This is a question that holds a lot of people back from leaving their jobs. They rightly fear the existential dread that comes with an excess of time and lack of things to do.

This often convinces many that taking a leap into the unknown is not worth it. Others who decide to take a leap fall prey to hustle traps. They get excited about someone else’s goals and don’t realize that all they are doing is trying to calm their own fears.

When I left my job I was so afraid of creating another job for myself that I rejected almost any idea that was structured in a way to trade off time in the present for a payoff in the future. Yet I still had the problem: what do I do with my time?

The good news is that most humans, given enough time, will be naturally drawn to things. For me, it was writing, creating online courses, and podcasting. The issue was that there was not much advice on how to do these things without aiming at traditional goals.

If you’re going to write you should try to get published.

If you’re going to podcast, you should try to perfectly execute your launch.

If you’re going to create an online course, you should run a cohort-based-course.

People pick these goals because they are legible. They are the “smart” thing to do. In other words, most people see these are the things you should aim towards, and thus, why not aim for them?

Because I didn’t want to create a job for myself, however, I’ve had better luck embracing what I’m now calling “ship, quit, and learn.”

Instead of orienting towards specific goals far in the future, I design micro-experiments with only one goal: try stuff and then figure out what to do next.

My approach is probably a bit too risk-averse for some but can be powerful, especially for those who are early on an uncertain path and feel stressed about committing in one direction too early. It’s also more powerful if you are able to do many experiments throughout the year.

Let’s break down the three parts:

#1 Ship – Minimize The Friction To Getting Started

You have something you want to do but have been scared. What’s the minimum action you can take that would still feel like you are pushing yourself out of your comfort zone? Do that.

For example, if you want to launch a podcast, open up your recording app, and record a monologue of why you are launching a podcast.

I’ve helped many people get started on creative projects via a one-week “action challenge” in my reinvent course. You can check out some ideas for inspiration here.

#2 Quit – Design For Walking Away

Design your experiment for quitting. When I started my podcast, I decided that if I didn’t like it that much, I would just stop doing it.

Many of us were raised with the idea that you should never quit anything. This is useful for some things but absolutely terrible advice for creative pursuits. Quitting lots of things is probably the best way to find the things you want to commit to. When you design for quitting, you also put less pressure on yourself because it doesn’t make sense to overinvest in time or money.

When I launched my podcast, I had a crappy cover I threw together in PowerPoint in 5 minutes and didn’t spend any money on anything else.

I was terrified when I launched my podcast but by lowering the stakes I was able to power through that first phase of discomfort and discover the magic of hosting a podcast and having deep conversations with people I admired.

#3 Learn – What Does The Experience Tell You?

This may sound too obvious or too simple, but the goal of any experiment should really be to figure out what to do next. If this sounds like some sort of infinite game, you’d be right. Almost everything I do is oriented toward finding things worth doing, indefinitely. The spirit of “ship, quit & learn” is openness to experience and being willing to see what emerges when we lean into creativity and spontaneity. Often there are three routes people take: scale up, continue going, or quit.

After I launched my podcast, I decided that “keep going” was what I wanted to do. I liked being able to keep the show small and not having the pressure to grow or use it to make money. Over time I’ve made incremental improvements and have gotten better at interviewing but the spirit of the podcast is still the same.

Check out my podcast! (Still going five years later!)

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Ship, Quit & Learn – A Framework for Finding Work Worth Doing appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

And he’s also my podcast guest in this episode.

His writing has been an inspiration to me as I try to carve my own path after leaving what he calls “Team Elite.” Let’s take a journey through some of his ideas…

“Make, Protect Teach”

Ben made my list of people that inspire me when in the early months of the pandemic he leaped to action.  While most of the country was gearing up for political debates, he launched a non-profit to work behind the scenes to acquire and distribute masks to healthcare professionals across the country.  He was embracing his self-described ethos of “make, protect, teach”:

What does it mean to Make?

It means you are an investor. A manufacturer. An artist. A craftsman. A kid at a Maker Fair. A farmer. An engineer. A home builder. A coder. It’s the creation of some THING through the application of some creative IDEA.

What does it mean to Protect?

It means you are a soldier. A policeman. A fireman. An EMT. A nurse. A doctor. It’s a Neighborhood Watch. It’s a mechanic fixing a car. It’s also a unionization drive. It’s also a fiduciary managing a portfolio.

What does it mean to Teach?

It means you are a teacher, of course. Or a writer. Or a researcher. Or a priest. Or a homeschooling mom. It means you’ve got something to say to your Pack, and you’ve got the guts to say it.

In our conversation, we talked about why this matters to him.  At the simplest level, it’s about enabling people to “connect with the real.”  He shared that all around the world he sees good people doing great things, helping their neighbors, and contributing where they can.  But those same people, “have been told that it doesn’t matter.”

This resonates with my own story.  At I rose in the ranks of the strategy consulting world it amazed me as almost everyone was obsessed with the broad idea of “impact.”  It didn’t seem to have a connection to anything except what could be quantified on a spreadsheet.  It was not, as Ben says, connected to the “real.”

Ben’s interest is in, “creating bottoms-up social movements that embrace make, protect, teach.” While many people dismiss such notions as too simple, preferring large-scale political ideas, he feels that a local focus on what matters – helping your neighbors and giving where you can, is what matters.

He says that his writing revolves around a simple question, “how do we reconnect with the real?” or put another way, “how do we reconnect with our own human lives?”

These questions attract hundreds of thousands each month to his site, Epsilon Theory, which he runs with his partner Rusty Guinn. 

He’s been writing for years but the real journey started at the age of 32.

When Time Flipped

Everything became real for Ben at the age of 32, when he lost his father.  The news came a few weeks after declining an offer from his parents to pay for a flight to visit them on a trip to London. When he heard the news of the loss, he felt his future was stolen from him, “There’s something about the dynamic of your father dying suddenly that changes your relationship with the future and with time.”

This shifted his perspective to living in the present instead of focusing on the future. However, as he embraced this philosophy, he found himself at odds with the direction of broader society and culture.

He started to notice that political, economic, and business leaders were increasingly focused on investing in the present and replacing the optimism of the future with a permanent state of political fear. We all know what he’s talking about. We need to do something NOW because the future will be worse. Or another spin, we need to go BACK to how things were because now is not so great.

He calls this state of affairs the “Long Now“

The Long Now is everything we pull into the present from our future selves and our children.

The Long Now is the constant stimulus that Management applies to our economy and the constant fear that Management applies to our politics.

The Long Now is the Fiat World of reality by declaration, where we are TOLD that inflation does not exist, where we are TOLD that wealth inequality and meager productivity and negative savings rates just “happen”, where we are TOLD we must vote for ridiculous candidates to be a good Republican or a good Democrat, where we are TOLD that we must buy ridiculous securities to be a good investor, where we are TOLD we must borrow ridiculous sums to be a good parent or a good spouse or a good child.

“I think it’s a mistake to romanticize the past or demonize the present,”  he argues. Instead “The threat of the future INSPIRES me. The threat of the future DRIVES me.” It keeps him in the now.

Narrative World & Industrially Necessary Work

Ben and his partner Rusty look at this broad shift through the lens of narratives.  Their research has found that institutions are increasingly embracing “missionary statements.”  These are statements or sets of ideas that are presented as facts but are really opinions. 

The goal is not to inform anyone, it is to flood the information ecosystem with a preferred narrative so effectively that it shifts common knowledge. Everyone knows that everyone knows it is true.

One of the areas we have both explored is the common knowledge of work. Our scripts are so deeply embedded around work that we have a hard time understanding that they emerged hundreds of years ago. Our current remixes of these work beliefs are so deeply intertwined with the success of our current institutions, we have a hard time knowing what is real anymore. As we discussed on the podcast, people have a hard time seeing me as a “real” worker because I spent my time outside the default path.

Ben calls these scripts the “industrially necessary” stories that keep the whole thing going. Except now these scripts might not be so necessary. They are shifting from necessary to preferable. Which means politics and narratives are what matter.

I reached out after he and Rusty published “Working Narrative” talking about the emerging remote versus in-office “debate.” We both felt this was inning 1 of a baseball game that may go into extra innings. It’s not that we think that work is headed in a definite direction, its that it feels more up for grabs than ever. Both political parties still center their narratives around jobs than the kind of work that is emerging in the new economy.

As I like to say, the only career path left is “go tech, go finance or SOL“

In writing about work we have both found that the topic elicits and strange and outsized response relative to the facts conveyed.  What people are reacting to is often not the information itself but the sense that things they knew to be true are under attack. 

The sense that the common knowledge that had seemed like the settled fact is shakier than ever.

I’ve experienced this in my own path.  I don’t work a typical but I still spend time working, I support myself and spend a lot more time helping other people than I did in a previous life.  It’s much more meaningful and feels like it matters. Nonetheless, people get upset at how I’ve organized my life. They think I am cheating, or that it’s not possible, or that I’m abdicating a sacred duty.

The reality is that I’m living in the now. Investing in the future. I believe in the future and I’m excited that I have people like Ben to follow.

Still Carving His Path

The most impressive people I know are the ones that are committed to a long-term path. Ben is living what he claims to care about and I hope to be doing the same at his age. As he says:

“I’m still trying to find my path in the world”

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Ben Hunt on Industrially Necessary Paths & How To Live In The Now appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Millions, if not billions, have thrived following this path. It worked so well, and for so long, that people stopped thinking about why they were doing it.

I want to argue that the meaningful lives that resulted from this were accidental rather than a result of following a certain path and that today, following this path might undermine one’s attempt to live a meaningful and happy life. Across the world, people are following this path and coming up short. They are doing what is expected of them and what they thought would make them happy. Yet their lives are filled with anxiety, stress, and a life lacking meaning. Why?

