He is one of the leaders of a subculture-emblematic of our larger culture-where people are obsessed with hacks in the name of productivity. (For example, Tim Ferriss famously became a world champion kickboxer, despite not knowing how to kickbox, because he exploited a loophole in the rules. However, I do begrudge Tim Ferriss one thing: he is arguably one of the most famous and successful proponents of "hacks." In the purest sense, a hack is a way of being more efficient, but what it usually comes across as is a shortcut. "įrom his podcast and some parts of his books, I think that Tim Ferriss is a rather deep thinker and thoughtful person generally. On his podcast, his most ubiquitous media property, Tim Ferriss starts most (or maybe all episodes) by saying something close to, " welcome to the Tim Ferriss show, where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers to tease out the routines, habits etc. The 4-Hour Workweek was a great book, and Tim Ferriss is someone I still follow and look up to. The tagline for that book was, " The 4-Hour Workweek is a new way of solving a very old problem: just how can we work to live and prevent our lives from being all about work? " (Sound familiar?) Tim Ferriss, with his book The Four Hour Work-Week, was one of the first high profile people to advocate for a lot of the things digital nomads aimed for. There were a lot of trends that emerged form this movement which persist to today. They then lived off their laptops doing online or gig work, usually in places their western currency went really far, like South America, East Asia, or Eastern Europe.Īutomation, remote work, consistent travel, entrepreneurship, being a brand, prioritizing experiences over possessions, grinding (sometimes), prioritizing mental health over the grind (other times). They had taken the lemons handed to them by the 2008 financial crisis, inescapable student debt, and inevitability of boomeranging back to mom and dad's house, and turned it into the lemonade of digital nomadhood. College graduates raised on the internet looked around, collectively said, "fuck this," and got jobs they could work from anywhere. Many smart, capable young people felt they had been sold a bill of goods about what college would get them. An implosion in the job market, a dearth of affordable credit for houses, and an average student loan debt higher than ever before meant that the safe, cushy, lifelong jobs people had expected to come after college since the baby boom just did not exist any more. Already back then, there was an explosion of people, mostly millennials, who had what I called lemonade lifestyles. I was pretty prejudiced going into reading the book. Beyond that, the book serves as the most recent interest development in a centuries long debate about how to decide what to do with your life. On its own, the book has a wide range of interesting and useful ideas to offer concerning careers, the nature of work, leisure, society, and how we measure our lives. Through summary, review, context, and memoir, I want to make the case that the book, The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd, is immensely important because of both its content and its context. Luckily, I was completely wrong. The author pulls a lovely bait and switch: it’s not really a book about careers at all. The vagueness of the marketing materials, uniform positivity of the reviews, and my familiarity with the subject matter made me explicitly skeptical that I would enjoy the book, and subtly skeptical that I could learn anything from the book at all. The descriptions and blurbs I could find were somewhat vague, like this one from Amazon, “ The Pathless Path is about finding yourself in the wrong life, and the real work of figuring out how to live.” It seemed like the book was about picking the right career, a topic about which my own job search and years of teaching at a university have made me an armchair expert. Last month on Twitter, several people I consider smart, unconventional thinkers recommended a new book by an author I had never heard of.
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