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Finding the work that matters to us is the real work of our lives.
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📍A NEW WAY OF LIVING
I want to see people live the lives they are capable of, not just the ones they think they are allowed to live.
It’s been exactly eighty years since World War 2 ended and the world hasn’t been the same.
Eighty years since The Allies vanquished the German Military, driving them to their knees and ushering decades of economic flourishing unlike anything the world had ever seen.
The U.S. economy more than quadrupled their economy between the years 1945 and 1970, adding more than 36 million jobs in the non-farm sector alone. Several countries in the EU experienced similar results.
Unemployment rates were as low as they’ll ever be and society was thriving in this new epoch of prosperity and fortune.
Unfortunately, this new era had a hidden cost, a disease which society would fail to diagnose for the next half a century.
One that would defy the tenets of success and shatter the dogmas of what we considered to be a good life.
And when the economy eventually plateaued, the pedestal in which we placed our “dream life” would eventually crumble and only then would we understand that:
As the world continues to change and technology reshapes our lives, the stories we use to navigate life become outdated and come up short.
Every since World War 2 ended, society was driven towards a path that it would eventually become what we would consider “normal”.
Unbeknownst to us, this new normality would become the defaul path, as author Paul Millerd calls it. This refers to “the conventional, socially accepted life trajectory that people are expected to follow—typically involving getting a stable job, climbing the career ladder, saving for retirement, and adhering to societal norms without questioning whether it truly aligns with personal fulfillment.”
As author and anthropoligst Sarah Kendzior puts it, we’ve been indoctrinated in a culture which praises “Money over merit, brand over skill.”
One in which always moving forward to the next big goal is not the “regular” behavior, it’s the expected one.
One where value comes from credentials and our ability to surrender ourselves to the desires of the “industry”.
One that punishes the creative and rewards the common.
One that slowly, but surely, kills out ability to aspire for a life full of purpose and settle for one fillled with certainty.
The problem is that our culture has engaged in a Faustian bargain, in which we trade our genius and artistry for apparent stability.
But every tale has a hero and this one is no exception.
Author Paul Millerd takes inspiration in David Whyte´s idea of “the pathless path” and introduces a new way of living based on the warm embrace of uncertainty and a journey into the unknown.
“It’s a call to adventure in a world that tells us to conform.”
It is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”
In a world were success is measured by credentials and our ability to obey, we’ve become world class athletes. More specifically, world class hoop-jumpers.
A term coined by writer and former professor William Deresiewicz to describe the behavior of his students at Yale “who seemed more concerned about getting A’s and adding bullet points to their resumes than using their time at one of the world’s best universities to follow their curiosity.”
That’s why perhaps unconsciously, and most definitely without question, we’ve accepted the reality that we must subdue our desires to do what we like in order to do what we must.
“We are convinced that the only way forward is the path we’ve been on or what we’ve seen people like us do. This is a silent conspiracy that constrains the possibilities of our lives.”
And most of them are based in what Canadian Psychiatrist Eric Berne calls “life scripts”: This refer to “unconscious life patterns or narratives that people adopt based on early childhood experiences, parental influence, and societal expectations. These scripts shape how individuals view themselves, their relationships, and their potential in life—often guiding decisions and behaviors without them realizing it.”
This “set” of unspoken rules are essential for people’s own perception of success, and even if different countries have different cultures, it would surprise you how similar this scripts actually are.
On a recent study done by Dorthe Berntsen and David Rubin, they found remarkable consistency across countries with regard to the events that people expect to occur in their lives, most of them happening before the age of 35 such as: marriage, owning a house, having children, etc.
In simpler terms: We’ve been told how to live and what to expect.
Which begs the question.
Where’s our freedom to chose?
When did we embraced this tenets of how’s life supposed to be lived and can we ultimately change them?
To answer that, we must first understand why we think of work as we do and why have we adopted this first-person work-centric story as philosopher Andrew Taggart calls it.
Chasing prestige
“…in all men’s lives at certain periods…one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.”
In his 1944 lecture The Inner Ring, British writer C.S. Lewis described it as an “invisible, exclusive social circle that people desperately seek to be part of, often at the cost of their principles.”
And boy was he right.
Our need for aproval and the source of our validation-seeking behavior goes back thousands of years ago, not only historically, but even biologically.
Ancient survival tactics, evolutionary psychology and even brain chemistry, all have in-depth explanations as to why we seek validation and acceptance from our peers.
This is 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.
Ever since we learned to co-exist in small social groups, we placed a significant value on being able to belong to a group. And as years went by and societies became bigger and bigger, the need to belong to the most exclusive circles has just increased.
