…Working even a good job cramps your sense of possibility, imposes narrow objectives, and eats away at the little things that could grow into big things if they weren’t so oppressed by the rigors of existing structure…
This is part of why we need an active leisure class in society. Productive exploration requires the application of skilled personal judgment to chasing hunches and interesting problems without narrow material and objective constraints. It is generally unfair and wasteful for this to be anything but voluntarily self-funded…thus, speculative exploration is a special duty of those with means. Relatedly, it’s unfair and wasteful for the people who could be out there exploring and building the future on their own dime to be either working normal jobs or simply managing their money for profit. This is a key part of what it means to be a responsible elite. You use your privilege and your personal judgment to explore and solve problems that no one else can.
If you have the resources to spend some time exploring, if you are on to interesting threads of novelty that few other people have, and if you have the spirit to tighten your belt, throw out your map, and explore off-road, then your real job is to do so. It is a grave sin to neglect that kind of cosmic duty. But many more people have the means and privilege to quit their tracked careers than ever realize it and act on it. You need far less than you think to live in monk mode and pursue this kind of exploration. What this means in practice is that at some point far before you are or feel ready, you need to quit your job.
Even if you are rich and have no nominal boss, statistically speaking you are still effectively a wage slave. If all you end up doing is nursing the money, without ever exercising the authority to decide on which future it shall be spent, it might as well be someone else’s… You don’t actually need the money; in reality, the money needs you to give it a worthy purpose…
This is related to why man became stunted with the dawn of agriculture. We traded a life limited by the occasional violent struggle over bountiful surplus for a more predictable life limited by grinding labor after barely sufficient nutrition. Scale won out, but not health. Quitting your job, in the full sense I have described here, is a bit like quitting that agricultural life to return to a life of adventure on the wild frontier. It is a much less certain existence and a more violent one. But the combination of leisurely surplus, mortal intensity, and demand for novel virtue is where you will find life at its healthiest and highest. It is where we will find the most important destinies.
Live like an aristocrat:
…In the early modern era, landed gentry and similar were essentially unemployed. Perhaps they did some minor administration of their tenants, some dabbled in politics or were dragged into military projects, but compared to most formal workers they seem to have worked relatively few hours. They filled the remainder of their time with intricate social rituals like balls and parties, hobbies like hunting, studying literature, and philosophy, producing and consuming art, writing letters, and spending time with friends and family…I sometimes wonder if there is some implicit classism in people’s worries about unemployment: the rich will know how to use their time well, but the poor will need to be kept busy.
…the urge not to feel useless….