Tyler J. Disney

Patterns · November 8, 2026

Decouple Income from Dream Chasing

Action

Earn the money you need to live via work that is efficient and not against your values, but don’t insist that what you do to earn money is also in perfect alignment with your ideals or ‘life’s work’ or purpose. Earn your money in one mode, and chase your dreams in a separate mode.

Discussion

The holy grail of mainstream lifestyle design is to be employed doing work that is Meaningful to you – to get paid to do what you Love and think is Important.

If you can get paid to chase your dreams, stop reading this and just do that.

If you are not currently getting paid to chase your dreams, consider this:

The idea that it’s very important to get paid to chase our dreams assumes that we have to spend the majority of our lives earning money just to live or have a baseline nice life. So if you aren’t chasing your dreams at work, that means you’re spending the majority of your life not chasing your dreams. Which is terrible.

However, if you arrange your life such that you don’t need to spend the majority of it earning money (via having a very low cost of living), then you have more of your life energy to devote to chasing your dreams.

You can work seasonally, or part time, or in a focused 5-7 year push, and then spend the rest of your life chasing your dreams.

Elizabeth Gilbert writes about this from the angle of the creative in her book Big Magic. She writes that it is very stressful to put the pressure of paying the bills on our dreams. Does the world owe us a living wage to chase our dreams? That would be nice, but it seems not to be the world we live in. Gilbert thinks that instead of asking our dreams to support us, we should promise to support our dreams.

If our dreams one day begin to generate income, wonderful.

If they don’t, that also is fine. We never expected them to. That was never the reason we were pursuing them in the first place.

It’s also worth questioning what difficult decisions you will have to make about your dreams and purpose if you demand remuneration from them. Rent is due in a week and things are tight, do you take a shortcut with your work in order to make the deadline? Or do you honor the integrity of your dream and tell the client you need more time to do it right? Dreams pressed into labor have a tendency to become something other than what we dreamed.

Another reason we assume that the only way to chase our dreams is to get paid to do it is that we have internalized the idea that only remunerable activity is of value. If you can’t get paid for it, that is a signal that the thing ought not be done. Our society won’t state this explicitly, but this assumption is baked into our thinking. Work that is not paid is not valued.

This pattern is an invitation to pursue your dreams no matter what the world values. This pattern invites you to remove one possible failure mode, the failure mode of “no one will pay for this”, because you don’t need the world to pay you to chase your dreams. You can just chase your dreams.

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