, getting a student job will help and you will make some acquaintances.
Don’t expect to mesh with the Danes quickly, the Danish society is very tight knit, but if you find yourself getting invited to hang out with a few people at an apt, it’s a good thing! It means you are becoming part of the group!
Danes can be brutally honest, so be prepared for that. It’s not because they intend to be mean, it’s because such is their society. They don’t intend malice, but they provide constructive criticism and you will find them to be quite friendly!
Get acquainted with the language asap; use anki cards and watch shows on Netflix to learn the sounds. As you get better, switch to audio description and you will improve your skills quite quickly.
I followed the link to the volcano study, and it said the opposite of what the author said that it said. The adults who were displaced had worse outcomes than the other adults who were not, but the children of those adults did better, and their offspring, and so on.
If you want your life to be a long road of craters, sure, blow up your life constantly.
You'll see the craters of your own life blown up. And around those, the craters of your partners' life, and the craters of your kids' lives too (anxiety, commitment, daddy issues).
It seems the only factor the author is encouraging the reader to take into account when deciding to blow up their life is themselves. There is zero altruism or kindness in this advice.
It feels like a very beginning of the 2000 position. The generation that was first allowed to divorce and blow up everything. And it's very good that we got this liberty, much better for everyone involved than the previous status quo. But it's still a failed experiment with a lot of collateral damage and hurt people.
The job of our generation is to find how to build our life in a more stable way, this time with kindness to avoid falling back to the conservative and violent approaches of the past.
So the selfish advice feels really outdated and out of place.
My responsibility is only to myself and my wife. I help out my now grown (step)sons who I love as my own kids because I can. But they weren’t my “responsibility” once they got grown.
My parents are still healthy and self sufficient at 80 and 82. If they weren’t, I would definitely take care of them as the only child.
Blowing up your life with your own hands may leave you unprepared or resorceless to react to your life being blown up by external factors. If that doesn't ever happen, congratulations, you're in a lucky minority.
This is a wrong advice that will always sound like a profound wisdom if it works for you, or emerge as a protective rationalisation if it doesn't quite.
Don't do it without a parachute of course, but as long as you have a monetary cushion, what do you have to lose? Move to a country with good healthcare, don't own a car, what hardship could possibly happen otherwise? Outside of extreme tail risk situations that could happen to anyone at anytime, I don't buy it.
> Disruptions can work even if you didn’t initiate them yourself. How about a coin toss? Participants in a survey conducted by Steven Levitt who made major life changes they’d been mulling over—proposing marriage, moving—based on the result of a coin toss were much happier, six months out, than those who didn’t.
I'm so skeptical on such a study.. Obtaining solid results on this kind of survey is so hard or even impossible...
I'm happy for this guy but I have no idea if what he says will work for someone else.
The only good thing I see in this article is that... it's possible to blow things up for the best, and that's great.
I sense survivorship bias the size of the fucking mountain here.
I do agree, as I have experienced it too, that it is easy to get stuck in "content with life enough", but trying to change it by basically throwing the dice with chance of fucking it up immensely should be last resort reserved for when you have no idea what you even want to do in life.
It's perfectly possible to just look deep at what you want from life and come up with some plan to get there. There will be plenty hardships and learning opportunities in any such plan that's even slightly ambitious.
I spent years examining (also together with my psychologist) the question:
“People always tell you to follow your dream”. But often following one’s dream comes at a cost, or at least comes with some risk. Yet, the advice to “follow your dream” is a blanket advice, it supposedly trumps everything else.
I ended up deciding to not follow my dream, at that point in life, and I am happy I didn’t.
I won’t be telling my kids to “follow your dream”. Think about it real good before blowing up your life.
