If ya ain't got nothin, you ain't got nothin to lose.
But if life is working well this is pretty bad advice.
In praise of blowing up your life
41–50 of 352 posts
Re: In praise of blowing up your life
#42I propose that this fellow does not have any children or other dependents.
Re: In praise of blowing up your life
#43Before 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 sout…
...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.
Re: In praise of blowing up your life
#44I 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
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.
Re: In praise of blowing up your life
#45I 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 about.
Re: In praise of blowing up your life
#46If 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).
Hell to it! yolo! (/sarcasm)
Re: In praise of blowing up your life
#47Do not take life advice from someone with the blind confidence of a mediocre white man.
Re: In praise of blowing up your life
#48DO 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…
Very right.
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.
Re: In praise of blowing up your life
#49Just 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. Rewriting your application doesn’t necessarily feel great right afterward. You always wonder at least once if you’ve made a terrible mistake. You look around at your new scenery, and you say to yourself, wait, this isn’t life, I remember what life was before [ownership], it was that thing I left behind. But this feeling of disequilibrium can motivate you to find a better equilibrium, and six months is probably about how long it takes for a motivated person to stabilize their trajectory and begin to understand Rust's ownership rules.
Re: In praise of blowing up your life
#50I 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
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.