In praise of blowing up your life

a reminder for the relatively sane

Generally, I think blowing up your life is a good idea. Sure, not for Cocaine Bob, who is on his fifth marriage and tenth DUI. But for the relatively sane, by the time you’re mostly ready to leave a job, or a city, or a relationship, you probably have good reason to. Status quo bias is utterly pervasive. Most people are tremendously resistant to change, capable of coming up with countless ingenious stories about why something different will be worse than what we have. We will stick with familiar pain over variance, even if we are financially and socially secure enough that we will remain safe and fed after walking away. 

At any given time, your motion is being constrained by an agglomeration of previous decisions made by a previous you, decisions that might have little to do with your current wants. Maybe you spent years forming habits that you just don’t enjoy anymore, or you’ve carefully curated an environment that now feels stale. All of these factors, collectively, present a bulwark against change. It’s possible to modify your life while mired in this mass of ongoing circumstance, but it’s difficult. The human default is sleepwalking. 

However, in a dramatically new situation, you have no choice but to act your way into being someone else. That someone might be only slightly different in the end. But, on the other hand, that someone might be much more aligned with your real and present desires and potentials.

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 south. That ended up becoming the material for my first book. My current professional chapter began when I said “fuck it” to journalism when I couldn’t take the constant ethical compromises and the bullshit of pretending to care about the news cycle. After some flailing, I now make a lot more money and am a lot happier. Blowing up my first marriage was the most difficult one of all, but it was an obviously correct decision, for which my ex-wife later thanked me—we were locked in a pattern that was hurting both of us, and if one of us didn’t walk away, we would’ve eventually been one of those unhappy old couples who constantly radiate bitterness.

Disruptions can work even if you didn’t initiate them yourself. How about a coin toss? Participants in a survey conducted by Steven Levitt who made major life changes they’d been mulling over—proposing marriage, moving—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. Blowing up your life 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, 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.

There’s no guarantee that blowing up your life turns out well. If there were a guarantee, it wouldn’t be blowing up your life. The guarantee is simply that the worst you can do is the worst-case scenario, which is, for readers of this Substack, probably survivable. On the other hand, the upside might be much greater than you suspect. I can’t say, if you’re reading this, that the big life change you’ve been contemplating—however fearfully or hesitantly—will work out. And I’m sure there are all sorts of reasons that paralysis is tempting. But there always are.