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.
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.
I've been contemplating doing this for a while now. I'm definitely ready to move on from my current city.
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.
I usually start in a new place with the expat groups in FB, Meetup, etc. Any desirable location you might be considering is nearly guaranteed to have them. Go to a few events and meet people, there's usually locals too. Another great option is group clases like crossfit, salsa dancing, etc.
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
>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.
It is fascinating to see old friends fall into this trap. Things seem great for the first few months but eventually the same old issues arise with time.
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.
There's an equivalent in personal finance where people think that a payrise will solve their money woes. Their habits remain, their discretionary spending scales up, and they usually continue on with the same problems.
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 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.
Blowing up your life in the sense of the article would have involved leaving your wife. I imagine that or similar extreme changes is what the parent meant.
A lot of people in this thread think selling all their furniture is a life explosion.
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.
In creativity, unless you are a savant it takes grinding to increase your ability to match your taste.
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 isn't so much that it is hard, it is a case of how much you are put off by the potential hard work. How much drive you have regardless of the challenge.
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.
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.
While moving from Pittsburgh to Paris to Hong Kong to Singapore to Berlin to Cape Town is more likely a waste of energy again and risks burning you (not mentioning the planet) out. It's a lot easier to turn the adventure-o-meter up than to turn it down.
Agreed. This brand of self-aggrandizing “I did it my way” advice adverts always exemplify a special brand of narcissism; the speaker is unaware that they aren’t the center of their own life. The truth is that “blowing up your life” isn’t usually good or laudable: if you regularly find yourself in situations where you think it’s best to hard reset you’re probably very confused about what you want and need and, ironically, would probably benefit more from figuring out how to renegotiate an undesirable situation than eternally storming between grand schemes.
Some would argue the human experience is inherently social, with other humans and the lack of stable community (putting down roots amongst friends, family and a hyperlocal community) isn't realizing said experience to the fullest. To each their own though.
I disagree, and I want to try to say this in the least cringey and New Age-y way possible, bear with me. Your limited sensory experience indicates you are the “center of your life” - that you are some spirit in your head, inhabiting a body that bumps into other bodies, etc. When you grow up you gain an awareness of other people having this experience alongside you. Sometimes it’s possible to reorient your understanding of this experience away from “I” and towards “we” and to broaden the scope of what “your” life is about. This would mean things like considering your family or community the “center of your life” which I think is considerably better happiness wise than the naive egoism that we take as the (Very American) default setting for life.
But also to the contrary this is the exact line of thinking that causes the large majority of people to sleep walk through life, as the author says. It is a hard truth of life that the large majority of people (80+% I would say) do not take any real risks in their entire long life.
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.
So what? Why take risks? Merely to say “look I took a risk and it paid off”? I get that risk-taking can result in wealth, fame, etc. but (and I think this is where opinions like OP’s break down for a lot of people) a lot of people struggle to get through the “sleepwalking” life - going to college, finding an apartment, getting your first car, etc. can be huge risks if you lack some generational wealth to back you up in case things go sideways. I mean, hell, most Americans have like $500 in their bank account. Going to the grocery store is a life-or-death (or eternal medically induced poverty) is right around the corner.
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.
"Taking a risk" by definition means things may improve for you, but they can also get worse. Most people aren't in that great of a position in the first place, they don't want to fall even lower. Esp. since the lows are really low and the highs aren't really as high, and have a diminishing returns quality to them. As Jordan Peterson put it "you can only be so happy, but you can be 100% dead".
Going big and blowing it up - what is there not to like? Going big requires investments and while there is a sunk cost fallacy there is also compound interest. Most larger endeavors have investments from more than one participant - and it often needs just one person to blow it all up. Last but not least: All big investment require taking on risk and you ability to stomach those may decline over time - there is survivor bias in the tale of heroes.
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.
It’s interesting that a lot of people don’t like big changes, because I’m generally the exact opposite. If I haven’t had a big change in a few years, I start feeling really anxious—like I’m letting life pass me by. Most people crave constancy and routine; I seem to crave novelty and adventure.
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 spent years having solo adventures only to realize I'd been missing out on shared adventures with a long term partner. With the right person, your adventures can be much bigger, at least for me. Your mileage may vary.
I think maybe it has to do with self confidence, or childhood trauma? I had a very unstable childhood and things quite often didn’t “just work out”. Adults in my life literally got stabbed and died when “interesting” new things happened. “Hi nice to meet you”, “oh he’s dead now”. “Time to go live in the women’s shelter! Hey now we live in a trailer in the middle of nowhere!” Change was scary and often not for the better. Major change was what you happened when you crawled out the window to escape dad beating mom every night.
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.
It’s just life. But I mean I definitely understand the other side of the coin. To me when things get really really bad it’s time for a really really big change.
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.
I definitely found myself in what you're describing.
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.
I been on great adventures throughout my life, and the result is that I learned I'm happy right where I'm at. The place where I grew up, left a few times, returned to every time (gladly, every time), and still call home. Could just be that different people are different.
"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.)
Except that traveling is already requiring change in a person, opposed to being stationary. You have to face new situations all the time - requiring a different state of alertness and consciousness.
