"How to Drop Out"

[7Wannabe5]

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.

According to the Urban Dictionary a "trick" does mean an incident of converting everything that can be converted into incidental income.

[Ego]

According to the Urban Dictionary a "trick" does mean an incident of converting everything that can be converted into incidental income.

You deserve a standing ovation for this reply. I really did laugh out loud. Well done.

[7Wannabe5]

Always happy to amuse.

[classical_Liberal]

Do shit you like. Get good at it. Get paid.

You don't even really need a great skill set for this. Particularly in this labor market. You just need the human connections to make things happen. Which is healthy for any person anyway.

This is the same old stuff rehashed. Social capital is super valuable in the incidental income multiverse.

There's a brewery and arcade in town i go to twice a week when I'm not traveling. Instead of spending $20-30 a night when drinking beer and playing video games, I work for the owner and pour beers for the customers (many are my friends) when I hang out. I get all the free games i want and enough incidental income to cover my housing, food, utilities and health insurance. I'm already FI without this. What do I give up? I commit to going there on a certain night or two a week instead of randomly going.

People who don't trust incidental income flowing after ERE are people who are so stuck in the work-spend lifestyle, it inhibits their ability to think in an enterprising fashion. The first step is to remove oneself from the work-spend environment (this may require some capital to live), The second to to recover and rework a few synapses (This is where you spend a little of that previous capital). The third is to just live life and let things happen.

Good luck! It's nice reading here again.

Edit:
PS I actually emailed the author of "How to drop out" years ago and we had a conversation. He specifically stated his biggest problem (ie regret) about writing the piece was the amount of time he wasted driving to his remote location.

I wont speak for him, but for myself. You don't need to live in a remote location to drop out. J+G is a great example.

[zbigi]

I get all the free games i want and enough incidental income to cover my housing, food, utilities and health insurance.

Two evenings of work a week are enough to cover all basic expenses?

[jacob]

Two evenings of work a week are enough to cover all basic expenses?

Sure, see e.g. https://earlyretirementextreme.com/my-4 ... -week.html

[zbigi]

Sure, see e.g. https://earlyretirementextreme.com/my-4 ... -week.html

I meant "two evenings of NO SKILL work a week". Of course, with a specialised skillset and high hourly wage, it's perfectly doable.

[jacob]

I meant "two evenings of NO SKILL work a week". Of course, with a specialised skillset and high hourly wage, it's perfectly doable.

From my perspective, hacking latex files is no skill work (just part of the tool set of a STEM academic). Pouring beer on the other hand ...

I think the point was that one doesn't just walk into these situations without some form of capital. For copy-editing it was the capital of having written scientific articles. For bartending it's the social capital of hanging out in bars and knowing people. Thus the key is to have a diverse portfolio of capital AND the outlets/connections to capitalize it. This usually means a social network because social networks have less competition than e.g. online ads.

[zbigi]

I know people who just picked up bartending jobs without any sort of previous experience or social capital (except being young and pretty girls) - they just showed up for an ad posted on the door. There are billions of people who can do that. Whereas there are orders of magnitude less people who are fluent enough in Latex.

[candide]

Well in any case, one must use what one has.

The expense side is still the more important one, and the easier for most people to deal with. As Thoreau wrote

I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely.

When Thoreau wrote this, there were still slaves in the United States, so the statement wasn't meant for everyone in every case everywhere on earth. But for the people he saw day-to-day and the people free enough to read what he wrote, it was clear to Thoreau that most of them had choices they could have made.

[zbigi]

Thoureau was a Harvard graduate in the early XIX century. That alone probably put him in top 1% in terms of privilege and opportunity (esp. in the US, where there was no aristocracy/nobility). His Walden phase was essentially equivalent to some XXI century rich young heir slumming it out in the third world for fun, before they come back to the safety of their wealth and privilege. I don't think we can learn much from him in this regard.

[jacob]

His Walden phase was essentially equivalent to some XXI century rich young heir slumming it out in the third world for fun, before they come back to the safety of their wealth and privilege. I don't think we can learn much from him in this regard.

