zlacker

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.

>>throwa+(OP)
Ditto for most of Insta. All those travel pics and nonstop selfies

>>throwa+(OP)
What is your diagnosis

>>throwa+(OP)
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.

Thoughts?

>>throwa+(OP)
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.

>>sledge+vv
If you’re posting here, good chance you’re in a generational cohort that is entering prime midlife crisis years.

>>projec+4x
Good point. What's a little quater/midlife crisis in addition to all the other major crises going on the world simultaneously? Haha. :)

>>projec+Ow
He was unable to make and keep connections that he found valuable enough to preserve. He wrote a post about blowing up your life and barely concentrated on the biggest reason not to, to preserve your social connections and proximity to the people you love to spend time with.

I would be very surprised if this person did not have an "avoidant" attachment type.

I think you underestimate how severe the trauma of feeling disconnected from other humans can be.

I think the authors blog post conveys that he hasn't come to terms with the idea that "Wherever you go, there you are."

>>hayst4+1D
You can preserve connections after leaving a place or changing a relationship. Most people are capable of this. It sounds like the author was as well, since he mentions having an amicable conversation with his ex-wife after his divorce.

Social alienation is very bad, but is not severe trauma. Severe trauma would be something like being held in solitary confinement for months.

>>projec+kE
> Social alienation is very bad, but is not severe trauma.

Voluntary social alienation can definitely be caused by trauma, I think that's what the person your reply to implied

>>lm2846+ZE
The problem with trauma as an explanatory model is is that if you dig deep enough, pretty much anyone has had life experiences that may be characterized as traumatic. And even if you find someone who hasn't, they've clearly lead such a sheltered life that it's a sort of trauma on its own.

Because of this, childhood trauma is a sort of universal explanation that will explain things even outside of psychology, everything from wheat allergy to male pattern baldness. You bet there's trauma in there somewhere causing it.

>>margin+OF
Surely divorcing your wife, randomly moving to Thailand and telling people they should do the same to get happier isn't a normal behavior. Call it what you want

>>lm2846+XG
Who gets to define normal though? We have one life in this crazy universe.

>>lm2846+XG
Normal, perhaps not. But at the same time, if you've been living your life according to what's considered normal and expected of you with no regard for your own wants and needs, then it may be healthy indeed.

>>margin+OM
Yes there is a lot of wiggle room, but the majority of it is working on yourself, not fleeing

>>lm2846+rN
If you're living in a place in which you are not happy, with people you don't like, then leaving may be absolutely what you should do. You don't have to put up with relationships that aren't working.

>>throwa+(OP)
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.

>>lm2846+XG
I didn’t get the impression he divorced his wife and randomly moved to Thailand at the same time. That would perhaps be a little more extreme.

Also didn’t think he was encouraging others to move to Thailand with no research, it seems like he acknowledged it was a rash decision.

>>margin+OM
Also, if you spend just a few days in Thailand talking to foreigners, you quickly realize that there are tens of thousands of people who moved to Thailand on a whim.

Many of them flame out in tragic (or tragicomic) fashion, some succeed and settle down, others move on to the next thing with some more life experience under their belt, like the author did.

His path is a typical one among young Westerners who move to Thailand. “Normal” is all relative.

>>margin+fO
> If you're living in a place in which you are not happy, with people you don't like,

The epiphany happens when you realize it's probably not the place or the people who are making you unhappy, but yourself and your beliefs.

That's what "wherever you go, there you are" means. It means you can't escape your self and you have to confront who you are no matter where you physically are.

This person is avoidant. That means when his wife did things rather than having an "us vs the problem" mindset, he is looking for the door. That means the woman over time will come to understand that she's not good enough, or there's an expiration on their time together. This raises the stakes for even small disagreements and creates a self fulfilling prophecy that ends the relationship.

So he hurt her by not being attached, and she acted in ways that made him unhappy as a result.

It was him ultimately that created his own unhappiness.

>>hayst4+gK2
You're very quick to reach for the diagnosis based on relatively little information.

>>margin+EG4
Quotes from his blog:

> Before psychedelics, I was intensely commitment-phobic, and assumed that either I wouldn’t settle down with anyone, or that I’d be in an open relationship for the rest of my life. I thought this was a philosophical position, based on principled arguments about the drawbacks of monogamy, rather than an emotional defense.

> This didn’t, like, permanently cure my loneliness and alienation, but it did make me appreciate how difficult it is to be a person, for me and for everyone. I felt less alone, certainly.

>>hayst4+1D
This is off topic but your original comment is from May and super old. I just wanted to say thanks for mentioning Running on Empty back then. It made me get a copy and it explained a lot for me, and I'm really grateful to have found it.