This is my accidental meaning hypothesis

Accidental Meaning Hypothesis: The meaning derived from a default path of doing what everyone else was doing was accidental and an outcome not of working in a certain way, owning a home, and so on. It was the result of strong economic tailwinds, strong community spirit, more two-parent households, and unique financial and social circumstances where far more people felt like they were doing better than the previous generations. Today people aim at these same external markers of success (home, family, stable full-time jobs) but are not finding their lives meaningful at the same rates that previous generations were.

We Want To Do Better Than Our Parents

The key part of the default path was not only that you succeeded by doing what everyone else was doing, but also that you did better than your parents. John Steinbeck captured this sentiment in his book America and Americans in 1966:

No longer was it even acceptable that the child should be like his parents and live as they did; he must be better, live better, know more, dress more richly, and if possible change from father’s trade to a profession. This dream became touchingly national.

For more than 50 years people have gone into adulthood with the idea that they should achieve more than their parents while still following the same general path.

When Steinbeck wrote that, a gold rush was underway. The US economy was still in the early days of a period called the “Great Boom” and anyone working in the US or other advanced economies was set to cash in on the enormous dividend of a global industrialization effort that would last well into the 2000s.

In addition to this, the baby boomers entered a workforce in the 1970s with little to no competition, as the biggest generation at every point throughout their entire careers and stayed in senior leadership positions at most companies longer than anyone expected. As the economy has slowed to 2-3% growth per year, it has meant that current generations can no longer simply show up to work and know that everything will work out.

A central “fixed-point” as Venkatesh Rao puts it in the American Dream is owning a home. In 1975 the median house was around 500 square feet per household member. Now, it’s closer to 1000, and this is with smaller families, which means that people are buying bigger houses than previous generations despite having fewer kids. The cost of homeownership has also gone up as regulations, increasing financialization, and delayed housing purchases have all put pressure on a purchase that many adults had achieved by their mid-twenties.

Women have also entered the workforce to a massive degree but what this means is that less of life is built around local communities and more are built around accelerating a career. Instead of relying on local energy to solve problems, people now rely on outsourced providers and services to meet their needs to keep their career dreams going.

So people are working hard at working their way towards success but not realizing that they are not developing the skills or mindset that might help them learn how to live a life worth living.

People Have Stopped Having Faith In This Story (But Don’t Have An Alternative)

People have stopped believing that if they “work hard” and do what their parents did that they will earn the same rewards. While economists will argue that the following chart should be adjusted for household size, many young people now generally agree with the takeaway from the following graph:

They don’t trust that they will get what they think they deserve. As Seth Goding says, “the educated, hardworking masses are still doing what they’re told, but they’re no longer getting what they deserve.”

Another reason people have stopped believing this story is that the story has split into three different paths.

Research from Pew (see below) has shown that the middle class has been shrinking since the 1970s while the lower and upper classes are increasing. This means that more people than ever have entered the upper tier of the economy, and many people are falling back into the lower-income tier of the economy

This has taken the “American Dream” and turned it into three unique stories, each with its own flaws.

The American Dream was historically a middle-class dream. One where the differences between people were not as pronounced and it seemed that if you were working hard along with everyone else, that it was a fair game. However, that changed. Morgan Housel argues that things started changing in the 1980s and since then,

The economy works better for some people than others. Success isn’t as meritocratic as it used to be and, when success is granted, is rewarded with higher gains than in previous eras.

In a sense, the “American Dream” split into three different stories, all with their own issues.

1. Upper Class (20% of people): People in superstar tech companies are building their lives around expensive convenience and trying to distance themselves from the rest of society and finding that they have achieved the traditional American dream on paper, but are having trouble finding the important things that enrich their life.
2. Middle Class (50% of people): People in the middle class who either envy the people in the new elite or are happy with the middle class but finding it increasingly hard to make ends meet let alone do better than their parents
3. Lower Class (30% of people): People in the lower class think that they don’t have a damn chance working in their service economy jobs of ever achieving the American dream and the data says they are right.

Shifting economic conditions have nudged people to build more of their life around work and put shift away from local communities. Everyone still wants to do better than their parents but it requires a lot more mental energy devoted to work. Derek Thompson called this new ethic Workism and observed that it was a perfect “blueprint for spiritual and physical exhaustion.”

Lack of meaning is channeled into an endless search for the dream job that doesn’t exist.

As people put more emphasis on finding meaning at work they move away from the things that seem to matter: relationships, community and connection. Social capital gets built but the playgrounds, once maintained by stay-at-home parents, people with time after work, and opting-in to a different kind of social ethic, remain empty.

Increasingly, much of the middle-class has moved away from the stable foundations that made up the middle class for long and are sensing that they too should orient more of their life around work so that they don’t too fall out of the middle class and at best they can get a taste of that upper-class luxury experience, if only for a little bit of time.

This leads to a vicious cycle.

Many of these people are still tied to the idea that if you work hard you’ll be taken care but are frustrated to find that unless you are working in the tech economy or in an elite city hard work isn’t all that helpful and that if you end up rich and working all the time, you might not find your life all that meaningful.

Accidental meaning doesn’t work anymore

We need new scripts for how we think about work. I’m not sure what this looks like but hard work and full-time work for the average person no longer delivers the goods. While new dreams are being hatched in the promise of the creator economy, the results might be even more polarized than the traditional economy.

Right now you own your own meaning and you’ll need to take steps to make sure that you are actively designing your life. This is the advantage anyone who has taken a break or dabbled with self-employment knows. Everyone is operating in the gig economy carving their own path but the knowledge of this is not widespread. The 2020s will be the decade we stop believing in the work hard and you’ll be taken care of script.

Meaning doesn’t happen by accident anymore. It only happens when we figure out what matters.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Accidental Meaning: How The Baby Boomers Misled Us About What Leads To A Happy Life appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

I do not summon you to slothful or idle inaction, or to drown all your native energy in slumbers and the pleasures that are dear to the crowd.

That is not to rest;

Yet this is how we now think of leisure. People call this “time off” because work is the central pursuit of life of which we base our concept of time around. We think of leisure as laying around on the weekend catching up on sleep, playing video games, watching Netflix, or a vacation. Bertrand Russell noticed that in the 1930s that work was draining the energy of the average person such that they had nothing left beyond what they gave to their job:

The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

By 1948 the German philosopher Josef Pieper called the this domination of work over our lives “Total Work” in his book “Leisure: The Basis For Culture.” He was shocked that even after World War II, when the world narrowly escaped destroying itself, people couldn’t wait to restart their old habit.

As an antidote he argued that people should reach back into history and adopt the more ancient version of leisure:

Leisure is the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative, beholding, and immersion — in the real. In leisure, there is, furthermore, something of the serenity of ”not-being–able–to–grasp,” of the recognition of the mysterious character of the world, and the confidence of blind faith, which can let things go as they will; there is in it something of the ”trust in the fragmentary, that forms the very life and essence of history.

He put it even more simply:

We mistake leisure for idleness, and work for creativity.

In a world of “total work,” there is no space for contemplation or rest. There is no need for people to be in “harmony with themselves” as long as they are employed. To “know thyself” is a secondary concern, and any sort of break from work is merely in the service of doing more work. As Pieper put it:

The simple ”break” from work — the kind that lasts an hour, or the kind that lasts a week or longer — is part and parcel of daily working life. It is something that has been built into the whole working process, a part of the schedule. The ”break” is there for the sake of work. It is supposed to provide ”new strength” for ”new work,” as the word ”refreshment” indicates: one is refreshed for work through being refreshed from work.

The case for an old definition of leisure

In the book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, Alex Pang examined how challenging it still is to actually take time for leisure:

If you want rest, you have to take it. You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously, and protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it.

This lack of rest is not necessarily adding to productivity. Pang also makes the case that some of the most successful people in history did not work that much. Their lives were filled with leisure, activity, and rest.

Charles Darwin, for instance, did most of his work in a few hours a day in the morning. Here is how his day looked:

8:00: Work

9:30: Read mail and write letters

10:30: Tend to birds, greenhouse, or perform experiments

12:00: Take a long walk

1:00: Lunch & answer some letters

3:00: Nap

4:00: Take another walk

4:30: A little more work

5:30: Dinner

Depending on how you slice it, on a typical day, Darwin did about 2.5 to 5 hours of work, took a nap, and went for a couple walks — yet he still had plenty of time to publish 19 books.

One of the more compelling stories in Pang’s book is about a study from the Illinois Institute of Technology. In the 1950s, the study’s authors surveyed scientists about the number of hours they worked. What they found was that productivity was not linear — those who worked the most hours were not necessarily the most productive.

Instead, the most productive scientists worked between 10 and 20 hours per week. The scientists who worked the most hours were somewhat more productive than the other scientists but were still not as productive as the ones who had more rest and time off in their lives.

Our modern mindset around “hustle” equates hard work with success. More hours equals more results. But Pang showed in at least one environment and with many successful people throughout history, that this is not always the case.

As Pang concluded in his book:

The ancient Greeks saw rest as a great gift, as the pinnacle of civilized life. The Roman Stoics argued that you cannot have a good life without good work. Indeed, virtually every ancient society recognized that both work and rest were necessary for a good life: one provided the means to live, the other gave meaning to life.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post How Obsession With Work Killed Our Connection With Leisure appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Favorites From The Year

• From Nuclear Families to Forged Families (link)
• Redefining what “prosperity” means for capitalism (link)
• The Inner Ring by C.S. Lewis (link)
• Solitude and Leadership – An Annual Favorite (link)
• Reflections From a Token Black Friend (link)
• Powerful Essay on Risk, Losing Friends & What Matters from Morgan Housel (link)
• Venkatesh Rao’s Art of Gig had a very high signal to noise ratio while being consistent source of wisdom for navigating the solo path throughout this insane year
• Stephen Cope’s Great Work of Your Life was probably my favorite book of the year

Work, Work, Work

The theme of the newsletter is the modern state of work and contemplating what this means for how we live our lives. Thus there are a lot of links in this category.

