In or near your area may be your problem. You have friends and family there, you know a lot of the stuff around. You can just get back into your comfort zone whenever you want to.
Travel, overseas. You’re a student, now’s the time when you have few responsibilities, presumably no girlfriend / boyfriend and you happen to have a lot of cash. Perfect.
Here’re the steps:
Set aside some time, maybe a few months over uni holidays
Think of somewhere you’ve always wanted to go, or a few places
Buy a ticket to a major city near that place.
Buy a backpack and pack very light
Get on that plane, and find the nearest youth hostel in your destination.
Making friends, getting drunk, having new experiences - that will come automatically. You’ll be surprised at how many people you meet, including hot people of the opposite sex. You won’t be travelling on your own for long - I guarantee you’ll be travelling with other people within a few days.
If it sounds scary and not at all like you, that’s the point.
Pshaw to everyone advising Diamond to stay at home. I’m going to reiterate myself, even sven and Atticus, and be more didactic: go to South-East Asia or China. A ticket there shouldn’t cost you more than $500, and you can get a round-trip for way less than a grand. You can get by on ten bucks a day, and really push the boat out on twenty. That means you can fly there, spend a month there, and come back, for less than $2K. If you stay in the right places you’ll make friends on your first day there, and if not, in a couple of days. You will never regret it.
I’ve got some decent recommendations for South-East Asia, especially Indonesia. Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia - it’s all good, incredibly cheap, great food, terrific beaches, a few jungles and temples and so on. The perfect backpacker destination…
Diamond, have you considered taking up some volunteerwork in your own city? Helping out with, for instance the Salvation Army feeding the homeless will cost you nothing but a little time, and it will be very interesting.
One more thing: I have done lots of interesting daring things, and as a consequence, I have lots of stories to tell.
However, I have just as many memories of (minor) stupidities and social faux-pas, committed while doing so, that still make me cringe internally everytime I think about them. That’s the price for doing things outside my comfort zone. YMMV.
One more thing. You may wonder what you have to offer to " interesting people" so they’d be willing to hang with you. Well, don’t worry about it. Showing interst in them and their stories us usually more then enough. Saying you are willing to participate in any idea they have next (if you’re comfortable with it) is even better.
This doesn’t really say “Think for yourself” or “Don’t be afraid of trying new things” to me. I guess the rural upbringing, never-once-tried-smoking or-drinking crowd has a different definition of “making up your mind for yourself” than me. Unsurprised am I. Aren’t differences a wonderful thing!
Experience for experience’s sake is stupid. Living your life where you have to try everything once just because is self-defeating.
Experience for the sake of expanding your horizons or because it doesn’t matter and what-the-hay are separate items from experience for experience’s sake. Dropping your brain off the cliff and getting the experiences you need to get in with a bunch of people who don’t give two shits about you is something to caution against. Don’t throw away your brain, use it, decide for yourself what is and isn’t reasonable things to do.
And if deep-down you decide that the person you want to be is a pot-smoking mathematician college-professor, go for it–most of this board is them, and they’re all cool people. Just don’t put a joint to your mouth because hey, you have to try everything at least once. You aren’t gaining anything–you’re just losing a little bit of your ability to decide for yourself.
But any time you are doing something in order to follow some law, because you were told to, begged to, or believe you should–but you haven’t consciously done the plusses vs. minusses in your head you are being stupid. There are no stupid things to try in life, just ones you did without thinking about.
All of which was too long to write and really not my central point, and so summarised into a simple cautionary warning to not fall into a cycle of doing things for no reason.
“Cautionary Warning” by John Sykes is, by the way, a kick-ass song.
I apologize for hitting the wrong button and posting a barely composed message! (Can the mods please delete?)
As I was saying, sorry for the level of snark in my posty #47. It was uncalled for. I realized a bit later that I should have said “I don’t think I’m understanding your point. Can you clarify?” Thank you for responding as if I had phrased in this manner.
I like what you say in post 48 a lot. It approximates my philosophy as well, although I’m perhaps a bit less conservative than you, but I’m not going to argue over degrees. Excellent post.
When I started college, I had had a pretty rough and tumble life. My family is far from normal and there were a lot of bad times, but I still felt like I never lived and never experienced any of the good stuff. Two places where I met a lot of characters, some that I’d come to love and some that I’d come to loath, was at the college gaming club and the local goth club. I’m a geek, I’ll admit it, but geekdom includes a lot of different people with a lot of different experiences and they are a pretty welcoming bunch. They mostly take you as you are. I met my SO there and had times I’ll never forget. There are times we were at Denny’s at two in the morning that are etched into my mind. Goth clubbing is fun. The people aren’t quite as accepting, but good God, it is theater of the living. And if you’re cool with the them, they’ll be cool with you.
I have no doubt that I’ve lived more in the past three years than in the seventeen before. And don’t worry about how old you are or life passing you by, just jump in and live.
