"How to Drop Out"

[7Wannabe5]

However, we have financialized slavery or work, that is, we have turned it into a financial product, called a job, which can be bought and sold by investors and filled and changed by workers through a process known as writing resumes and interviewing. We have also pretty much eliminated any conditions on who can buy and sell jobs—not quite so on who can hold them which means, somewhat ironically, that having a job is considered quite a privilege these days.

I considered editing my immediately above post to read "lovers" rather than "men", but I didn't. Reason why is made evident by this quote from the blog. The analogy is gendered because, although increasingly considered quaint, men still hold the privilege of offering relationship contract in our culture. Prospective employees, those seeking the "privilege" of being offered a job after an interview, wait to hear from the employer. Old-fashioned female daters, those seeking the "privilege" of being offered furthering of relationship with some guy, wait to hear from him. In both cases, the default posture is submissive.

The submissive posture is not entirely to be avoided. For instance, it's the posture in which we open ourselves up to learning or expansion of consciousness or spirituality. One problem is when the submissive posture also becomes neurotic or anxious rather than strong and receptive. We fret about our annual review or whether or not he will text today or tomorrow, rather than proceeding to live our own lives in alignment with purpose. Another problem is when we feel compelled to assume submissive posture in relationship to a person or organization which we do not respect, because this creates a great deal of friction. Sometimes a "lack of respect" can be more due to being a "punk" or a "brat" or a "drop out", but oftentimes it is well warranted, or even structurally emergent.

[WFJ]

I think I understand where you are coming from, but ignoring stress is a bad idea. It will lead to mental and physical breakdowns. It sounds to me like what you are actually doing is addressing your stressors from a rational perspective and reframing your view of of the external environment. This is a valuable skill and you should keep practicing it. It is a fundamental tenet of stoicism.

It is worth noting that a lot of people are dealing with work related stress that is far beyond a late TPS report. Some people have highly toxic work environments with passive aggressive (or straight up aggressive) managers and coworkers. In my last job I had a death threat, which was added to the list of other colleagues who received those. It wasn't unusual for someone to scream at me or my coworkers for implementing local laws and regulations. That job was stressful as fuck and I'm glad I got out when I did.

Stress often results from working on something that is very challenging while you have low skills (see Mihaly csikszentmihalyi on flow and worker productivity). When you add familial/monetary obligations into that equation it quickly becomes a pressure cooker.

We are also inundated with news and negative messaging through the internet in modern times. Combine that with increased social isolation, and it begins to explain why stress/anxiety/depression are at record levels for teens (see Johaan Hari's books or Ted Talks).

What would our ancestors think if the sky was filled with smoke and you couldn't see the sun for months at a time every year?

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One of the issues with chronic stress is that most people aren't completing their stress cycles. When someone was running rom a predator the fact that they ran and escaped acted as a natural release valve. They completed that stress cycle. We don't do that often with modern stressors. We bottle it up instead. There are different ways to complete the stress cycle, but working out/exercise is my favorite. Even better if it is in nature.

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@Take2 - My old boss used to be a pretty avid rock climber. He mentioned to me that his climbing experiences helped keep work-related stressors in perspective.

Financial self-imposed stress from one's own decisions but easily diffused with a low consumption lifestyle.

At work, try to become and communicate to all those around me that I am a Cane toad. Harmless, docile. easy to interact with but if anyone even tries to lick me, they will die. Easy to kill me but any mild, even exploratory attack, will result in death. Still a "brown belt" in this regard as I don't know how to temper my power against those who even mildly attack at work and doubt (even if possible) will ever develop this skill. Don't get many Christmas cards from collogues, but this is not the purpose of work.

This is much easier to do in a one-party consent state and right to work state as any supervisor who chooses to attack can (will) usually be also fired (a few times in my career, but don't list this on my resume although a great skill to have). Always have some designation that will provide some income and have no problem taking hobby jobs after some terrible corporate work experience.