Gig Economy & The Future

• Decision day for 1,300 Vanguard workers as their jobs head to India-based Infosys (link)
• The profound changes caused by the Internet are only just beginning; aggregation theory is the means (link)
• Re-Read: The Real Future of Work (Politico) (link)
• New York Gig Workers Win Right to Unemployment Benefits (link)
• Within the historical relationship between capital and labor, gig-workers would be considered scabs (link)

Indie Life, Solopreneurship & Hacking A Living

• Politician quits politics to become a Jesuit Priest (link)
• Gig Worker Identity: “For a free-agent, being an amateur, as opposed to a professional, is more important than being paid by the gig rather than with a salary” (link, Art of Gig)
• We regret the things we don’t do.  Not the things we do.  (link)
• Hunter S. Thompson’s Life Advice To A Friend Is Priceless (link)
• Reflecting on our ‘radical sabbatical’ living on the Thai Island of Ko Lanta (link)
• The negative effects of burnout spill over into every area of life (link)
• The “Middle-Income Trap” and Careers (link)
• How Can Indies Not Waste the Reboot? (link)
• Being an Illegible Person: This older post from @vgr on Ribbon Farm is still very relevant to someone not following the default path of work (link)
• What does it mean to be an independent researcher? (link)
• Strategy for challenges you might expect in working online and self-employment (link)
• The Creator Economy Needs a Middle Class (link)
• Nat Eliason on “passive income” – “My interest in entrepreneurship originally started as an interest in passive income” (link)
• A field-guide for independent strategy consultants (link)
• Matt Trinetti Should I niche down my blog? (link)

Ponderings On The State of Work

• Universal Basic Income and the Capitalist Production of Consciousness – Oshan Jarow (link)
• How Work Became a Job (link)
• Losing the Narrative: The Genre Fiction of the Professional Class (link)
• Workism Essay from the Atlantic in 2019 (link)
• “For a secular monk, the only knowable pursuits are human pursuits, the
  only genuine aims human aims.”  (link)
• A reflection on “corporate man” from the NYT in 1984 (link)
• Re-read: If work dominated your every moment would life be worth living? (link)
• Morning Brew’s “Decade in Work” (link)
• In Praise of Work: “The problem isn’t that we derive too much of our worth and value from work.  The problem is that our jobs are becoming increasingly abstracted from work.” (link)
• Anne-Laure Le Cunff on “Are we too busy to enjoy life?” (link) and how to shift from “productivity porn to mindful productivity” (link)
• Are Our Management Theories Outdated? (link)
• The Case Against Work: Ignoring enormous human suffering and potential (link)
• From Productivity to Psychedelics: Tim Ferriss Has Changed His Mind About Success (link)
• “It’s Time to Think!” – Should we not focus on true leisure first before we fall again into the trap of materialism? (link)

Remote Work & New Ways of Working

• I contributed to the Holloway Guide to Remote Work (link) – no affiliation
• Citi to Offer Workers a 12-Week Sabbatical, Extra Vacation Days (link)
• Startup and entrepreneur visas around the world (link)
• Pieter Levels 5-part series on the future of work (link)
• Facebook will now let some employees work from anywhere, but their paychecks could get cut (link)
• From airlines to Starbucks, a massive part of our economy hinges on white-collar workers returning to the office (link)
• Stripe’s One-Year Remote Reflection (link)

  Interesting Surveys, Demographics & Trends

• The average age of Congress will now be a decade younger, thanks to the midterms (link)
• “The Slacker” – What Americans should understand about Japan’s 1990s economic bust (link)
• Millennials are less wealth that previous generations, even worse for those without a degree (link)
• A different way of thinking about inflation: The Cost-of-Thriving Index (link)
• Americans’ Perceptions of Success in the U.S. are disconnected from their own definitions of what matters (link)

Reflections On The Future

Future Of Education

• Purdue is keeping tuition locked at $10,000 (link)
• Adjuncts are taking over Academia (link)
• Reflections on achievement from Singapore, 1974 – “The Great Paper Chase…Training ground for the adult rat race” (link)
• Lazy Rivers, The Price of Education & Student Debt (link)
• The Long Decline of American Higher Education Has Begun (link)
• A looming shortage of students will upend the business model of higher education. To survive, colleges need to do more with less. (link)
• Colleges Have a Silver Bullet to Win COVID Tuition Lawsuits, But Can They Afford to Use It? (link)
• What Happens to All the Asian-American Overachievers When the Test-Taking Ends? (link)
• Google announces 100,000 scholarships for online certificates in data analytics, project management and UX (link)
• The Invented History of ‘The Factory Model of Education’ (link)
• The financial returns to college are falling “Is College Still Worth It?” (link)
• Disadvantages of an Elite Education: “Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers” (link)

Economics & The Future

• Vinay Gupta on Spiritual Colonialism: “We are all pretty clear something is profoundly wrong with the world, and maybe with humanity itself. But what is wrong, and what do we do about it?” (link)
• Definite Optimism and its role in innovation in human nature (link)
• The Social Capital Stall Behind America’s Gerontocracy (link)
• Why Democratic leaders still misunderstand the politics of social class (link)
• Russ Roberts: The Economist as Scapegoat (link)
• Ray Dalio: Our Biggest Economic, Social, and Political Issue (link)
• The $1 Trillion Question: New Approaches to Regulating Stock Buybacks (link)
• Critiques of meritocracy are on everyone’s lips right now. Why? (link)
• Is Productivity Growth Becoming Irrelevant? (link)
• The Medieval Future of Management (link)
• Professor David Autor’s latest research shows how economic polarization stems from urban job loss (link)
• Tech Companies Want You to Believe America Has a Skills Gap (link)

Pandemic, Crisis & Response

• Covid-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality (link)
• System dynamics and our response to Covid – Bonitta Roy (link)
• How the coronavirus is creating a political opportunity to overturn one of the worst practices of the kleptocracy era (link)
• COVID-19: A War Broke Out In Heaven (link)
• The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System (link)
• The Nature of Work after the COVID Crisis:  Too Few Low-Wage Jobs (link)
• Liminality?…Well, there’s a free sample! (link)
• A Plague Is an Apocalypse. But It Can Bring a New World. The meaning of this one is in our hands. (link)
• Martin Gurri: The Prophet of the Revolt (link)

Other Interesting Things, Etc.

• Agnes Callard has a great essay on how we glorify geniuses and how it relates to The Queen’s Gambit (link)
• Kevin Kelly’s 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice (link)
• Speaking is for motivation, writing is for thinking (link)
• The cynics guide to reading business books (link)
• What is Transcendence? The True Top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (link)
• Calling Bullshit Course: Data Reasoning in a Digital World (link)
• Robert Hogan on the “Dark Side of Charisma” (link) and related: Can we tell good leaders from bad? (link)
• Thinking For Yourself & Curiosity, Paul Graham (link)
• Positive and Negative Liberty (link)
• Kevin Love, NBA Player: “To Anybody Going Through It, Being depressed is exhausting” (link)
• Psilocybin therapy 4 times more effective than antidepressants, study finds (link)
• Society has a cultural bias towards extroverts (link)
• The case for one billion Americans (link)
• Rather than attempting to persuade us (via our rational, analytical minds), ads prey on our emotions. Read Ads “Don’t Work That Way” (link)
• The Blue of Distance, an essay from Rebecca Solnit (link)

Memorable Podcasts From This Year

• The Conversational Nature of Reality, David Whyte (link)
• Peter Attia & Jason Fried: Work-life balance, avoiding burnout, defining success, company culture, and more (link)
• Seth Godin on Argument against using remote work to copy in-person working habits, especially meetings (link)
• Daniel Kahneman: Putting Your Intuition on Ice (link)
• Mall Mullenweg on Sam Harris: The Remote Playbook (link)
• Shane Parish, The Knowledge Project: Roger Martin (link), Chamath (link) & Patrick Collison (link)
• Multiple Econtalk Episodes: Emily Oster, Zena Hitz, Steven Levitt
• Tyler Cowen and Audrey Tang (link)
• Agnes Callard on Big Ideas with Erik Torenberg (link)
• Derek Sivers, Entrepreneurialism as Spiritual Practice (link)
• Eric Weinstein’s Interview with his 14 year old son (link)
• Ben Hunnicutt: Leisure: the (Forgotten) Basis of American Progress (link)
• John Vervaeke: The Cognitive Science of Capitalist Realism (link)
• Malcolm Gladwell On Democratic Lotteries (link)
• Tim Ferriss’ Journey After Childhood Abuse with Debbie Millman (link)
• ZigZag podcast with Khe He on his “male identity crisis” (link)
• Not Overthinking: Inner Rings – The Desire to Fit In (link)

Boundless Creations

A listing of all the essays and podcasts I published this year.

My Essays

• Hustle Traps: Ten Guaranteed Paths To Burnout For The Self-Employed Creator (link)
• Recovering from “Lifestyle Creep”: How I cut my cost of living by 75% (link)
• Boomer Blockade: The boomers reached power at younger ages and then have stayed in power (link)
• Why Did People Stop Caring About Developing a Meaningful Philosophy of Life in the 1970s? (link)
• The dark side of consulting: A belief that the scale of “impact” matters more than what you are doing (link)
• The Future Of The Prestige Economy: Who Gets Status? (link)
• Check out Hamsternomics: Printing Money, The Economy & Work Beliefs , a collaboration of Paul Millerd and Ryan Borker, who both have experience jumping on and off the hamster wheel at multiple points in their lives
• Chaos Theory & Building Resilient Organizations (link)
• Going Remote? Here are five tips from companies who are already fully remote (link)
• Virtual Spaces: How To Teach & Engage With Virtual Communities (link)
• The best advice on working remotely your boss doesn’t want you to see (link)
• Matt Mullenweg’s & Automattic’s Five Levels Of Remote Work (link)
• The ultimate guide to becoming a digital nomad or remote worker (link)
• The Second Chapter of Success: Figuring Out What Matters (link)
• Updated: A gift economy is not about the money, it is about unlocking generosity & gratitude (link)
• Work In Tech, Finance or Go Solo or be without a career path: The Reality Of An Economic Model Without Enough Jobs (link)

Reimagine Work Episodes

• Diania Merriam on Imagining The New American Dream (link)
• Group reflection with Andrew Taggart on Total Work and our present crisis
• Steph Smith on a 21^st Century Career (link)
• Oshan Jarow – Life Beyond Work (link)
• Laurel Farrer on How to work remotely, well (link)
• Will Bachman on independent consulting (link)
• Amy McMillen on carving her own path and writing a book (link)
• I Interviewed my wife about her own journey (link)
• Packy McCormick on writing a kick-ass newsletter (link)
• Uri Bram on running The Browser remotely & #goodreads (link

My Indie Consulting Lessons (A Small Experiment)

I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with this but this is an ongoing holding ground for short videos and lessons I’m compiling for navigating life as an indie consultant.