Though perpetual pursuit of prestige may seem inherent, it is not without its drawbacks.
C.S. Lewis warns “that the desire to belong to such elite, unofficial groups can lead people to compromise their morals, manipulate others, and lose their individuality—all in pursuit of social status and validation.”
And as you might’ve guessed it, the best way to chase prestigue is through work, which is ultimately where our value in society comes from.
Right?
Work & Your Place in Society: A brief history lesson
If we are going to imagine a new way forward for our work and our lives, we need to understand where our current ideas from work come from and how they have changed.
The year was 1776, and Economist Adam Smith´s book, The Wealth of Nations, had just introduced the principles that would eventually become the pillars of modern capitalism.
Unfortunately, as time moves on, there´s a been clear disconnect between modern perception of capitalism and Adam Smith’s view, where he saw a system of free markets, specialization, and mutual benefit, whereas today's capitalism often prioritizes endless labor and consumption for their own sake.
But, how did this disconnect happen and where?
While performing some research, German historian Max Weber found that the “spirit of capitalism” struggled to take hold in societies that embraced a “traditionalist” mindset towards work. In Weber’s view, a “traditionalist” view of work is one where people work as much as they need to maintain their current lifestyle, and once that aim is achieved, they stop working.
And this wasn’t an isolated instance.
Several countries have shown that people, if paid enough, will stop working. This presents a clear pleateau of effort and productivity once a certain limit has been reached.
That raises several questions:
When did this shift occur and why did it not happen universally?
Why do people continue to work for work’s sake even beyond what they’re asked for (and paid for)?
To adequately answer, we must travel back, not a couple of decades, but several thousands of years.
Eudaimonia and The Church
Several thousands of years ago, people in ancient Greece hadn’t been introduced to Adam Smith’s ideas of capitalism, less so, the cultural and societal changes that the Industrial Revolution brought.
Here, work was seen as a “necessary function of society” where a divison of labor was imperative for mainting social order.
In Plato’s most famous work, The Republic, he argued that while “money-making work” such as farming, manufacturaing, and trade are definitely important, they should be seen as secondary to others such as those dedicated to philosophy and well-being of the state.
For Aristotle, Plato’s most famous student, work was simply considered a necessary evil. Where the prime aim of life was “Eudaimonia,” which roughly translates as “happiness,” but is better expressed as “flourishing.”
In Aristotle’s words, “the more contemplation, the more happiness there is in a life.” Contemplating one’s place in the universe was seen as one of the most worthwhile things to do and at minimum, more important than the “money-making life.” Something Aristotle referred to as:
Something quite contrary to nature…for it is merely useful as a means to something else.
This also introduced the concept of leisure, which in modern times has been distorted and is now is often met with skepticism, even mistaken for mere idleness.
Yet in Ancient Greece, leisure (or scholé) was seen as a vital aspect of a well-balanced life, particularly for free citizens. “It was not merely idle time, but a space for intellectual and philosophical pursuits, such as debate, art, and reflection. Leisure allowed individuals to engage in activities that fostered personal growth, civic responsibility, and wisdom—key ideals in Greek culture”
Additionally, the greek word for leisure is the root of the english word “school”. “Scholē (leisure) was originally used to describe a time for learning and thinking.
The Greeks believed that leisure should be spent learning and discovering new things.”
As you can see, leisure was perceived as an esssential activity, specially to stay in touch with our passions, which is something we tend to lose grip on as we get older and get carried by the dullness of the adult life.
And for the next 1,500 years, most of the world either remained skeptical about work or saw it simply as a way to meet basic needs. The latter idea was strengthened by the Catholic conception of work.
Work was first mentioned in the bible in Genesis, the first book of the Christian Old Testament, as God is condemning Adam for eating fruit from the Tree of Life. God tells him that only “through painful toil” will Adam continue to eat fruit and only “by the sweat of your brow will you eat your food until you return to the ground.”
Later, in the New Testament, St. Paul warns against idleness more directly: “He who shall not work shall not eat.” And in regard to those who refuse, he continues: “do not associate with them, in order that they may feel ashamed.”
The lesson is clear then: Work is a duty.
Later, in the 1500s, Martin Luther and John Calvin broadened this concept as part of what is now known as the Protestant Reformation. Grown disappointed of their religious leaders they went on to attack them for living idly in monasteries. Sociologist Max Webber summarizes this shift:
The way to honor God was not to surpass worldly morality in monastic asceticism, but solely through the fulfillment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world. That was his calling.
Luther took issue with the Church’s system of “indulgences,” in which people paid the Church to absolve them of their sins. He thought individuals should be able to have their own relationship with God.