Wise words :) However ... 'I won’t be telling my kids to “follow your dream”'. .. well, they'll probably do what they wanna do anyway, won't they? ;) My advice to our kids would be, follow your dreams, but be pragmatic, don't put all your eggs in one basket. If you want, to use random examples, to be a musician or something without reliable income, or spend a lot of time travelling for fun, then you're gonna have to learn how to live on little, e:g learn cheap healthy cooking skills, in extreme situation you might have to live in an old van or tent some of the time. And/or maybe develop some specialist work skill that isn't your ideal profession but brings in money quick when you need it. Alternatively, base your life around a career that pays enough to get by, while allowing free time to follow your dreams maybe by working part-time or something. I know someone who works as a teaching assistant in schools whilst doing lead roles in good quality amateur shows. She seems very happy, presumably happier than if she was professional actress. I guess my argument is , its not either/or, its a trade-off.... BTW we are SO lucky in tech. We can have it all, decent paid job that isn't crazy hours. Take time out to go travelling, come back and as long as you got the skillset you'll get hired again. Some other professions have even more freedom... anything medical, always in need. Nurses can call the shots completely.. (in terms of choosing hours, shifts, career breaks to go be in a show, protect a rainforest by occupying it or something)
Perhaps in the US. It's the privilege of living in an extremely wealthy country - the risk of following your dream is not that high, since, if you fail, you'll probably still be able to eke a relatively comfortable living. It doesn't work that way in most other countries. In most places, having a stable job that allows you to afford an apartment or (gasp) a house!, IS the dream, whereas in the US it's almost seen as failure due to lack of ambition.
However, seeing that living expenses in the US (mainly housing) are going way up, perhaps the era of following your dreams will end there (US) as well?
Although the US is a wealthy country, I believe for most people "following your dream" there could be much harder than in Europe. Especially in terms of an unexpected healthcare problem at the wrong time.
Of course some people are wealthy enough for this not to be a problem, and it is easier to get investors there. Still, I would not characterize it as risk-free in the US.
In a couple of small, wealthiest countries in Europe (Scandinavian countries, Switzerland), sure. But everywhere else, if you go for the dream and fail, you'll be barely making a living. Whereas in the US, you can fail and likely still land a $40k-50k job doing whatever. In Europe, managers in serious firms often don't make $50k.
Also, serious health problems before 40 are really rare.
I think you're both right in the sense that, USA is more forgiving of career "mistakes" and people get many chances to "make it big" financially , while Europe is a little more conservative about career history but has better safety net which also gives people chances to re-invent themselves. (Speaking as someone who's lived in both UK and US). :)
Change can bring happiness. I don’t know about blowing things up, but finding something that’s under your own control and doing something with it can help get out of ruts or create adventure.
Work/relationship/city sucks? Change it. Can’t or won’t? Find something else you can and will change. You might be looking for fulfillment in the wrong places. Make the choice to try some new things. It will keep you young.
Flip side: re-evaluate what you have. We are wired for novelty. Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say. That doesn’t mean where we are and what we have is bad. It could be that you’d have been blown away at half your age to meet who you are today.
Anyway these are platitudes but they’re so well-trod because everyone faces this in some form or another. People blow up their lives and have all kinds of adventures, sure. But you don’t have to blow up your life to create adventures. Just, the next chance you get to do something you’ve never done before, go for it.
I have this game that I call "Coin of destiny", not sure where I heard this from or if it is widespread, but the idea is to flip a coin for dilemma when you can't decide. It also works in group.
The hard part of the game is to take it seriously, in the sense that as soon as you decide to play, then the final decision is irrevocable and you must follow the destiny.
I agree with this post, but I don’t think he makes the most convincing argument.
Risk taking is hugely important to growth and profit. All investments come with some level of risk and riskier investments, on average, provide a higher return.
Continuing to do what you have been doing is the safe choice. Making incremental tweaks will result in incremental gains. When you make a big change, you take a big risk and you should be chasing the possibility of a big reward.
If you “blow up your life” without a reason and without a goal, I doubt it’ll go that well. But if you leap at a big bold goal, you may find yourself achieving it!
> All investments come with some level of risk and riskier investments, on average, provide a higher return.
Average outcome is computed by summing multiple potential outcomes, and diving by number of trials. It's completely meaningless in the context of big life decisions, because you don't get many trials - you get one or, at best, several.
By illustration - let's say someone offers you to either take a guaranteed $1000, or a wager where you flip a coin and, if you win, you get $502k, but if you lose, you owe $500k. That wager has a expected value (i.e. average outcome) of $2k, which is greater than the guaranteed $1k you'd otherwise be getting. And yet, it's obviously a terrible choice, due to 50% chance of giving you debt that will cripple you for life.
