Rohan Bansal

on the atlas — 2

• Quit Your Job18 savers
• Chesa Boudin Recall: How San Francisco Became a Failed City - The Atlantic3 savers

highlights — 15

• After all, it wasn’t the farmers themselves who continued to define history, but the wilder chariot-men who ruled over them and lived lives of leisure and empire.

  Quit Your Job

• So take the leap, and have faith that God’s trust fund will come through with what you need. You already have the “fuck you” money and the privilege to build a better future. You just need to overcome your fears and turn to the great tasks that might inspire you if you started acting on that privilege.

  Quit Your Job

• Ironically, it is these focused strategic empires that display the best financial performance.

  Quit Your Job

• Of course, you will also realize, in an unfortunate majority of cases, that the job simply isn’t that important. You are, in fact, just doing someone else’s will in exchange for money. It is not worth your life. Then you will quit to strike out on your own.

  Quit Your Job

• You can do this before you quit your job. Transform your perspective thus: rather than seeing the job as carrying out someone else’s will in exchange for money, see it as itself your sacred cosmic duty.

  Quit Your Job

• A key difference between the job life and the empire life, besides having a literal wage job or serving your money as if it were your boss, is in whether you take full responsibility for the question of ends. Are you plugged into someone else’s assumptions about value, and deferring to the existing structure, or are you maintaining and defining your own understanding of what must be done that other people can plug into?

  Quit Your Job

• Ruin is largely an illusion in the modern world anyway. If you lose everything you own, you generally still have your network and skills. Even a nominally risk-loving financial utility function is overly conservative in practice because it’s hard to lose these intangible assets.

  Quit Your Job

• To make such bets you must be indifferent at some level to whether you end up a king or a monk, or even dead. The indeterminate hedge-trader with his logarithmic utility function assigns infinite negative utility to ruin. The man of action serenely regards ruin as the most likely possible outcome, mitigates it where he can, and leaps anyway.

  Quit Your Job

• Spending the money on private jets, mansions, and fancy meals is hardly much better without some driving higher purpose to give them meaning. What good does that do for society, or even for you? What grand future are you building thereby? Or is it just someone else’s desire you picked up by mimesis from Instagram? Keeping up with the Joneses, chasing the validating promotion, and slaving away at a job for material trinkets that ultimately mean nothing are not vices limited to the middle class. Or really, they are limited to the middle class, but the middle class includes most of our supposed r…

  Quit Your Job

• It is generally unfair and wasteful for this to be anything but voluntarily self-funded, though some well-designed research institutions can effectively simulate productive leisure and accelerate the exploration process.

  Quit Your Job

• This is part of why we need an active leisure class in society.

  Quit Your Job

• The world is full of ideas and opportunities to explore, but it takes time outside of structure to even adjust your eyes to the landscape of possibility.

  Quit Your Job

• This is actually a consequence of a fairly general theorem about how to find treasure in complex search spaces: 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.

  Quit Your Job

• The reason any of this is worth sharing is because it’s my example of what you might call “active unemployment,” or if you prefer the traditional term, “leisure.” The Romans called it “otium.”

  Quit Your Job

• I debated with my collaborators over the next year or so. Is this what we really wanted to do with our lives? Or should we get safer hobbies like drunken rock climbing? If we were in, we should be in with our whole lives and deaths, and with all our resources, because this stuff can’t be pursued by anything less than the whole person. We were in. We moved from around the world to the center of the universe in California. Once there, we got jobs where we could pursue our project full time.

  Quit Your Job