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In praise of blowing up your life

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Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#61

Post by eastbound »

monero-xmr wrote: post #56

Alternatively, never blow up your life! Live near your family and lifelong friends, establish hardcore roots with your community, always be surrounded by love. A road less taken by the educated elites, but a happy and fulfilling road nonetheless. The Onion’s take: https://www.theonion.com/unambitious-loser-with-happy-fulfil...

Interesting topic.

When you are socially underdeveloped, the strange sheep, the sightly bullied, the not-taken seriously, well it’s not so bad to go twice around the globe a few years and come back.

There’s debate. I’ve lost a lot of social fabric. I’m workaholic because I don’t have enough friends. But I’m millionaire, own my startup, own my house, and I can get advice on how to manage at work, get a psychologist, etc.

It’s not ideal, and ideally people would have recognized talent at home and/or just included me because I was a living person, but they didn’t seem to have this ethics. Travelling the world taught me what was necessary to give me the social chances that everyone had at home. Now I have weight. I’m not sure I’d have anyone’s respect without money and travels.

So: When home is broken anyway, do follow some dream, yours or not, travelling wasn’t even a dream for me, it will make you a broken soul with broken social fabric, but with more experience.

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#62

Post by [deleted] »

eastbound wrote: post #61
monero-xmr wrote: post #56

Alternatively, never blow up your life! Live near your family and lifelong friends, establish hardcore roots with your community, always be surrounded by love. A road less taken by the educated elites, but a happy and fulfilling road nonetheless. The Onion’s take: https://www.theonion.com/unambitious-loser-with-happy-fulfil...

Interesting topic. When you are socially underdeveloped, the strange sheep, the sightly bullied, the not-taken seriously, well it’s not so bad to go twice around the globe a few years and come back. There’s debate. I’ve lost a lot of social fabric. I’m workaholic because I don’t have enough friends. But I’m millionaire, own my startup, own my house, and I can get advice on how to manage at work, get a psychologist, e…

[deleted]

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#63

Post by jmbwell »

Change can bring happiness. I don’t know about blowing things up, but finding something that’s under your own control and doing something with it can help get out of ruts or create adventure.

Work/relationship/city sucks? Change it. Can’t or won’t? Find something else you can and will change. You might be looking for fulfillment in the wrong places. Make the choice to try some new things. It will keep you young.

Flip side: re-evaluate what you have. We are wired for novelty. Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say. That doesn’t mean where we are and what we have is bad. It could be that you’d have been blown away at half your age to meet who you are today.

Anyway these are platitudes but they’re so well-trod because everyone faces this in some form or another. People blow up their lives and have all kinds of adventures, sure. But you don’t have to blow up your life to create adventures. Just, the next chance you get to do something you’ve never done before, go for it.

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#64

Post by renewiltord »

If I'm being honest, a lot of people in this TPOT community fail at the things that normal people just absolutely master naturally. Like, this guy, if I recall was all about sensitivity and understanding and all that shit and then got married and divorced for exactly the things that, had he succeeded at the things he talked so much about, he wouldn't have had any trouble with. Ultimately, it's better if you don't learn how to read from the illiterate.

The reality of life is that the people who talk the most about basic things are often those who have found greatest difficulty with them. Sometimes this is because they are thinking about them at a deep level. Other times, perhaps more often, it's because they are unable to penetrate the shallowest of surfaces.

You'll see this with all of these TPOT and TPOT-adjacent posters: they will claim to be renegades and say the most mundane things, claim to be empaths and find themselves unable to understand or be understood, claim to be makers and doers unlike those who only say and yet produce nothing of significance but blog posts.

This isn't to disparage them, but perhaps there is a reason blowing up their lives leads to happiness. And perhaps that is the tool they should use. I would, perhaps, even recommend that everyone in TPOT should use that tool for the betterment of their selves.

Not because it's a good tool in general but, sometimes, the local maximum you found is actually an anthill at the bottom of a well, and the rest of humanity is standing at ground level, and God and Nature have conspired to hand you only two tools: a heavy metal plate with dynamite at the bottom, and bones and flesh strong enough to withstand the upward acceleration.

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#65

Post by 3np »

jrumbut wrote: post #45
Wonnk13 wrote: post #6

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

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…

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.

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#66

Post by nmfisher »

valzam wrote: post #19
Scubabear68 wrote: post #13

The flip side of blowing up your life regularly like this, is you are throwing away momentum you may have accumulated in your current life.

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 ye…

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.

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#67

Post by laeri »

This is part survivorship bias in my opinion and probably not very good life advice. You can and should only do this if you have enough money to sustain at least one year without income. His example is very risky as no income was guaranteed, if you can continue to work in another place why not. It is true that people get accustomed and complacent to their life situation, jobs, etc. And a change in country or job can shake them out of it. However, success and progress in a lot of things require constand effort over time and this is usually easier if you have a consistent routine. Completely changing your life requires you to find a new routine somewhere else which sets you back at least a month in my experience. I say this from experience as I quit my job and am working on my own project in another country. It is challenging to do only work and experience less docial interaction as your social network is still in the old place.

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#68

Post by phnofive »

monero-xmr wrote: post #56

Alternatively, never blow up your life! Live near your family and lifelong friends, establish hardcore roots with your community, always be surrounded by love. A road less taken by the educated elites, but a happy and fulfilling road nonetheless. The Onion’s take: https://www.theonion.com/unambitious-loser-with-happy-fulfil...

The Onion's take ten years on is a bit different:

https://www.theonion.com/women-explain-why-they-became-tradw...

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#69

Post by NovaDudely »

hnzix wrote: post #50
NovaDudely wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#70

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

Blowing up your life with your own hands may leave you unprepared or resorceless to react to your life being blown up by external factors. If that doesn't ever happen, congratulations, you're in a lucky minority.

This is a wrong advice that will always sound like a profound wisdom if it works for you, or emerge as a protective rationalisation if it doesn't quite.

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