> I quit my job and moved to Thailand without doing any research about the country, figuring that I could be a bartender again somewhere if it all went south.
Ironically, this seems like the most off-the-shelf thing to do if you're a little unstable, want a big change, and are probably NA or EU born; specifically Thailand, not that it's necessarily a bad thing depending on what your mission is.
There is some virtue in blowing up your life, I'd say at least once, because sometimes it's just necessary to get you out of your hometown or out of a stagnant relationship, a bad career or whatever. People need adventure more than they think. But you never escape suffering somehow, and you never escape needing to grow as a person.
I blew up my life initially for a job in a better city, which I ended up getting fired from and then ruining the relationship I had back home. However, now that I love my city and community, would I move for a job again? Fuck no, not unless my situation was dire, or I fully get priced out of my neighborhood (lol, rip Canada). If it was dire, it would probably be a worthwhile shot. But I'll also never move back to my hometown unless the same dire circumstances are present.
It would be foolish to continue arbitrarily blowing up your life though just for the sake of it. Sometimes you do need big change, but you need to be able to evaluate why you need that change and maybe what you hope will be different next time, at least some core things.
This kind of sounds like me. My life has been blown up voluntarily and otherwise. These include multiple immigrations, career changes and most recently quitting my well paying job with nothing lined up.
Not all of them worked out. But I don’t think I regret any of them. Though I think this was much easier because I was not married. Nowadays I do have to think about people nearby when I try to blow up my life.
Also, I’ve found myself starting to yearn for some stability after all these years of change. It would be nice to put my roots down and join or cultivate nice communities.
I knew since I was 8-9 years old that I had to run away from things that reminded me of my home. So moving out first from my hometown and then from my country was something that I has planned for a long time, and nothing that I regret even if it meant leaving all the personal growth I had.
My wife on the other hand decided to stay with me for the trip, and she still has emotional ups and downs with regarding of leaving her career behind, even if she’s working on getting her career back, she’s starting from zero.
I blew up my life by quitting my job in January 2020 to find some new opportunities in the following months. Then the pandemic hit, my weekly training ended, extreme back and head pain came back, I wasn't able to fix myself up for a long time. Split with my gf, changed places to something that gave me extreme anxiety and a lot of gray hairs. Held off depression for a long time.
Now I slowly get back into healthier lifestyle and try to piece myself back together to something what once was.
It's very easy to write something like that especially after everything worked out well. Keep in mind there are many types of people and some of them will always land on top (I'd say those with the best networking skills, which I have zero).
I just want to stress something that is often missed. If you are feeling good in current status quo just think what kind of person you are, what skills you have, what is easy and what is hard. Don't change your life drastically until you get to know yourself well. You can't "power through" everything that happens and there's a level of suffering that makes it all not worth it in the end.
Before taking advice from these comments, please think about Nonsurvivor Bias. Do you think someone who blew up their life and had it go incredibly well is spending their morning on Hacker News? Is that how your ideal summer day would be, when Golden Gate Park is right there?
Post TL;DR: Blowing up your life can be a good idea for those who are relatively sane and feel stuck in a job, city, or relationship. People tend to resist change due to status quo bias, but breaking free from familiar pain can lead to personal growth and alignment with desires. Making major life changes, whether by choice or through external disruptions, can result in improved outcomes and happiness. While it may feel uncomfortable initially, the disequilibrium can motivate positive change, typically stabilizing within six months. There are no guarantees, but taking risks and embracing change can lead to a better life.
So much of the article and the comments are focused on "blowing up your life" as a result of negative situations. Here's a sample of some of the negative verbiage seen here: "Baggage", "socially underdeveloped", "chore", "needs improving", "psychological trauma".
Sure, sometimes people are actually in a rut and want to do something drastic to reset their life. But what about people who made a change just because? Is it incomprehensible that some people have the spirit of adventure in them and take life altering courses of actions just for the sake of it?
"Blowing up" pathological patterns and habits makes sense for some interpretation of "blowing up". If you're in with a bad crowd that creates constant near occasions of sin that you easily succumb to, cutting ties and cleaning house is very good.
