Ask Erik Hoel: "If I take a job at Meta, should I go long-distance with my girlfriend?"

TIP advice column #1

The advice column is for fun and for paid subscribers only (any paid subscriber can submit an advice ask at any time). Instructions for how to submit are at the end.

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Dear Erik,

I was fired from my job last December. Since then, I’ve gotten rejected from every single company I’ve applied for except Meta. I’ll have to move to San Francisco in order to accept this job offer which means moving away from my friends, family, and girlfriend. I’m very unhappy about this since I hate the idea of moving to San Francisco under any circumstance for overdetermined reasons, but it’s even worse having to move away from people I love.

My plan right now is to keep interviewing to see if I can get a remote job since Meta takes 4-8 weeks to actually match me with a team. There’s also the possibility of going remote at Meta, but it’s manager and org dependent and I have very little control over whether or not that happens. I expect it to take around a year or more if it happens at all. 

I’m worried that my relationship will end. My girlfriend said that she’s willing to do long distance, but all my friends who have done long distance have not been able to maintain their relationship.

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Since this is my first advice column ever, I’ll start in a way appropriately themed for The Intrinsic Perspective. First principles first. Which means pointing out that, when it comes to love vs. career choices, you have to acknowledge, hmmm, how to put this… every age has a “Hegelian” consciousness, and you must understand the consciousness of your age and then try to counter-call it.

Let’s unpack. So the historical era you happen to be living in has its own psychological peccadilloes—its psychohistory. Career vs. relationship is a classic question about life balance, but to achieve balance you have to know which way the culture leans, what it prefers, its biases, and then correct for that in how you lean. It’s as if you’re riding a ship in the waves. This is what’s behind the importance of (select) contrarianism in life—if two options present an agonizing choice for you personally, then choose the one that would be the less common choice, the opposite of what your culture pushes, since you are likely downweighing its success substantially. If the ship is tilted, and both left and right have their own equal pulls, choose to go against the tilt.