Life could be really beautiful, if not for the combination of being coerced into work on the threat of poverty and having little control over what we really do there.
I feel like I've spent most of my life trying to crack this problem, how to live happily when such a system exists, or how to escape it altogether.
My method so far has been to train and educate myself into better, "freer" forms of employment, and it's worked out to some extent. But I still often feel immense money pressures, and an underlying feeling something is deeply wrong. There's a deep sense of insecurity, of running on a treadmill, one that prevents any kind of true happiness or contentedness.
I've read someone here mention the Buddhist "the glass is already broken" type of mindset, and I understand that not all things are perfect and stable, and why this realisation would help. But this aspect of life is entirely artificial, work and resource allocation don't need to take this form. It's an unnecessary kind of suffering. If we do accept suffering and precariousness, surely it should only be the truly necessary and unavoidable?
Anyway, I feel like I've tried multiple avenues to liberate myself. I've been in higher education and training for years, in an attempt to get into tolerable work, especially the kind of thing where I help others ("Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life"). While I'm grateful to have found semi-fulfilling work, I still feel suffocated. I've looked into frugal living and "financial independence"/FIRE. I've even tentatively tried political activism and collective organisation.
These are all ongoing projects, but I suspect the only way to truly get yourself out of the rat race is to either abandon it entirely, or to own enough capital that you have others make your money for you.
I want to open myself up to different methods, though. How have others navigated this problem?
Even on .gs a post will spring up that poses a novel new solution. The lad doing remote tech support, for example. We also seem to have an improbably high number of wealthy lads, here.
I'm not so interested in wealth as an end in itself, I just want to be sure I'm doing everything I can to build a worthwhile, secure, and free life.
> My method so far has been to train and educate myself into better, "freer" forms of employment, and it's worked out to some extent.
> While I'm grateful to have found semi-fulfilling work
Teach me your ways.
I think along similar lines to you and my current goal is to follow in remote tech support lad's footsteps and live somewhere cheap while working from home. Long-term I'm learning coding in the hopes of eventually being a work from home codemonkey programmer.
I think one of the biggest obstacles to living free in Britain is the overcrowding and draconian system of planning permission which makes cheap housing impossible. Land seems cheap enough but good luck getting permission for your Kaczynski cabin or your concrete yurt. The most straightforward path to cheap housing seems to be getting a narrowboat for £20,000 and becoming one of those canal boat hippies. If you move farther up the canal every two weeks you don't need to pay mooring fees.
That's not it. In my overly wordy post I should have mentioned I have no problem with hard work, but I do believe I (and people generally) should have a afar greater control over what they do with their lives.
What I want isn't laziness, it's freedom and self-determination.
By the sounds of it, I think self-employment might suit you. It's often harder than a nine-to-five, but you have much more autonomy. Every penny you earn is yours, not because of the whims of your boss but because your customers want what you're selling. Check out your local chamber of commerce - they probably offer free courses and support on starting a business.
>>28911 I live a semi-hobo lifestyle and typed up a load of bollocks but I don't know if it'll interest or be of use to you or anyone else, but I can post about it if you want though. The summary is basically I travel around the world and pick up work occasionally, half the time I rough it. At the least it could give you some ideas, like this guy who left it all:
I mentioned him to someone the other day I was chatting up and since then he has appeared on Reddit's front page and now here, strange 'synchronicity' maybe that daft bastard Jung was right, or you're that hot goth chick who inexplicably blocked me on OKCupid?
I can and have earned more than groups of my friends put together (hence the ‘wasted potential’), which to me was very isolating since the people I cared about lived in situations I couldn't relate to, and the people in my situation seemed all be power hungry materialists. I really didn’t know what to do with the cash other than stop working and watch the clouds drift by.
My current dream is to try amass enough cash to buy a plot of land somewhere so remote there aren't even roads. Getting things there might be a chore, but I would have a space I could call my own where I don't bother society and society won't bother me. Live an Epicurean lifestyle somewhere taking pleasure from my garden.
My Ex has been well into a show on Netflix called 'How to Live Mortgage Free with Sarah Beeny', that might be worth the watch for you.
