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In praise of blowing up your life

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Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#111

Post by eastbound »

ilyt wrote: post #108
eastbound wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. What an egotistical thing to say. You're not entitled to have people waste time trying to "be friends with you" just because you're financially successful > I’m workaholic because I don’t have enough friends. You don't make friends and are workaholi…

You see, I’ve proven that I’m a good person in many occasions, despite naysayers.

Now if we all must collude to make women in tech succeed, then surely we can include me at an improv group.

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#112

Post by scarface_74 »

I’ve mentioned the last year of my life on HN where my wife and I decided to get rid of everything we own that wouldn’t fit in four suitcases including our cars and we became “hybrid digital nomads”. We fly to different cities across the US and stay in midrange extended stay hotels and stay in our own “Condotel”[1] the other six months in Florida.

What I haven’t talked about is what got us to this point. I grew up in a small town in southwest GA, moved to metro Atlanta in 1996 and stayed there until last year.

We had a house built in 2016 in the northern burbs and thought we had our “forever home”. All the time from 1996 -2020 I bumped around between 7 jobs as a journeymen “enterprise dev”.

My wife had lived in metro Atlanta all of her life. We got married in 2012 (both on our second marriage).

Everything changed in 2020. Our youngest son (my stepson) graduated from high school, Covid happened (didn’t fatally affect anyone in our inner or outer circle) and I fell into a remote job at BigTech.

When things got back to normal around 2021, we both realized that life is short and we wanted a change. That’s what caused us to blow up our life and we are both happier now that we really can’t acquire “stuff”.

When we left our condo in March to start our six month trip, we put it in the rental pool, it gets professional managed like a hotel room and we get half the rent to cover our mortgage.

We don’t own a car. We take Uber for six months once we hit a city and we have a Sixt subscription and we rent a car by the month when we are at home.

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#113

Post by tlarkworthy »

vjk800 wrote: post #84
tlarkworthy wrote: post #55

I have a theory that this is the Monty hall problem effect in practice [1]. When you blow up your life you are opening an unknown door... But after you have narrowed your options, so the outcomes are likely to be better than your status quo. [1] https://link.medium.com/N6HaHXgyAAb

With an almost infinite number of doors though, and with all of them containing something that might or might not be the prize depending on your point of view. And your opinion of what counts as a prize changing after every opening of a door. So maybe this analogy doesn't really work...

I don't think it really affects anything if the prize is decided after opening the door.

The analogy only really fails if your internal value system values predictability... Which for some people is true.

But for others who have a vague feeling of dissatisfaction then the chances are that the unknown door picked from a shortlist of options will yield better results than staying put with the option given to you via external factors

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#114

Post by scarface_74 »

johnea wrote: post #32
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

DO NOT LISTEN TO THIS GUY!!! 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…

See my previous comment where I talked about blowing up my life.

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.

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#115

Post by eastbound »

hzay wrote: post #104
eastbound wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it will make you a broken soul with broken social fabric, but with more experience. I didn't expect this :( Why are you this way? Reading your comment until that point, I thought you'd figured life out.

Haha you expected a fairy tale. Real life is harder and never clean-cut.

But the good news is when a man embraces difficulty, isn’t it?

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#116

Post by scarface_74 »

laeri wrote: post #67

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…

I was tempted to delete my previous comment about how I “blew up my life” because I realized that I really wasn’t as bold as I thought I was.

I kept my above average paying job working at BigTech where I was able to work remotely. I only officially moved one state away where I stay half the year while traveling the other half, and I had assets to fall back on.

I didn’t sell my other house, I rented out to my son and two of his friends we had known forever. I had assets. I didn’t “burn the boats”.

But I’m going to let it stand.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#117

Post by akprasad »

Gareth321 wrote: post #93
akprasad wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow what relationship these two stories have with each other -- the first is on living in community and putting down roots, and the latter is on far-right cultural atavism.

It depends if one interprets "trad wife" to mean "far-right cultural atavism" or "traditional wife." I try to listen to those who subscribe to the movement, and they report the latter, every time. It seems those who interpret it as "far-right cultural atavism" refuse to actually listen to the women who find meaning in the lifestyle. Inasmuch, I see these articles strongly linked, and I find the juxtaposition really i…

The Onion clearly takes the former reading in their piece. I mean, it's barely subtext:

- "I wanted to live all my internalized misogyny"

- "Replenishing the white race is a full time job in itself"

- "A feminist cut me off in traffic once"

- "I believe in choosing a marital structure from an arbitrary point in human history and pretending it represents some kind of inviolable rule.”

But if you find value in juxtaposing these two, more power to you.

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#118

Post by creakingstairs »

This kind of sounds like me. My life has been blown up voluntarily and otherwise. These include multiple immigrations, career changes and most recently quitting my well paying job with nothing lined up.

Not all of them worked out. But I don’t think I regret any of them. Though I think this was much easier because I was not married. Nowadays I do have to think about people nearby when I try to blow up my life.

Also, I’ve found myself starting to yearn for some stability after all these years of change. It would be nice to put my roots down and join or cultivate nice communities.

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#119

Post by ilyt »

dylkil wrote: post #23
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.

momentum going down is usually what makes people unhappy, blowing up your life up kicks momentum in a new direction

Nope, it just changes direction. It can be entirely for worse

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#120

Post by ljlolel »

librish wrote: post #102
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...

This is a great path, but I think it's easy to overestimate how many people are able to take it happily. It's making a lot of assumptions: - You have a good relationship with your family - You have good friends who also didn't move away - You are genuinely happy with the work you get to do in a town with more limited career choices - Your location (area and population density) plus salary can support your hobbies

Also notably that onion article was published over 10 years ago in 2013. At least by 2020 (before remote work) that seemed impossible to fulfill given the increasingly competitive global capitalist system creating massive uncertainty (and causing taking pills and overdose) to everyone especially rural and those back home
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