Calvin paired Luther’s increase in individual freedom with the idea that everyone is predestined to serve God through a specific calling. Working hard in the area of one’s calling determines the status of a person’s relationship with God.
This ideas helped in the formation of the framework in which we all try to fit called the work-life equation.
On the later half of the 1940s, philosopher Erich Fromm summarized this transformation, saying, “in the Northern European countries, from the 16th century on, man developed an obsessional craving to work which had been lacking in a free man before that period.”
Essentially, people traded one master, the Catholic Church, for another, their vocation.
Unfortunately, not all changes are good. The line with which we measured how hard or how much we should work had just vanished, and the Church’s measure for “goodness” no longer applied.
Religious scholars point out that the Protestant “work ethic” is more than a blind obsession with work. It is paired with thrift, self-discipline, and humility. Yet as fewer people look to religion for wisdom on how to navigate life, they are only left with the watered‐down version of these views.
As boundaries grew obscured, little by little work started to take over our lives. Where once it was an activity to support our lifestyle it has now became our lives and more precisely, who we are.
And even though all of this happened more than 500 years ago, you can still see remnants of the Catholic and Protestant conception of work within us.
I had internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it – explicitly and implicitly –since I was young.
As I’m sure it happened to all of us, growing up we had a clear idea that work was not only an obvious goal, but a required one, yet we seldom ponder on the why?
Outliers and Anomalies
The educated, hardworking masses are still doing what they’re told, but they’re no longer getting what they deserve.
The modern version of what we’ve come to understand as the default path appeared just after World War II. Fueled by unprecedented economic growth, this paradigm shift was mostly led by the USA and it’s “long boom” where annual GDP growth rates were as high as 13%.
And there was ample data to underscored the magnitude of this economic transformation.
Professor Raj Chetty at Harvard found that nine out of ten people born right after World War II did better economically than their parents.
Add this to business globalization and the rich tapestry of job openings and you have a perfect scenario of almost full-employment as Keynes calls it.
Over time people came to expect constant advancement in their lives, and John Steinbeck perfectly captured the sentiment in his book America and Americans in 1966:
No longer was it even acceptable that the child should be like his parents and live as they did; he must be better, live better, know more, dress more richly, and if possible, change from father’s trade to a profession. This dream became touchingly national.
And it was the baby boomers who got the full experience since they were born in the middle of this period, and rose to leadership in global institutions by the end of the 20th century.
That’s why it’s so hard for earlier generations to grasp a different lifestyle than the one they’ve been presented with, and more importantly, the one they’ve seen that works.
Since tracked careers worked for them [the baby boomers], they can’t imagine that they won’t work for their kids, too.
And it’s not their fault. To be honest, it would’ve been near stupid to opt-out of the default path because as Thiel points out, “whether you were born in 1945 or 1950 or 1955, things got better every year for the first 18 years of your life, and it had nothing to do with you.”
Yet, as new geneartions come of age, and start introducing themselves in the labor force as well as taking leadership positions, it’s essential to understand that this chapter of humanity was an anomaly.
We made a mistake and by that, I mean my generation and my parents’ generation. The mistake we made was thinking that the period from 1946 to 1980 was the norm. No, it was not! It was the anomaly! We had just wiped out the manufacturing capabilities of anyone who could challenge us. So, the idea that you had that job with the gold watch, and you could work there for your entire career and raise a family of four and all of that, that was an anomaly.
And now we must reap what our parents and grand-parents had sowed. A life built around a flawed system that now seems anachronic, like a sand-timer in a time of smartphones.
We entered adulthood thinking we could copy‐and‐paste what our parents had done, but it was more complicated than that. Factors that support meaningful lives, like economic growth across all sectors, a young population, two‐parent households, generous pensions, and company loyalty were anomalies of the past.
A Higher Calling & Wage-Based Societies
The idea that a job wasn’t merely an obligation but a calling was popularized in the late 1990’s.
Amy Wrzesniewski, a Yale professor, asked people to define their work in three ways:
Job
Career
Calling
The research concluded that those that could find a job they saw as a “calling” would generally experience improvements in their “life, health, and job satisfaction.”
This view contrasted with the usual “job as a career" type in which work is often driven by external rewards rather than internal purpose.
While John Calvin believed in the doctrine of predestination and how our skills and vocation are all part of God’s plan, Wrzesniewski and her cowriters were offering a new path to fulfillment and it only required for us to find a better job.
This was also reinforced by the appearence of companies like Google, who was awarded #1 Best Place to Work, probably by popularizing the idea that work could indeed be fun by offering crazy benefits like having a gym, dry cleaner, and dozens of other stuff inside company grounds.
