Has anyone here ever tried throwing everything away?

This may be the generic reddit advice you're avoiding, but you should try therapy.

Lots of people think they should make some dramatic change in their life, especially irreversible, and usually that's not healthy. I think a lot of people dream of something big and dramatic, because the idea is cathartic, but I don't think most people find that reality matches this idea.

I like the saying "nothing ever changes if nothing ever changes" for moments like "when will I finally be in shape" because obviously it'll never happen if I don't start working out. Similarly, until you address what gives you these feelings, nothing will change about having them. You'll probably have them still after you close those doors.

If you said that you've always wanted to start a business, but you were scared, that's one thing. If you said that you wanted to move to Colorado because you've always wanted to live in the mountains, that'd be cool. But there's nothing you seem to be emotionally running towards, you just seem to be focused on what you're going away from, or the act of change which is the sign that there isn't a "destination" that will make you feel content. Again, therapy my friend.

Yes, i took this drastic step a decade ago due to "Filial Duty" reasons.

Had my Life/Career/Job/etc. in the US (with my "Green Card" and was a month away from filing for Citizenship) when i made the decision to literally "throw away my life in the US" and move back to India to live with and take care of my then recently widowed Mother.

I took the decision to put myself into a "self-imposed limited box" (mentally and somewhat literally), staying away from the Industry/Friends/Companionship/Travel/etc. to live with and take care of my Mother on my savings, alone and by myself (because i don't have a family of my own).

Only a year ago, my "Filial Duties" have come to their natural end and i am now trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my Life.

Lessons Learned:

1) Every decision has a consequence which may/may not be according to how you planned it.

2) Whatever be the consequence, you have to live with it and manage it all alone. Only the lucky few get any external help.

3) You will fall into depression, give in to self-pity, anger/hatred at the world/people involved, financial hardship etc. But you have to build mental fortitude to face them all and manage them without falling apart.

4) You will have to learn to be truly self-reliant, disregard the expectations/opinions of the world and learn to do what is "your duty" to do.

5) You will find that a study of Philosophy is truly helpful in managing how to deal with what happens to you in Life.

Yes I've done this 3 times in the last 20 years. That is, thrown away all but a small bag of possessions and a bag of clothes and resettle in a remote location cutting off contact with all but a couple of people, and with only a few hundred dollars in my pocket. I abandoned a house, quit a well paying great job and broke up with a fiancé. I could detail these experiences but it would be a long and somewhat personal post. Probably nobody wants to hear my life story. But I moved from a small town in England to Manhattan to San Francisco and later the South Bay and then I just did it again in December, moving to a small town in Oregon. So is it worth the risk? Yes absolutely. Changing everything in your environment is an excellent strategy to get out of a rut. I consider the first time I did this to be the best but also most reckless decision of my life. I lived happily in Manhattan for 11 years through my twenties and just had the most spectacular time. I'm so proud now looking back at the young man I was. That was an incredibly brave move. I think in my old age now I'm just a shadow of that character. "Or hasn't been able to accept that he has". I think you mean what and if so that's the key, dissatisfaction. If what you have simply isn't enough, you should take the risk. Don't settle.

Anyway AMA if you like

After 15 years as a SysAdmin I took a job making gears. The pay and commute sucked, but unlike my previous job, there were physical artifacts at the end of the day that I helped create. Some of those gears could still be in service in a century, far outlasting almost everything else I've done.

However, that closed a door on an IT career, and that caused a lot of fiscal discomfort. It's only with a lot of help that I've avoided disaster living in the precariat as a result of my decision.

It was life altering, a strong change I'm not sure I should have taken.

Then Long COVID got me, and here I am out of the workforce for good.

I'm leaving academia after 10 years of being a postdoc, moving back to my broken home country, and have split up with my loving girlfriend of 3 years.

I am a wreck, but I remember how unhappy and frustrated I felt in the relationship, and in the various postdocs that I did. I need a change, I need to not run away from my family problems, and I need to live somewhere where I feel heard and understood, even if it's a downgrade lifestyle wise.

I frequently feel a desire to effectively go off the grid and cut ties with the family I was born into, skip the country and start a new life. However, I’ve never actually done that, partly because I recognise that I am romanticising in my own mind what it would be like, and simplifying things. There would be just as many (what feels like) insurmountable challenges in the new life, they’d just be different challenges. In saying that some of the challenges I have in my current life (like ADHD) would follow me everywhere anyway.

