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
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.
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.
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....
>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.
"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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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…
>
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.
[+] [-] Wonnk13|2 years ago|reply
Moving cities, or relationships, or jobs isn't worth as much if you aren't simultaneously working on yourself
[+] [-] lm28469|2 years ago|reply
> 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
[+] [-] jrumbut|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] NovaDudely|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] johnea|2 years ago|reply
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....
[+] [-] willio58|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mattficke|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] resolutebat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarface_74|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shagymoe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antisthenes|2 years ago|reply
Got it.
Just in case someone finds this "profound".
[+] [-] softsound|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beaugunderson|2 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] Dowwie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2b3a51|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] cutenewt|2 years ago|reply
What rental pool service did you use?
[+] [-] MuffinFlavored|2 years ago|reply
What does this cost roughly?
[+] [-] varjag|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redmand|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Glawen|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Woeps|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unethical_ban|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] refurb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hutzlibu|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] elliotwagner|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaaarrgh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] projectazorian|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IAmGraydon|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] switch007|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sledgehammers|2 years ago|reply
Thoughts?
[+] [-] arisAlexis|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monero-xmr|2 years ago|reply
The Onion’s take: https://www.theonion.com/unambitious-loser-with-happy-fulfil...
[+] [-] applecore|2 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] jongjong|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] namtab00|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dave3of5|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Gigachad|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mmkos|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] totallywrong|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Scubabear68|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tlarkworthy|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://link.medium.com/N6HaHXgyAAb
[+] [-] renewiltord|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] laeri|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarface_74|2 years ago|reply
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966
[+] [-] zvmaz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rm445|2 years ago|reply
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'.
[+] [-] shove|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aleph_minus_one|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] PartiallyTyped|2 years ago|reply
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.