In the late 2010s the expectation that work should be meaningful became a default expectation of college graduates.
By 2019, a survey of workers in the United States and Canada found that more than offering good pay and benefits, 78% of people thought “employers have a responsibility to keep employees mentally and physically well.”
And it only has increased during the last decade where you have thousands of companies striving to do what Google did. Selling the idea that working for them is theis “calling”. As the following slogans show:
Facebook: Do the most meaningful work of your life
Microsoft: Do what you love
McKinsey: Have a career that fits your calling
It’s high stakes when an entire generation of workers not only thinks that work should be the most important thing in their lives, but also that it should enable them to thrive in all aspects of their life.
Sadly, people have misunderstood the entire work-life philosophy, and naturally so. Over the last century we’ve experienced colosal societal and economical shifts and it’s normal that we’ve clinged to the only form of certainty humanity has seen in the last century.
Though the main problem remains alive and breathing and we’re still unable to find a solution.
A study from the University of Sussex by professors Bailey and Madden interviewed 135 individuals in 10 different professions about the most meaningful moments in their jobs. Their conclusion: “helping people find meaning in their work is complex and profound, going far beyond the relative superficialities of satisfaction or engagement.” Their research found that instead of joy, meaningful experiences were “associated with mixed, uncomfortable, or even painful thoughts and feelings, not just a sense of unalloyed joy and happiness.”
In English? Despite people wanting fun and joy in their workplace, the most meaningful moments came from overcoming obstacles and getting through setbacks.
Though this is much different than what most companies are promising and increasingly what many people have come to expect out of work.
Unfortunately, the problem lies deep within our understanding of what a job is. As Paul Millerd puts it, by thinking of a job as a way to solely create money, we limit ourselves from new possibilities.
We must understand why money has become a benchmark with which we take all major decisions in our lives.
Sociologist André Gorz spent the latter half of the 20th writing about the role of work in society. He argued that many countries had evolved into places where the primary way one gained “membership” in society was through formal work. He called these places “wage-based societies”
Never mind what work you do, what counts is having a job.
“One of the downsides of the “regular” way of thinking is that it leads to an oversimplification of how societies operate, assumptions on how people should live their lives, and ignorance of the realities and downsides of the “regular” way of working..” - Paul Millerd
And rightufully so. The default perception of work may glorify those able to submit their freedom in exchange for certainty yet it punishes anyone who does differently.
It´s as flawed as the education system where standarized tests are used as benchmarks to measure people skills.
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
Why is it that we place a higher value on a high-earning lawyer than a stay-at-home mom?
Or a finance advisor over a musician?
This metric of having a job (specailly glorified ones) as a synonym of success and societal value was implemented right after World War II and later on the US formalized it after passing the Full Employment Act. Thus creating a clear metric that everyone could use to judge a performance.
The answer seems quite simple: Jobs are good. Right?
Well, kinda.
The costs of unemployment are well beyond documented in academic studies.
“Researchers at the University of Stirling found that people who are unemployed can become less friendly, less hard‐working, and less open to new experiences.”
But there’s some nuance to it. And the evidence is right in front of us. Specially in the way people are working.
“In 2016, economists Lawrence Katz and Alan Kreuger highlighted a group of 30 million people categorized by the U.S. government as “alternative” or “nontraditional” workers and showed that they were responsible for nearly all of U.S. job growth from 2005 to 2015, adding nearly 10 million jobs. McKinsey found a similar result in USA and Europe where 100 million people are now “non-traditional” employees.”
As you can expect, this new type of workers have become more famous as Covid further forced the world to shift the way we work.
This could involve working from home, flexible schedules, result-based jobs, and more.
And above all, people are surprised this workers as quite happy.
This came to defy a basic understanding of a job, one where it was an “obligation” to work a bare minimum of 8 hours and working anything less would result in public shame rather than “happiness”.
This unleashed a tidal wave of challenging questions about our jobs and how we perceive them.
Nowadays people have started to question the reality they’ve been presented with. Wondering if having a job itself is the goal, or if there’s something more to it.
Phrases such as:
It may suck, but you’re getting something to put on your resume!
Everyone has to work, what are you supposed to do?
You should be grateful for being paid
Seem like remnants of an era long gone and as days go by, more people demand a deeper meaning to what they hope to dedicate their entire lives to instead of getting paid to be busy.
An Epiphany
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
A pebble in your shoe
The ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn’t mean anything.
Once you allow yourself to answer the questions you´ve been too “busy” to answer, you start to realize that the foundation in which you’ve built you’re entire life is not so stable after all.
