Ask HN: Has anyone here ever tried throwing everything away?

It's been a good decision so far. The stock market has been performing well lately, which has been good for my savings during this time of unemployment.

It has yet to be seen whether I "threw it all away". Everyone close to me seems to think it was a rash decision and a big step back in my career. They might be right. I think I'll be difficult to get a job with the same compensation I had before. When I rejoin the job market, I'll probably be a few steps back.

But as of now, I have yet to see any negative repercussions! Just a long relaxing vacation. Ask me again in another eight months when I decide it's time to start looking for a job again and I might have a different answer. We'll see.

It likely won't "work", but it will be a useful experience providing perspective and reflection, and you won't have to wonder "what if". There's a slight chance it will change your life around.

Six months after graduating from Northwestern University cum laude in EE and mathematics I quit my cushy 6-figure WFH job to move to Finland as a quasi-illegal immigrant. (I say "quasi-" because I had an EU passport waiting on me anyway, and also because "money-minded STEM undergrad from a top university moving to a much poorer country" is, ah, not what you usually think of.)

I was unemployed for over a year due to passport issues, living in a tiny vacation town of ~10,000 close to the Arctic Circle, and used the time to get unfucked psychologically from growing up in an abusive household. I got back into coding to pass the time, starting with 3 months of reading and doing every exercise in https://haskellbook.com/. I wiped my GitHub profile clean of 10 years of half assed experiments. Later I also quit drinking (hit 500 days sober yesterday), and got married.

My savings were annihilated, which to be clear was because of my own stupidity which I have now grown out of. You don't just exist in Finland for a year and manage to burn over $20,000 unless you have some kind of idiotic vice you're pouring that into. We reached the point where we had to go to the church for food handouts (God bless the Finnish people for being so accommodating of well meaning strangers). All future prospects of being a millionaire, or even having a six figure job again without starting my own business, were destroyed. I haven't spoken with my birth family in over a year.

It was the greatest thing that I ever did. I'd do it all over in a heartbeat. :)

Do I recommend it to others? I wish I could. I think I existed in a very rare confluence of intelligent × conscientious × extraverted × little to lose × much to gain when I made all of these moves. Now that I'm in a place where I'm actually quite happy with my life I would have to handle such plans with considerably more care. How would my wife finish her degree? Could my wife finish her degree? What if she really is pregnant, do I really want to move out of Finland without even seeing the best part of it (raising kids here)? Do I want to give up living in the cyberpunk backwoods of the world just to chase a bigger paycheck doing more or less the same things I already do?

I have never objected to putting down roots. I happened to be in radioactive soil.