Quit Your Job - Wolf Tivy

By Wolf Tivy, in Palladium Magazine https://palladiummag.com/2022/01/06/quit-your-job/

Summary

• 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.
  • “Working even a good job cramps your sense of possibility”; i.e. you can’t effectively chase interesting novelty in a job. You need unstructured, undirected time.
  • In fact, society depends on some people living this way—that’s where many important ideas come from.
• The point of quitting isn’t to wallow in carefree hedonism: it’s to discover and honor your sense of purpose, to take your own ideas seriously along no one’s axis of value but your own.
  • It’s possible to do this in the context of a job by reimagining the work as “your sacred cosmic duty”. Of course this is only possible when the job actually is important.
• Many people frame quitting in terms of working a job for oneself—something well-specified like “I’m going full-time on my coaching side-gig”. That might be more fun, but this isn’t “quitting your job” in the full sense advocated here. The aim is wide-open spaces, freedom from obligation and “should”, cultivation of impulses.
  • Once you quit, you’ll feel pressure (from yourself and others) to “start something”, to “become successful”, but these impulses will tend to lead you astray because you haven’t yet had a chance to cultivate your own sense of value. They’re about others’ ideas of purpose. You have to engage in “hard leisure”—playfully chasing your curiosity without trying to “succeed” along others’ axes—to cultivate your own.
  • (Echoes of Process over product)
• People imagine that quitting your job is a privilege for the ultra-wealthy, but many more could manage it than most imagine.
  • One reason people don’t quit is that they (correctly!) don’t yet have faith in their ideas. Those impulses weren’t able to grow in a job-laden life. You have to give them a chance to emerge: “you get good ideas from {years of hard leisure}.”
  • You won’t be able to see the path to sustainability, but if you’re doing something beautiful, forces will emerge to support you.
  • And even if they don’t, your life will become much more interesting.
• “Leisure” doesn’t necessarily mean ease. Once you find an opportunity worth chasing, you’ll need to pursue it with struggle and intensity.

Q. If you have the means to quit your job, in what sense is it your social responsibility to do so?
A. Progress depends on insights derived from the pursuit of interesting novelty; working a job constrains that pursuit.

Excerpts

The best search strategies for complex problems like life generally don’t seek out particular homogeneous objectives, but interesting novelty. The search space is too complicated and unknown for linear objective-chasing to work. … 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. … To get the biggest and most interesting payoffs, you have to start by chasing merely interesting novelty in an open-ended way.

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.

Besides reaching its proper form in the leap of faith, life reaches its highest development in the bold struggling attempt. You will find it beyond the comfort of tracked existence and in the curiosities and inspirations one finds in the wilderness.

So quit your job and become the wild and ambitious elites you wish to see in the world. Live by instinct in the untracked frontier, shoot your shot, and live or die by your intuitive visions of what must be done. You can carry out your cosmic duty and win glory only in the bold attempt.

Twitter thread

When people ask where I work, I sometimes describe myself as “feral”. It’s a joke… but also a serious aspiration. Good things happen when I try as hard as I can to chase my sense of excitement, ignoring impulses to produce legible outcomes. This essay really captures the aim: https://palladiummag.com/2022/01/06/quit-your-job/

The 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This line of reasoning nicely echoes @ufotransluscence’s “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. https://autotranslucence.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/becoming-a-magician/

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.

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. https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/1486870216260808707

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.”

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.