I expressed that with a little dramatic flair, but my point stands.
I wasn't commenting on the tone or spirit of the remarks/advice (yes, everyone has been kind), simply characterizing the content of the responses.
The OP expressed a conclusion (and shows intellectual honesty and good character by admitting he made a mistake), and then gets dozens of reasons supporting the opposite conclusion ("so-and-so lives in a minivan"). That in and of itself is fine: a true friend will correct you if you're wrong, while an enemy will let you drive off a cliff. But in this case, nobody was refuting the reasons for his conclusion, or offering overwhelming reasons for the other direction: most of the reasons essentially were an argument for the status quo / "sunk cost fallacy". So reading this I was reminded of a professor who said "SUNK COSTS DON'T MATTER" in almost every lecture for a semester, the Silicon Valley "rapid iteration / pivot / move fast and break things" mentality, and I just recently listened to Maxwell Maltz from the 1960s who had a lot of wise points about how to respond to mistakes.
And I found this reasoning a little comical in a forum populated by people who pride themselves in not being bound by tradition or societal expectation. I'm actually the first one to say that people probably should stay with their careers and spouses and stuff. But this is just a used Honda that he recently bought.
It helps if you just think of it like a logic or rhetoric example:
* Thunder Dan decides A
* Forum members offer reasons in support of NOT A
* The reasons are arguments from inertia / sunk costs / tradition
* Forum members generally pride themselves on being nontraditional
Conclusion: Forum members are being inconsistent
It was this inconsistency which I was pointing out with a little hyperbole.
I am just as emotionally supportive as the others, but I'm also intellectually supportive, since I'm NOT listing reasons (many of which seem weak and grasping in service to a very strange form of traditionalism) to second-guess his decision.
So yes, if he's really making a mistake, by all means let him know (and tell me if my fly is unzipped!). But since his decision seems pretty reasonable, I'm just going to support him and encourage him to move forward