More like a minimalist building a tiny house in his parents backyard. (Walden Pond is about a mile down road from mom.) I think we can learn a lot [from Thoreau] about dropping out of the striving middle class; he's not really writing for the demographic that is struggling to join it. Even though the behavior is similar (being frugal, not have many possessions, etc.) the [internal] motivations and reasons are very different. Thoreau lives without stuff because he's concluded that happiness doesn't come from the pursuit of stuff---he later became a naturalist---whereas people who never had [much] stuff believe that more stuff will make them happier.

It is worth pondering if one needs to "be in" first before one can consider "dropping out"?

[candide]

@zbigi

Thoreau's entire career included school teacher (young children), handyman, free-lance writer (not particularly successful), live-in servant, and land surveyor. It's not like Thoreau was a tenured professor, nor given a cushy job in banking or a political machine (as if the Whig party that was in the midst of collapsing offered any of those).

The Harvard of the time was a divinity school only one generation off from the last Massachusetts blasphemy trials. There was a real revolutionary -- not established -- tone to the transcendentalists and the intellectuals of Concord. Also, the Ivy League had no where near the strangle-hold on American politics that it has had since 1980. In fact, looking it up just now, after John Quincy Adams, there wasn't a single President from an Ivy League institution until Teddy Roosevelt. Thoreau lived at the low point of Harvard's influence on America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... _president

If you want to throw ad hominems at a dead person and use that as a block to not learn anything from his life or writings, then that is your choice. But don't be surprised if not everyone agrees with you.

ETA: Thoreau also worked briefly in the family business: pencil manufacture.

[chenda]

(esp. in the US, where there was no aristocracy/nobility). His Walden phase was essentially equivalent to some XXI century rich young heir slumming it out in the third world for fun, before they come back to the safety of their wealth and privilege.

Well you can argue it had (has ?) a de facto aristocracy dominated by a WASP elite. But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, most great men and women in history have come from privileged backgrounds, as they had the leisure and money to pursue worthwhile projects. A real hand-to-mouth cabin dweller at Walden Pond probably would not have much to teach us, although its unfashionable to say that. It seems modern readers are disappointed by the lack of 'authenticity' of his cabin days, but I actually lament the decline of the leisured class.

[zbigi]

@zbigi
If you want to throw ad hominems at a dead person and use that as a block to not learn anything from his life or writings, then that is your choice. But don't be surprised if not everyone agrees with you.

We can probably learn something from anyone and anything. I'm just arguing he's not exactly the paragon of self-sufficiency that people sometimes make him out to be. His period by the lake wasn't particularly long, he wasn't really isolated at all, was receiving food and afaik services (laundry?) from mom and he had an strong background and safety net to fall back on if things go south. There are/were definitely people who pushed the self-sufficiency to its limits, but Thoreau wasn't one of them. His writing was good though.

[zbigi]

More like a minimalist building a tiny house in his parents backyard. (Walden Pond is about a mile down road from mom.) I think we can learn a lot [from Thoreau] about dropping out of the striving middle class; he's not really writing for the demographic that is struggling to join it. Even though the behavior is similar (being frugal, not have many possessions, etc.) the [internal] motivations and reasons are very different. Thoreau lives without stuff because he's concluded that happiness doesn't come from the pursuit of stuff---he later became a naturalist---whereas people who never had [much] stuff believe that more stuff will make them happier.

It is worth pondering if one needs to "be in" first before one can consider "dropping out"?

I remember him criticizing the "worker bee" society a lot (see his line about most men living lives of quiet desperation). It seems that a lot of the "dropouts" have at least partially negative (avoidance) motivation - they conclude that the pursuit of stuff is just too much work for the stuff that in the end it gets you. Interestingly, some people are able to get jobs which pay really a lot for not that much work - and this makes the tradeoff less obvious even for people who are particularly antiwork and not into stuff. For example, in my case - is 1 more year of coding worth 50 years of eating out (instead of having to cook)? For now, I concluded that it is.

[candide]

I think my point is that he didn't say he was self-sufficient, just that he was simplifying his life. And, further, he was doing so to see what kind of life was worth living. Thoreau gets punished for not living up to stereotypes that were created for him by past misreadings of the book. .

