Yeah, moved to a different city because my wife got a new job. Turns out maybe we liked where we lived before better, but guess what! We can’t exactly pack up and leave because we can’t afford to just fuck right off and waste the time and money we spent moving, along with wasting the goodwill she has earned from her employer due to her hard work. So guess what we get to do! We get to learn to like where we live or else accept that we live somewhere we don’t want to be. For every one story about a person who spontaneously packed up, moved and started over and subsequently carved out a happy, successful place in life, there are ten more where it just continued to be a precarious, stressful and kinda shitty “journey.”
Edit: I should clarify, my wife didn’t just decide to take a new job. She works in medical research, and her bosses decided to move to a different company/hospital/state and take their studies with them, and they asked my wife to follow them and continue to work for them (and they only asked one other person to follow them). My wife could have stayed at a now-gutted organization or she could maintain her work relationship, stay on the studies that she had been in charge of as the expert and get the new staff up to speed. Just as well, my wife plans on going to grad school, so it was beneficial for her to maintain that work relationship so that she might get a publication or two from having worked for these people and having stayed on their studies. We also did lots of research about the city we were moving to, we crunched the numbers on the difference in cost of living and average income etc., she took a trip and looked at places to live, but it was somewhat hastily done because she had to wait for her new employer to actually approve her trip and agree to pay for it. Ultimately, you can’t predict whether or not you’ll like a new city especially when it’s so far from where you’ve lived before and the culture is different. She couldn’t have predicted that her new employer would be much less accommodating because you only really find that stuff out once you’re going through their orientation program. So, while people can argue that “nobody made us move” and “it’s our own fault,” there were circumstances that made this move a good career decision, and we made a decision to honor that over how much we like where we are because we can’t exactly afford to, nor do we want to undo all the effort it took to even make it to this point. My intention, and indeed my rhetorical premise wasn’t situated on “blaming rich people” for my problems or whining, but more to illustrate that the point made in the original post has some real-life validity and that sometimes these “courageous” acts of spiritual spontaneity are much less practical when you don’t have the money to just fix it should it not pan out, and from the perspective of people who don’t have that money, it seems less “courageous” than it does whimsical and that when people who have that kind of money go around telling others to just take these leaps of faith, it comes off less inspirational/motivational and more naive. If my anecdote offended your sensibilities, that’s on you not me.
Furious--Max on January 23rd, 2020 at 02:58 UTC »
Go to school? Debt. Start a business? Debt. Buy a house? Debt.
ASK_ABOUT__VOIDSPACE on January 23rd, 2020 at 03:10 UTC »
I'm so used to seeing opposing views in this format that my brain didn't know what to do
stinkydooky on January 23rd, 2020 at 04:28 UTC »
Yeah, moved to a different city because my wife got a new job. Turns out maybe we liked where we lived before better, but guess what! We can’t exactly pack up and leave because we can’t afford to just fuck right off and waste the time and money we spent moving, along with wasting the goodwill she has earned from her employer due to her hard work. So guess what we get to do! We get to learn to like where we live or else accept that we live somewhere we don’t want to be. For every one story about a person who spontaneously packed up, moved and started over and subsequently carved out a happy, successful place in life, there are ten more where it just continued to be a precarious, stressful and kinda shitty “journey.”
Edit: I should clarify, my wife didn’t just decide to take a new job. She works in medical research, and her bosses decided to move to a different company/hospital/state and take their studies with them, and they asked my wife to follow them and continue to work for them (and they only asked one other person to follow them). My wife could have stayed at a now-gutted organization or she could maintain her work relationship, stay on the studies that she had been in charge of as the expert and get the new staff up to speed. Just as well, my wife plans on going to grad school, so it was beneficial for her to maintain that work relationship so that she might get a publication or two from having worked for these people and having stayed on their studies. We also did lots of research about the city we were moving to, we crunched the numbers on the difference in cost of living and average income etc., she took a trip and looked at places to live, but it was somewhat hastily done because she had to wait for her new employer to actually approve her trip and agree to pay for it. Ultimately, you can’t predict whether or not you’ll like a new city especially when it’s so far from where you’ve lived before and the culture is different. She couldn’t have predicted that her new employer would be much less accommodating because you only really find that stuff out once you’re going through their orientation program. So, while people can argue that “nobody made us move” and “it’s our own fault,” there were circumstances that made this move a good career decision, and we made a decision to honor that over how much we like where we are because we can’t exactly afford to, nor do we want to undo all the effort it took to even make it to this point. My intention, and indeed my rhetorical premise wasn’t situated on “blaming rich people” for my problems or whining, but more to illustrate that the point made in the original post has some real-life validity and that sometimes these “courageous” acts of spiritual spontaneity are much less practical when you don’t have the money to just fix it should it not pan out, and from the perspective of people who don’t have that money, it seems less “courageous” than it does whimsical and that when people who have that kind of money go around telling others to just take these leaps of faith, it comes off less inspirational/motivational and more naive. If my anecdote offended your sensibilities, that’s on you not me.