However, in saying that, I have had times where I have been deeply unhappy in whatever I was doing in life at a time, and with regard to that, I’ve started over numerous times. I started out studying to become a lawyer. I was in my 3rd year of a law degree when I quit. I was also living in a house with a guy who was addicted to methamphetamine and unpredictable, one night, while he was out, I packed up all my shit and slipped out in the middle of the night, changed my number and never looked back. A few years later, I found myself working in a crappy job, but I had got quite high up and the money was fairly decent. I hated it so much though, so I quit my decent paying job and became an apprentice basically on some of the shittest wages I’ve ever had in my life. Financially that was difficult but doing that was the right choice it’s finally starting to pay off. There has been many times in my life where I’ve walked away from situations, or cut ties with people who were dragging me down. I often go along with things sometimes, pretending I am ok to the outside world, while I recognise I’m not ok on the inside, and when I feel like that, I try to strategize, and think of ways to make my situation better. Sometimes though, it is better to just walk away and start fresh.

I quit my job around four months ago, voluntarily leaving behind a cushy $560k yearly comp. Nothing lined up, just decided I needed a break.

It's been a good decision so far. The stock market has been performing well lately, which has been good for my savings during this time of unemployment.

It has yet to be seen whether I "threw it all away". Everyone close to me seems to think it was a rash decision and a big step back in my career. They might be right. I think I'll be difficult to get a job with the same compensation I had before. When I rejoin the job market, I'll probably be a few steps back.

But as of now, I have yet to see any negative repercussions! Just a long relaxing vacation. Ask me again in another eight months when I decide it's time to start looking for a job again and I might have a different answer. We'll see.

Though I haven't thrown literally everything away, I've thrown lots of things away and have made significant changes to my life on more than one occasion. In fact, I'm in the middle of planning some more big changes for the remainder of this year.

I can't make recommendations because I don't know enough about you, but I've always found benefit from making big life changes in the long term. More than once, I've left my job to live on savings and do some things that I want to do. There's a level of stupidity in blowing through savings that way, but I also had more valuable life experiences during that those times than I did playing the rat race. I always ended up back on my two feet, even though I occasionally used the help of others.

Other changes I've made include moving to a different country, tossing nearly everything I owned except that which held intimate value, and lived in small spaces with friends in order to afford getting a new education. Even when I kind of screwed up, I learned a lot about myself, had some great experiences, and just used persistence to end up in a better place. I'm glad I have enough crazy in me to do these kinds of things and not end up living a life completely devoid of fulfillment. I'm even grateful for the times I ended up working menial jobs. At least I was finally alive again in some sense and gained new perspective.

This is one of those situations where you probably already know the answer and just need confirmation. Do something radical and new. That feeling you get every few months will remain mysterious unless you actually respect it via action. If things don't work out, you'll find your way back.

Earlier in my life I noticed a pattern, that every 7 years or so I get a strong urge to throw everything away and start over from scratch. It felt like various aspects of life situation - friends, lovers, jobs, city, the country - had run its course, that I had explored and experienced all I could, that things were starting to repeat themselves and had gotten stale. "Is this all there is to life?" Then, I'd find or create an opportunity somewhere else, often far away - a new job, a new person, new state, new country.

I've lost count how many times I've done this, but every time it feels like the world is falling apart. The daily dis-satisfaction became too much to bear, I had to get out and do something to turn everything upside-down. It's a traumatic event, to leave the old life behind. But I would feel such a release and peace when I finally manage to find the next big step. It has always worked out for the better, though sometimes it's a real struggle to get there.

In fact, I'm at such a crossroads these days. I already know which way I'm going to go: south, to a sunny country near the sea.

I couldn't recommend it to anyone though, I've only done it because I had to. There is great value in having a comfortable life with well-known routines - and one day I hope I will settle down.

I’ve started over a couple times. Move with only a backpack. Live in an empty apartment in a new city. New job. New people. It doesn’t feel fresh it feels weird. Like I don’t even have a spatula to flip an egg. New places are nice, but there are good places and bad places. One in ten are places I’d actually want to live and even the greatest places have a dark shadow. Paris has grimey parts even at the fringes of the awesome parts.

If you get the recurring feeling that something needs changing that feeling will almost certainly follow you into any circumstance you put yourself in. It might be worth digging into the source of it.

Now, granted I do know people who follow a nomadic traveling life, but they do it with a childish sense of wonder, not out of a desire to throw everything away. And even those people wonder what it would have been like on the other path. Because traveling cuts off other branches of opportunity. “What would it have been like to have a career?” my one wandering friend says.

Yes, changed country, friends and job.

In the end, old family ties brought me back to where I started.

It is very hard for a tiger to change it's stripes. I've gotten better results standing up, from where I am now.

The radical change gave me life experiences for better or worse. In the end, it's hard to beat building roots at home.

It's super cheesy to post lyrics on any forum, particularly Beatles lyrics, so scroll past if you're not into it.