My current situation, as a simple analogy, is I'm a cog in a Bernie Madoff like fraud machine and refused to mail out fraudulent statements once realizing they were fake. Supervisors have used "Do X or else", several times and my response is "put it in writing, fire me or leave me alone". I've been offered a settlement, reassigned to mop the floors and won't be mailing out fraudulent statements for the remainder of my time with this employer (end of 2022). Will explore whistle-blower complaints, but quite difficult to prove this fraud (see Madoff SEC complaints). This is only the second time I've been around fraud and luckily both occurrences when work was more for an activity than something for income (low SWR). Had exposure to fraud happened early in my career (high SWR), might have a different perspective. Terrible working environment and several colleagues are experiencing major life altering stress, but I just hop along and cash my checks. WFH definitely helps in this regard as their other's financial related stress does not wash off on me as this can happen.

Last review at current fraud organization was filled with fraud, assume to garner some kind of over-reaction to justify firing, my response was "I disagree. Does this mean I can skip the team building exercises?". So I am currently exposed to what most would perceive as a terrible work environment but doesn't create stress more than a traffic jam.

Considering the average life expectancy was in the 20's-30's, a few hundred years ago, ancestors would gladly swap some pollution from carbon for the benefits they provide. Article mixes mean and median but provides the point (median age is what one would like to know). The ancestors had reason to stress as they were exposed to death regularly, while modern humans create stress because we are not exposed to real stress.

https://www.verywellhealth.com/longevit ... ry-2224054

Rule of law should protect one from death threats. I've had co-workers, supervisors and relatives exposed to death threats and all rely on the law to defuse these situations, but they are stressful, but fleeting.

[guitarplayer]

Considering the average life expectancy was in the 20's-30's, a few hundred years ago, ancestors would gladly swap some pollution from carbon for the benefits they provide. Article mixes mean and median but provides the point (median age is what one would like to know). The ancestors had reason to stress as they were exposed to death regularly, while modern humans create stress because we are not exposed to real stress.

https://www.verywellhealth.com/longevit ... ry-2224054

Having had a look at the article, I think this figure had been confounded by the child mortality, they mention that barring it people would have lived until about 70. Ironically, plummeting child mortality contributes to soaring pollution from carbon in modern days.

@WFJ I must say I like the bird's-eye view! It is about the perspective, seeing the big picture, making sure we know what we wish for, contemplating before making choices, being ready to ditch the sunken cost (low SWR helps), etc.; essentially pursuing ERE (and beyond)!

It is clear that the points raised by @WRC, @AH and others are valid, too. Without the groundwork, there comes the stress.

[chenda]

Having had a look at the article, I think this figure had been confounded by the child mortality, they mention that barring it people would have lived until about 70. Ironically, plummeting child mortality contributes to soaring pollution from carbon in modern days.

+1 This is a very common error I see all the time, adult life expectancy is very different from the mean average.

[guitarplayer]

the mean average.

Article mixes mean and median but provides the point (median age is what one would like to know).

which would be fixed by using the median as @WFJ rightly points out, but the figure would have been significantly higher then (or meaningless if the mortality rate had been above 50%).

[7Wannabe5]

High infant mortality will also somewhat skew median. What you need is median life expectancy for those who survive to age 6. One very good book I read, which was a summarization of many American pioneer journals, made the point that our notion of their hardiness is overblown. Adults prior to modern medicine were often stricken with a variety of maladies and injuries, and other adults frequently noted in their journals that they spent significant amounts of time engaged in caring for them. Also, there was the ever present essential trade-off for our big headed species leading to frequent childbirth death for women. Actually, complications from childbirth is still on the list of things most likely to kill a young woman, along with being murdered by a male of the species. Antibiotics changed everything.

[chenda]

Also, there was the ever present essential trade-off for our big headed species leading to frequent childbirth death for women.

Yup, the death in childbirth tole was horrendous. I think the lords prayer once had a suffix to pray for the welfare of pregnant women.

There should be an annual day of remembrance of the countless forgotton women of the pre-anesthesia and pre-antibiotic past who often gave their lives giving birth, without whom none of us would be here today. Its hard to fathom the pain and suffering they went through to perpetuate the species.

