Who's not brave, will regret! Or maybe not
A colleague handed in his notice to travel the world, in the middle of all this, and I cannot find the argument against it
A colleague resigned last week to travel around the world. No new job. No plan beyond the first few countries.
The timing looks absurd. Everyone is tense about AI, about what the work turns into, about whether the ladder still has the rungs it had two years ago. People are reading layoff announcements like weather reports. And he booked a flight.
My first reaction was that this is reckless. My second reaction, which took longer and is the one I believe, is that I cannot name the safer option.
Staying is also a bet. It just does not feel like one, because it is the bet everybody else is making and it comes with a salary while you wait for the result. Nobody staying has information about next year that he does not have. We are all guessing, and some of us are guessing from a desk.
There is no safe timing to wait for. There is only the version of waiting that pays you while you do it.
There is a saying I grew up around, roughly: who is not brave will regret it. I have always liked it and I have never fully believed it, because regret needs something to compare against, and the comparison does not exist.
If he goes, he will not know what the year at the desk would have been. If he stays, he will not know what the year on the road would have been. The alternative is always imaginary, and imaginary lives are either flawless or catastrophic depending on what mood you are in when you summon them. That is not evidence. That is weather.
So: who is not brave will regret it. Or maybe not. Both sentences survive contact with reality equally well.
Which brings me to the cow.
Betrachte die Herde, die an dir vorüberweidet: sie weiß nicht, was Gestern, was Heute ist, springt umher, frißt, ruht, verdaut, springt wieder, und so vom Morgen bis zur Nacht und von Tage zu Tage, kurz angebunden mit ihrer Lust und Unlust, nämlich an den Pflock des Augenblicks, und deshalb weder schwermütig noch überdrüssig.
Consider the herd grazing past you: it does not know what yesterday is, or today. It jumps around, eats, rests, digests, jumps again, from morning until night and from day to day, tethered on a short rope to its likes and dislikes; tethered, that is, to the stake of the present moment, and therefore neither melancholy nor weary.
Nietzsche, 1874, in the essay on history and life. The animal cannot remember, so it cannot resent. It cannot anticipate, so it cannot dread. Neither melancholy nor weary is an astonishing thing to be, and it is not available to us.
And the trade is fair, mostly. The same memory that makes us miserable is the reason anybody has ever built anything that outlived them. I would not hand it back.
But I notice how much of what I carry is just tether length. Not the thing itself, whatever the thing is this year. The version of it I keep running in the background, which charges real hours for a future it cannot actually see.