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.
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...
What does this even mean? Of course you are the center of your own life. That's the human experience.
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.
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.