But the article has another thread running through it, that of a life of no commitment and of self-indulgence. This is especially obvious when read while imagining someone with children, but it likewise applies to spouses, families, communities, etc. Human beings are intrinsically social animals. Human beings need societies in order to flourish. All societies are defined by a common good, and that common good is prior to the private good. In fact, the private good exits for the sake of the common good. Self-indulgence might appeal to the hedonistic, selfish person celebrated by our culture, but it doesn't produce happy people in the true sense of the word. It leaves us alienated. This is a reason why we're seeing skyrocketing rates of mental illness and all sorts of identity politics. Nature, when frustrated, reacts in pathological ways. The return of the repressed.
Unfortunately, liberalism (the Lockean philosophical tradition, not liberal institutions) is a defining feature of the modern West, and the US in particular. The habits of mind that liberalism insinuates affect all of us and misshape our intuitions. But liberalism is in a period of increasing crisis. It is not going to last that much longer as it is unsustainable. Liberalism purports to offer a middle ground between radical individualism and collectivism, but all it really gives us is a "diabolical synthesis of the two, a bureaucratically managed libertinism" (Feser 2008).
A life of ostensible "self-fulfillment" is a road to misery and emptiness.
Good advice if you're already confident a number of things you find troublesome about your life cannot be resolved, such as if you've already gone through therapy or tried more focused interventions that have not worked. Sometimes you have to leap to the new platform, and its hard to see just how bad your context was until you've left it.
Question is what is the threshold for change, and are there 'blow up some things' changes that can be made prior to 'blow up everything'. Would love to see this in the form of a (How Much) Should I Blow My Life Up self assessment.
"pretending to care about the news cycle"... yes, of course multi-billion dollar multimedia organizations will hold the presses for you while you concoct some puff-piece story to be ready for 4am to corner the insomniac news market.
As my former-Marine uncle put it "losers always have a thousand excuses". Not saying this author is a loser, but the whole piece comes off as a whinging self-excuse with the whole tone being "I could easily have been great if I was bothered".
I blew up my life in 2016. Under constant stress I pushed everyone else away in order to think. This didn’t help the stress. To a certain extent I fucked up my life.
I think that for this audience, the assumption of status quo bias is questionable. I am relatively sane, I think, and I could use more "stay the course, play the long game" advice than "blow up your life" advice. To paraphrase a review for a book I've forgotten the name of, "quitting is boring" (because it's too easy).
In lieu of all the nearly hundred comments arguing life should be carried forth this way or that way or another, here's my two cents instead:
You Only Live Once.
To the extent you don't bother or harm your fellow peers, go as calm or as wild as your heart desires. So long as you have agency in where your life takes you, you at least won't regret anything.
I like the principle of this and have kind of done it myself previously, however I'm currently finding it's a _lot_ harder to consider blowing up your life when you have kids that are old enough to care. I think the resentment having your life blown up for you makes this considerably less appealing...
I want to do this so bad with a couple things in my life. But I know I won't because those things matter so much to me and I can't stomach putting those decisions up to chance, even if doing so would make me feel better 6 months out. Maybe I should try being a little more selfish!
"Blowing up your life" is what you do in a desperate search for meaning-making when you haven't taken the much more durable and constructive path to meaning-making of having children
Before you take this guy's advice think about whether you want to be a single childless man going to tend bar in Thailand in a desperate attempt to make his life interesting to him
Blowing up your life is exactly that, a big frikin mistake.
I've made several decisions that later revealed themselves as life blowing. It's not worth it.
In youth it's easy to imagine that you have infinite tries to get it right. This is totally wrong. Decisions that set your life back years can only be overcome so many times, and never completely.
So, instead of blowing it up, add it up slowly year by year, increasing your traction and equity....
I've made big moves, with no plan, and more often than not it's been a good experience. Even the moves I regretted ended up teaching me more about myself.
I'm sorry it hasn't worked out for you, but there's no guarantee it would have worked out if you had stayed put either.
This article is harmful; it is just a guy trying to justify his decisions to himself. Nobody should take his "advice" to their lives. Everybody's situation is unique and so before making any major decisions do a proper risk/cost/benefit analysis and only then follow through with the decision. In Life you have to live with the consequences whatever they maybe and there are very few opportunities to "rollback and do over" any fateful decision.