[7Wannabe5]

@chenda:

Yeah, our DNA only stores about 1.6 gigabytes of information, but our brains can store 10 gigabytes electrically and 100 terabytes chemically/biologically! So, human females are pretty fantastic at wetware development. Intellectual property crime against humanity of all time was that the two brothers who invented birthing forceps refused to make the design freeware.

Hard veer back to the topic at hand...I found being pregnant or breast-feeding to be a good excuse for "dropping out." And the fact that I had kids before I had my first full-time corporate job caused me to never take corporate employment very seriously. I felt bored and trapped, but never particularly stressed on the job.

[Jin+Guice]

Bumping this thread bc the OP essay talks about overcoming exestential dread briefly in the beginning.

Also, I think that making incidental income is possible for basically the reasons 7w5 says.

I think getting paid is nefarious in that we have learned to worship paid employment in a way where it is important to reject it as sort of a polemic exercise, before you are able to come at it sideways.

It is certainly possible to have some fun while getting paid if you can free yourself from the shackles of obligation. The obligation to do a good job in poor circumstances. And, more importantly, the obligation to keep doing any job at all.

You can for sure still get paid to do all sorts of weird shit like mop cum in a porno theatre and sell crack cocaine to people who may sometimes attempt to murder you. It's not all corpratized yet. I have no doubt that, when performed for pay, these activities will become so routine that they will become boring and unremarkable. Which is the reason to not combine passion with pay. Thankfully a thousand more adventures await.

The submissive posture is not entirely to be avoided. For instance, it's the posture in which we open ourselves up to learning or expansion of consciousness or spirituality. One problem is when the submissive posture also becomes neurotic or anxious rather than strong and receptive. We fret about our annual review or whether or not he will text today or tomorrow, rather than proceeding to live our own lives in alignment with purpose.

Face down, resume up.

[prudentelo]

"Incidental income" needs case studies rather than theories

THeory is sound. Sounds good.

But who actually does this? How?

[guitarplayer]

There is a relief worker where I work who made a sort of career for herself at money laundering departments of various banks. She now works for a consulting agency as a money laundering unit supervisor. She earns well above the UK median in that job. Still, she does relief work for minimum pay where I work, probably minimum 10h / week. It is not that she is lonely, her parents are nearby, she has a daughter, she seems on good terms with her folk by the sound of it. I think she just likes to hang out with us.

That being said, she is not ERE by any stretch of imagination and could not get by on this 'incidental' income alone.

In one alternative universe I could see DW and I both doing two days a week at where we work, thus earning over 2 JAFI combined, enjoying the company of everyone at work much better and having lots of good personal time.

[candide]

@prudentelo

Look through Ego's stuff.

If you are going to say that what he does isn't incidental income, then there is probably some misunderstanding of definitions -- which could be on my part.

[Jin+Guice]

@prudentelo:

Do shit you like.

Get good at it.

Get paid.

Example:

On July 4th our band got paid in ~$100 each in drugs, food and booze to play for under 30 minutes at a party that I was already planning on attending.

At some point the week before I got paid $20 plus beer to play guitar with my friend at a bar. Probably wouldn't have gone to the show, but I was happier doing this then sitting at home.

I'm not currently trying to make money playing guitar at all and I do it for free all the time, inclusive of playing gigs.



I see people getting trapped by imaginary restrictions. I could *probably* pay my very low expenses playing guitar in New Orleans, but it would fucking suck and I would be broke and hustling all the time. I imagine part of the point of incidental income, strictly defined, is that you don't know how much it will be until it happens to you?

So one trap at its extreme is "I can't match my $100k salary doing this, so therefore it doesn't exist."

The other trap I see is that incidental income doesn't exist bc it is not 100% fun the whole time. This morning I played drums in an empty rehearsal room for half an hour. I think I was having fun for like 20 of those 30 minutes? But what is fun really? Personally I would've rather been eating or fucking for half an hour, but there I was, in a foodless, sex free room I rent to play drums and rehearse bands (rehearsing a band is fun like 15% of the time). Technically I paid for 10 minutes I didn't enjoy, like some sort of fun hating wage slave who lost his soul to the groove mines years ago.

