This is the second part of my AMA series. In the first one I answered questions about money.
Graavy asks: Do you miss anything from your past life as an on-grid worker/consumer?
I don’t miss anything about being a consumer. I used to get off on buying nice beer or getting nice airbnb’s, but now I’m just kind of embarrassed about how I felt about it. Advertising tries to convince us that being able to afford nice stuff makes us special and powerful and it just doesn’t. Another middle class white dude gets a job good enough to buy All the Craft Beer: nobody cares.
What I miss about my career was the period in 2009-2016 when I was working with a group of smart, diverse, purpose-driven people on interesting projects with the goal of decarbonizing the built environment. That was cool. I miss that comradery and the sense I had of being a valuable part of that team. The large scale engineering design work was interesting as well.
Graavy: How do you let go of the ego satisfaction of a white collar career, as well as the dark lust for money and status?
I need to break this down.
How do you let go of the ego satisfaction of a white collar career?
The thing about ego satisfaction is that it is not durable. You just get hits of it, but the ego is ever striving so it’s not like I’d arrived at a state of ego contentment due to my white collar career.
To a certain extent I’ve just replaced the ego satisfaction of a white collar career with the ego satisfaction of being a postconsumer solarpunk polymath, which in my book is way cooler.
It also helps that during my career I had doubts about how satisfied I ought to be that I was able to play by other people’s rules. I suspected I was just a cog in a system I didn’t understand very well, that I was being a bit of a sucker. There was a voice in the back of my head saying you knowing you’re just following someone else’s script, right?
So it wasn’t that difficult to give up attachment to being a player in someone else’s game. The wonderful thing about being autonomous is that you stand or fall on your own rules, your own script. There’s durable satisfaction to be had in forging your own path, even if no one else recognizes it.
Something to watch out for when transitioning away from a conventional lifestyle is is whether or not you're focused on freedom-from vs. freedom-to motivation. Both are fine, but watch out for an unbalance. It's common for people to lack freedom-to, because they're drowning in a system they dislike and all they can think about is Getting Out.
But there is a whole deep and rich world beyond the conventional, off-the-shelf proscribed lifestyles! The easiest way to let go of aspects of your previous life is to be so fully engaged with your new rich abundant dynamic etc post-conventional life that you rarely even think about your old life. It's hard to see how this will feel when you're on the other side, though.
How do you let go of the dark lust for money?
By avoiding cultural programming that the pursuit of money is the best thing ever.
By consuming the wisdom of the sages, pretty much all of whom have said some variation of “the pursuit of wealth for it’s own sake is a sucker’s game.”
By observing my own experience. I went from spending $70k/yr on whatever early-30’s something dude’s spend money on (beer, bikes, burgers…) to spending $7-10k/yr, and my life is better now. That doesn’t mean that spending very little causes a Good Life, obviously, just that spending a lot is a requirement for living a Good Life. So I now have data from my own personal experience that money isn’t worth lusting after.
How do you let go of the dark lust for status?
I think status gets a bad rap. Hear me out here.
Humans are social critters. We’re designed to want to be well esteemed by others. It’s how our cultures have always worked.
Status goes toxic when we aren’t intentional or cognizant of who we’re trying to be high-status to. Being globally interconnected makes it easy for status games to get far out of hand as well.
The trick, I think, isn’t to eschew status altogether, to pretend that we don’t want to be well regarded by others. It’s to be choosy about who we want to be well regarded by, and what we want to be well regarded for.
I used to want people to think that I had an insane work ethic. Guess what? I was a workaholic, and the only people who thought that was cool were other workaholics. I had to do some inner work to to disrupt that pattern.
There is a specific list of people, and a demographic, that I want to be well regarded by. And I think that’s okay. These are the people who share my values. In a sense, my status amongst these people is a test for me on how I’m doing with respect to my own values. It can be hard to find people who share your values, so you have to be prepared to go it alone if necessary, but once you do find them, status is a useful dynamic of human culture.
In General
In all of this I think it’s important to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. A lot of people knee-jerk react against things like productive endeavor, hard work, and being useful, just because these things are associated with capitalism, and I don’t go in for that. Like, let’s keep a little nuance, here.
I’m not anti-work. I’m anti-playing someone else’s game and not knowing it, I’m anti-spending most of your best years trudging through a routine just because that’s what everyone else does, and I’m anti-victim mentality.
I am pro-personal autonomy, pro-figuring yourself and what you want to do in the world out, and I’m pro-large numbers of people chasing their stoke and bringing their gifts to the world, whatever that looks like.