A guide to blowing up your life

It's been 3+ years of experimenting on my own life. Here's what I've learned.

Hi, I’m Lane.

In 2022, I blew up my life. I sold everything I owned and went leaseless to travel the world full-time. Since then, I’ve taken an experimental approach to every area of my life: Career, community, creativity, dating, and more. Most recently, I left my nine-to-five job for a career sabbatical to focus on writing.

Earlier this year, I spoke at Creative Mornings on the theme of Journeys about my unconventional lifestyle and the path I took to get there through a series of lifestyle experiments. My life now looks radically different than it did three years ago. Back then, I don’t think I could have imagined my current reality. All I knew was that something had to change.

I originally gave this talk in January, but September always feels like the start of a new year too, doesn’t it? Crisp fall air, fresh notebooks, that intoxicating “back-to-school” feeling. Perfect time for a blank slate. Blow up your life with me. 😈

Love,

Lane 💋

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You’re all familiar with the default path. It’s the conventional life blueprint: college, career, a classic nine-to-five job, settling down in one city, marriage, 2.5 children, etc.

For most of my life, I followed the default path perfectly. Not to brag, but I did exactly what I was told. I went to school, got good grades, married young, and secured a 9-to-5. I bought a house, and I was thinking about children. If I had been honest with myself back then, I would have admitted that life didn’t quite fit. I channeled all my energy toward my career and domestic routines, constantly trying to tamp down the question: “Is this it?”

All the things I would have said I valued—a rich creative practice, deep community, novelty, exploration, adventure—were completely absent from my life. But this was the default path. This was what success looked like. And I was nothing if not a gold-star student.

The truth is: I probably could have continued that way forever, if not for the personal crisis.

IN DEFENSE OF THE PERSONAL CRISIS

Most of the time, moving off the default path requires a breaking point. Enter: The personal crisis! For me, it took the form of divorce and religious deconstruction, which catapulted me off the default path and how I thought my life was supposed to look. It required me to take inventory of my life. It forced me to ask: What do I really want?

One of my mentors suggested I fill out a Wheel of Life. Here’s a downloadable version, or you can sketch your own. The instructions were to shade each section of the pie based on how fulfilled I currently felt in that area of my life. When I stepped back from my wheel, I was appalled to see the shape it made.

Work and Finances were mostly filled in, which made sense, as that’s where I’d devoted all of my energy and the last decade of my life. Creativity was barely shaded. Connection, Home, and Fun & Adventure were almost blank. I sat there for a few long minutes, staring at it. Seeing my priorities on paper like that flipped a switch in me. Is this it?

Recently, without thinking much about it, I entered my information into the SSA’s Life Expectancy Calculator. I highly recommend this if you’d like a wakeup call.

According to their calculations, I have about 52 years left to live. That’s if I’m lucky. It made me think of one of my favorite books, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by

Oliver Burkeman

, so titled because 4,000 weeks is the length of the average human life. He writes:

“Mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of living solely for the future. One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.”

When I was still on the default path, I assumed there was some cosmic teacher who would be ready with a gold star if I executed the path perfectly. I’m here to gently remind you (and myself): This isn’t a dress rehearsal. This is the big performance. There’s no prize for dragging yourself dutifully through the motions. There is no reward at the end for hitting all the milestones. This is it.

When I thought about radically changing my life, of course, I was terrified. I was worried about money, stability, and uncertainty. I was worried I would make a mistake or a bad decision. I could fail. (Or worse, be seen trying.) I could be wrong about what I wanted for myself. People would circle around me, gleefully singing “I told you so!” Maybe they really do know better? And anyway, who am I to reimagine my life?

Around that time, I came across this quote from Diane Ackerman:

“I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.”

I realized I was much more scared of wasting my life pursuing external markers of success than I was of the alternative: inventing my own.

Yes, the unknown path is scary. But was it scarier than the known path, which kept taking me where I didn’t want to go?

RUNNING THE EXPERIMENTS

I would no longer tolerate a life that felt too small, too narrow, too claustrophobic. I was ready to veer off the default path and boldly go—where? What did I want? When you go an entire lifetime following a clear, paved default path, it’s not as simple as just veering off to your new future. What I needed was some data.

Instead of making any big decisions, I decided to run some experiments. I called this “prototyping my life.” I would methodically uncover what a less conventional and more creative way of living might look like for me. To navigate these lifestyle experiments, I set some parameters to guide me.

Experiment guidelines

• Prioritize reversible decisions. Most experiments aren’t permanent. The worst-case scenario? I go home or make a different choice. Everything is a prototype. Every decision is a pilot, not a commitment.