“Not because of the contradictions in other people’s lives, but because it makes it difficult to live in contradiction in your own life.” - Paul Millerd
It’s now that you realize that you’ve indeed played your part in this Faustian Bargain, as Seth Godin calls it, sacrificing a life of passion for one of certainty.
You realize that the sum of your choices, it’s not a sum of your deliberately made decisions to prioritize passion but rather some forcefully made ones. Ones that Occam’s razor provides the best explanation: You’ve played it safe.
And that’s ok. Right?
To some degree it is. But the problem lies not in what you do, but how you measure it.
When I quit the New York Times to be a full-time mother, the voices of the world said that I was nuts. When I quit it again to be a full-time novelist, they said I was nuts again. But I am not nuts. I am happy. I am successful on my own terms. Because if your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.
And I believe I can safely say, there’s very few people who have succeeded doing what they really wanted to do.
It’s so easy to lose grip of your passions, specially since we´ve been told to follow “money-making” careers and not ones we´re passionate about.
Those are hobbies” they say…
And even though that may be somewhat true, that there are indeed better paid career paths, . there’s ways to make a living beyond what’s “normal”.
But for that you first need to a proper foudnation to build your home. To not only remember but to clarify what your priorities are.
So here’s a tip. What Paul calls a daily reminder.
Years ago Paul had attended a lecture by an MIT alumnus, Earl Jones, who had shared the following with his class: A list of words that reminded him of what he values, something that popped up on his calendar every morning
For example he had written:
Health
Family
Creativity
Relationships
Your case may be different but the purpose remains the same: to remind you of what your priorities are and make decision around those values.
Are you a worker?
Once you’ve taken the red pill, as Neo did in the insanely famous Hollywood movie The Matrix, you start seeing things as they are and not as you wanted them to be.
You’ll start to battle with inner thoughts about things you’ve taken for granted and now seem like sand castles being carried away by the rising tide.
One of this questions regards being a worker. Something many people who have worked independently might’ve contemplated by now.
An article written by philosopher Andre Taggart showed the following question:
If work dominated your every moment, would life be worth living?
I’d bet both my dogs that for 90% of people the answer is Hell no!
Even though for most, orienting our lives around work is the “smartest” thing to do, when asked if work took over every moment of our lives, it’s normal to run away while screaming out your lungs.
And honestly, it’s hard to imagine any other existence, one where work doesn’t take over.
And luckily for most, they’ll never experience this feeling ‘til they’re 65 at least.
And once you retire, you’ll come to realize that there’s life beyond work, and unfortunately, nobody told you how to live one.
Hence why most retirees go immediately back to work after retiring.
Ironic right?
So consider it normal to cling to the worker identity inside of you. It’s rooted itself so deep that even without a job you’ll think of yourself as lazy when not doing anything productive in “work hours”.
Taggart’s idea of “total work” remains true: “a state of existence in which work is such a powerful force that almost everyone ends up identifying as a worker first and foremost.”
To disconnect oneself from this will take some conscious effort.
According to Taggart, living in a world dominated by total work undermines the “playful contemplation concerned with our asking, pondering and answering the most basic questions of existence.”
And the first step is removing that idea that our perceived value comes from our ability to keep working.
A New Hope
The one who wonders not only does not know, he is intimately sure that he does not know, and he understands himself as being in a position of not‐knowing. But this un‐knowing is not the kind that brings resignation. The one who wonders is one who sets out on a journey, and this journey goes along with the wonder: not only that he stops short for a moment, and is silent, but also that he persists in searching.
Embracing a new and different way of living is a challenging journey - one that demands oppennes to our emotions and the possibilities that lie ahead.
Dismantling the dogmas we've carried throughout our existence demands not only conscious effort but also a willingness to embrace uncertainty and the new paths that may unfold.
But this journey is an exciting one for sure. So take no solace in certainty, ‘cause the time to take a leap is never perfect, and so it is.
A great way to reduce the risk involved in this immense life change is what Paul calls: Prototyping your leap.
By performing small experiments we reduce the friction by not “risking it all” while at the same time we’re trying new stuff.
This kind of approach, focused not on being brave, but instead on eliminating risk, is common for people who take unconventional paths. - Paul Millerd
By making small changes everyday we are opening ourselves for new opportunities that might tell us what comes next.
Wonder and seeing the world in a new way
“Many people dislike some parts of their jobs. But they stay in their jobs because their suffering is familiar. To change would be to trade the known for the unknown and change brings discomfort in hard to predict forms. So people avoid change and develop coping strategies. They learn to sidestep the manipulative manager, or like me, change jobs every couple of years, plan vacations, stay busy, and get drunk during the weekend. Play this game long enough without becoming too burned out and you might end up getting promoted.”