• Shifting your mindset: connecting with other freelancers, grappling with your fear & defining what “success” means (link)
• Naming your practice (link)
• How to identify as a freelance consultant without trapping yourself in that identity (link)
• How to think about your service offerings & positioning (link)
• Four ways of finding those initial projects (link)
• How to work with consulting talent platforms (link)

Newsletters, Creators & Spaces That Inspire Me & I Keep Coming Back To

• What Really Matters, Russell Max Simon (link)
• Not Boring, Packy McCormick (link)
• Mythology Studio, Martha Balaile (link)
• Dig Well, Amy McMillen (link)
• The Diff, Byrne Hobart (link)
• Khe He & Rad Reads (link)
• Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings (link)
• Anne-Laure’s Ness Labs (link)
• Venkatesh Roa’s Art of Gig (link) and Breaking Smart (link)
• Curious Humans, Jonny Miller (link)
• Two Truths and a Take, Alex Danco (link)
• Pam Hobart’s philosophical advice for smart people (link)
• Curious Lion, Andrew Barry (link)
• Robbie Crabtree’s Three Things Thursday (link)
• Noah Smith’s Noahpinion (link)
• Wellness Wisdom, Patricia Mou (link)
• David Perell’s Newsletters (link)
• Nat Eliason’s Monday Medley (link)
• The Fire Jar (link)
• Deliberate on the Internet, Artur Piszek (link)
• Musing Mind (essays, podcast, & book notes), Oshan Jarow (link)

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post 150+ Things Worth Reading & Listening To From 2020 appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

A review of the first 30 years of the data in 1996 highlighted a fascinating shift in values.

Especially notable are changes in two contrasting value statements: The importance of “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” and of “being very well off financially” In the late 1960s developing a meaningful philosophy of life was the top value, being endorsed as an “essential” or “very important” goal by more than 80 percent of the entering freshmen. Being very well off financially, on the other hand, lagged far behind in the late 1960s, ranking fifth or sixth on the list with less than 45 percent of the freshmen endorsing it as a very important or essential goal in life. Since that time these two values have basically traded places, with being very well off financially now the top value (at 73.6 percent endorsement) and developing a meaningful philosophy of life now occupying sixth place at only 43.1 percent endorsement

You can see a visual representation of this swap in the following graph.

While “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” seemed to drop steadily from survey launch, the goal of being well off financially didn’t seem to take off until the early 1970s.

The other interested thing from this long-term data is how consistent the other values have been. I looked at the top 4 values from 1970 – 2015 and found that despite the two above mentioned values changing place, the other three values remained remarkably consistent.

Those three things?

1. Raising a family
2. Helping others who are in difficulty
3. Becoming an authority in my field

Essentially, take care of the people in your life, try to help others and be good at what you do.

These seem like a good recipe for like and aligns with the wisdom and research on what leads to a meaningful life.

But still, why did college students become so obsessed with money and why has it remained so central?

Could it be due to how school has become about test scores and grades?

A Harvard study from 2014 highlighted the gap between what parents claim to care about and what children thought their parents cared about.

According to a 2012 study, 96% of parents surveyed viewed developing moral character in children as “very important, if not essential” and highly valued their children “being honest, loving, and reliable”(Bowman et al., 2012). Research suggests that most parents across race/ethnic groups value caring or “benevolence” more than achievement and are far more likely to value “benevolence” over “power” (Suizzo, 2007).

When you ask parents what they care about they say that they want their kinds to be kind people with integrity.

But what happens when you ask their kids? Here is the results of a survey of 10,000 students asked to rank what their parents value:

Hmmm. Who you going to trust, the parents or the kids?

I was lucky not to have parents that cared a lot about grades but it was still clear that getting good grades was the best thing you could do in school. If you were not getting good grades, parents often were quite concerned about that person’s future. The social pressure to achieve was clear at an early age.

Its easy to see children raised into this environment looking for the next metric they can optimize for after college. There may not be any grades in life but your compensation is is the next best thing.

But What Does Society Want?

Almost everyone seems to have an opinion of what “society” wants and this seem to be very different about what people report about what they really want.

Partly because of my own experiences earning less money and partly because of a fascinating survey from Gallup called the Success Index. In their survey they ask people two questions:

1. How do you personally define success?
2. How do you think others define success?

Take a look at the main section of this on status:

Almost everyone thinks success is about being good at something you care about while at they same time they think that almost everybody else only cares about being rich and famous.

How can this be?

Either most people are lying about how they define success or people have a terrible understanding of the motives of other people.

My guess would be that it is a bit of both. It’s very easy to delude ourselves into thinking we are doing things for the right reasons while assuming that others are in it for the wrong reasons.

What I think this survey tells us is that even if people do have good motivations for doing whatever they are doing, they feel that they will be judged by a different societal standard.

A different section of the survey shows this in an even more dramatic way. It asked people to rank 76 different elements that are part of their personal definition of success. Similar to the survey with college freshman we see that having a family is an important part of people’s lives.

However, when you ask the same people about their perception of broad societal definitions of success we see the lowest ranked value from above jump all the way to #1 and to a dramatic degree.

It seems that most people assume there is a broad societal benchmark of “success” that mostly has to do with how much money, status and fame one has. Despite this, most people also seem to proclaim very different definitions of success.

What does this all mean?

Could it be that people still care about what it means to live a philosophically meaningful life and that they are too ashamed to share that?

Or have money and fame overtaken everything else as the de facto aim of life for most people?

It’s worth looking back at the start of the original data set. Who were the people answering the survey in 1966?

William Whyte’s book titled “The Organization Man,” which detailed the new trend of young people moving to suburbs and large corporations, gives us a glimpse into the mindset of a college student in that time.

While they talk little about money, they talk a great deal about the good life. This life is, first of all, calm and ordered. Many a senior confesses that he’s thought of a career in teaching, but as he talks it appears that it is not so much that he likes teaching itself as the sort of life he associates with it—there is a touch of elms and quiet streets in the picture. For the good life is equable; it is a nice place out in the suburbs, a wife and three children, one, maybe two cars (you know, a little knock-about for the wife to run down to the station in), and a summer place up at the lake or out on the Cape, and, later, a good college education for the children. It is not, seniors explain, the money that counts.

William Whyte, The Organization Man

In the book he shares how it was genuinely shocking how little risk young people wanted to take compared to previous generations. They saw the chaos of the war and did not want to repeat those days. With this backdrop it might make sense that developing a meaningful philosophy of life might become a central goal of one’s life.

Over time, however, young people started to care more about money until it became the most important metric in their life. This was furthered by the common knowledge that everyone knew that everyone else thought getting rich was the prime aim of life.

Revisiting the American Freshman data, the #1 goal of students was has remained “being very well off financially” for almost 50 years and throughout that time has only become more important. In 2019 it reached one of the highest levels on record with 84% of students said that being well off financially was essential or very important.

Despite this, all of these surveys share some very consistent themes over the past 55+ years. People still see having a family, being helpful to others and being good at what you do as things that are centrally important to a life well lived.

It doesn’t appear that money is losing its grip on our imagination but it might be a relief to consider the fact that many people only conform to these goals because they think everyone else thinks this way.

I for one don’t have wealth as my #1 metric of success and I officially give you permission to abandon that as a central aim of your life as well.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Why Did People Stop Caring About Developing a Meaningful Philosophy of Life in the 1970s? appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Modern work critics blame Frederick Taylor for the hyper-optimization of the modern workplace. The accepted narrative is that Taylor kicked off a movement that looked at work as something that could be optimized and managed and that his efforts kick-started a 100+ year movement of steadily increasing optimization.

Sounds good but its not true. Today’s hyper-optimized workplace would not exist except for the emergence of a new kind of worker: the career-driven knowledge worker.

Taylor was mostly concerned with the manufacturing world and he believed that an embrace of his principles would help not only managers, but production workers:

“The principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee.

Frederick Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, 1911

He wrote in a time in which the kind of service and knowledge work that is common today barely existed. While his techniques did gain popularity in manufacturing, it would take another 30 to 40 years for analytical and measurement techniques to gain widespread adoption.

It took the emergence of a new kind of work.

The Career Path & The Need To Perform

After world-war II as the US repurposed its military workforce there was a boom in employment in the business world and for the first time. the goal of working for a big corporation became a common goal.

William Whyte famously called them “Organization Men” and wrote more than 400 pages making sense of this new type of worker that started to identify with a company above any other affiliation in their life:

The ones I am talking about belong to it as well. They are the ones of our middle class who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life, and it is they who are the mind and soul of our great self-perpetuating institutions.

William Whyte, The Organization Man, 1956

This was a dramatic shift from the age-old conflict between labor and the owners of capital. Once that had existed from the earliest days of capitalism.

While the manufacturing workers of Taylor’s time had a strong “class consciousness,” these “white collar” workers in the 1950s were not sure who they were:

White-collar workers rarely knew where they were, whom they should identify with. It was an enduring dilemma, rooted in what might be called a class unconsciousness, that would characterize the world of the office worker until the present day.

– Cubed, A Secret History of the Workplace

Despite attempts throughout the 20th century for labor movements to include these workers, knowledge workers distanced themselves from organized blue-collar workers.  Instead of labor unions, they formed “associations” and increasingly saw themselves as aspiring business people who might one day become business owners.

