Finally reading ’s book. It’s really good. Really drives home the extent to which the culture of modern work is is a success cult. You’re in it even when unemployed, or in obvious McJobs, with no pathway to the Promised Land of corner offices.
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Not done yet, but the first part is a really solid interwoven tale of his own journey into and out of the cult, told with almost painful honesty, and reflective commentary drawing on things like academic literature on burnout and eclectic philosophical sources.
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I hadn’t prioritized reading it since I assumed I’d know what it was about from his newsletter, but no… this is polished and fresh content. It really should be a mainstream airport bestseller type book, not niche subculture blogger self-published book.
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The cult of work extends down to high school, into retirement, and sideways to “non-working” spouses, and deprogramming out of it is 3x harder than a normal cult because it is an overwhelming majority rather than a minority of crackpots in a compound. Never thought of this angle
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It’s not that jobs and workplaces are bad, or that we don’t need the outputs of the industries that are within the cult of work. Paul is careful, where many are not, to not demonize paycheck work itself. What’s toxic is “success culture” for powering its labor needs.
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Not sure how to define this separately, but “success culture” as in:
— people who are paid more are more worthy
— jobs are in a hierarchy of prestige and that’s good
— prestige is a good variable to maximize
— spreadsheet-optimizing job-hunting is healthy
Etc etc
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It’s tough to thread the needle here. Critiquing the cult without sliding into “tear down capitalism and let’s all live on organic farm communes/trad communities” bullshit. This book is so far managing it. I’m guessing the last chapter won’t devolve into BTFSTTG polemics 😆
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I’m not sure why I was never really into this cult side of work. Possibly because they didn’t want me. Unlike Paul, I was rejected by McKinsey and didn’t bother trying again 😆
The one real job I had for a few years, I enjoyed well enough, but never got attached to.
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My own writing on the topic has mostly been about free agency as a macrotrend that seems destined to eat the paycheck economy, reverting to a historical mean of say 80% non-paycheck. Sort of ideology-neutral trend-riding. I didn’t consider this cult aspect or take it seriously.
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In fact I have been hostile to what I saw as a hypocritical demonization of paycheck world by gig economy people. After all, we indies wouldn’t be able to do our 4hww slacker mediocre lifestyle shtick if strivers at Stripe, Zoom, Google etc weren’t building infrastructure for it
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Not sure if you can have all those nice things without a mimetic cult of success staffing it with prestige-crazed blue-pill poppers, but I think Paul’s convinced me if it’s possible at all, it would be a good thing to bring about.
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Will add any more thoughts to this thread as I finish
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I’m most interested in how to reprogram people in the cult when it is destroying them without producing any value. It’s a sad waste of life. At least where someone in the cult is killing themselves to do something that benefits the rest of us, it feels selfishly worthwhile.
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Heh fundamental theorem of free agency
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This explains why getting fired or laid off rarely leads to flourishing free agency even when it leads to long-term or permanent unemployment. You need to consciously let go the coping mechanism and adopt wonder.
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People who are forced in to free agency rather than leaving it voluntarily in fact may romanticize the career success cult even more and get more strongly attached to it
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To add a bit of nuance, wonder is the ingredient that turns trial and error into potential serendipity. You kinda surrender to currents of “unreasonably lucky”
People who are still attached to success cult are too bureaucratic-scientific about it. Trying to six-sigma a niche.
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Ok, finished. Kinda did a speedrun of the second half, which is a bit of a smorgasbord of ideas drawn from various places/people (including a couple of cameos by me) with the context of the Life of Paul as the unifying thread.
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If you’re like me, it will be a hit-or-miss stream of stuff, but with enough of a yield rate of interesting points to get through. It’s almost like a sampler pack of zeitgeist ideas, with a slight bias towards the woo end of the spectrum, without much editorializing.
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Interesting thing for me is that being both older than Paul, and with more time logged on what he calls the pathless path, there was still plenty of provocation for me, as well as reminders of stuff I should stay more conscious of.
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Also some sharp differences from being a different person. I kinda dislike about a third of the writers/books he cites (Seth Godin being the big one) that I am familiar with, indifferent to another third, and actually like a third. I suspect I’m just much less liberal in inputs.
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Overall this book should probably be in graduation care packages or something. The first half is especially valuable, including to those who’ve gotten out of the cult but don’t appreciate what they’ve pulled off. Everybody who grows old and logs the miles. Few reflect cogently.
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The second half is probably more useful to younger people who are still evaluating and selecting their influences. Paul serves as a an honest broker presenting selected wares from the idea marketplace circa 2022. Older people have likely already chosen.
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