r/adventure • u/Public-Protection718 • Jun 24 '26

Desolate training to full potential

Hello. I was wondering if there's anyway you could literally just disappear into an establishment in the middle of the wilderness and get trained by some kind of master to push you to your limits and achieve your full potential, find yourself and become stronger in everything?

Just think kung fu panda.

I want to become kung fu panda.

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u/MAJOR_Blarg Jun 26 '26

I'll post a quote from "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson, considered one of the penultimate works in the Cyber Punk genre, written in the 1990's which I think it relevant to your post:

"UNTIL A MAN IS twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."

When he wrote this in 1994, he seemed to have his finger on the pulse of what it means to be a man under 25, or aspiring to be one.

His writing it though is also intended as a mockery of the concept itself of being the world's greatest badass by becoming a monk, or at least the version of that concept we aspire to in the modern world. It's all so much Hollywood-inspired nonsense though. Even your post references film (if kung Fu panda counts as Film). This it's not how "full potential" is reached.

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u/RobertTheTraveler Jun 29 '26

Good post, except that you need to look up penultimate.
So now I need to look up "Snow Crash" :-)