Taylor wanted to close the divide between labor and capital. These workers had no interest in seeing that divide in the first place.

The knowledge worker was focused on managing a career, developing skills and acquiring achievements or as Merriam-Webster now defines it, “pursuit of consecutive progressive achievement.”

People saw themselves not as a part of an organization but as someone with a first-person account of achievements and contributions and over time, that narrative was something that could be (and eventually, needed to be) carried from employer to employer. 

And as the job morphed into a career, the worker shifted from someone merely doing their job to someone that needed to perform. 

Continuous Improvement & The “Theatre Of Work”

Before the 1960’s the idea of a “career path” was not a thing. Workers hoped to merely keep their jobs. Early uses of the term seem to have been aimed at two audiences: men joining the military and women joining the workforce.

Over time, the idea of a promising career path was connected to the end of a college education and over the 2nd half of the 20th century, it would become common knowledge that the whole point of going to college was to land a good job.

Whyte, writing in The Organization Man writes, “The union between the world of organization and the college has been so cemented that today’s seniors can see a continuity between the college and the life thereafter that we never did”

The idea that a young person was to orient around a good career became increasingly popular. It was not until the 1980s, however, that the analytical tools became central to such a career. This is when new “schools” of business thinking like Total Quality Management, Six Sigma and Lean entered the scene. 

These programs gave the career-driven person language and initiatives to “proof” they needed and guaranteed that career success and analytical measurement of that success would become inseparable.

Every aspirational leader attached their careers to these programs in the 1980’s, most notably Jack Welch.  In 1989, he gave an interview in which he detailed GE’s newly launched “work out” program:

We want 300,000 people with different career objectives, different family aspirations, different financial goals, to share directly in this company’s vision, the information, the decision-making process, and the rewards

For someone at GE, it was very clear that you would need to get involved in one of these programs if you hoped to progress at the company. By the end of the 1990’s every large company had similar programs and employees had figured out that to get ahead you needed to document your progress.

In today’s working world, the reality of work is that good work does not pay off. You also need to share that success in something consultant Tom Critchlow calls this the “theatre of work”:

Many people aspire to “silent success” at work – to do work that “speaks for itself”. Unfortunately this is the wrong move in the theatre of work. Instead we should aspire to the opposite – for knowledge work, the performance of the work is the work.

Continuous Improvement programs helped complete the shift of work into a performance and kept workers in a non-stop search for problems that need to be fixed.

A New Kind of Worker

The point of all of this is not really to decide whether or not Frederick Taylor is to blame for our hyper-analytical workplace.

It is to make you aware that a unique set of circumstances emerged in the second half of the 20th century that birthed a new type of worker: the knowledge worker.

Despite knowledge work still only being half of the workforce (estimates vary), these workers have a dominant hold on our current myths and stories about what it means to work and what is means to be a human in the modern age.

Consider the changes in our mindsets that resulted from this new type of worker:

• The point of college is to get a job
• One should always be growing and improving at work
• Finding deeper meaning and belonging at work is vital
• The most important battles of freedom are for increased labor right
• Doing good work is not enough, you also need to self-promote

There are many subtle shifts that have emerged in the last 50-70 years but what makes them remarkable is that we all seem to accept that this is the way things have always been. Modern criticism of capitalism often miss this point. They don’t realize that work and a career was not always so central to our existence. It is only when work is the center that blowing everything up seems logical.

The emergence of knowledge work and the wealth that is has enabled many to generate across the world has been a huge positive in terms of freeing many people from having to worry about putting food on the table each week.

Yet the shift in consciousness that arose around the emergence of this new kind of work has led us into many traps. We look for belonging and meaning at work but never seem to grasp it. We crave the deeper truths of life but our schools only teach practical skills to get you hired. We fight for freedom for more people to work but find ourselves lacking the deeper things that give our lives meaning like connection, community and relationships.

I don’t have a utopian vision of what new work beliefs should look like but I can sense that they are starting to emerge. The majority of knowledge workers around the world are now working from their homes. They are finding that our scripts about the role work is supposed to play in our lives are outdated but they don’t have a better answer.

Whyte was a keen observer of the dark side of this new side of work when he was writing in the 1950s. He saw that the draw of aligning oneself with an organization and a certain kind of work was appealing

In a world changing so fast, in a world in which he must forever be on the move, the individual desperately needs roots, and The Organization is a logical place to develop them.

We still need those roots but after 65 years its time to realize that work is not going to deliver them.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post The Knowledge Worker Mind & The Birth Of Careerism appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

I’ve written quite a bit about the fragile labor economy and believe the gaps I’ve written about have become more visible than ever.

Here are the questions I’m thinking about for the next year.

#1 What happens when work doesn’t seem a necessary part of our lives?

In Max Weber’s famous treatise on Capitalism published in the 1800’s, he argued that a central element that enabled capitalism to emerge and succeed starting in the 1500s was the fact that so many people eventually developed a “spirit” for capitalism.

Many people incorrectly equate this spirit as greed, but as Weber points out, greed is timeless and universal not a product of capitalism.  It has been seen at all times in history and in all types of economic systems.  Instead Weber suggests that capitalism might have become so effective because of its ability to restrain greed:

Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse. 

By channeling this natural human urge into work, it can theoretically benefit not only the greedy person, but society at large.  

What then motivates work?

This is where things get tricky and where we might be on a slippery slope regarding our work beliefs.  

Weber argues that the Protestant reformation and the shift from people believing work was a necessary evil to one where work was seen as an end in itself was the ultimate shift that unlocked the potential of capitalism to succeed across the world.  As he says, “simply: that business with its continuous work has become a necessary part of their lives.”

In the US, this belief is deeply connected with how many measure their success in life:

This necessary part of people’s lives has been stripped away and many more are working remotely and questioning if there work is really all that essential at all.

#2: How does unstable work relate to how people think about the future?

To explore this, it’s worth taking a trip across the world to Japan, where the economy has been relatively stagnant since the end of the 1980’s boom years. 

While Japan has softened some of the blow of this stagnation with a 15% increase in the labor participation rate of women since 2000, it also saw a steady increase “nonregular” work which grew from about 20% of the labor force in the 1990s to almost 40% in the late 2010s.

Many of these people, sometimes called “freeters” opt out of steady paid employment even when it is available.  This loss of faith in the prospects of employment has fueled a vicious cycle in Japan.  People stopped believing in the future and companies stopped investing in employees.

The result was a self-fulfilling prophecy that made the “non-regular” employment class of workers permanent:

Naoki Shinada, an economist at the Development Bank of Japan, explains that in the immediate aftermath of an economic shock, it makes sense for companies to use temporary and part-time workers to control costs and maintain flexibility. But problems arise when this becomes the standard hiring practice, making it “more difficult for firms to maintain some skills embodied in their labor force.”

People have lacked faith that things will improve in the future and so they take the “non-regular” path.

We’ve already seen these non-regular paths emerge as I explored this in my conversation with Sarah Kessler about her book Gigged.

Will we see a two-tiered labor economy emergewhere some have great jobs and others will do various gig work over the course of their lives?

#3 How will the cross-generation disconnect be resolved?

Part of the reason the belief that “if you work hard, you will be taken care of” exists is that it was true. Yet, this has become less and less true:

Every ninety out of one hundred people born immediately after World War II ended up earning more than their parents. For millennials, its a coin flip. What will this look like for Gen Z?

This has had a huge effect on household wealth where each generation (except baby boomers) have had less wealth at similar ages:

Younger generation have not just sat and mourned the decline of the American dream, they have changed their approach to life.  Young people have put more emphasis on experiences over things and have delayed marriage, homeownership and having children:

As a result, the gap between the number of children that women say they want to have (2.7) and the number of children they will probably actually have (1.8) has risen to the highest level in 40 years. (From 1972 to 2016, men have expressed almost exactly the same ideal fertility rates as women: In a given year, they average just 0.04 children below what women say is ideal.)

What further cultural changes will emerge? How will people think about money, where they live and how they spend their time?

One thing that is already happening is a soft wealth transfer from baby boomers to millennials. Consider this:

“in 2000, 23 percent of men aged 21-30 lived with a parent or close relative, but by 2015, that number surged to 35 percent.”

That number is likely going up in the next couple of years.

Many of these parents quietly fund the lives of their kids because lets be honest its a bit embarrassing, especially in a country that believes in work so deeply. Yet this current crisis may be different.

In many western countries, the way to pass wealth down to the next generation was work. That mechanism is not working anymore and has not been working for a while. Will we see new norms emerge? Will boomers embrace a “pre-inheritance” and look to buy a house so their children can start raising their own families or will they continue to believe that work is the only way that people get ahead?

#4 What is the role of making stuff and our relationship to optimism and the future?

Over the past 50 years, there has been a consistent trend of decreasing manufacturing jobs offset by an increase in services jobs. 

These new jobs are often positioned as “higher-value” work.  While some are many are what Adair Turner has called “zero-sum” work – work that can’t be automated and does not drive productivity gains:

Look around the economy, and it’s striking how much high-talent manpower is devoted to activities that cannot possibly increase human welfare, but entail competition for the available economic pie. Such activities have become ubiquitous: legal services, policing, and prisons; cybercrime and the army of experts defending organizations against it; financial regulators trying to stop mis-selling and the growing ranks of compliance officers employed in response; the huge resources devoted to US election campaigns; real-estate services that facilitate the exchange of already-existing assets; and much financial trading.

Dan Wang has written about the role of this shift in our relationship to optimism about the future:

“Although manufacturing jobs can be wasteful, I don’t think (they have) this issue of being zero-sum.” 

The conclusion being that if we just adding more manufacturing jobs we might increase optimism about the future. People have been talking about “bringing back” those jobs for decades – it’s not going to happen.

Silicon Valley is one place that has been dreaming about the future, one with software and robots instead of traditional manufacturing.

Can people become optimistic about these efforts especially if the robots are doing the building? Or do humans need to use their hands and make stuff?

