Professional experience or life experience?
Sometimes you can do both, but sometimes it's one or the other.
I'm at that early stage in my career where my experience and earning potential is growing quite quickly. Assuming the average industry experience trajectory looks logarithmic, I feel as though I'm currently shuffling up the linear region near the beginning. Which is why, when my girlfriend and I decided to pack up and go travel around Australia for a year, I hesitated a little bit.
The "rational" part of my brain started coming up with counter arguments, the largest two being:
I'm going to put my career growth on hold at a tumultuous time in the company's growth, when opportunities for leading new projects and getting promoted to new positions are disproportionately more likely. I've got a good thing going at the moment and I shouldn't sabotage that.
This trip is going to cost a lot and this funding is coming straight from my savings and investments. As someone with a damn good appreciation of compound growth and a high risk tolerance for throwing nearly all of my savings straight into index funds, it's killing me to be leaving money on the table like this. Every £1,000 I'm spending now is £14,000 I'll be missing at retirement1.
To these, I say the "rational" part of my brain can go stub his toe on a cheap IKEA wardrobe. Because there's a whole lot more to life than pay checks and and money management, even if those things are very important. I'm selling my index funds and I'm going to Australia.
When I'm old and grey and reminiscing on my life, I may regret not accumulating those tens of thousands of pounds, but I sure as hell won't regret flying across the world and experiencing everything that travelling like this has to offer. I'll be looking back at the limited time I've had on this earth, knowing that I didn't work it all away under someone else's employment. I'll be able to say that I travelled. I saw things, met interesting people, experienced but a sliver of the variety and colour that this earth has on display - all while I was fit and healthy and able to do so.
I'll have decades to earn back the difference and to master my industry. But I won't have decades of health and opportunity to "suck the marrow out of life"2.
Australia here I come!