"How to Drop Out"

[zbigi]

https://ranprieur.com/essays/dropout.html

[Sclass]

Thanks for posting. Fun read with some interesting ideas about power and authority.

His life choices aren’t quite my cup of tea. But I do enjoy the author’s clarity on ownership and servitude.

This guy walks a slippery slope near homelessness and being a hobo.

[fiby41]

Here is the article linked as the Kafka parable from the wayback machine:

Before the Law

Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” At the moment the gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one glimpse of the third.” The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be let in, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper often interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot let him inside yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.” During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the unlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud, later, as he grows old, he still mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in the long years studying the gatekeeper he has come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper. Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. Now he no longer has much time to live. Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body. The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know, then?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”

Here are more such essays: https://web.archive.org/web/20061103023 ... katofc.htm

[AxelHeyst]

Thanks for posting. Reading along these lines is contributing to recent doubts about my notion of earning $ 'incidentally'. He makes the point that trying to earn money doing what you love is almost impossible, which I totally buy. My idea was/is that if your CoL is low enough, you can just forget about earning money and do stuff you want to do, and as long as you're going in to that with a big enough buffer (~3-5 years cash) and are pursuing a Renaissance strategy, it's somewhat inevitable that you'll incidentally make enough $ to be fine. I wonder if this idea is naive, or if it wouldn't be wise to add in a certain amount of "stoke-decoupled income generation" to the strategy.

[Kriegsspiel]

I've been reading Ran's stuff for years now. He wrote a lot of interesting stuff years ago. Here's one I had bookmarked with advice on groceries, how to find a slacker job (I wonder if MikeBOS read it back then. He acquired some slacker jobs, but never wrote about them that much), and driving efficiently.

Lately it seems he's mostly been writing about drugs and women's soccer and woo woo metaphysical stuff.

[zbigi]

I have those doubts too. I'm just not sure if will I find paid activities other than my current career to be substantially better than the current career. As the essay says, even fun things tend to suck when done for money. So, in other words, the money we receive for work can be seen as largely a compensation for the inevitable suckage - i.e. if the job was somehow intrinsically rewarding, people would do it for free. For example, plenty of people write open source software for free, whereas the same people would have to be paid loads of $ to get them to work a sucky software job at say Google (which could even involve working on the same open source software! - but under the corporate yoke).

This is contrary to the main tenets of ERE, which I see basically as a solution to the job/money problem seen through the specific lens of a person like @jacob - i.e. someone who loves obtaining new competencies, hates repetition, and has protestant work ethics. This explains why ERE got smaller traction than other FIRE variants - it's appealing mostly only to the couple percent of people who are like Jacob. The rest would rather stay at boring job at say $50/h than do (less boring) varied odd jobs and gigs at $25/h, as they see the work as just means to an end anyway.

[mountainFrugal]

Thank you for sharing this. I enjoyed reading it. My favorite quote:

Humans are map-making animals, and we're always trying to make a map so good that we no longer have to look at the land. This is a mistake, and if you reject the dominant map, it's best to learn to not use any map at all. There is one rule that's very simple, but not easy: observe reality and adjust.

[AxelHeyst]

@zbigi, Hm, perhaps. Im with you on most of what you're saying, but I think the main reason ERE is niche is because most people lack the same sort and intensity of carrot vector as Jacob. Going full ERE just to retire a couple years sooner than you can MMM style doesn't make sense to most people, because most people are just trying to attain freedom-from working forever. Which as so many people have proved is somewhat easy.

Jacob's carrot vector, the Why, involves such gargantuan things as resolving the metacrisis, living within an equitable slice of the global pie, and truly and everlastingly freeing his mind from the shackles of dominant culture. If *those* are your why's, the 'extreme' aspects of ERE make sense and you just get to it.

Without those Why's as fuel, you'll lose dissatisfaction at wl5. That's my model for it anyway.

[AxelHeyst]

I can state my doubts more clearly: studies have shown that when you start giving someone money for something they used to do just because they like it, they start to like it less. The mechanism might be because external rewards calls into question ones sense of agency, which is a required ingredient for intrinsic motivation.

Thus, it might be impossible to make money incidentally. Earning money for something might always corrupt it. If true, an optimum life firewalls income generation to activities that are merely tolerable and over with as quickly as possible.

....arriving, once again, at the range of recommendations laid out in the book 13 years ago. Sigh.