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Questions About The Future Of Work appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Look at this cute little guy:

Right now, as citizens of the United States we may become that hamster.  Near term, we don’t really have a choice.  Long term, we might have a choice.

A lot of people have asked us what printing money means. Like, what actually happens and why should we care? That simple question turned into a long investigation. 

The result is this piece, which aims to give you a better understanding of the whole economy using hamsters. Hamsters are fun. They’re playful. We understand their need to run faster and faster on wheels.

But, my friends, the joke is on us. WE are the hamsters right now.

We’ll explain WHY we, U.S. Citizens participating in the global economy, are just like that hamster and explore WHETHER we want to remain on the hamster wheel. 

It’s an ambitious agenda, requiring us to do a first principles explanation of a bunch of economic concepts, including:

• What money really is
• How it powers the economy and as a result, our hamster wheels
• Why fast is never fast enough on the hamster wheel (hint: it’s greed!)
• What happens when hamsters lose interest in the hamster wheel?
• What does the future look like? Wheel or no wheel?

Can you really just “print” money?

Apparently, yes. Governments across the world are “printing money” at an unprecedented rate, unleashing trillions of dollars into the economy.  The US central bank has pushed $2.5T of fiscal stimulus which estimates suggest could become $6 trillion with more expected.  

That’s a huge amount of money. But what does it mean to print money?

Printing money now is not like the very old days, where you had to print paper dollars. Physical Money (or “M1” in economic terms) is not where the action happens. Imagine instead, you log into your online bank account and instead of being like “damn, pay day is so far away”, you’re like “damn, that’s a LOT of money” when you see $10 Billion Dollars in your account. That’s what printing money is like these days. It’s a ledger entry: the government says there’s money in your account and voila, there’s money.

That’s what the  government is doing right now. You can go read the technical details but it’s not significantly more complicated than that. They’re distributing money in all sorts of ways: buying financial objects (in particular stocks and bonds), giving banks money to lend, along with standard policies like setting interest rates and spending on government projects. And thank goodness: people are short on cash right now. They’ve lost jobs, businesses have lost customers, all because people are overwhelmingly staying home now.

Intuitively, printing money seems to be a good solution to a crisis. After all if you can just create money out of thin air, why wouldn’t you? And if it works so brilliantly, why aren’t governments doing this all the time?

You probably have some sense that it isn’t quite that simple. And you’d be right. Furthermore, we’re printing money at a scale the world has never seen. It is an extraordinary global experiment, the implications of which are hard to understand or predict at all. 

Before getting there, we’ve assumed we understand what we’re printing (“money”). Let’s make sure we agree on what that is. In exploring money, we’ll also introduce three simple lessons of “Hamsternomics,” or in other words, how we are all like hamsters running around on hamster wheels.

Three Intro Lessons To Hamsternomics

Hamsternomics 101

With a bit of magic, you are now transformed into a hamster:

Hi Hamster.

Hamsters are simple, peaceable creatures. They care about one thing: running on the hamster wheel. 

Running on the wheel seems to provide them food, shelter, and warmth, which they pay for each month with what they call “hammies.”  No one seems to remember when these “hammies” were created, they have just always been part of hamster world.  Asking where they came from to other hamsters gets you looked at funny.

What they all do know is that each time they make the hamster wheel rotate they get 1 hammy. This shows up on a counter right beside the wheel, so they know how many hammies they have. Hamsters love this direct feedback!

At the end of every day, they  press a button called ‘food’ –each time they press the ‘food’ button, a hammy gets moved from their counter into the ‘food’ pile. At precisely 8 PM, food gets divided among the hamsters based on how many hammies they put in.  Over time, this system works nicely. No hamster runs a lot more than they need to because after all they can only eat so much food. 

So you’ve got a ton of hamsters running on wheels, splitting food pretty nicely. Life is good!

One day, overnight, a new button appears next to the ‘food’ button. It says ‘Hamster Prize.’ Intrigued, a few intrepid hamsters press that button a couple of times. One crazy Hamster named ‘Larry’ presses it 100 times. 

At 8 PM, he gets a neon sign in his cage that says “Hamster Prize.” They soon figure out that the person that puts the most hammies in the pot at 8PM wins this ‘Hamster prize.’ 

People start running on the wheel more to get the “Hamster Prize”, competing against each other. Often to exhaustion and sometimes even to the exclusion of food. This behavior perplexes some other hamsters, but soon enough people seem to take even this behavior as basic.

At this point, even with this simple hamster world. We’ve illustrated what money is. Specifically money (or hammies) is 2 things:

1. A store of value – the counter shows how many times you’ve run around the hamster wheel, and proves that you did so.
2. A unit of account for transactions – food is divided according to the number of hammies you put in. The hamster prize goes to the hamster that puts in the most hammies. No hammies, no prize. But having the prize also proves you put the most hammies in one day.

But in a deeper sense, you’ll recall that hammies merely represent the number of times a hamster has run around a hamster wheel. Hamsters believe that they’ll have food when they press the food button at the end of the day. But there is no rule written that they must, and in fact no one guarantees it. In a very real sense, for a hammy, or any money, to have value, hamsters (or humans) have to believe it means something in the first place. That belief is a pattern, renewed every day, by the run-on-the-wheel-then-collect-your-food cycle. Hamsters run because it always seems to work, and it always has.

On another day, everything changes again. There’s now a new alexHAM button in the hamster pen. It allows them to hit the button and then make a small squeak indicating something that they want.  An algorithm powering the button calculates how many hammies it will cost and then the hamster gets to work on the wheel.  At the end of the day they hit the button again and can exchange a number of hammies for the item they wanted.  Some keep the items, but others start producing them for the hamsters in nearby cages.  Things start to get out of hand as hamsters come up with infinite numbers of things they want: fluffier beds, hamster sweats, upgraded water bottles and so on…

With this shift, the hamsters started paying more attention to how much hammies everything cost and they started to have a better understanding of what was valuable in the eyes of other hamsters.

Hamsternomics 102: Debt

With the new buttons, the hamsters started to imagine all sorts of things they could create and new ways of managing how things are produced.  As things became more complicated, they had to come up with better ways to manage everything.

For example, if a hamster gets sick, would they run out of food because they can’t run on the hamster wheel?  No, of course not, hamsters aren’t savages!   

What they do is they allow the sick hamster to promise to run more times in the future in exchange for some hammies now, which they can use to get food. It’s a simple system. A trusted hamster subtracts some hammies from their counter and gives it to the hamster in need. The hamster in need just runs a few more times around the wheel every day to pay it back to their friend. Voila. 

As the rules get more complex, the hamsters start using the word “economy” to describe all the activities related to running on the wheel and acquisition of things.

As the demand for the new things increase, the hamsters figure out new ways to get what they want faster.  Similar to how the hamsters stay fed when they are too sick to run, they start making promises to other hamsters in exchange for hammies that they can use today to buy what they want.  Some of the hamsters make these promises to hamsters they don’t know as well, who demand a small “interest” payment in case they fail to follow through.  Eventually almost all the hamsters make some transactions using this method, which we would call credit and even start to keep track of everything in a digital account rather than exchanging real physical hammies. The whole system works because most hamsters run around the wheel enough times to pay everyone back. 

This enables the hamsters to dream bigger.  They start doing things that were previously impossible, like building hamster mansions that take months, or writing hamster novels which take years. 

Now remember, when one hamster owes another hamster some hammies, you’ve in effect ‘created’ new hammies magically. The ‘borrower’ hamster gets some hammies now – which they can spend on whatever they want. The hamster gets that same amount of hammies later, plus some bonus hammies! Where do those hammies come from? Well, the borrower hamster has to run around the wheel a few times. It doesn’t take too long to realize that every hamster loan represents some hammies in another hamsters bank account, or a promise to run around the wheel a few more times to get more hammies.  Again this might make your head spin, but that’s OK. Just remember, there’s a balance of payments that exists. Every hammy in the hamster economy can be accounted for, by spinning on the wheel or as a promise to another hamster.

The system works well, but over time people notice there are patterns. 

Some of the more astute among you may have noticed some similarities to Ray “Hamster-Legend” Dalio’s conception of the “economic machine.” We were definitely inspired by him and highly recommend his full 30-minute video on the subject, but its certainly not required to understand what’s happening in hamster world.

Hamsternomics 103: Government!

After a while, hamsters realize they want some things that no individual hamster can pay for. So they create a hamster government. The hamster government can make things like space lasers (so cool!) and giant hamster wheels that hundreds of hamsters can go on at the same time (wow!). But sometimes, their projects get so ambitious that there aren’t enough hammies. No problem, AbraHAMster Lincoln says, we’ll lend money to ourselves. 

“What?” says the collective hamsterland?

“Easy” Ham Lincoln replies.

“We’ll give any hamster that wants a promise to get more hammies (when everyone has gone around the hamster wheel a few more times) in the future in exchange for some of your hammies now.”

“That sounds circular,” say the hamsters. “Aren’t we the ones who you rely on to get hammies for projects?”

“Indeed.” says Ham Lincoln. “Indeed.”

That last point is an important point. If you ask a single hamster to go around one more time on the wheel, it’s pretty trivial. But if you ask a single hamster to go around 1 million times, it’s pretty tough! But it’s pretty easy to promise that you’ll go around 1 million times at some point in the future. At 180 rpm’s (seriously), that’s 90 hours of hamster wheel spinning. Not an impossible amount, but a lot of hamster wheeling!

Making promises is great when everything is working normally. Hamsters run, food is provided. However, make too many promises and, you need to have more hamsters, the hamsters need to go faster, or things are going to get pretty uncomfortable for our furry friends.

INTERLUDE: HAMVID-19 CRISIS!  

CRISIS! HAMVID-19, a deadly disease, emerges in the hamster world. AbraHAM Lincoln decides to shut down all the hamster wheels but this causes a major problem! Hamsters have made promises to run around the wheel a number of times but now that is impossible. What will happen? 

Lots of pain, that’s what.