Reading this story, you're subjected to the winner's bias. There's another guy out there somewhere who also threw away his career, wife and home, but never replaced it all, never found whatever he assumed was out there, and never wrote a blog patting himself on the back and spewing life advice.
The point is that life compounds, and it can be nearly impossible to salvage a bad situation.
For example, it's a lot harder to save a bad marriage than it is to try again, and avoid your previous mistakes. Does this mean that you should never try? No, but you shouldn't stay in a bad situation over fear of blowing it up either.
If you try something, that's a chance at making something new work. If you stay in the same situation, it's harder to apply your learnings.
Because a 6 month absence can be a deal breaker in a lot of circumstances where a job is on the line. Employers are going to choose the people with constant employment over the people who quit "just because."
Idk, I've taken more than one 6 month break in my career and I'm fine. If you've got the skills nobody cares. And besides, it's easy to fudge it in tech. Say you were working on a side project or a startup idea, or did some volunteer work for local non profits.
> There’s no guarantee that blowing up your life turns out well.
ahem... agreed. In fact, I have seen this many times, and most have not turned out well.
But some have turned out quite well.
A lot of times, we have no idea what's good for us, and when we get what we want, we find that the fox wasn't worth the chase.
In my case, I was forced into my current situation, and it has turned out well.
I was laid off my previous career, as a manager/engineer at a very well-known camera manufacturer, and discovered, to my anger and dismay, that the current tech industry actively hates people over 50.
Not a fun time.
But it forced me to take stock, and I realized that I actually have plenty to retire on, and there really wasn't a need for me to be desperately seeking work.
I then lowered my requirements, since I didn't need the money. I would have been happy to work at risky startups, for equity. I have a pretty vast array of experience and skills that would have been almost ideal for a startup.
Still wasn't enough. I'm still old. Damn.
Well, I guess I'm retired, then, whether I like it or not.
Turns out, I like it. I can afford the tools I need, and I still work (more than I ever did). I just don't make money at it, and the folks I'm working with, though young, appreciate me and my work. They know the value they are getting, and the gray hair doesn't fill them with fear. Surprisingly, I'm actually pretty good at working in a team. May have something to do with having worked on high-functioning teams for my entire career.
TL;DR: I was afraid to take the plunge, and needed to be pushed.
In my case, it's worked, but I was very fortunate. A lot of others, in the same case, would have been absolutely clobbered.
I have a friend that is a chef. He got pushed out for being old (actually won an age-discrimination suit). He used his winnings to set up a catering business, and now makes way more than he ever did, as a wage slave.
He's really, really good at what he does. That's the thing that a lot of ageists don't seem to understand. That gray often caps a great deal of competence and ability. It isn't just about "culture." Getting Stuff Done requires Discipline, Competence, Tenacity, Skill, Intelligence, and Ability. Many older folks have these, in spades.
> "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."
Just for fun, I replaced "blowing up your life" with "rewriting your app in Rust":
Rewriting your application: whether you do it or a volcano [destroys the existing code base], it’s effective. How about a coin toss? Participants in a survey who made major codebase rewrites (to Rust) based on the result of a coin toss were much happier, six months out, than those who didn’t.
That six-month figure is important. Rewriting your application doesn’t necessarily feel great right afterward. You always wonder at least once if you’ve made a terrible mistake. You look around at your new scenery, and you say to yourself, wait, this isn’t life, I remember what life was before [ownership], it was that thing I left behind. But this feeling of disequilibrium can motivate you to find a better equilibrium, and six months is probably about how long it takes for a motivated person to stabilize their trajectory and begin to understand Rust's ownership rules.
I see where you're coming from, but that doesn't match my experience. Plenty of non white people immigrate to different countries to try their luck at a better life.
Maybe the difference is what standard you compare yourself to?
- Black dude from the US: I can't move to Thailand, what would happen if I fail
- Black dude from Rwanda: I might as well move to Thailand, maybe I'll have better luck over there
Moving cities, or relationships, or jobs isn't worth as much if you aren't simultaneously working on yourself