As Paul puts it, people are capable of tolerating high levels of misery for long stretches of time given sufficient coping strategies.
It’s actually part of what makes us humans and it’s called cognitive dissonance: “a psychological phenomenon where a person experiences discomfort or tension from holding two conflicting beliefs, attitudes, or values. To reduce this discomfort, individuals often change their beliefs or justify their actions.”
And apaprently, the only thing that can overrun this wonder.
“Wonder is the state of being open to the world, its beauty, and potential possibilities. With wonder, the need to cope becomes less important and the discomfort on the current path becomes more noticeable.” - Paul Millerd
This is a great tool and once you get used to it you’ll realize that future worries have now suddenly become wonder and excitement.
You stop thinking about worst-case scenarios and rather ponder on the benefits of an uncertain path.
Making life changes requires overcoming the discomfort of not knowing what will happen.
Though it’s easier said than done right?
Openning up to new possibilities does help in making a shift but does nothing in dealing with the uncertainty, specially in a path most don’t understand. More so when even we fail to make sense of it.
That’s why adopting what philospher Agnes Callard calls an aspirational journey is so important.
This is the: slow process of “trying on the values that we hope one day to possess.”
As opposed to the “regular” amibitious journey in which we already know what we value, which is mostly money and prestige.
Learning to exist with this new “vagueness” is vital as you move forward in this new path beacuse as Callard says: “you’re learning to see the world in a new way”.
Overcomming fears
Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.
Taming your fears is never an easy task, and as famous sci-fi philosopher Master Yoda once said: In order to vanish your fears, you must name then first.
I believe that for most of the people delving into this “new path”, their biggest fear is failure, at least one based on the default metrics.
To overcome this, you can use Tim Ferriss’s six step guide for fear-setting:
Write down the change you are making.
List the worst possible outcomes.
Identify actions you could take to mitigate those actions.
List some steps or actions you might take to get back to where you are today.
What could be some benefits of an attempt or partial success?
What is the cost of inaction in three months, 12 months, and in a few years?
This shifts our focus on the uncertain future to the manageable present.
As you’ll soon realize, most fears are based on overestimations and/or highly unlikely occurences.
As Tim Ferris’s puts it: Once you go through the process of thinking about your fears, you’ll realize that you’re risking a permanent 10 for a highly unlikely 4.
This is the type of exercise that forces you to reckon with the fact that we’re risk averse creatures, but that doesn’t mean that we should avoid it, but simply learn to manage it.
And what about another fear. One that lies deep in our hearts and holds us back from pursuing what we love?
Will they still love us?
Among people who have taken the pathless path, the most common question appears to be: “will the people in your life love you less if you do this?”
Unfortunately, there’s a couple of things you need to understand.
First, every comment is a judgement of what people value. Don’t be defensive just because people don’t agree with you. As a matter of fact, disagreeing is somewhat of a requirement in the pathless path.
Second, the pathless path is an aspirational path and can never be fully explained. As Callard tells us, to attempt to convince people that you are moving in the right direction can be futile. People who value comfort and security often cannot understand why anyone would willingly pursue a path that increases discomfort and uncertainty.
That’s why one of the worst things you can do is trying to convince other people that you’re moving on the right direction. People have different values and those who value the default path will never understand a more “flexible” one.
The wiser response always is to open your heart and be vulnerable about why you’re making the choices you’re making.
📍THE PATHLESS PATH: Reimagining life
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Uncharted thoughts
As you plunge into this new lifestyle, there’s a couple of concepts that will come in handy in order to make the most out of it without yielding into the comfort of the default path.
The art of non-doing
“There’s a phrase in Chinese, “wu wei,” that describes how I felt. In English, its translation is “non-doing,” but not in the sense of doing nothing. Non-doing is not about escaping anything or being lazy but instead refers to a deep level of connectedness with the world.” - Paul Millerd
It’s not about being lazy, but rather living in a way in which you allow for things to happen and not force them.
On the default path, you’ve learned forcing things is the normal behavior and we actually glorify those relentless enough to not giving up, yet, on the pathless path things are much different. Here is more about enjoying the journey and the creative act for it’s own sake, allowing yourself to be led where your passions take you.
In this path we don’t punish those who try and fail but rather we enable it.
As Paul puts it: nothing good gets away, as long as you create the space to let it emerge.
And for you to be able to let your creative side flourish, you´ll require what we call “breaks”.
And I’m not talking about the regular 2 week vacations. To be honest, it’s quite impossible to learn something about yourself in such a short time span. This are usually andrenaline packed vacations with minimum time to allow yourself to “breathe”.