Whenever I'm in this mood, the Beatles tune You Never Give Me Your Money drifts through my mind. It reminds me of the times I've owned enough to carry. In the right circumstances it's liberating. And yes, they had limousines, but it still works for me :)

Out of college, money spent

See no future, pay no rent

All the money's gone, nowhere to go

Any jobber got the sack

Monday, morning turning back

Yellow lorry slow, nowhere to go

But oh, that magic-feeling, nowhere to go

Oh, that magic-feeling, nowhere to go

One sweet dream

Pick-up the bags and get in the limousine

Soon we'll be away from here

Step on the gas and wipe that tear away

One sweet dream came true today

(Edit: formatting.)

I’ve had similar feelings. Sometimes an environment can truly be toxic but often, IMO, these urges come from a place of fleeing from yourself and disguise themselves in different appearances/urges.

This quote put it into perspective for me, even though I’ve only seen one or two episodes:

"A darkness carried in the heart can not be cured by moving the body from one place to another." —Season 3 Episode 6 - Dust to Dust, Babylon V

I spent a few years deeply contemplating suicide and made some pretty serious attempts. Ultimately, I reflected on the meaning and purpose of life, had an epiphany, found God, lost God, found God again and settled in with a family for the long haul.

Some people keep running from place to place all their lives, the ones I’ve met don’t seem to have ever accepted a reason for settling in and are just as restless at 70 as at 21.

Good luck, hope you find your peace. Peer support groups can help. Would also recommend Victor Frankenstein Man’s Search for Meaning and Fulton Sheens talks (last one is religious but he was one of the first TV superstars, highly educated, extremely eloquent, and palatable for mainstream of the time. He has good reflections on what is life, why are we here, etc and available on YouTube).

Sorry if my advice is too generic but my heart goes out to you. I really believe now that we all have a place in this world and that our “hearts are restless until they rest in God” - St. Augustine. Now maybe you find a different God than I did but I firmly believe the search is ingrained into our DNA and your restlessness is a prompt for deep reflection. Read up, make some sacrifices (give things up, eg stoicism for the pagans here), get some peer support, accept that somethings are going to suck, find peace.

It gets better though. I know that’s another platitude and I’ll spare you anymore.

You must go some place rather than leave one behind. Not that there really is a point as you will always find a way to be you. If you are going to look for yourself outside yourself it's going to be a long journey. I'm not saying it wont be interesting... what was the meaning of life again?

For years I did month-to-month Airbnbs to chase these feelings around being able to pick up and move wherever, whenever. If you can do WFH and have financial security, I would say sell some stuff, put the rest in storage, and make a plan to come back to your starting point in 6-12 months. You might just need to process things. A lot of people who move to Alaska or Hawaii to "get away" end up learning about themselves, and that's good.

If you don't have that flexibility, yes it's tricky to move to a new city. Get hired first if possible. Set realistic expectations for yourself (e.g. I will go to some Meetups and grow basil, NOT I will become the best _ in NYC and meet my BFF in the building). That's something a therapist or life coach type can help with, too.

Unless it means cutting ties with people, just do it.

It likely won't "work", but it will be a useful experience providing perspective and reflection, and you won't have to wonder "what if". There's a slight chance it will change your life around.

I think it works. Once. Especially if you're young.

I think almost everyone could stand to strip away all the should in their life, everything everybody's always told them they should be, should want, etc. Radically question it, once.

Because once you do, you have to answer the question. Who are you? Who do you want to be? And then do the hard work of becoming that person.

Otherwise it becomes too easy to treat it as a "solution" every time things get hard, because it worked that one time. But you never grow robust if you uproot too often. You'll find yourself old and withered and dry and disconnected.

Wherever you go, there you are. OTOH reducing clutter, visually and mentally may calm oneself… YMMV

Stuff: toss it if you don't have a clear, exact reason to keep it. It's nice to have things, and if you have room for them and it doesn't cost much keep them, but otherwise it's _just_ reacquisition cost if you need it (I know that is a meaningful cost sometimes, but also sometimes it's cheaper to ditch things)

People: they come and go, and often dropping them is not great but ok. Don't feel beholden to an acquaintance just because. The real ones though, and you know who they are, never let go of them. you only get a few of those people in life, don't waste them.

Job: if you're in this headspace, it's a commodity, you need to live but don't let it own you. use the toothbrush rule: don't throw out your old one until you have a new one, because it sure feels dumb to fish your old one out of the trash when you got busy and didn't make it to the store. But don't be afraid to throw out the toothbrush for one that's not worn out.

For everything in general: find what the actual issue is. That's a simple to say but massively hard thing to do. But, blowing up your life is something that shouldn't happen every 2-3 months or years, and the urge to do that is a sign of deeper problems that's mere change won't help.

