The Bloom Briefing Goes to Europe

A subtle shift of emphasis to write more about life and meaning

Apr 11, 2022

In recent years, the YOLO (You Only Live Once) Millennial has become a trope. It’s hard to find a week when the BBC doesn’t have an article on its website about someone quitting their London-based banking job to move to Costa Rica, Morocco, or Thailand to take time off or be a digital nomad. The New York Times ran a feature-length story about the phenomenon last year.

The underlying message of such pieces is generally the trading of money and prestige for time and experience. The protagonists of such stories decide that they would rather have the time to do the things they want to do than the recognition and compensation that stems from high-paying jobs in one of the world’s global metropolises.

Now I’m a YOLO Millennial.

Last month, I left my job of 8 years. A week later, my partner did too. For the last 11 months, we’ve been planning an ~8-month journey. As I’ve shared this news – first with a few close friends and then subsequently with a much wider groups of colleagues and acquaintances – I’ve gotten a lot of encouragement.

I’ve gotten fewer questions (though definitely some!) about the decision. Many of the reactions I’ve gotten have amounted to, “oh, that’s amazing; I’d love to do that.” Despite existing in the exact social milieu about which so many articles have been written (young white-collar professionals), I don’t know anyone else doing this. Many of my friends and colleagues have left their jobs recently (or have plans to shortly), but they have mostly opted for other jobs or graduate school.

So what animated our decision to take a break, to travel, to have no next thing lined up? Why are we doing this? Isn’t it risky? How will it impact what the Bloom Briefing will be about? I’ll answer those questions here as a sort of mission statement for the writing to come over the following months.

Why quit my job to travel?

The principal animating force for my decision to quit my job and travel is a belief in the finitude of life. I find notions of heaven and hell unpersuasive. The concept of reincarnation is slightly more aligned with how I understand the world but not in a way that obviates the finitude of life. This leaves simply a belief that my existence is entirely contained within the endpoints of my birth and death.

A secondary premise follows. If life is finite and the period of life is a complete accounting of my existence, I ought to get the most out of it. This thought, however, elicits the question of what exactly it would mean to “get the most out of life.”

Here, I find the thinking of the pluralists helpful (even if at first it digs the intellectual hole to come out of a bit deeper). Pluralists like Isaiah Berlin observe that there are many forms of the good. They are often in conflict with each other. And they are incommensurable (i.e., unable to even be evaluated against one another). This means that when we choose between them, we sacrifice something.

A helpful illustration of this could be posed by the very trade-off I have just made. Is it better to work a good-paying job which doesn’t do any harm in the world and which allows for an exceedingly comfortable lifestyle? Or is it better to stop working and pursue things I wish to pursue (like thinking and writing and experiencing new cultures)? There’s not a right answer! But I have to choose. And when I choose one or the other of these things, the other is sacrificed.

Choice – and the experience of choosing – is at the heart of the human experience in contemporary (liberal) society. We make 10s, 100s, 1000s of decisions every day. Most are inconsequential (or purely aesthetic): Do I wear the green shirt or the blue shirt? Others influence the very nature of our lives: Where should I live? Whom should I befriend?

So I had to make a big choice: keep doing a job with a comfortable lifestyle (or find an equivalent job) OR quit my job to do something different. The finitude of life pushed me to take the seemingly riskier option.

Age, here, also plays a role. I am still relatively youthful – youthful enough at least to do lots of walking and some big day-hikes. I am not responsible for supporting anyone else financially. Those things may not always be the case. Waiting until retirement to do some of these things actually feels riskier if doing a number of the things I will do on this trip is very important. I may die. I may become physically incapable of doing some things. I may have responsibilities that prevent me from doing these things.

What, exactly, am I going to go do?

My partner and I are spending April-November (inclusive) traveling. This travel is based around a series of long stays (roughly one month in length) with some shorter more touristic travel in between. For most of April, I’m in Vienna. Then we’ll spend some time in the Italian countryside. Then Western Ireland, Northern Wales, the north coast of Spain, and Sevilla.

The purpose of these longer stays is to get to know a place a bit better than would otherwise have been possible if visiting in the typical high-speed tourist fashion. What is it like to become a regular at a Viennese café, an Irish pub, a Sevillian tapas bar? That slower pace of travel also affords me time to read and write. I want to think a bit more about what we’re all doing on this small blueish orb and how we might live a bit better.

Identifying the themes of future writing in advance is always a bit challenging, but I think I’ve settled on four thematic areas.

What to believe. It matters not to me whether you believe in heaven and hell or the finitude of life. But if a belief in one or the other of those realities colors your choices, then it matters a great deal. If you treat service staff with contempt because you believe you are predestined for salvation and they aren’t, you’re a bad person, not because of what you believe, but because of how your belief colors your choices. How do we prepare ourselves for action and choice by holding the right ideas and attitudes in our head?
How to choose. Choice is also the bedrock of moral judgment. We judge people for things they choose. We shouldn’t (and usually don’t) judge people for circumstances not of their choosing. The answer to the question, “am I a good person,” is tied up in the choices I have made. How do we make better choices, where better means both “higher utility-bearing” and “more virtuous”?
How to find joy and wonder. Life transcends mere biological processes (respiration; digestion; excretion) when we experience joy and wonder. Camaraderie, beauty, awe, love. Our boundless capacity to find these and other things that transcend the merely functional is what brings meaning and significance to our lives. How do we appreciate and savor that which is most consequential for our finite lives?
How to better structure society. Our ability to hold the right ideas to make better choices and find wonder and joy is bound up in the structure of society. Destitution; an oppressive government; a homogenous culture; a hegemonic religion. All (and more) can be barriers to our ability to thrive that come from well outside of the individual’s control. How should we seek to change the institutions of society (government, religion, work, etc.) so that they help facilitate fulfillment?

How will the Bloom Briefing be different now?

For the coming year, the Bloom Briefing will focus on these questions of how to be in the world. This is not a new kind of I have written on such questions many times before. Some examples:

For those of you long-familiar with the Bloom Briefing, the change here won’t be extensive. There will, however, be less explicit writing about American politics. There will still be some! Politics does impact these questions of how to be in the world a great deal (see the fourth bullet in the previous section). Current events often provide useful familiar examples to illustrate important points about choice and the structure of society.

I will also incorporate elements of our travels into my writing. While this won’t be a travel blog, our experience at points of interest should provide excellent material for contemplating these challenging questions. If you’re interested in the travel updates and our reflections on our travels, my partner and I are co-authoring those on a separate Substack called The Grand Adventure.