If you’re a hamster that promised to run around the wheel – you have to break those promises. On the other side, if other hamsters promised you hammies, you don’t get those hammies. Now imagine you’re somewhere in the middle – you were a judicious hamster that saved, gave money to some deserving upstanding hamsters, but then made a promise based on those upstanding hamsters so you could buy your own food. 

Utter chaos. 

AbraHAM Lincoln now can’t make promises to other hamsters. He’d certainly look foolish promising that people will run around the hamster wheel when running around the wheel is prohibited!

What if… Ham Lincoln muses… I just change everyone’s counters *as if* they are running around the wheel? Wouldn’t that make everything better?

And with that question and thought experiment, we bid our fair hamsters adieu.

The fragile human hamster wheel

We’re not so subtle. Perhaps you have seen already the parallels between our world and the hamster world. We operate in our own version of hamsternomics, except it’s more complicated. Instead of individual hamster wheels, we build things, move things or offer services to others.  Money is available, saved, and exchanged in significantly more complicated ways. And when something like Covid-19 hits, not all value is immediately destroyed because there are all types of different hamster wheels that exist.  People who work online might be able to keep going at the same speed.  Others who work at restaurants may be off the wheel for months.

What is similar is that we’ve developed special institutions like the central bank that can “inject” money to help keep hamster wheels in motion when people start to lose faith in the system.  This was partially credited with keeping the 2008 financial crisis from becoming an even worse challenge for the global economy.

In short, as we mentioned at the beginning, what AbraHAM Lincoln ponders at the end is *in reality* what is happening now. The $1,200 stimulus checks are being ‘printed’ – given to us without needing to pay it back.

However, printing money is equivalent to the government automatically running the hamster wheels and eventually hoping everyone will ‘get back on.’ The government can keep the wheels running for a short time but eventually needs people to jump on themselves while picking up the speed over time.

In our current crisis, they are not even thinking about that yet, they are just trying to stop things from falling apart.

“A government’s creation of money and credit and its spending of this money and credit cannot produce goods and services or employ people (though it can give them money and credit to not go broke).”

In the short term, the pattern of ‘everything working’ is so strong and instinctive, we trust that it will in fact keep working. And as long as it does, we’ll all be (mostly) happy. But at some point, people will need to be motivated to get back on their human hamster wheels.  

It’s worth restating the assumptions being this, that it critically depends on people believing that the hamster wheel story is true.  The story goes that if you keep the wheel moving and push harder, you will have more food, security and comfort.

But over the past twenty years, cracks have begun to appear. Looking at alternative measures of success like the “cost of thriving”, it becomes clear that it takes the median person in the US almost 12 more weeks per year to earn the same quality of life in 2018 as they did only 18 years earlier in the year 2000. The wheel is going faster and faster. There’s a “Red Queen” problem (from Alice in Wonderland) – you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place!

Which brings us back to our friend from the beginning. Get thrown off the wheel too many times and you’ll stop believing in the story.

The Three Motivators: What Gets People Back on The Wheel?

Few people have any memory of experiences with the economy working in a different way, so believing in the story is the only option people think they have.  

Our current story enables different people to have different motivator for why they participate in the system.  Three of them we want to highlight are meeting our desires, trying to become wealthy and/or to be employed as a way to contribute to society.

These were all on fragile ground before the crisis, but because of it the cracks are becoming more visible.

Motivator #1: Our “Insatiable Desire”

As humans we have two kinds of needs: relative and absolute. When your child says they ‘need’ a new toy, we consider that a relative need. When a bystander says that an unconscious victim on the beach needs CPR, we consider that an absolute need. The categories are intuitive, but non-obvious. People live without things we’d consider ‘absolute’ needs: consider homeless people. However, we generally agree as humans that certain things should be provided: food, shelter, health care (to a degree) etc. The key to understanding the desire for Universal Basic Income and the like is that we, as a US economy, theoretically have way more than enough to provide for everyone’s basic needs.

Relative needs, then, are where the action is. Many things we want *because* others have them. We want other things because we simply want more of them. It’s not enough to have *a* yacht, you yearn for a bigger yacht. Humans have an innate comparison mechanism to others. We gather our own self worth not absolutely, but for the most part in relation to other humans.

The insatiability of our relative desires means that the conceptual growth of an economy can be modeled as ‘infinite’ – as long as there is something for which we humans are willing to work for, we’ll continue to work for it and go after it. Money is the simplest measure of how badly we want something.. That number can change, and motivate people to do more to get the things they want. You’ll often hear common terminology for this phenomenon: supply and demand, and where they cross as the market price. Prices are extraordinary things in plain sight

but they’re tangible representations of what we value in society.

And so the hamster wheels turn.

Motivator #2: Take Risk, Get Rich

Are we all just hamsters making promises to each other to spin more times around the wheel? You might ask how do we keep getting ourselves into this predicament?  What stops us from looking around and declaring “I finally have enough!”and just live out our days in leisure? 

Essentially, it’s the fact that our relative  needs are a ratchet.  The more you have the more you want.  We are on the hunt for things that are better, faster, cooler and make us stand out compared to others. 

One hypothesis for why the US has been so economically successful is that it is has created better incentives and ecosystems than any other country for individuals to attempt to meet the insatiability of human desire.  

In short, if you have an idea — however crazy — you are encouraged to pursue it and if it succeeds, people readily accept that you should become extraordinarily wealthy because of it..

While this incentive structure can have terrible effects when those people try to hack the financial system (e.g. ahem, too-big-to-fail banks), on the balance it has created the greatest economic engine the world has ever seen.

Things that people want come from the U.S. market: Silicon Valley technology, Hollywood entertainment, World-beloved consumer brands that wash our floors and clean our dishes, and sexy electric cars.

The sheer madness of some of the investments means that some people end up looking like Jeff Bezos, and others like Adam Neumann. And while WeWork’s valuation was magical thinking, the ability of Adam Neumann to keep the borderline fraud alive for so long is a fundamental part of our system.That Neumann can create the company and fail and then try again is a feature, not a bug.

Many other systems wouldn’t allow this to occur, and in fact systematically take actions to prevent it.

Without risk, there is no chance of asymmetric reward. Without that reward, the hamster wheel slows, as we’ve seen from other economies like France and Japan. 

Motivator #3: Get A Job, Be A Good Member of Society

To be on the hamster wheel is to take part in a collective society.  Increasingly, at least in the US, this means paid employment.  

As one of the only countries in the world to embrace “employment-at-will” the amount of people in the labor force is a lot more dynamic in the US than in other countries.  During “normal” times there is an argument that this kind of labor relationship enables companies to react more quickly, hire faster (and more people) and generate more wealth than they would with another setup.

For our current crisis, however, we’ve seen an unbelievable amount of people become unemployed in a short time.  In a 28-day stretch starting March 26th, the US saw more than 30 million people file for unemployment with still more likely to come.  Compared this to Germany, where in a country fourth the size of the US, they only expect about 2.35 million people to collect unemployment benefits throughout the entire crisis.

While this experiment may prove to be a “feature,” not a bug in our ability to respond to the crisis, there is no doubt that the scale of the response will have dramatic implications for the future of the business world and how people think about work and what motivates people to take risk.  

Ultimately, the idea that we collectively contribute to society by being employed has a strong fundamental basis historically. The question is whether that’s true anymore.

No Off-Ramps from the Hamster Wheel

John Maynard Keyes suggested in the 1930’s that we faced an “economic problem” which was simply how do we produce enough as a species to meet a satisfactory level of needs – what we called “absolute needs” earlier.  He projected that by 2030 we would have achieved a level of economic prosperity that would enable us to once and for all solve this problem and that the real problem would shift to how people would think about spending their time after working a minimum number of hours during the week.

Many who argue for a Universal Basic Income are using this line of thinking and trying to tell us “We’ve solved the basic economic problem! Let’s start acting like it!”

While this may be true the argument falls down once you recognize that most of these absolute needs are met within the context of a market economy – the hamster wheel needs to keep turning.. We saw this most clearly in many Western nations in their early reactions to the pandemic.  When the hamster wheel stopped moving, there were breakdowns in production and supply chains.  While people were able to quickly react in some cases, like making masks for their communities or sharing food, people can’t just manufacture their blood pressure medicine in their kitchen.  

Many people are projecting that eventually people will return to their hamster wheels.  That the things that have motivated them in the past will motivate them in the future.  This is a bet that things will return to “normal.”

However, here again we see Dalio pointing out the obvious about human nature and its relationship to economic activity.

The level of economic activity that we will see will depend on how we are changed by this experience with the virus …I believe that we will be profoundly changed by this experience for many reasons including how the discussions about who will pay the bills (e.g., will we pass this debt on or will we raise taxes) and about who should have what (e.g., should there be fewer differences in our access to basic needs) occur. Many other profound changes will also occur, such as attempts to have self-sufficiency in an interdependent world and the changes in the global world order.

There are very difficult questions about life that will come up. Despite being a rich country, there are still people that go without food or shelter and many more struggle to find adequate housing, work that pays a living wage and affordable healthcare. 

Yet, it remains unavoidable that no country has found a system to provide those needs for everyone in a society. Many charismatic leaders were certain that utopia was close, but all have either come up short or taken disastrous turns towards violence and repression.  

For now, all hail the indomitable hamster wheel!

Epilogue: Three Questions About The Hamster Wheel

Why do people stay on the hamster wheel?  Simply, because it’s worked so far and everyone else is on the wheel.  If they keep doing it, their family will be kept safe and secure.  Or at least that’s always been the case.

We do what we do because dammit, that’s what we do!

This crisis is unique in that it is giving millions of people a clear view at the hamster wheel and people are starting to question if it’s all worth it.  Should we go back to the wheel?  Are we getting a good deal? 

No one is really sure, but people are starting to wonder.  Most people want to keep their lives going as they have been going.  They want to meet their absolute needs and also want to keep their relative needs met, but the whole thing is showing more cracks and is more fragile than ever. 