The other trap is that bc earning the incidental income is not "fun" or "enjoyable" 100% of the time, them money isn't really incidental.

So... I think that there is a trade-off between money and enjoyment. They are inversely correlated, but not perfectly or even close to perfectly. I also think doing almost any activity long enough to get good at it AND doing almost any activity that requires coordination with other people (even worse if you must be in the same place at the same time) is going to have some level of stress and some degree of "this sucks."

I think that earning money for something is a slippery slope. I think this is bc we tend to over value money and we are convinced that maximizing profit is always necessary and good. We are also taught that you must make your entire living from something in order to claim to be justifiably doing something.

If your "incidental income" isn't fun for a day, probably keep at it and if it isn't fun for a month, probably stop?





I think a viable third option is to think about how much money you need and try to have the most fun you can making it. Doing this with a little planning and thought seems like the best way to accurately consider the money/ enjoyment trade off (not that "enjoyment" would actually be a composite of several variables, which is why this problem is also harder than it seems, I think).

[prudentelo]

My post isn't meant to say "this is impossible". SOrry if it came across like that.

Only meant to say "I have seen way more people want/plan to do this than actually did it" and "what is reliable system [because specifics always will be personal] to get from not having it to having it".

This is exactly my thought: @jin+guice: I think that earning money for something is a slippery slope. I think this is bc we tend to over value money and we are convinced that maximizing profit is always necessary and good.

I see many "traps" where overworked, burned out contractor/self-employed is only overworked and burnt out because of choice to work for ALL the money rather than stopping at some point. But still, also reasons for this: to become a contractor often it's needed to invest in network, marketing, etc. THese are fixed costs that become very large per hour at low hours. Or have atrophying skills only valuable for X more years, where X is proportional to hours worked (practice).

The big question is whether truly scalable earning opportunities exist. THat is, where you won't get kicked out of the work line eventually or suffer exploding per hour costs of employment by reducing from 60 to 30, 20 or 10 hours. Uber driver is one. How many others?

How many really are better than just working at cash register for 10 hr/week ?

Amateur band is a tried and true way to earn beer money.


@candide

thanks for the tip. checking it now

[zbigi]

Art (painting) is like that. People will always want commisioned portaits of their family members and pets. The preferred techniques and styles don't change that much over decades, so you don't have to chase the latest fad. The money is better than working at the cash register. It can be an incidental income for anyone who's already very skilled in figurative painting anyway. That's a high treshold though which could easily require 10 years of skill building to get there, so definitely not anything you just stumble into.

[ertyu]

Correct, I know someone who earns his living by painting portraits from photographs. Essentially the task is, paint this picture as accurately as you can. He then ships the finished painting to people. Once, when he traveled to Germany, he earned some income locally by joining a "painting farm" - a warehouse that employed artists to paint the same copy of paintings of various local landmarks that were then sold to tourists.

[Ego]

@candide, that is quite a compliment. Thank you.

I found a book from 1920 at the swap meet a few weeks ago that began with this:



It reminded me of John Muir, the drop out VW guru mechanic, who wrote that he would often begin a journey with a vehicle that was running poorly. He would tinker with it while on the road and deal with the inevitable breakdowns so that by the time he returned home the vehicle was in tip top condition and his mechanical skills remained sharp.

I guess my point is that the trick to dropping out is not to determine a precise definition of incidental income. The trick to dropping out is figuring out how to convert everything that can be converted into incidental income.

[guitarplayer]

@Ego you know I now study Maths and the beauty of it strikes me so much in that sometimes many sentences can be encapsulated in just a few key words, like what you are talking about in terms of the graph theory is perhaps making life as close to a 'complete graph' as possible and with n >> 1.

[fingeek]

@Ego you know I now study Maths and the beauty of it strikes me so much in that sometimes many sentences can be encapsulated in just a few key words, like what you are talking about in terms of the graph theory is perhaps making life as close to a 'complete graph' as possible and with n >> 1.

A web of goals, one may say

[guitarplayer]

Totally @fingeek! The ERE book is really nicely dense this way.