> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.tebeforejitsu.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # I Want Better Adventures - URL: https://www.tebeforejitsu.com/i-want-better-adventures/ - Published: 2026-09-11T16:56:20.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-11T16:56:20.000Z - Author: Adam Lamagna - Tags: Life I've spent a lot of time lately wondering what the hell I'm doing with my life. I'm thinking about selling my house. Eventually buying a van. Getting rid of most of the stuff I've accumulated. Traveling around the country. Training at different dojos. Writing about strange places. Meeting strange people. Taking my dogs places they've never been. And every once in a while, usually when I'm thinking about money, the economy, or what the world is going to look like five years from now, a little voice asks a perfectly reasonable question: *Are you sure this isn't a terrible idea?* I don't have a particularly good answer. Maybe. Selling a house is a big deal. Walking away from a predictable paycheck is a big deal. Taking a substantial amount of money you've accumulated in your life and using some of it to buy a vehicle you intend to live in is objectively a little crazy. There are a thousand things that could go wrong. The housing market could change. The economy could get worse. AI could completely reshape the way a lot of us make money. The van could break down in Saskatchewan. Or I could discover six months into living on the road that I absolutely hate living in a van. I don't know. That's the part I've been struggling with. I keep wanting certainty before I make a decision about a future that is inherently uncertain. And lately I've started thinking maybe that's the wrong way to look at it. Maybe I don't need to know where I'm going to end up. I need to know that I can handle myself wherever I end up. I've done a lot of different things in my life. I've worked construction. I've sold thing in-person and over the phone. I've managed people. I've built teams. I've written stories. I've played music. I've learned how to teach. At 40, I walked into a dojo knowing almost nothing and earned a black belt years later. Some of those things worked out. Some absolutely did not. But every one of them left me with something. A skill. A story. A relationship. A scar. Occasionally all four. Maybe that's what I've been accumulating this whole time. Not a résumé. A toolkit. I think we're entering a period where that's going to matter. Nobody really knows what the next ten years are going to look like. Technology is moving unbelievably fast. Entire industries are changing. Jobs that seemed secure ten years ago don't look quite as secure anymore. New ways of making a living are appearing just as quickly. I could spend the next decade trying to predict all of it. Or I could make myself harder to trap 😁 Learn more things. Need less stuff. Stay physically capable. Keep some money in the bank. Talk to people who know things I don't. Keep writing. Keep training. Keep asking questions. And remain willing to change direction when the road in front of me morphs again. That's starting to feel like a much better definition of security than simply owning a house and having a paycheck. I still like having a house. There's something incredibly comforting about knowing exactly where you're going to sleep tonight. I know where everything is. I know the neighborhood. I know which floorboards make noise. I've accumulated enough stuff to solve problems I haven't had in years. But comfort has a strange way of becoming invisible. Eventually you stop noticing the things you once worked so very hard to get. And somewhere along the way, I've started wanting something else more. I want to wake up somewhere I've never been. I want to train with martial artists who do things completely differently than I do. I want somebody in some tiny dojo to show me a technique that makes me question something I've believed to be true for the last five years. I want to find the weird roadside places that can't be found in travel brochures. I want to sit by a fire with a book and my dogs asleep nearby. I want to walk through places where strange stories happened and then write some of my own. I want to meet people whose lives make absolutely no sense to me and ask them how they got there. I want to get lost occasionally. I want to come home occasionally too. Whatever "home" eventually ends up meaning. And I'm beginning to understand that the goal isn't to build a life where nothing can go wrong. That life doesn't exist. The goal is to become someone who can deal with things when they do go wrong. Maybe I sell the house. Maybe I buy the van. Maybe I travel for a year and discover an entirely different place where I want to live. Maybe Te Before Jitsu turns into something much bigger than I imagined. Maybe fiver years from now I'm doing something that hasn't even occurred to me yet. I don't need to know. That's actually starting to feel like the best part. For most of my life, I've thought I was supposed to be working toward some final version of things. The right career. The right house. Enough money. Enough accomplishments. A nice retirement at the age of 67\. Some imaginary point where I could finally look around and say: *Okay. I made it!* I'm not sure that point exists either. And I'm not sure I want it to. I'm 45 years old. I'm lucky, there's still a hell of a lot of road ahead of me. I don't want to spend all of it protecting what I've already accumulated. I want to see what else is out there. I don't know exactly where I'm going. I don't know what I'll be doing when I get there. I don't even know if I'll stay. I just know I want better adventures.