I mean let's look at some of this good writing of his:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

This had particular urgency for Thoreau because his brother had died in his arms just a few years before the Walden experiment. To paraphrase some lines from totally different context of the movie Network (1976), death became real, it had dimensions.

So, what if the time at Walden was just a man living in a tiny house that he built for himself so he could lower his burn rate, have time to think and write, and get through his mid-life crisis? That sounds like a worthy thing to do, and a great set-up for a book about life, philosophy, and frugality.

During his two years in the tiny house, Thoreau wrote copious notes, but it didn't fit together to make the book he wanted until he got into the work of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, and this led him first to start a very different type of journal, but secondly gave him wave after wave of epiphany in how to organize Walden into the masterpiece it became.

Refactoring all of this with some of the jargon of the forum: our Henry David was a seeker, dissatisfied with the world around him. He then used social capital to get access to other capital (Emerson's land, Bronson Alcott's ax, wood from an Irish shanty) to build a tiny house and grind up through Wheaton Levels 5, 6 , 7. This time had him completely leave Plato's Cave, and moved him through WL 8, 9, and I'm going to argue for 10. And it was only here that he circled back and was able to make Walden the book, rather than the Walden tiny house experiment and notes.

To me, the contrast becomes clear by reading Emerson. It supposedly many of the same ideas, but pedantic and blinded by privilege. (Though, again, credit is due for all the preachers from formerly Puritan stock who took the risks of speaking blasphemy and calling for cultural and religious innovation. Emerson might be seen as paving the way).

[candide]

For example, in my case - is 1 more year of coding worth 50 years of eating out (instead of having to cook)? For now, I concluded that it is.

This is what made me so confused about the line of criticism you were taking above. You seem like a blunt, no-nonsense realist. (I'm saying this as a compliment). So I didn't understand a resentful framing of Thoreau. And here you are showing how much more economically privileged you are than him -- there is no one year of his career that would have earned him enough (ie checks to him while he was alive) to eat out for half a century.

[zbigi]

This is what made me so confused about the line of criticism you were taking above. You seem like a blunt, no-nonsense realist. (I'm saying this as a compliment). So I didn't understand a resentful framing of Thoreau.

I though about it some more - perhaps what triggered me is that the book did not seem genuine in that regard. Afair, he painted his adventure as "living alone, self-sufficiently in the wilderness", while as we know it was far from that. It seemed like an XIX century equivalent of your typical van living or tiny home youtube channel, which oozes positivity, spiritual wholeness and w/e, but hides all the "cheats".

Btw, on a not related topic, it's cool to see how influential he (and Emerson? I didn't read him) was. Pretty much most of "advanced" countries at the beginning of XX century had bohemic movements, which wanted to drop out of society and do art (or, thought they wanted to art, but in reality they were just "escaping from" society, while only few of them were "running towards" art). But, since the US had the unique naturalistic literature tradition (perhaps Walt Whitman also plays into that?), the US boheme, quite uniquely AFAIK, developed into back-to-the-land hippies - and now, after losing the 99% of hippies which were terrible at farming, into permaculturists etc.

Oh, and I agree that software people are by far the most privileged part of the pleb today. I often wonder why so many people, when they plan their career, don't just go for software - is working on logic puzzles for 8h a day so repulsive for most people? Perhaps they associate with math, and most people think they suck at math?

[guitarplayer]

Well in any case, one must use what one has.

The expense side is still the more important one, and the easier for most people to deal with. As Thoreau wrote [...]

When Thoreau wrote this, there were still slaves in the United States, so the statement wasn't meant for everyone in every case everywhere on earth.

Also, Seneca in 'Consolation to Helvia', in the context of exile as a punishment and following presenting an example of Apicious, a famous cook of the time who squandered most of his wealth and poisoned himself at the end, concluding that the remainder of the wealth would not afford him the expensive lifestyle he deemed necessary for a life well lived:

Greed is satisfied by nothing, but nature finds satisfaction even in scant measure. The poverty of an exile is, therefore, no disadvantage to [the exiled]; for no place of exile is so lacking in resources that it does not prove richly fertile for supplying a man’s needs.

I think Seneca would make a case for the slaves, too.

ETA: Thoreau also worked briefly in the family business: pencil manufacture.

Ha! Sometimes I feel like I live for those nuggets