I made a radical change of job, continent, language, etc. I came out the back side of it delighted with the results. The change was carefully researched, and was consistent with my values. I had considered some possible not-delightful outcomes (including dying doing something worthwhile) and decided I could accept them. I explained my reasoning to those who would be impacted, and they respected me enough to accept and support my decision.

So, yes, I'd recommend it, but only with clarity and transparency. Not as a careless jump into the unknown.

Yea, I did that.

The important thing is to understand that life is expensive. The main expenses are cars, houses and families. How many of each of those do you want?

You need to understand wealth correctly before sacrificing a career. I am not sure if I should have spent more time making tech money or more years making nothing.

You should stay in tech long enough to establish the situation you need. Most professions pay dramatically less and require dramatically more.

Not everyone needs to journey the same. I wouldn't go to therapy unless if it were free and the drugs were too.

Young British Artist Michael Landy did this exact thing in 2001, cataloguing and destroying 7227 possessions.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/jan/27/like-wi...

Didn’t quit the job, as it was remote and I needed the income to fund my travels. But in my mid-twenties, I pretty much left everything behind and spent the next five years doing the digital nomad thing in Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Croatia, Morocco, and so forth. I absolutely recommend it, but you should expect to get tired of the lifestyle after a few years.

see Sacrifice by Tarkovsky

i have done similar but smaller thing a few times, always kept some links to past - those which matter - e.g. family, friends, some belongings. The rest - job, geography, society.. don't care.

there is a saying going like: "when cart turn wheels up, roads are aplenty" -- usualy taken negatively/precautionary -- but it is bipolar, i.e. if u want plenty of roads, then... turn the cart bottom up..

The other useful advice i have is: think driving on ice.. Leave the car to go as it wants to, and only then study that and start reacting

and... have fun. Or at least have that as further target.

a friend of mine quit his(educated and quite cerebral) career around 50, bought a van, and became a landscape gardener for 3 or 4 years. He was way happier. Of course, he had less money, but he didn't need it. After that he started doing less gardening and started organizing music events (he'd been going to loads of concerts and hanging out with band managers anyways). He's still starting out with that but has hosted a few local ones himself and worked on the team for some bigger ones

It can absolutely work. I can't say its always easy, but it will make you a much more interesting person for sure.

YES!

Mother in law moved in with us. And into the garage is her stuff from a full house.

7 years later, I threw a garage sale sign up that said "Make Me An Offer that I Can't Refuse".

Now I can park two cars in the garage.

I'm currently in such place, I want to move on from working for someone and focus on my side service products but it's quite hard leaving a monthly stable income that's currently paying for mortgage and loans. I don't know if it's opportune but I'm gonna share my self-service pitch deck just in case:

https://arasaka.software/pitch

Yes many times (and still kinna recovering from last time). Everytime you do this you become stronger.

Yeah! I'm going to take this to brag, for a certain definition of bragging.

Six months after graduating from Northwestern University cum laude in EE and mathematics I quit my cushy 6-figure WFH job to move to Finland as a quasi-illegal immigrant. (I say "quasi-" because I had an EU passport waiting on me anyway, and also because "money-minded STEM undergrad from a top university moving to a much poorer country" is, ah, not what you usually think of.)

I was unemployed for over a year due to passport issues, living in a tiny vacation town of ~10,000 close to the Arctic Circle, and used the time to get unfucked psychologically from growing up in an abusive household. I got back into coding to pass the time, starting with 3 months of reading and doing every exercise in https://haskellbook.com/. I wiped my GitHub profile clean of 10 years of half assed experiments. Later I also quit drinking (hit 500 days sober yesterday), and got married.

My savings were annihilated, which to be clear was because of my own stupidity which I have now grown out of. You don't just exist in Finland for a year and manage to burn over $20,000 unless you have some kind of idiotic vice you're pouring that into. We reached the point where we had to go to the church for food handouts (God bless the Finnish people for being so accommodating of well meaning strangers). All future prospects of being a millionaire, or even having a six figure job again without starting my own business, were destroyed. I haven't spoken with my birth family in over a year.

It was the greatest thing that I ever did. I'd do it all over in a heartbeat. :)

Do I recommend it to others? I wish I could. I think I existed in a very rare confluence of intelligent × conscientious × extraverted × little to lose × much to gain when I made all of these moves. Now that I'm in a place where I'm actually quite happy with my life I would have to handle such plans with considerably more care. How would my wife finish her degree? Could my wife finish her degree? What if she really is pregnant, do I really want to move out of Finland without even seeing the best part of it (raising kids here)? Do I want to give up living in the cyberpunk backwoods of the world just to chase a bigger paycheck doing more or less the same things I already do?

I have never objected to putting down roots. I happened to be in radioactive soil.