You’ll need at least a month. Only once you’ve given yourself enough time to ponder on life’s toughest questions and play with your curiosity, will you be able to start traveling your own path.
And thus, we arrive at the first crossroad of resistance: Retirement.
The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too poor to buy our freedom.
One of the major barriers to taking a break is believing we have to wait for retirement.
That a life of enjoyment and control can only be acquired when our health is deteriorating and doctor appointments are a weekly activity.
We’ve been told that only through painful toil and after 40(ish) years of hard work can we take a proper break.
But it’s important for us and the sake of our future that we understand that retirement is a flawed concept and the sooner we embrace it the better.
Retirement was introduced in the late 1800s in Germany to provide support or the small number of people who survived to the age of 70 could no longer phisically work.
“Now people live longer and are healthier, so retirement is no longer rare, and in some countries, people are projected to spend up to one‐third of their life retired. This has led to enormous expectations that this period of one’s life will be happy, peaceful, and enjoyable.”
And what once stood with noble purpose now shows its fractures, slowly unveiled by the passing of time.
As Tim Ferris puts it in his book 4 Hour Work Week, retirement as a concept is flawed for 3 reasons:
It is based on the assumption that you dislike what you’re doing during the most physically capable years of your life.
Due to inflation and several other economic phenomenons, most people won’t be able to afford a “hot-dog-for-dinner” for the rest of their lives.
If all works out (which rarely does), then you’re a hard-working machine, meaning that 1 week into retirement and you’ll be so damn bored you’ll go immediately back to working
The solution?
What Tim calls mini-retirements.
Insrtead of waiting your entire life to retire, simply redistribute it allowing yourself to enjoy life as you live.
This are not “vacations” but purposefully planned time-off, designed to reset, reflect, and explore something meaningful to you.
This may last several weeks even up to several months, but the purpose remains the same.
And this is merely a part of what the pathless path is all about.
As Paul mentions:
On the pathless path, retirement is neither a destination nor a financial calculation, but a continuation of a life well-lived. This shifts attention from focusing on saving for the future to understanding how you want to live in the present.
Life-experiments
In his book, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill introduced a concept he referred as “experiments in living”. As he did some researched in regular people’s lives, he soon realized that “conventional ways of living tend to “degenerate into the mechanical’’ and that if societal norms are too strong or rigid, original thinkers who would otherwise experiment will be stifled”. Hence, the “experiments in living” are quite literally experiments we should do in our own lives as an attempt to defend our individual freedom and allowing ourselves to live our lives in our own ways, even if they may be unconventional or unpopular.
As Mill puts it: Societies thrive when individuals are not only allowed, but encouraged to explore different lifestyles unique to their own need and passions.
Your new credentials
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
In the year 2019, Gallup, American reserach and consulting firm surveyed Americans about success. They wanted to see their response to the question: How do you personally define success?
What seemed a simple question unraveled a deeper truth — a quiet flaw in the lens through which we view success.
The results:
97% respondents agreed with the following statement: “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”
But, when asked: How do you think others define success?
Only 8% gave the answer shown above
The other 92% felt that other people defined success as follows: “A person is successful if they are rich, have a high-profile career, or are well‐known.”
So what is it then? Money and status or following our own interests?
Paul believes that the disconnect happens because of how we tend to simplify the messiness of human nature down to simple stories when talking about taking leaps and picking life paths.
That’s why we tend to disguise our intentions when talking about our goals and only tell the stories we think will be seen as acceptable.
And worst of all, it’s the young ones who pay the highest cost. Since they haven’t experienced the ups and downs of their own paths and don’t yet understand how others are making decisions years ahead of them, they default to “the heuristic of respecting the people who other people respect,” as doctor and writer Scott Alexander has noted.
In the pathless path you must understand that the “old world” credentials are no longer valid and a new definition of success must emerge. One that considers one’s passions and fulfillment rather than 0’s on a bank account.
One that encourages a willingness to investigate and to wonder if there’s a better way to define success.
As more and more people decide that these tests are silly, we can create new and better games. Ones that aren’t optimized for how employers like to see the world, but rather align with how we are motivated to learn and grow through our lives.
The new you
A large part of choosing your path is figuring out which values will determine your worth.
A bad egg
In his essay “The Industrially Necessary Egg”, Ben Hunt introduces the concept of “bad eggs” through a personal anecdote. While raising chickens in his farm in Connecticut, he describes how fresh eggs which often come with imperfections like dirt or feathers, are perceived as bad in comparisson with spotless refrigerated eggs commonly found in supermarkets.
Hunt explains that this eggs are not only safe, but superior in quality.
So why do we gravitate towards the “cleaner” ones?
