Quit Your Job
Metadata
Highlights
- I debated with my collaborators over the next year or so. Is this what we really wanted to do with our lives? Or should we get safer hobbies like drunken rock climbing? If we were in, we should be in with our whole lives and deaths, and with all our resources, because this stuff can’t be pursued by anything less than the whole person. We were in.
- The reason any of this is worth sharing is because it’s my example of what you might call “active unemployment,” or if you prefer the traditional term, “leisure.” The Romans called it “otium.”
- Value is very legible within a clear plan to reach a clear objective. But you cannot pursue interesting novelty—things that no one else is doing or which you have never seen before, or the little threads of nagging curiosity or doubt—by chasing along known direct value gradients. But that’s where the treasure is. That’s how you will find the place where you need to build. To get the biggest and most interesting payoffs, you have to start by chasing merely interesting novelty in an open-ended way.
- 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.
- This is, after all, the point of quitting your job and exploring: to find the new lands of opportunity in which you will build an empire.
- You don’t actually need the money; in reality, the money needs you to give it a worthy purpose, but everyone gets this backward. And if you don’t need to work very hard at managing the money, that’s just because your job is protected by the union. What is capitalism but the overgrown trade union of the idle rich?
- True ascent beyond the kept life comes only from taking bold, determinate leaps of faith on real constructive projects.
- To make such bets you must be indifferent at some level to whether you end up a king or a monk, or even dead. The indeterminate hedge-trader with his logarithmic utility function assigns infinite negative utility to ruin. The man of action serenely regards ruin as the most likely possible outcome, mitigates it where he can, and leaps anyway. He rejects the comfortable half-existence of drifting with the indeterminate human tide and manifests his bold vision into the world.
- Life necessarily involves these fatal leaps of faith—bets which you have no certain way of knowing will work out but which define your whole existence and require your intense effort. The squirrel has no way of knowing or checking that his instinct to bury the nuts will lead him to new life in the spring; he can only trust that God has given him what he needs. Any low-risk bet comes likewise with low returns. The highest returns of life and glory come from taking hard bets on your best visions of the future and being able to make them work through dedicated struggle.
- No one can or should be the lone overman who defines all value for himself. We need to cooperate with and defer to each other to make society possible. But even if we individually can only bite off a small piece of the overall purpose structure of our society to manage ourselves, we need to actually do that far more than we do now. For any given question of ends, someone, somewhere, must be taking responsibility. Someone must make that leap of faith to define ends for the rest of us to work towards. No one else is going to do it. Why not you?
- Haul yourself back out and take your appointed sentence of years of hard leisure while you search for inspiring purposes that are truly worth your life and for the skills and secret knowledge you will need to fulfill them. You will find them only in the strange and unjustifiable curiosities you have when you’ve been freely following informed instinct for months.
- The other reason is that to actually accomplish at your full potential, you have to start doubling down on particular bets long before you know that you can follow through. You won’t see the whole path when you begin. You will have no way of knowing whether it exists, or whether what you are pursuing is even possible. If you have more certainty than that, you aren’t aiming high enough. You have to bet your life on faith that the universe will provide if your vision is good enough.
- Looking around us, we see a world filled with beautiful creatures. Everything that has flourished has done so by fulfilling some niche in its ecosystem, embodying some novel virtue, and striving hard to bring its vision of life into the world. Where a beautiful status quo is corrupted or overcome, it is often for some internal lack, or by something that has developed new virtues that will enable even grander beauty after the disruption. The preponderant beauty of the things that survive implies a justice to the logic of survival and thus providence for the virtuous.
- There is a surplus wealth endowed in the universe to those with the virtue to win it. This is not just resources won in competition, but more importantly also the random providence that falls on you simply for thriving in novel ways.
- 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.
