I usually just roll my eyes at stuff like this, despite being dangerously close to the stereotype (however, most of my family is working class, so I actually worked with my hands before becoming a developer), but this line made me angry:
> Sometimes, during those months of toil, our anger burned so intensely that we thought the boards we threw into the woods might never land.
To paraphrase Gandalf, next time throw yourself into the woods and save us all a deal of trouble.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but Wherever you go, there you are. Few people get the Eat, Pray, Love ending. Usually you come back finding that you shouldn’t have had to leave in the first place. If you feel like chucking it in, live an austere life and save up first. That lowers your cost of living, and focuses you. If you can’t take that, then you won’t handle the next phase. If you can handle that, you may find you don’t even need to go. Evaluate before following through on the rest of your plan out of some sense of completionism.
I lived out of two bags the first time and a car the second. I learned a lot about myself and the world. I had a good amount saved up, but I've met people who've done similar trips and haven't. I got the idea from a guy I met in a hostel who saved up $10k in a year from his job waiting tables, and traveled for a year off of it. My best friend lived in Germany for years off of <500 euro a month teaching English.
It's not an easy life for sure. Eventually that server went back to work at his restaurant, my friend teaching English returned to Ohio and I got a job in software engineering. I still wouldn't trade the experience for anything.
Did that for a while in my early 20s. Spent a few months in Asia with just a 35L backpack of clothes on my back and the odd book. This was before wifi and smartphones. Happiest time of my life.
Why did that make you angry? Presumably it's private land and they have a vested interest in cleaning it up (especially before sale). Isn't it just talking about the highs and lows of a major challenge?
> Three weeks later, we found a quarter-acre of raw land near Pat’s tiny off-grid in the Cascades. It was a sloping meadow of ferns a short walk from the Skykomish River, festooned with mature Douglas fir, big leaf maple, and cedar.
A quarter acre isn't big enough to throw for distance. But the fact that he describes the land as a fern meadow (sic) pretty much sinks it. He was tossing onto the neighbor's land.
You could be right about them cleaning up, but the overlap between "throws tantrums" and "good forest steward" is far from perfect. I bet there's still bits of wood out there, next to broken plants.
I think you have to account for the fact that this is a creative writer and they exaggerated from the headline onwards (everything went wrong, etc). There's every chance he threw one piece of wood. His description and photos show that what he could describe as "woods" are right beside the house.
A more positive form a comment like this could take is to explain what relevant information the article included past the break. Then we'd all learn something, or at least those of us who didn't read the whole article would.
> Sometimes, during those months of toil, our anger burned so intensely that we thought the boards we threw into the woods might never land.
To paraphrase Gandalf, next time throw yourself into the woods and save us all a deal of trouble.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but Wherever you go, there you are. Few people get the Eat, Pray, Love ending. Usually you come back finding that you shouldn’t have had to leave in the first place. If you feel like chucking it in, live an austere life and save up first. That lowers your cost of living, and focuses you. If you can’t take that, then you won’t handle the next phase. If you can handle that, you may find you don’t even need to go. Evaluate before following through on the rest of your plan out of some sense of completionism.