• The goal isn’t to not fail. It’s to grow. Success wasn’t about avoiding mistakes; it was about testing, learning, and evolving. Failure would be staying stuck. Success looks like failing, learning, and iterating from there.

• Choose new discomfort. When in doubt, choose the option that feels unconventional, surprising, or slightly uncomfortable. Growth lives there.

• Exploration over expectation. The goal wasn’t perfection or even certainty—it was discovery. Instead of aiming for a specific outcome, I let curiosity lead the way. Try it and see what happens. Take action first, analyze later.

When I looked at my own Wheel of Life, I noticed the biggest area of discontent was “Home.” So I decided to start there. I dusted off my scientific method approach and started brainstorming.

1. Observation: Where do you feel stuck? Who do you admire? Who are you secretly jealous of?

I felt stuck and stagnant. At that point, I’d been in Nashville for 10 years. I’d been living in the Southeast for my entire life. I was still living in the house I’d bought with my ex-spouse. My routines felt empty and uninspired. I felt isolated.

I’d always secretly wanted to live abroad. I found myself jealous of people who could move from place to place and live out of suitcase. Radical minimalism had always appealed very deeply to me (I have the YouTube search history to prove it).

2. Hypothesis: What is a lifestyle or change that might move you in that direction? What would this look like if I liked it?

Sell everything, go leaseless, and move abroad.

This sounded completely unrealistic. Borderline unhinged. I had always assumed I wasn’t the kind of person who did that. But in this new life, throwing out the old blueprint, why not? I could be whoever I wanted to be. Or at least I could test it out.

That’s where the experimentation mindset came in.

3. Experiment: How could I test it out in small, reversible ways? Remember, this isn’t a permanent decision. It’s a prototype.

Baby steps: I could put my stuff in storage (I could always go get it). I could rent out my house (I could always come back). I could pack my life into a single suitcase (I could always get things I needed there). I could spend a few months in Europe for the summer (I could always come back if I didn’t like it).

4. Learn, adjust, repeat.

And that’s exactly what I did. I bought a one-way ticket to Europe and spent the several months traveling around Europe while working: I lived in Italy, Portugal, France, Switzerland, and Croatia. I traveled solo, lived with strangers, and met up with friends. I listened to my desires, experimented, and took the next step based on that feedback loop, and it opened the door to a life I couldn’t have predicted.

WHAT I LEARNED (+ NEXT STEPS)

Of course, none of the things I was so afraid of came true. I did not want to reverse any of my decisions. In fact, I wanted to do more. I took those learnings and doubled down.

Over the next three years, I kept testing, tweaking, and evaluating: I got rid of my storage unit and sold all my belongings. The more I removed from my life, the fuller it felt. Since I started traveling full-time, I’ve lived in over 50 places across the U.S. and Europe. Constant travel showed me that community isn’t something you find, it’s something you build. Getting out of my rut and routines inspired me, and I started writing again. Since then, I’ve been published, landed a literary agent, started work on my first book, and embarked on my creative sabbatical. I learned to reject old beliefs, retired default societal scripts, and “shoulds” about how my life should look.

Turns out, I didn’t need to know the destination. I listened to my desires, I experimented, and I went where they led me. Every step of the way, I followed that feeling of aliveness. It did not lead me astray.

Getting off the default path gave me the space I needed to imagine a new kind of life, one that reflected my true values and desires, even if it looked very different than what I’d once imagined. The path I wanted didn’t exist. I had to invent it.

Taking a curious, experimental, playful approach to my own life, rather than following the rigid, linear path I always thought I was supposed to, expanded and widened my world. My life now looks nothing like I imagined it would. It looks unlike the lives of most people I know. But it fits me in a way the old one never did, which feels pretty remarkable.

Through these experiments, I learned I have the power to change my life. This might sound obvious, but it wasn’t to me—at least not for the first 30 years of my life. The world is scary right now. To think expansively in a world that increasingly wants to limit our options is a radical act, especially for queer people, women, and other marginalized folks.

Draw your own Wheel of Life. What’s one area where you’re stuck? What would this look like if you liked it? What’s one area where you could make a small change? Your path will look completely different from mine, and it should.

I’ll leave you with this quote from the poet David Whyte:

“How do you know that you’re on your own path? Because it disappears. How do you know you’re doing something truly radical? Because you don’t know the next step.” •

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Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please give it a heart or restack: it gives me the nudge to keep creating and helps my work reach more people.

I’d love to hear from you: What questions do you have for me about the experience? What experiment could you run this month to blow up your own life? I would love to hear about it. Let me know in the comments, send me a DM, or come find me on Instagram. 💋