When people ask where I work, I sometimes describe myself as “feral”. It’s a joke…but also a real aspiration. Good things happen when I try hard to chase my sense of excitement, ignoring impulses to produce legible outcomes. This essay really captures it:
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.'s central argument is that the most meaningful paths—for you and for the world—can’t be planned; you have to uncover them by chasing interesting novelty, without safe knowledge of which paths will succeed or fail. But working a job usually makes that impossible.
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The reason to “quit your job” (metaphorically or literally) isn’t to wallow in carefree hedonism: it’s to discover and honor a richer and more personal sense of purpose, to take your own ideas seriously along no one’s axis of value but your own.
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People who quit often feel pressure to “start something”, to “succeed”. But those pressures are about others’ default ideas of purpose. You haven’t cultivated your own telos yet. For that, you need to time spent engaging with your impulses—playfully, non-instrumentally.
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Many people frame quitting in terms of working a job for oneself: “I’m going full-time on my coaching practice!” That may be more fun, but this isn’t quitting your job in the fullest sense. The aim is wide-open space, cultivation of instinct, freedom from the tug of obligation.
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The deeper problem with quitting in order to do something well-defined is that you’ll be limited to paths you can clearly articulate from within your current world—that is, the confining context of a job. The most meaningful paths probably aren’t on that menu.
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This line of reasoning nicely echoes 's excellent “Becoming a Magician”, which defines extraordinary growth in terms of becoming a version of yourself which seems impossible, even alien. What got you here won’t get you there. autotranslucence.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/bec
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One important claim Wolf makes is that yes, of course, stepping off a well-defined career track requires a great deal of privilege. But many—most?—of the people who *could* take that leap wrongly think of it as a fairy-tale, something only “other people” could do.
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I don’t know how true this is. Obviously there are huge practical barriers for even many quite wealthy people, as I learned in the many excellent replies to the thread below. But it’s not totally untrue either. I needed a lot of cajoling to take the leap.
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This question's gauche, but: given the prevalence of $400k++ comp packages for ~30-year-olds in Big Tech, why aren't there lots more "gentle[wo]man scholars"? i.e. people quitting to do non-remunerative creative projects
I can think of some, but shouldn't there be thousands?
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In any case, Wolf correctly argues that one common reason people don’t quit is that they—correctly!—lack faith in their ideas. Their instincts seem weak because, often, they are. You have to give them a chance to grow: “you get good ideas from years of hard leisure.”
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This makes me more optimistic about the recent surge of small grants (eg Emergent Ventures). “You’ll fund me for 3-12 months…but then what?!” Seems iffy if judged by how well it can launch well-defined projects. But maybe very promising for cultivating highly personal instincts.
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All this seems awfully selfish—and in a real sense it *needs* to be, to cultivate your own sense of purpose. But Wolf argues (and I agree) that many important kinds of progress depend on insights which emerged from this kind of idiosyncratic "hard leisure".
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