Seems like you're looking for an external solution to an internal problem. The rat race might not make you happy, but you can be happy in spite of it. Dreaming about building yourself a free and easy life is just capitalism of a different flavour.
What internal problem are you referring to? Having a very significant constraint on how I spend my time and effort seems like a very concrete external problem, to me.
> While I'm grateful to have found semi-fulfilling work, I still feel suffocated
Because that statement about not having to work a single day is bollocks.
Work is work at the end of the day. Something I do so I get paid and may survive a few more days.
Myself, I markedly dislike 9 to 5, five days out of seven each week. Feels like some sort of rotting hell, though better than the Chinese 996 and whatever was back when my ancestors walked the earth. Luckily I found myself a half-decent shift work which I don't hate yet. I don't do cold calls, I don't have to stand behind the counter, nor do I have to crawl in mining drifts. It generates pretty okay income though I'm still skint.
Sometimes it seems to me like there are people who've cracked it. The owner of the business I used to work for. He'd built it from ground up. I may only judge as far as I can prod, I can't crawl into his head and find out what he's thinking and how he's feeling really. It might be - and very probably is - not at all that rose-coloured as certain types tend to think about entrepreneurs.
> There's a deep sense of insecurity, of running on a treadmill, one that prevents any kind of true happiness or contentedness.
There's truth to what they say about money not buying happiness.
I mean yeah, it's also true when people pithily remark "But it sure helps!" as well, but the point still stands.
I believe this is what otherlad was referring to as an internal problem. I guess different people deal with things in different ways, and you are a very deterministic, free willed person. You do not like the thought of admitting that you have less control over life than you think.
But doing so can be liberating in a way all of its own. If you admit that the system is stacked against you, that your socio-economic background and geographical location presents you with hurdles and obstacles that you simply wouldn't have if you'd been born as the son of, say, an Australian cattle rancher, or an Alaskan fisherman. Sure you can make steps toward attaining those lifestyles, but in the end, is that really what will make you happy and solve your existential angst, or is it just what you think will do so?
At the end of the day you are just one of countless billions. My philosophy here might sound like defeatist guff to you, but somebody has to do that 9-5. Somebody has to collect your bins. Somebody has to mop the floors. Somebody has to do it, or else we'd have nothing, collectively. If we all lived the off-grid dream in a rural cabin, society would collapse.
You have no more right to freedom and self-determination that Gupta from Delhi who's desperately working as an Uber driver to be able to afford a better life in Britain. Both of you are trapped on the wheel to escape into another form of slavery. And so it continues.
Thus, the only pragmatic solution is to find happiness within. Come to terms with the fact that you live in a pre-utopian period of history where we haven't yet invented robots to take away all burden of labour and leave humans to pursue art and science undistracted. Perhaps one day you will be born again in another cycle as part of that time.
Don't mistake this post for me telling you that action to change your situation is futile, or that you should somehow just settle for a shit 9-5 and use obliteration of the self to accept it. But a shift in mental perspective can be helpful. Your political activism is probably a good thing to be doing- You might exist in a time of unbridled capitalist serfdom, but maybe you can pave the way for something better.
The frustrating thing for me is that I know exactly what I'd do if I had a lot of money. Genuinely, I have immense plans for myself and some quite grand projects in mind, if I'm ever in a position to carry them out. But of course, the kind of high powered career with great monetary rewards generally comes with huge demands on time and freedom. I'm open to hearing about exceptions...
Personally I don't relate much to the fishing allegory, as I think it romanticises the life of the fisherman a bit. I used to want to go full on Richard Proenneke, and while I do understand the appeal of a life of simplicity and all that... the world is complex and dangerous, and wealth gives you many more options and opportunities and safety nets. Maybe I'm too ambitious, but imagine a life where you have a cabin to retreat to, a flat in a city, and the freedom to move between then both at your will. None of this would be in the UK, I should say.
I don't buy the "work is just the way it is" idea. There's no perfect job, I'm aware, but some jobs are a lot more tolerable, or comfortable, or even empowering than others. I'm still holding onto hope I can strike on a career where I have the freedom to move between different sectors, work on interesting projects, make my own schedule, etc..
