Moving cities, or relationships, or jobs isn't worth as much if you aren't simultaneously working on yourself
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
What does this even mean? Of course you are the center of your own life. That's the human experience.
A lot of people in this thread think selling all their furniture is a life explosion.
> 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
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.
To tie it to HN, the vast majority of new companies fail. Wisdom would say don't waste time on a new company, yet many of us do just that.
I 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.
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.
Very different from people who are straining or destroying their relationships to go have some croissants in Paris or whatever.
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.)
The worst is seeing someone making a mistake, warning them, and then they do it anyway.
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.)
Some actually very close bonded and always together like in the original tribal meaning, some very loose and casual. Just like minded people, who like to be on the move, but not alone.
Especially the feeling extraordinarily lucky to have it part.
Chaos gives me anxiety. I know the general state of things IS chaos, change is the only constant, ecc. ecc., but I guess the schopenhauerian minimization of suffering is the only mantra I can entertain.
It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective that my ancestors who voluntarily got on a boat for weeks and came to the USA sight unseen had a similar wild hare. Maybe things were really bad in Denmark at the time or maybe they just really had wanderlust. No idea.
I think things we call “disorders” like manic depressive episodes partially serve this function and there’s potentially huge rewards for venturing off into the great unknown. Manic episodes are the rocket fuel to take big risks and potentially get big rewards. Obviously enough people hit the big rewards (by having more land, having lots of kids, getting rich) that it has an impact on our genetics and our personalities. But at the same time, the dead men at the bottom of the Mediterranean who were looking for adventure don’t tell us their tales of failure.
And I guess that leads me to what I really turn my nose up at OP’s line of reasoning. Sure, he can move to Thailand and become whatever kind of journo-grifter. I have a wife and kids! I can’t/don’t want to blow it up just to say “I took a risk” and leave them destitute. Which maybe that’s all to say there’s a big difference between gambling with someone else’s money and gambling with your own.
That specific quote is from letter 28 "On travel as a cure for discontent"
Seneca is always a good intro, easy to read and pretty low level, as in scenarios that you would face in your everyday life instead of more metaphysical topics.
It 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.