This would be the point when others might pivot to a very clear vision of what comes next and how we will shift.  We’re not so confident.  We see the flaws in utopian thinking.  But we do think it is time to contemplate the questions underlying the hamster wheel.  

1. Is the Hamster Wheel still as important as it has been historically?
2. Is there an alternative to the hamster wheel? What would that look like?
3. What kind of future do we want to build?

These are not easy questions and may even be uncomfortable to even think about. But given what we now know about the hamster wheel – it appears the days of happy mindless spinning may not be as sustainable as it has been in the past..

Unless we decide what we want to do next – there may be a lot of unhappy hamsters.

About This Essay

This essay was a collaboration of Paul Millerd and Ryan Borker, who both have experience jumping on and off the hamster wheel at multiple points in their lives.  This essay put us out of our comfort zone, but we are deeply curious about what we got right and what was missing. We’d love to keep the conversation going and you can join in the conversation by emailing us your thoughts, sharing on social media or following along on our newsletters.  You can easily find Paul’s link to subscribe on this page, but you can also join Ryan’s explorations on “the future is work” by subscribing here.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Hamsternomics: Printing Money, The Economy & Work Beliefs appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

My Short Summary

Alex Pang makes sense of the idea of “rest” through his own journey taking a sabbatical after leaving Academia and the corporate world. What he discovers is that we have lost connection with an ancient idea and broader conception of Leisure as one of a mix of contemplation and action. He explores how our modern work beliefs have crowded out rest – both the active kind (like exercise) and passive kind (contemplation) – in favor of the 40+ hour work week and being “productive.” An antidote to our empty work beliefs. Recommend.

Key Themes & Quotes

When our identity as a person becomes too wrapped up in being a worker we become lost

How taking an identity as a “worker” undermines your existence

If your work is your self, when you cease to work, you cease to exist.

The business world has been overtaken by a cult of “busyness” where we have lost the connection between “hard work” and “good work.” Americans are uniquely obsessed with work and have some of the worst problems with overwork in the world, dating back hundreds of years.

William James diagnosis on Americans

Consider William James’s diagnosis of overwork in his 1899 essay “Gospel of Relaxation.” He argued that Americans had become accustomed to overwork, to living with an “inner panting and expectancy” and bringing “breathlessness and tension” to work.
…
In 1899 William James noted that that many Americans had gotten “into a wretched trick” of overwork and overextension, which increased “the frequency and severity of our breakdowns.” An anonymous writer in Singapore’s Straits Times observed in 1913, “The tendency of the present age is to mental overwork and the exhaustion of the brain force.” Two years later, Bertie Charles Forbes noted that the modern industrialist “works harder than any of his workmen,” and the banker “gets early to his office and performs more work—and brainier work—than any other three men in his nerve-wrecking profession.” Such men had made America the envy of the world, he said, but they were “committing suicide by overwork.”

And the modern cult of busyness and “performing busyness”:

As a result, service workers and professionals are rewarded not just for performing work but also for “performing” busyness at work.

Today’s workplace respects overwork, even though it’s counterproductive, and treats four-hour days as “contemptibly slack,” even though they produce superior results.

On how companies are manipulating people based on our broken ideas of leisure to get people to stay in the office:

As sociologist William Davies argues, today’s workers are told that passion is their greatest asset and that they should do what they love (or at least love what they do); employers, meanwhile, have come to see happiness as a strategic resource that boosts employee productivity, decreases absenteeism and turnover, and increases customer satisfaction. In a few very privileged companies, where competition for talent is ferocious, this translates into free food, entertainment, on-site dry-cleaning, and other perks; elsewhere, it’s deployed as a kind of weaponized positive psychology, in which automated systems watch for signs of discontent, negative voice tone during customer phone calls, and indicators that happiness is at suboptimal levels. In environments like these, the ability to detach from a workplace that wants to commoditize your emotional life, and to cultivate a private life rather than succumb to easy alternatives that keep you in the office, is more valuable than ever.

Leisure once had a deeper meaning – it used to be an active engagement with life through contemplation or engagement in things that brought you alive. Our modern conception of it is as a passive pursuit and often merely in the aim of “recharging” for work.

The Roman and Greek conceptions of leisure and rest:

Of course, I can’t claim any special insight here. The ancient Greeks saw rest as a great gift, as the pinnacle of civilized life. The Roman Stoics argued that you cannot have a good life without good work. Indeed, virtually every ancient society, recognized that both work and rest were necessary for a good life: one provided the means to live, the other gave meaning to life. Today, we’ve lost touch with that wisdom, and our lives are poorer and less fulfilling as a result. It’s time we rediscovered the good that rest can do.

Referencing Josef Pieper and his discussion of work in Germany after World War II, he references Piepers idea of leisure that seemed to be lsot in the culture

Pieper described as not just a “result of spare time” but “an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm.”

This idea of leisure – one of “inward calm” was slowly eroded and then looked at skeptically and ow dramatic this shifted our culture:

Anything created through contemplation (or religious revelation, or intuition) was, by definition, less impressive and trustworthy.
…
These philosophical arguments might seem arcane, but the assumptions that knowledge is produced rather than discovered or revealed, that the amount of work that goes into an idea determines its importance, and that the creation of ideas can be organized and institutionalized, all guide our thinking about work today. When we treat workaholics as heroes, we express a belief that labor rather than contemplation is the wellspring of great ideas and that the success of individuals and companies is a measure of their long hours.

Pieper shares the idea of the ratio and the intellectus, which is that ideas can be formulated through work (ratio) or intellectus (spiritual means):

Devoting yourself only to the first (to ratio, in other words) and neglecting the second (intellectus) might make you more productive in the short run but will make your work less profound in the long run.

Another example from history, he cites Sun Tzu

Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “It is the unemotional, reserved, calm, detached warrior who wins, not the hothead seeking vengeance and not the ambitious seeker of fortune.” In The Book of Five Rings, written around 1645, Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi advised, “Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm.”

Breaks can be vitally important, but a vacation within the context of full-time work probably will only give you 3-4 weeks of relief

At this rate you’d need to take a week vacation every month to really “recharge”

Psychologists have since discovered that a similar effect holds for even relaxing vacations: the benefits don’t last very long. When they measure mood, energy levels, engagement, and happiness levels among workers before and immediately after a vacation, then weeks or months later, psychologists find that the emotional boost that a vacation provides lasts about three or four weeks. After that, your happiness and job satisfaction levels return to their prevacation levels: it’s “lots of fun, quickly gone,” as one article puts it. (And for perfectionists and workaholics, the fade-out effects happen even faster.)

Looking back in history, you find many prolific creators did not work as the people we glorify today. There is a consistent convergence around 4-hours of deep work. Our modern work culture has lost connection to good work because we orient around a 40-hour work week instead of looking at the worth of the output.

Here is how Darwin spent his day”

After his morning walk and breakfast, Darwin was in his study by eight and worked a steady hour and a half.

At nine thirty he would read the morning mail and write letters. Downe was far away enough from London to discourage casual visitors, yet close enough to allow the morning mail to reach correspondents and colleagues in the city in just a few hours.

At ten thirty, Darwin returned to more serious work, sometimes moving to his aviary, greenhouse, or one of several other buildings where he conducted his experiments.

By noon, he would declare, “I’ve done a good day’s work,” and set out on a long walk on the Sandwalk, a path he had laid out not long after buying Down House. (Part of the Sandwalk ran through land leased to Darwin by the Lubbock family.) When he returned after an hour or more, Darwin had lunch and answered more letters.

At three he would retire for a nap; an hour later he would arise, take another walk around the Sandwalk, then return to his study until five thirty, when he would join his wife, Emma, and their family for dinner. On this schedule he wrote nineteen books, including technical volumes on climbing plants, barnacles, and other subjects; the controversial Descent of Man; and The Origin of Species, probably the single most famous book in the history of science, and a book that still affects the way we think about nature and ourselves.

Anyone who reviews his schedule cannot help but notice the creator’s paradox.

Henri Poincaré

Toulouse noted that Poincaré kept very regular hours. He did his hardest thinking between 10 a.m. and noon, and again between five and seven in the afternoon. The nineteenth century’s most towering mathematical genius worked just enough to get his mind around a problem—about four hours a day.

A study of scientists in the 1950s:

A survey of scientists’ working lives conducted in the early 1950s yielded results in a similar range. Illinois Institute of Technology psychology professors Raymond Van Zelst and Willard Kerr surveyed their colleagues about their work habits and schedules, then graphed the number of hours faculty spent in the office against the number of articles they produced. You might expect that the result would be a straight line showing that the more hours scientists worked, the more articles they published. But it wasn’t.
…
The data revealed an M-shaped curve. The curve rose steeply at first and peaked at between ten to twenty hours per week. The curve then turned downward. Scientists who spent twenty-five hours in the workplace were no more productive than those who spent five. Scientists working thirty-five hours a week were half as productive as their twenty-hours-a-week colleagues.

It looked something like this:

Companies and people find tremendous value in taking extended leave – sabbaticals – and they are probably underutilized in modern society – both for individuals and within companies

He is a big fan of sabbaticals, having discovered the idea for his first book during his own sabbatical. Here is an example from Korea he mentions:

Organizations can also benefit from sabbaticals, as the experience of Samsung Electronics shows. In 1990, when it was still struggling to expand outside Korea, Samsung started an overseas sabbatical program for its most promising executives. Every year, two hundred people attended a three-month boot camp heavy on language immersion, meditation, and education in local customs; they then headed off for six months to one of eighty countries, where they learned the local culture, made friends, and essentially played amateur anthropologist; they then spent another six months working on a business-related project of their own design. Within a decade, the experiences of these graduates were contributing to Samsung’s dizzying rise as a global brand. Today, graduates of the sabbatical program are among the company’s most senior executives, both in Seoul and around the world.

He cites the example of Stefan Sagmeister who gave a TED talk about he takes a year off from work every seven years.

“EVERYONE WHOSE JOB description includes ‘thinking’ or coming up with ideas will benefit from” taking a sabbatical, Stefan Sagmeister says. His

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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