My ways are nothing special. Essentially I had a picture of a career I wanted in mind about 5 years ago, and I've thrown myself headlong into training and further education since. I've been relentlessly strategic, picked out jobs, sacrificed countless evenings and weekends, gone through various periods of studying while working full-time, or working multiple separate jobs (not all glamorous). I've also taken risks and relocated multiple times.
It's absolutely been worth it. Even though I'm still aiming higher, right now I live independently in a beautiful city and I don't have anything resembling a 9 to 5. I'm just about scraping by with flexible part time work while I complete this particular phase of my study.
Agreed, there are many different aspects to happiness, and obviously money means very little in the face of, say, incurable health problems.
Yet I can't really diminish the importance of wealth, either -- just about every imaginable quality of life indicator (as well as psychological and social ailment) scales directly with income, with plenty of causal associations identified by researchers.
Just on a personal level, I know I am happier when I am financially comfortable and know I have means at my disposal if things ever got really bad.
>Somebody has to collect your bins. Somebody has to mop the floors. Somebody has to do it, or else we'd have nothing, collectively. If we all lived the off-grid dream in a rural cabin, society would collapse.
Absolutely, but I see no reason why a very select social class should be assigned those tasks on the threat of poverty if they don't. There are myriad ways of distributing labour.
It's also not that I see myself as distinct from or more deserving than Gupta -- in fact it's the opposite, I'm acutely aware of how people become trapped in structures that they simply don't have the tools or awareness to resist, including myself. Maybe this partly explains my manic approach to taking what control I can over my life.
Where I disagree with you is the idea that there are only different forms of slavery; even a glance at how people live should tell you that lives vary massively in terms of freedoms. Again, I can see that there is no perfect life (or perfect job, house, etc.), but I see no reason not to aim for the highest attainable life for myself.
>If we all lived the off-grid dream in a rural cabin, society would collapse.
Not necessarily. It sounds to me like you're just describing a different type of society with its own advantages and flaws. One I probably wouldn't advocate, for the record.
>But a shift in mental perspective can be helpful.
I understand. Appreciating what is good in your life can help you no matter what your station. But let's say, hypothetically, I'm already a highly emotionally developed (for lack of a better term) person, that I am appreciating what happiness there is in my life, but I'm still both extremely ambitious for myself and angry at the injustices that occur as a result of the current system. What then? What if I really am just searching for pragmatic solutions to a real world problem, and I've got the emotional side more or less sorted?
I'm sure you've watched enough Big Clive videos between you to bodge some kind of matter replicator. Once you've done that we're twelve months at most from being post-resource scarcity, the only issue then might be everyone having too many kids, but we should able to get off the planet quicker once the food and fuel issue it sorted. Actually no, we'd still be dependent on fossil fuels so maybe we're still knackered, but you'd have to check with GreenLad about that, I only really know about wild speculation.
>>28926 I suppose it would depend on how energy efficient your matter reassembler is. If you can create structures with more potential energy than your matter machine takes to assemble them, you're sorted.
>I want to open myself up to different methods, though. How have others navigated this problem?
The people I work with are pretty decent and my job is interesting, varied and valued. Hard days happen but you laugh it off with your mates which, even as an introvert, might be what you're missing. People are social animals defining themselves by those around them - Alasdair MacIntyre and all that.
I dunno, it looks like everyone has their own answer to this which is fair enough. I'm a lazy bastard so it probably helps that I have the expertise to slack off and still manage a decent enough job with the occasional bout of effort when absolutely necessary.
I've also been doing a fair bit of shagging this year.
>>28925 > Appreciating what is good in your life can help you no matter what your station. But let's say, hypothetically, I'm already a highly emotionally developed (for lack of a better term) person, that I am appreciating what happiness there is in my life, but I'm still both extremely ambitious for myself and angry at the injustices that occur as a result of the current system. What then? What if I really am just searching for pragmatic solutions to a real world problem, and I've got the emotional side more or less sorted?
No idea lad, not going to lie.
Just one thing I've just recalled.
A Russian ex-con told me once. He'd been doing porridge for several years and that made him realise how little a human being actually needed for happiness.
'Tea and some sweets', as he'd put it. And not being bothered.
Sage because I'm not really answering your question.