Although this may seem a egg-specific scenario, this extends across various aspects of our lives.
This example perfectly illustrsates how industrial processes have shaped our perceptions of quality and normalcy.
How many of the concepts we accept as immutable truths are often conveniences designed for industrial efficiency rather than true indicators of quality.
Same applies for chosing a career path.
“The pathless path is about ignoring the pull of needing to be a “good egg” and learning what truly enables you to thrive. What this really means is developing an appreciation for discomfort.” - Paul Millerd
It is indeed more comfortable to be a good egg and live in certainty, never feeling lost, but only the bad eggs now that there is wisdom in being lost.
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
Find your enough
One of the greatest skills you’ll develope on the pathless path is being able to know when is enough.
This is a skill that only those who’ve worked by themselves have been able to grasp. Because only when you have no one else to blame for your situation can you take ownership of your life and reflect on what is it that you really want.
Knowing your enough will allow you to avoid the profit-seeking behavior we’re so used to, and remove that “more-is-better” philosophy that has taken hold of our modern living.
Clarity is the key to successful decision making.
If we fail to define our enough, we simply default to more, which essentially means a desire to be fulfilled. Which as we’ve seen before, it’s a never-ending path, and a sad one as well.
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
One in a trillion
Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
Although it might seem utopic and a concept as fake as a 2 dollar bill or a hair-growth product, there is a way for you to find a job you enjoy.
And yes I do have to admit, it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Despite what modern gurus will tell you, the journey to meaningful work is often winding, arduous, and not without its share of heartache.
Remember that “the pathless path is not about finding a job or building a business or achieving any other metric, but rather a constant experimenting with different kinds of work in the search for something worth doing and then “working backward to build a life around being able to keep doing it”. - Paul Millerd
And for this you must abandon the narrow conception of work we all have. While making money is incredibly important from a survival sense, using it as a filter to find work worth doing is a terrible metric and a huge mistake.
This will bring the realization that finding a job worth doing is infinitely more important than any comfort and/or security a job might offer.
Be useful
Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact, they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary.
As we’ve all experienced, modern society has perfected the art of making people feel useless.
People would spend decades in the same company only to be fired without hesitations and be replaced withing a week.
Plus, as the AI wave sweeps across the world, threatening to displace countless from their livelihoods, we are called to seek new wells of purpose and validation beyond old metrics.
This is why finding a job that matters to you and makes you feel usefull is imperative.
Never in the history of mankind has been a bigger urgency for people doing what they love and sharing it.
Serving a mass audience is default path thinking, and an old one as well. The beauty of the pathless path is that it specializes in niche markets.
People crave uniqueness, so why should be hide ours?
You were born an original. Don’t die a copy.
Have some faith
Choosing a new path is difficult enough, and trying stuff you’ve never tried before is even worse. Though be wary of how you perceive yourself.
How we view and think about ourselves ultimately becomes a self-fulfilling profecy. Much like the pygmalion effect describes how expectations shape behavior, our self-perception is a key factor in who we will become.
Don’t get caught in what Daniel G. Gilbert calls the “end of history illusion”: the tendency for people to believe that they have changed a lot in the past but will change very little in the future.
The person who you’ll eventualy become might be entirely different from who you are now and that’s ok.
Growth requries change and change requires accepting that things might not always be the way we like them to.
So have some faith that things will work out, because they’ll eventually do.
As the old saying goes:
"Fortune favors the bold."
And if you need a little help, here’s Paul’s list of 10 things as challenges for us to embrace the spirit of the pathless path:
1. Question the default
2. Reflect
3. Figure out what you have to offer
4. Pause and disconnect
5. Go make a friend
6. Go make something
7. Give generously
8. Experiment
9. Commit
10. Be patient
“Dying,” Morrie suddenly said, “is only one thing to be sad over, Mitch. Living unhappily is something else. So many of the people who come to visit me are unhappy.” Why? “Well, for one thing, the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. We’re teaching the wrong things. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it. Create your own.”
This was a summay of a fantastic book by bestselling author Paul Millerd called The Pathless Path.
Paul Millerd is an independent writer, freelancer, coach, and digital creator known for exploring alternative approaches to work and life. He began his career in strategy consulting, working with prestigious firms such as McKinsey & Company, and later pursued an MBA at MIT Sloan School of Management. In 2017, Millerd departed from the conventional corporate trajectory to embark on what he describes as the "pathless path," seeking a more fulfilling and self-directed life.
Also, here’s a link of my personal notes on his book in case you want a lengthier dive into it:
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As always, thank you so much for reading, and I’ll see you next week.
Live for more,
Luis Beltran
Quito, Ecuador