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In praise of blowing up your life

sashachapin.substack.com

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Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#141

Post by sledgehammers »

projectazorian wrote: post #129
sledgehammers wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

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

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#142

Post by [deleted] »

pizza wrote: post #126
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...

Always wonder what people without roots are supposed to do. Where's the advice for them?

[deleted]

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#144

Post by 4ggr0 »

whitepaint wrote: post #124
hayst4ck wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One doesn't realize in early life that the price of freedom is loneliness. To be happy one must be tied." ~ CS Lewis I don't know the context of the quote and I know next to nothing about CS Lewis, but having blown my life up at one point and experienced freedom on a level few on this planet could achieve (health, money, time, and will) the quote rang very true for me. I think some people grow up in a community and…

> "Always be surrounded by love..." unless you are gay. Gay, trans, atheist, feminist, brown, an opioid addict, a questioner of authority, or otherwise different. Or a middle-aged white man. https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/

[flagged]

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#145

Post by ViscountPenguin »

hayst4ck wrote: post #121
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...

"One doesn't realize in early life that the price of freedom is loneliness. To be happy one must be tied." ~ CS Lewis I don't know the context of the quote and I know next to nothing about CS Lewis, but having blown my life up at one point and experienced freedom on a level few on this planet could achieve (health, money, time, and will) the quote rang very true for me. I think some people grow up in a community and…

I can't speak for racism or being an addict, but in the English speaking world I think lots of these issues are overplayed.

It's not uncommon for members of the trans community to recommend cutting off family members for acts as minor as accidental misgendering, while ignoring the very real harms of social isolation.

As a trans person who's lived in a multi-generational household where only one other member knew I was trans. I can personally attest that even being closeted can be a good tradeoff for many people.

Obviously in cases of violent queerphobia the calculus will be different, but I think people chronically underweigh community and make their own lives worse for it.

There's a reason for the modern resurgence of communes, and it's not just rent. After decades of increasing social isolation we're finally coming back to the realisation that we're social monkeys.

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#146

Post by mettamage »

emmanueloga_ wrote: post #49

Just for fun, I replaced "blowing up your life" with "rewriting your app in Rust": Rewriting your application: whether you do it or a volcano [destroys the existing code base], it’s effective. How about a coin toss? Participants in a survey who made major codebase rewrites (to Rust) based on the result of a coin toss were much happier, six months out, than those who didn’t. That six-month figure is important. Rewriti…

Haha, it's a great blog post about change in general. I think you could replace it with quite a lot that is about change.

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#148

Post by hayst4ck »

projectazorian wrote: post #128
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #51

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.

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.

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."

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#149

Post by svnt »

scarface_74 wrote: post #114
johnea wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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.

Re: In praise of blowing up your life

#150

Post by Woeps »

varjag wrote: post #137

As someone who is getting older, I have this to say: don't take a life advice from a 20-something, no matter how well meaning they are.

As somebody else who is getting older, I don't think life advice from any age should be taken at face value.
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