Everything must go

On pathfinding through joyful destruction

Every few years, like clockwork, I get the cheerful urge to completely fuck up my life. There’s no inciting incident nor scandal nor screaming match. It starts as a low hum, like a fluorescent bulb on the fritz, and soon becomes a full-body itch originating just behind my ribs. My attention drifts. My life starts to feel like an increasingly elaborate bit. Eventually, it’s time to burn the house down.

“Disaster Girl”, Dave Roth

The first time I noticed this feeling I was living in Houston and quietly obsessed with a man who may actually become the first astronaut on Mars. I had a solid friend group, a potential MD Anderson spinout, and a backyard for my dog. Then I got a call from the founders of a five-person robotics startup in Brooklyn. The CEO said, in his characteristically disarming and straightforward way, “Are you gonna work at Opentrons or what?” My “yes” was immediate and reflexive. I hung up the phone. I turned to my friend and said, “I guess I’m moving to New York? To build… robots?” It was news to both of us. I traded a stable-ish life for a chaotic startup and an impossibly high cost of living in what felt like an instant.

In the last decade this pattern has repeated enough times that my grandmother now calls me an “anywhere-type person rather than a somewhere-type person.” I’ve changed cities as casually as some people upgrade their phones and dispatched a handful of budding careers with only slightly more ceremony than it takes to skip a song in a playlist. Relationships that were perfect on paper got cut because the word settled makes my stomach turn. And I’m not the only one! There are enough of us, particularly in tech, that we have our own grab bag of TikTok-therapist-industrial-complex diagnoses: “broken attention span”, “archetypal avoidant personality,” “trauma response,” “emotionally unstable childhood,” etc.

Fine. Let’s self-reflect! Let’s say we all totally buy the nurture-over-nature narrative that something not-us has made us this way, be it social-media-fueled dopamine addiction or parental fuck-ups. May we also consider that this is not, in fact, only a problem to be solved? Pop psychology usually sets off my bullshit detector, but I read (and mostly liked) Existential Kink in which Carolyn Elliot suggests that maybe you keep doing the supposedly Bad Thing because you secretly enjoy it. Maybe it’s a thrill! Maybe you’re getting off on the precise moment you destroy the life you’d only just begun to recognize. Maybe it’s actually the source of your power and if you learn to wield it skillfully you’ll be unstoppable.

The more this cycle happens in my life the more that frame holds up. Responding positively to that low-grade staticky feeling has a near-perfect track record of instigating an intense period of oh fuck oh no followed by a lot of spectacular, beyond-all-sensible-expectations outcomes. The transition almost always includes a six-month crashout into loneliness, disorientation, and existential angst. But it’s also joyful and thrilling, and it ultimately carves out the exact space I need for every strange and wonderful thing that follows.

Last fall I began to feel that it was once again time to torch certain parts of my life. In an effort to do what I assumed was Something More Mature This Time, I ignored it. The resistance made me burn out hard, and that burnout ignited a flame that reduced practically every part of my life to ash anyway. To give myself credit, I thought maybe there’s a better way to respond to internal dissonance than setting fire to your LinkedIN bio every three years. Or maybe I was finally developing the natural desire for more consistency and stability that tends to emerge as we get older and wiser. But as it turns out, none of what I was clinging to was actually “me”. It was mostly habitual, and holding on for too long meant more collateral damage in the end. The destruction will happen either way.

In that vein, one of my favorite pieces of writing is Walter Benjamin’s “The Destructive Character”. The first line of the second paragraph gets right to the essence:

“The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room.”

Not make peace / make do / make partner / make things people want. Just, make room. This character is the clearest description I have found yet of that signal I keep trying to describe. It’s like my soul starts looking for an exit between my ribs at the precise moment the path ahead starts to feel overdetermined because I have faith that I’ll find some really cool uncharted territory in the clearing away:

“No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble – not for the sake of rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.”

It has taken me years to understand that what looks like instability and carelessness on the surface might actually be high-fidelity alignment with internal change. The world is full of half-dead systems coasting on inertia and sunk costs. Some are governments. Many are corporations. A few are marriages. Most are just outdated stories we keep telling ourselves about who we are, what we’re here for, and what we’re allowed to want. We give out moral trophies for endurance, but what if discernment is the better skill?

Developing that skill means learning to notice the shift when it starts, and responding proportionally. Here are a handful of ways I’ve learned to do that:

• Acknowledge, don’t resist. “I think I might be in pre-burnout arson mode” is a funny / helpful sentence to say out loud. Try it out, notice what comes up, observe, rinse, repeat.

• Examine your habits. Just because it’s familiar doesn’t mean it’s right! Ask yourself: “Do I want this? Is it aligned?”

• Try to start small. I’m all for total chaos, but maybe exit the group chat. Cancel the newsletter (NOT mine! Someone else’s). Get some bangs. Destruction doesn’t have to be total to be clarifying. Maybe you just need space. Make a little room for yourself before you do anything insane.

Every time I do this, it calls in something that’s more honest and gets me back into my flow. If you feel the same way, maybe that’s your cue to strike the match.

I recommend doing it cheerfully.