rant · moment 11 of 14
Amish Rumspringa as a Model for Everyone
from Fat Wins · #51
Audio-only archive episode — no video to seek.
6 minTim jokes that everyone should get a 'Rumspringa' year to do drugs and make bad choices before settling down, citing his own reckless past with pills and driving, then wonders about Amish retention rates after Rumspringa.
- 43:35Tim details his own wild youth: cocaine in the glove box, Oxycontin, snorting lines off a CD case while driving and getting in accidents.
- 44:02The baseline should be that everybody gets a Rumspringa-style year to get wild on drugs and do crazy stuff.
- 44:32Tim asks what percentage of Amish kids actually return after Rumspringa.
- 45:15Tim pitches Rumspringa as a gap year concept: take a year, figure yourself out, have sex, try things, then decide if that life is for you.
- 45:54Some people have a great time during that wild year but still decide everything that makes sense to them on a deep level is back home.
- 46:18Tim compares it to Long Island: people move away for college but often end up back because it's ingrained in your DNA.
- 46:45Debate over whether most people actually stay where they grew up or move away—Tim says there are real examples of people who do move.
- 47:41They pull up a statistic showing how far people move away from home based on geographic region.
- 48:18Explanation that Western sprawl means 26 miles isn't as significant as 26 miles in dense areas like New York City.
- 49:08Retention rate after Rumspringa is 80 to 90 percent depending on the community.