There is no way to live a wilder, more interesting life without leaving your comfort zone. There is no magic bullet book you can read or thing you will buy that will make your life any different than it is now. There is no regime or routine that will make you have more exciting friends.
Either your going to be able to get off the computer, get dressed up, and spent a few bucks at the local dance club (where you may have the time of your life or you may end up bored and ennui-filled as you sip overpriced drinks and wish you were back at home) or you won’t. When your friends call asking you to go someplace, you can either choose the comfort of home, or you can just say “yes” and go out with them. When your bored and have nothing to do, you can either do the same thing as always or you can go out to a coffee shop or poetry reading or just for a walk in a busy part of town.
Most of my crazy times have involved my “say yes to all invitations” policy- which means I’m often sleepy at work, in trouble with my boyfriend, broke or stuck someplace I hate with no ride home. Living an interesting life is always going to involve risk and a loss of personal comfort. And it’s always going to require some effort.
My only other advice is to ride the bus instead of driving. The fullness of life resides on the bus.
Well, I’m not going to suggest you stay inside for hours on end as a way of gaining experience, but if you’d like to gain a taste in the arts and entertainments I reccomend hitting up the public library. These days your local library probably has a better selection of movies than your local Blockbuster and a nice collection of CDs as well. And if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you can always order from another library for free. I consider myself a movie buff, and rarely pay for a damn thing. Og bless the Orange County Library. Sure, they don’t have anything by Hemingway, Steinbeck, Douglas Adams, Joseph Heller, Faulkner, Chandler, Poe, or any classic author for that matter, but damnit if they don’t have an amazing stock of movies.
Aslo, there’s a lot of crap out there, so if you do take my advice, do start a thread in Cafe Society asking for reccomendations for the film novice
Actually it can be, if you’re not afraid to be by yourself. Almost by definition it takes you out of your comfort zone, because even the shyest person among us probably isn’t going to just stay in the hotel while traveling. It worked for me in that after I came home from my first trip to SF, where I had gone out solo to hear live music in North Beach, I realize I could go out solo in LA too. If I wanted to go hear blues at Harvelles I didn’t have to depend on my perennially broke friend who’d be sure to say he couldn’t afford it and could we just go to the pub again, instead. I could just go. I’ve always been really shy, but once I started doing that, I did start to meet some people.
I agree. In my mind, traveling alone is the best way to travel. Every person you take along on a trip with you is going to consume about 20% of your energy- be it discussing what to see, having money differences, not agreeing on a standard of comfort, etc. When you travel alone, you can truly do what you want- you can skip the Louvre if you secretly hate museums, you can eat lunch twice because you couldn’t decide on a restaurant, you can stay in a boring town for three extra days because you love the smell of the air, and you can take a two-day train ride out to see some ridiculous thing nobody else would ever bother to see. And you can actually get a chance to interact with the people from the place you are at. People will invite you to their homes, they will share their meals with you, and you will experience things in a way you never could if you were just hanging out jabbering in English with your buddy.
As for companionship, there is no backwards ass part of the world that doesn’t have a <$5.00 hostel brimming with a motley but interesting assortment of wanderers. It’s common to hook up as travel partners- be it for lunch down the street or a month of hard-core travel. When your plans differ or you start to get one each other’s nerves, you simply part ways.
Regarding the cash- you can go on a trip that your grandkids will talk about for the cost of getting a mini instead of a powerbook. You can have a life-changing experience for the cost of not getting a few of the options next time you buy a car. Heck, canceling cable for a year can fund something you will remember forever and ever. If you are willing to travel cheaply (which IMHO provides the best experience) there is no reason why 2k can’t get you a month in the first world and three in the third. Things go away, but the experiences that travel brings will go with you to your grave. As an added bonus “The time I got stopped by camel-riding bandits in the desert” stories are always a big hit at job interviews.
Seriously. When I finished grad school, I realized how quickly life was flying by and that if I wanted to really “live” I had to get started. So I thought about all the things I wanted to do/try and I wrote them down. It makes all the difference.
First, it keeps you focused and gives you motivation to actually do them so you can cross them off your list instead of just dreaming about them. Then if you put it up somewhere that other people can see it can be a conversation starter. And sometimes the people who see the list have ideas of where to do those things. Someone saw my list on my refrigerator and said “Oh, you want to learn how to kayak? There’s an adult intro to kayaking camp I know about.” So I signed up, did it, and crossed one more thing off my list.
It also forces you to really think about what you want to do. It’s one thing to say “I want to experience things.” It’s another to sit down and force yourself to define WHAT things you want to experience. My list included rollerblading, learning to kayak, learning to quilt and so on. Once you have the list it’s a lot easier to find place to do those things. And through those classes or events, you do meet other people with similar interests and have an easy way to start conversations - you just talk about what you’re doing.
Diamonds, are you still around? What do you think of the ideas, especially the travelling ones? I can’t recommend travel highly enough, especially going on your own as Even Sven suggests.
