I'm 42 and I can tell you from experience that unless someone offered to pay your rent while you were gone, calls to adventure ain't all they're cracked up to be...
You're gonna come home to all the other Hobbits auctioning off all your shit
But the true adventure begins when you get back, rich with cultural experience and travel! Because that's when you realise you don't have any money left, you got evicted from your flat, you have 1000s of dollars in unpaid bills and you've got nowhere to go.
What a time to be alive!
The trick is to take out a ton of loans and buy a bunch of adventure stuff on credit cards before you leave then just never come back
I called someone to adventure once and offered to pay his rent for the month we would be gone, sounds like a good deal, right? Well he flaked out on me.
The harsh reality is that I (and I'm CERTAIN the collective "we") have received dozens of calls to adventure, and we've just rejected them for the relative comforts of the rat race.
Coming to terms with the fact that I'll never be a Gundam pilot has been a struggle to be honest.
Time to start building it in your garage.
I can't afford a garage :(
Same. Always love hearing these from the ground up stories where people become billionaires from nothing (except their garage and 1M+ cash injections)
Have you watched a Gundam show? It's probably for the best that you'll never pilot one.
Don't give up hope! Both Bilbo and Frodo were called to adventure by Gandalf at 50, and Bilbo left the shire for more adventure at 111.
nothing wrong with being an unnamed background character.
The novel Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu is a neat story about a self-described "generic Asian man" who is stuck in the "background Oriental male" role while aspiring to be the "kung fu guy"
Yes. I do have that specific stone tablet you need to continue your journey.
But if you want me to give it to you, you're going to have to make a whole lot of grilled cheese sandwiches for me.
Fancy ones.
Shropshire Blue. It's like a strong cheddar with blue cheese veins. I've only seen it at top cheese shops, but it's worth searching out
Fanciest grilled cheese I've ever had: Cheddar, feta, and a skosh of gruyere with a few fresh basil leaves.
If anyone else feels bummed out by this, there are a lot of calls to adventure you can answer at any time. 75% of fire departments in the United States are volunteer. If you’re in half decent physical shape, get out there. Disaster relief organizations like the Red Cross are good too. Lots of jobs to do where you can be sent to disaster zones for 1 and 2 week rotations, but also local disaster response, like showing up to house fires to help families find temporary housing.
This but for real
This is what finally growing up feels like and it's shit
One of my all time favorite fantasy books is 'Glory Road' by Robert A. Heinlein.
The hero sees a classified ad in the back of the newspaper. "Are You A Coward?"
You gotta make your own. Pack some stuff, ride your bike and punch some meanies on the way.
I was once told by a friend to be positive and that I'm the hero of my own adventure (I am not lonely at that time by the way, I was moving out of my hometown, which is funny enough since I realised after that people seem to think it's weird if you move out of town for any reasons aside from job or college opportunities). Anyway, I was indeed going on adventure by moving out of town but I never thought of myself as hero before or after. I don't like the expression because it sounds like stoking and inflating the ego. I have a friend who seems to have that mindset when we were younger, but when our 20s came, he fell into depression for not attaining his dreams and desires.
I think a lot of us were raised to hope and to be like a superhero making big changes to the world. Personally, I see myself as more like a traveller or soldier; experiencing and absorbing the world without necessarily trying so hard to shape the world to our own liking, and also facing challenges and adversities gracefully. Live your life to the fullest as you wish, but what I'm trying to say is be humble enough you're only human--not a god-- and know when to fight battles.
Edit: added more info
The last YA novel I read was Lucky Wander Boy. The main character was 40 something. Although his call to adventure was more akin to mental illness... 🤔
So a couple more years and I might be the protagonist. I gotta prepare.
You could always be the star of another movie with a 40 year old protagonist. The 40 Year Old Virgin
There are many calls to adventure, but we often don't heed them because it means discomfort and risk - sometimes to the degree that your long-term survival is jeopardized with few means to mitigate that (valid), other times just because sitting on the couch seems nicer (more often than not, an excuse - but a choice you're certainly allowed to make).
If your ability to survive by the trial's end isn't compromised, I think everyone should choose at least one adventure for themselves, even if it's something that makes you feel a little like Don Quixote. It at least gives you something to talk about.
Gandalf invited Bilbo Baggins on an "adventure" when he was 50, so not everything is lost yet.
Remember when they were calling everyone NPCs as if that wasn't shameless main character syndrome?
First off -- haha, I like it.
Second, it reminds me of something I read, but I can't remember the exact quote, and I'd be grateful to anyone who can figure it out. I'm pretty sure it was Vonnegut, and I think it may have been from Breakfast of Champions. The gist was that most stories are misleading because they teach people that life has a plot -- that it has major storylines, minor storylines, and so on. The author (Vonnegut?) then says that really life is just a bunch of moments, each as important or unimportant as the next.
Considering when I was a teenager I spent a lot of time reading post-apocalyptic books, that may be a good thing in my case for society as a whole.
The class war never stopped.
Hey, you! Yeah, you! Start a union at your workplace! Join an anarchist org. Run for local council on an environmental and transit platform. Attend a protest. Paint bike lanes!
"Everyone is the protagonist of their own life."
And people act surprised when grown men play computer games.
I received a call to adventure this week. Unfortunately, I can live my life remotely, so I'll barely miss a beat. Just in a different place for a while, and grinding a quest that could insulate me from the horrors of capitalism (if we succeed)
More like a proto-agonist
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