[7Wannabe5]

At the minimum, making money from incidental work requires

a) doing some kind of work
b) doing that work in the presence of other people who have money
c) some market mechanism

For instance, if the work you enjoy is painting smiley faces on rocks, and you also have a table and a cigar box and a sign which you can place by a busy sidewalk, Voila! incidental income.

Sometimes the market mechanism will be that some other human with money will simply spontaneously offer you money for the service or good they see you working at. For instance, 3 different young women asked me if I would take care of their child in addition to my own when I was a SAHM.

What is difficult is earning whatever currently qualifies as middle-class income simply doing the work you want to be doing anyways. I think it's the push to take it to that level that makes it not enjoyable rather than simply the cash exchange. IOW, it's the commodification that sucks the life out of the process. Once you start painting every smiley face rock in the style that sold best last week, you are done for stoke-wise. Unless, simply making money in the moment is your current stoke.

[mathiverse]

...

Thus, it might be impossible to make money incidentally. Earning money for something might always corrupt it. If true, an optimum life firewalls income generation to activities that are merely tolerable and over with as quickly as possible.

...

I don't think making money incidentally is a myth. I can give a few examples where the fact you get paid doesn't interfere with the intrinsic motivation if you don't let it.

Another option is getting paid to do and learn something that you *can't* do outside of paid employment. Jacob's stint as a quant was due to that. It wasn't that he was doing the exact same thing at home and now he got paid, it was that he got to do something meaningfully different that he already wanted to try, that he couldn't replicate on his own, *and* he got paid. He probably couldn't have gotten the gig without them insisting they pay him.

Another example is a musician who plays for fun taking a gig with someone they always wanted to play with anyway. The money is incidental. It might even be weird for them to decline it even though they would do it for free. The fact someone gives them a check at the end of the night doesn't ruin the experience. Maybe being forced to do it another one hundred nights in a row would ruin it, but the ERE person doesn't have to agree to something like that (or even the non-ERE person, but the non-ERE person is more likely in a position where they are "forced" to accept whatever terms they are given).

Maybe you want to run experiments on the large hadron collider, work on systems that get billions of transactions a second (ie whatever scale is hard to replicate on your own in the cloud without $$$), or live in Antarctica for a while. You can't do any of these things from home and it's much harder to do any outside of paid employment compared to doing them in paid employment. Thus you get to do something you wouldn't likely be able to do on your own and you also happen to get money for having the experience. In ERE terms, the zeroth order goal is not money, but one of the yields is money. And you don't have to do any of these things long enough for them to ruin your like of experience or field if you have enough money to leave when you've had enough.

[Laura Ingalls]

DH and I both have done paid employment in our semi-retirement. He works part time for the city deadheading roses and planting trees. I clean the building that houses my faith community. They are both jobs that we feel contribute to our community. Give us some structure and physical exercise. Neither of us would do the jobs for free, nor would we do them 40 hour or more a week. They do still generate about a JAFI per year each. We definitely live a life that could be dialed down a lot (less travel, less wealth transfer to kids) or up since total spending was about 2.5% of assets and only about 1% if you take out the earned income and the stimulus anomaly of last year.


This work isn’t “accidental” but it isn’t stressful or involve working for jerks either. I get his idea of having a job that you don’t think about when you aren’t there

[zbigi]

Maybe you want to run experiments on the large hadron collider, work on systems that get billions of transactions a second (ie whatever scale is hard to replicate on your own in the cloud without $$$), or live in Antarctica for a while.

The problem is, I suspect those things suck (maybe not the Antarctica example, but it's super-rare). The day-to-day reality of being a quant, "running experiments" on LHC or working on Internet-scale systems suck - you're a disenfranchised cog in a large bureucracy, a "human resource" or +1 in some manager's headcount. With the MBA-isation of global work culture it doesn't matter if you go to a large corp, a startup (which nowadays mostly means "large corp wannabe") or even academia - it's always the same experience. This is why experienced/wise software developers for the most part don't care if they'll be working on LHC or another stupid SaaS - they know that their day-to-day experience will be largely the same (and not a cool one), so they just sort job offers by the "salary" column instead.

[7Wannabe5]

@zbigi:

I grok what you mean by globalization of MBA mentality, but maybe it doesn’t equally apply to every job title on the planet? For instance, firefighters and kindergarten teachers don’t work in the same environment as software developers.

Another note I might offer is that the conventional work environment is kind of like television. If you do without it for a number of years, it can actually be kind of fun again for a little while when you do happen upon it again, because the novelty is temporarily renewed.

