The Pathless Path
Notes:
Post-traumatic growth: “appreciation for life in general, more meaningful interpersonal relationships, an increased sense of personal strength, changed priorities, and a richer existential and spiritual life.”
Driven people often feel pressure to be conventionally “successful” to appease their parents. But 9/10, those parents actually want their kids to “dream, take risks, and be able to explore more possibilities” in their lives.
The trap of prestigious career paths: “Instead of thinking about what you want to do with your life, you default to the options most admired by your peers.”
Calvinism: “Working hard in the area of one’s calling determines the status of a person’s relationship with God.”
9 out of 10 people born right after WWII did better economically than their parents.
Only 40% of adult Americans work more than 35 hours/week.
Employment statistics were not always such a primary measure of a country’s economic security. It’s strange that we use employment to judge a government’s performance.
Definition of burnout: “the bureaucratic infringement on a professional’s autonomy.”
Erich Fromm, “creative union:” when “man unites himself with the world in the process of creation.”
4 things that people notice when they take extended breaks from work:
people become aware of their own suffering and anxiety from work.
curiosity re-emerges.
people often desire to continue their “non-work” journey.
people write.
Experimentation: “I try to think about time in blocks of one to three months and within each block, I pick one or two things I want to prioritize and test. It might be living in a different type of place, working on new projects, traveling, or learning something new.”
Do an “experiment of the month”
Mill, On Liberty: societies need people to embrace their individuality and conduct “experiments in living.”
It’s not about money. “Many people I talk to are convinced that the formula for living on their own terms is saving up enough money. I wish they knew what I know: the longer we spend on a path that isn’t ours, the longer it takes to move towards a path that is.”
How people define success is not how they think other people define success. 97% of survey responders agreed that “A person is successful if they have followed their own interests and talents to become the best they can be at what they care about most.” 92% felt that other people defined success as “A person is successful if they are rich, have a high-profile career, or are well-known.”
The default path is a product of the industrial world. The pathless path is a natural progression for a digital-native world.
“Because I work for myself, I spend zero minutes a year blaming other people for my circumstances. It forces me to take complete ownership of my life and continue to experiment, reflect, and try again. In six months I can experiment with my life in many more ways than I did in the ten years I spent on the default path, allowing me to learn much more quickly.”
American anthropologist Ernest Becker: everyone wants to be a hero but is scared to admit it. You should live a life that feels heroic.
Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan: We need to have a coherent internal narrative about why we are living a certain way. This is the ethos of the pathless path and if you don’t know or understand your own story, you will struggle. “Self-authoring.”
Paul’s self-imposed rule: “any time I consume something from an individual that inspires me, I have to send them a note to let them know. … I love what you are doing. I hope you keep going and let me know if I can help.”
Fromm again: the root of a positive version of freedom is a deep sense of connectedness with the world. A path the achieve this state was through “creative activity.” In creative work, the worker and his object become one, man unites himself with the world in the process of creation.
Clocks only became popular in the 1600s. Until then, people thought of time in terms of activities.
Quotes:
“The ease of having an ambition is that it can be explained to others; the very disease of ambition is that it can be so easily explained to others.” -David Whyte
“The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing.” -Alan Watts
No amount of money can buy the peace of mind that comes with finding a path that you want to stay on.
“People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.” -Joseph Campbell
“We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.” -C.S. Lewis
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” -Gospel of Thomas
“Usefulness, whatever form it may take, is the price we should pay for the air we breathe and the food we eat and the privilege of being alive. And it is its own reward, as well, for it is the beginning of happiness, just as self-pity and withdrawal from the battle are the beginning of misery.” -Eleanor Roosevelt