In praise of blowing up your life
sashachapin.substack.com
sashachapin.substack.com
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
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 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
What does this even mean? Of course you are the center of your own life. That's the human experience.
After your first or second big move you might need to change careers or something instead.
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.
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.
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 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....
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966
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.
A lot of people in this thread think selling all their furniture is a life explosion.
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.
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.
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.
Very different from people who are straining or destroying their relationships to go have some croissants in Paris or whatever.
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.
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.
Got it.
Just in case someone finds this "profound".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36307059
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 didn’t take being “rich”.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.zippia.com/advice/business-travel-statistics/
and selling miles to credit card companies.
https://airlinegeeks.com/2021/12/17/here-s-why-airline-loyal...
If main cabin dropped by half, they would still fly the routes.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I liked the model but the numbers didn’t work out to make it an investment. Sounds like the one you found does, so congrats!
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.
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.
Hotel nightly rates are generally much higher than the daily equivalent of monthly rent. You’d need more info to know which is a better deal.
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.
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?
What rental pool service did you use?
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.
What does this cost roughly?
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”.
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.
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.
"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.
Personally I can find wisdom in 2 year olds babbling, as well as 90 years old. It depends on the person and time.
I discovered, that you can learn something from any person (even if it is, how not to do things). And age is not the determining factor.
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.
Such as?
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."
Social alienation is very bad, but is not severe trauma. Severe trauma would be something like being held in solitary confinement for months.
Voluntary social alienation can definitely be caused by trauma, I think that's what the person your reply to implied
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.
Thoughts?
The Onion’s take: https://www.theonion.com/unambitious-loser-with-happy-fulfil...
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.
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.
Or a middle-aged white man. https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/
In absolute numbers the suicide rate among men is an epidemic, but it's not fair to equate the two populations...
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.
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.
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.
There are traveller communities. You hook up, spend time together, split up and meet some of them around the globe later, if you want to.
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.
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.
Now if we all must collude to make women in tech succeed, then surely we can include me at an improv group.
I didn't expect this :( Why are you this way? Reading your comment until that point, I thought you'd figured life out.
But the good news is when a man embraces difficulty, isn’t it?
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.
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.
It's making a lot of assumptions:
- You have a good relationship with your family
- You have good friends who also didn't move away
- You are genuinely happy with the work you get to do in a town with more limited career choices
- Your location (area and population density) plus salary can support your hobbies
But yes, that is a lot of stars that need to align
https://www.theonion.com/women-explain-why-they-became-tradw...
- 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.
Edit: formatting
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.
Are the terms "elite" and "elites" a term with hidden meaning in the US? Is it a republican dogwhistle for democrats?
> 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.
Who would ever listen to you though?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How did you handle this?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It absolutely can be positive. But it is not at all guaranteed.
Sometime it all works out. And, sometimes, you throw away what seems to be “bad” in the moment, and find yourself much worse off with your new choice.
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.
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.
So maybe this analogy doesn't really work...
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
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.
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”.
But I’m going to let it stand.
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'.
that's because the title is some contrarian clickbait substack blogspam
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 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.
Any tips / suggestions?
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.
Hope I helped!
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).
Hell to it! yolo! (/sarcasm)
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 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.
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.
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.
Don't blow up your life. Its rubbish.
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.
“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.
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?
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.
Also, serious health problems before 40 are really rare.
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.
It's nice to see a link to some experiment/research about this process that seems positive - https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w22487/w224...
Ahah, that sounds crazy/extreme, thanks for mentioning
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But if life is working well this is pretty bad advice.
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?
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.
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.
I just skimmed the article but I got the feeling the author always is in favor of quitting.
It's fine that you do not want to do it. But there's a tradeoff here, it's harder to upgrade yourself.
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".
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.
YOLO.
I stay in it during the summer 4 days a week. I’ve learned how to be relaxed again and have worked through a few layers of anxiety.
Stayed to watch the pile-on in the comments.
ding Popcorn's ready.
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.
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.
change is micro blow-up...
Obviously if you have dependents it's harder to move physically, but not impossible, and quitting a job is totally doable.
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."
- Hunter S. Thompson
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.
not everyone can just move to thailand, become bartender and write a book about. that's a very specific trajectory.
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