I think the main point with a bullet of the article in the OP is the recognition that “the cave” is very much part of reality even after you have expanded your options or perspective. For a number of years I was stuck on self-employment being the ultimate solution for autonomy/freedom etc., but now I think it’s something more simple like just taking some time every morning to have a meeting with yourself about how you are running your life.

[oldbeyond]

I’ve read it before, but what resonated with me this time was the description of the inner journey and the pitfalls of “motivation”. To live free, one must always forge ones own path. This dimension is something I’ve been putting most of my efforts into recently.

[jacob]

The problem is, I suspect those things suck (maybe not the Antarctica example, but it's super-rare). The day-to-day reality of being a quant, "running experiments" on LHC or working on Internet-scale systems suck - you're a disenfranchised cog in a large bureucracy, a "human resource" or +1 in some manager's headcount.

It reminds me of one of those "what I do"-memes that were popular once.

[zbigi]

@zbigi:

I grok what you mean by globalization of MBA mentality, but maybe it doesn’t equally apply to every job title on the planet? For instance, firefighters and kindergarten teachers don’t work in the same environment as software developers.

I mean, plenty of manual labor and service jobs has gone the way of taylorism even before MBA was invented. The new development of the past 20-40 years is the increasing treatment of white collar "knowledge worker" types in the same way as factory workers were always treated (this change was made possible by computers, computerised tracking of business/administrative processes and the discrete/binary mindset that follows with it).

But of course you're right, there must plenty of jobs which were not MBA-ised yet. Unfortunately, I believe the ones requiring using your mind for the most part already are - you're either a part of a large bureucracy, or, even if you're at a small company, chances are you're selling services to a large bureucracy, which makes you follow their protocol and culture. That's why office workers are depressed so often, despite seemingly cushy working conditions... IMO the reality is that, increasingly fewer and fewer jobs are not Kafkesque (as if the pre-MBA world of doing the same thing 8h per day, every day, wasn't grim enough) - that's just the direction that our civilization is taking.

Another note I might offer is that the conventional work environment is kind of like television. If you do without it for a number of years, it can actually be kind of fun again for a little while when you do happen upon it again, because the novelty is temporarily renewed.

I see it more as a bad ex - it could be fun to get back together for a short while, but soon all the reasons for why you're not together anymore will again become blindingly obvious. It was always like that to me when I've gotten back to a job after a 6-18 months break. Maybe it's different if the break is 10 years long , but I suspect the difference would be only in length of the honeymoon period.

[mathiverse]

@zbigi - Some people may have decided that all jobs suck, but plenty of people haven't. I don't think all jobs suck if I can control the amount of time and effort I put into a particular job.

Even if all jobs *do* suck, if a person who wants to have a particular experience joins the company that provides it and then realizes it sucks, the suckage is pretty short lived since they can quit given their ERE/FI-ness. I don't see anything inherently wrong with trying something you think might be worthwhile and finding the opposite. I don't think it's better to give up on ever finding a job worth doing. Whether it's a job or a hobby, some might turn out to be a bad experience.

I'd also say that I've had jobs that I didn't like that other people *did* like, so I'm sure there is variation in what seems like a horrible, not worth it experience and what seems like a dream (if only in the beginning).

[7Wannabe5]

I see it more as a bad ex - it could be fun to get back together for a short while, but soon all the reasons for why you're not together anymore will again become blindingly obvious.

Not untrue.

Here's another way to look at it. You have your full allotment of time and vigor at your disposal. You have to occupy yourself somehow. Your three choices are activities that cost money, activities that make money, or activities that do neither. If you disallow activities that cost money, and you run out of activities that do neither, you may find yourself once again making money.

[theanimal]

You are also limited in terms of choosing non shitty jobs by the array of skills that you develop (or lack thereof). Someone on the more traditional path to FI that is hyperspecialized is only going to be able to do things related to their field or the usual assortment of menial labor jobs due to the lack of breadth in their skillset.

Serendipity plays a much larger role than it's given credit for. Jacob wasn't actively looking for a quant job, he was however interested in finance and the possibility of working in the field someday. I had a similar experience in the Arctic, getting involved with some graduate researchers studying lynx, snowshoe hares and great horned owls. I had no formal biology background, but they asked me to join them regularly and ended up paying me to hike around and find wild animals. That was fun. That job gave me enough experience in a science related field to get a job working in forestry later on.

I guess my point is, we only see the doors that exist in front of us at the moment. But the map is not the territory and opening up one door can lead to something else that we hadn't imagined.