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.
Yes, this is very true. But there are new nomadic tribes forming right now.
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.
Encountering a foreign culture, with foreign ways of thinking and behaving, can stretch and change you by forcing you to encounter assumptions and habits you didn't even know you had.
> 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
I think this is fairly myopic. Surely you’ve experienced firsthand someone telling you something, you not “getting it” or believing them, only to be like “oh shit this person was totally right” later on? Or maybe you can like, imagine that this is a fairly normal interaction other people have?
It depends. Nothing teaches better than failure. Of course I don't need to try heroin to know it's bad, but there are many other things that are worth trying and learning from.
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.
Not necessarily. "Inner wisdom", wisdom about yourself and who you are, usually can only come from your own experiences (both mistakes/failures and successes/victories).
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.)
It takes a while to get there… most people need to experience the pain of a few real mistakes of their own before they recognize the value of paying attention to other people’s.
The worst is seeing someone making a mistake, warning them, and then they do it anyway.
It seems real wisdom has a prerequisite: actually seeing/witnessing other people's mistakes.
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.
Also, changing the people around you can solve a surprising large number of problems.
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.)
Thanks for replying- I completely agree. Which writing is that quote from and/or any goods tips for where to start with Seneca for someone who didn't study the classics in college?
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 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 want to do this so bad with a couple things in my life. But I know I won't because those things matter so much to me and I can't stomach putting those decisions up to chance, even if doing so would make me feel better 6 months out. Maybe I should try being a little more selfish!
This is particularly true when it comes to your place of residence. Moving constantly means you never "lock in" a level of expenses and will always have to earn more to keep up with inflation of housing prices (be it rent or purchase price). At least in Europe it is common to have indefinite rental contracts with a clause saying they can never raise the rent more than LOW_SINGLE_DIGIT% per year or even only for 10 years and not after.
That's only true in specific parts of Europe. Where I am renting is like the wild west. Last year a friend's landlord put up their rent by €100, after 2 months of their 1 year contract...
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.
On the other hand, moving cities/countries/continents for a salary boost can compound over your career and be probably the best financial decision you'll ever make.
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.
I hope to blow my life up in a few within a the year sometime. Maybe not as drastic as others, but my life has been at a pretty low state. Finally have managed to crawl myself out of a nasty burnout/depressive period, and things are finally starting to work out. In the end, I do not have much to lose that I haven't lost already. I have no momentum or anything really.
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.
Feels a bit like a 'hill climbing algorithm'. Sometimes staying in the same place and climbing the hill works out well - but sometimes a big jump can move you to a bigger hill.
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.
Get a metro card or a bike asap. Note that the bikers in Copenhagen are quite fast so you better brush up your skills.
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.
Because a 6 month absence can be a deal breaker in a lot of circumstances where a job is on the line. Employers are going to choose the people with constant employment over the people who quit "just because."
Idk, I've taken more than one 6 month break in my career and I'm fine. If you've got the skills nobody cares. And besides, it's easy to fudge it in tech. Say you were working on a side project or a startup idea, or did some volunteer work for local non profits.
Good advice if you're already confident a number of things you find troublesome about your life cannot be resolved, such as if you've already gone through therapy or tried more focused interventions that have not worked. Sometimes you have to leap to the new platform, and its hard to see just how bad your context was until you've left it.
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.
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.
I agree with this post, but I don’t think he makes the most convincing argument.
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!
> All investments come with some level of risk and riskier investments, on average, provide a higher return.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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…
I’ve experienced both. We’re ultimately a lot more adaptable than we give ourselves credit for. We adapt to regret that never really went away but fades in terms of not being a point of daily focus. We adapt to the new place and call it “better” even when sometimes it isn’t.
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.
...because he switched careers and had a divorce? Not exactly a sign of a failed life, IMO. As a software engineer I feel damn lucky that I chose a career that I really like AND pays well; most people can't say the same. As for the divorce, you could get rich in a day if you knew how to reliably spot one of those coming early in a relationship.
"Blowing up" pathological patterns and habits makes sense for some interpretation of "blowing up". If you're in with a bad crowd that creates constant near occasions of sin that you easily succumb to, cutting ties and cleaning house is very good.
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.
Reading this story, you're subjected to the winner's bias. There's another guy out there somewhere who also threw away his career, wife and home, but never replaced it all, never found whatever he assumed was out there, and never wrote a blog patting himself on the back and spewing life advice.
The point is that life compounds, and it can be nearly impossible to salvage a bad situation.
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.
If you want your life to be a long road of craters, sure, blow up your life constantly.
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).
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 300 ms ] threadSomething 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 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?
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.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36307059
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.
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.
What does this even mean? Of course you are the center of your own life. That's the human experience.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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 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.
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.)
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
It's fine that you do not want to do it. But there's a tradeoff here, it's harder to upgrade yourself.
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!
Obviously if you have dependents it's harder to move physically, but not impossible, and quitting a job is totally doable.
Lots of options.
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'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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
that's because the title is some contrarian clickbait substack blogspam
> 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?
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.
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.
But if life is working well this is pretty bad advice.
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)