Quit Your Job
Metadata
Highlights
- alue is very legible within a clear plan to reach a clear objective. But you cannot pursue interesting novelty—things that no one else is doing or which you have never seen before, or the little threads of nagging curiosity or doubt—by chasing along known direct value gradients. But that’s where the treasure is. That’s how you will find the place where you need to build. To get the biggest and most interesting payoffs, you have to start by chasing merely interesting novelty in an open-ended way. (View Highlight)
- 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. (View Highlight)
- 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. (View Highlight)
- To make such bets you must be indifferent at some level to whether you end up a king or a monk, or even dead. The indeterminate hedge-trader with his logarithmic utility function assigns infinite negative utility to ruin. The man of action serenely regards ruin as the most likely possible outcome, mitigates it where he can, and leaps anyway. He rejects the comfortable half-existence of drifting with the indeterminate human tide and manifests his bold vision into the world. (View Highlight)
- If your vision is beautiful and sound, it will flourish. Resources will unexpectedly come out of the woodwork to support it. If your vision doesn’t have that virtue, you will be struck down for its lack. That’s life. It is also justice. Where this justice conflicts with our own human desires, perhaps it is we who are wrong, not God. (View Highlight)
title: “Quit Your Job”
author: “palladiummag.com”
url: ”https://palladiummag.com/2022/01/06/quit-your-job/”
date: 2023-12-19
source: hypothesis
tags: media/articles
Quit Your Job
Metadata
Highlights
- I debated with my collaborators over the next year or so. Is this what we really wanted to do with our lives? Or should we get safer hobbies like drunken rock climbing? If we were in, we should be in with our whole lives and deaths, and with all our resources, because this stuff can’t be pursued by anything less than the whole person. We were in.
- The reason any of this is worth sharing is because it’s my example of what you might call “active unemployment,” or if you prefer the traditional term, “leisure.” The Romans called it “otium.”
- Value is very legible within a clear plan to reach a clear objective. But you cannot pursue interesting novelty—things that no one else is doing or which you have never seen before, or the little threads of nagging curiosity or doubt—by chasing along known direct value gradients. But that’s where the treasure is. That’s how you will find the place where you need to build. To get the biggest and most interesting payoffs, you have to start by chasing merely interesting novelty in an open-ended way.
- 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.
- This is, after all, the point of quitting your job and exploring: to find the new lands of opportunity in which you will build an empire.
- You don’t actually need the money; in reality, the money needs you to give it a worthy purpose, but everyone gets this backward. And if you don’t need to work very hard at managing the money, that’s just because your job is protected by the union. What is capitalism but the overgrown trade union of the idle rich?
- True ascent beyond the kept life comes only from taking bold, determinate leaps of faith on real constructive projects.
- To make such bets you must be indifferent at some level to whether you end up a king or a monk, or even dead. The indeterminate hedge-trader with his logarithmic utility function assigns infinite negative utility to ruin. The man of action serenely regards ruin as the most likely possible outcome, mitigates it where he can, and leaps anyway. He rejects the comfortable half-existence of drifting with the indeterminate human tide and manifests his bold vision into the world.
- Life necessarily involves these fatal leaps of faith—bets which you have no certain way of knowing will work out but which define your whole existence and require your intense effort. The squirrel has no way of knowing or checking that his instinct to bury the nuts will lead him to new life in the spring; he can only trust that God has given him what he needs. Any low-risk bet comes likewise with low returns. The highest returns of life and glory come from taking hard bets on your best visions of the future and being able to make them work through dedicated struggle.
- No one can or should be the lone overman who defines all value for himself. We need to cooperate with and defer to each other to make society possible. But even if we individually can only bite off a small piece of the overall purpose structure of our society to manage ourselves, we need to actually do that far more than we do now. For any given question of ends, someone, somewhere, must be taking responsibility. Someone must make that leap of faith to define ends for the rest of us to work towards. No one else is going to do it. Why not you?
- Haul yourself back out and take your appointed sentence of years of hard leisure while you search for inspiring purposes that are truly worth your life and for the skills and secret knowledge you will need to fulfill them. You will find them only in the strange and unjustifiable curiosities you have when you’ve been freely following informed instinct for months.
- The other reason is that to actually accomplish at your full potential, you have to start doubling down on particular bets long before you know that you can follow through. You won’t see the whole path when you begin. You will have no way of knowing whether it exists, or whether what you are pursuing is even possible. If you have more certainty than that, you aren’t aiming high enough. You have to bet your life on faith that the universe will provide if your vision is good enough.
- Looking around us, we see a world filled with beautiful creatures. Everything that has flourished has done so by fulfilling some niche in its ecosystem, embodying some novel virtue, and striving hard to bring its vision of life into the world. Where a beautiful status quo is corrupted or overcome, it is often for some internal lack, or by something that has developed new virtues that will enable even grander beauty after the disruption. The preponderant beauty of the things that survive implies a justice to the logic of survival and thus providence for the virtuous.
- There is a surplus wealth endowed in the universe to those with the virtue to win it. This is not just resources won in competition, but more importantly also the random providence that falls on you simply for thriving in novel ways.
- 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.