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Quit Your Passion and Take a Boring Job

April 20, 2012 /

So many of these blogs seem to be written by people who work in their pajamas or by people with no opportunity cost to blog (they’re either financially independent already or stay-at-home parents). These are both great things, but I don’t hear much from a Joe Sixpack schlub with a 9-to-5 like me. Instead, there’s a lot of Tim Ferris-type noise about how us poor saps who go out and punch a clock are the suckers. […]

I realized that the job I loved so much was actually destroying me. I was living an emotional roller-coaster ride every day. The stress was incredible because of the constant mood whiplash. Most importantly, I realized I had become entirely cynical of the whole public school enterprise. That’s when I knew that I had to get out. […]

It took some painful life lessons and some hard financial times to learn that doing what you love is, in fact, absolutely not the paradigm we need to follow as individuals or a society. Instead, get out there and grab what affords you the most opportunities to be the best overall person you can be.

Get Rich Slowly: Reader Story: I Quit My Passion and Took a Boring Job

See also:

Is Getting Paid to Do What You Love All It’s Cracked Up to Be?

Towards a Socially Conscientiousness Lifestyle Design Movement

Beyond Growth’s Eric Schiller to Present on Digital Hipsterism at EsoZone Portland 2011

October 27, 2011 /

Eric Schiller

Beyond Growth co-founder Eric Schiller will give a presentation titled “Digital Hipsterism: Anti-intellectual Movements in Social Media” at EsoZone Portland 2011 on November 18. Here’s Eric’s description of the talk:

In this talk I will explore how social media technology has facilitated the creation of loose ‘internet cults’, and how they are used to influence their followers. I will analyze elements of the lifestyle design movement, Hacker News, and Reddit to further the thesis that social media portrays itself as a transparent means of communication yet in reality is anything but. Using the notion of ‘Digital Hipsterism’ to unmask the authoritarian and anti-intellectual core of these movements, I will demonstrate how depth of research and well reasoned arguments are not valued, but merely the appearance of depth is regarded as the ideal truth.

Eric is a part-time social critic and philosopher. When not writing snarky essays, he works as a freelance web designer and developer in Seattle.

Eric’s essay on digital hipsterism can be found here. You can read the Technoccult interview with Eric and his collaborator Duff McDuffee here.

17 Steps to Instant Success as a Lifestyle Designer

October 12, 2010 /

Colin Wright

1. Get a poofy haircut that only a rockstar could pull off.
2. Get rid of every thing you own, and make up for it by purchasing as much boutique yuppy clothing, shoes, and apparel that you can fit in a large backpack.
3. Use the backpack full of clothes and move to a foreign country with great beaches where you can feel wealthy by being around desperately poor people.
4. Talk about how many desperately poor people are around and how you wish you could help them.5. Take advantage of desperately poor people by leveraging your powerful American money against the pitiful local currency.
5. Take advantage of desperately poor people by leveraging your powerful American money against the pitiful local currency.

Read the rest: Beyond Growth: 17 Steps to Instant Success as a Lifestyle Designer

See also:

Lifestyle Design Sucks

My interview with Duff McDuffee and Eric Schiller of Beyond Growth

Towards a Socially Conscientiousness Lifestyle Design Movement

May 20, 2010 /

Lifestyle Design

I’ve got a guest post up at Beyond Growth:

In his “The Lifestyle Design (un)Manifesto” Eric calls for the transformation of lifestyle design “into a collective of people who can influence the greater culture for a sustainable future.” Can lifestyle design be reformed into something more socially valuable? Put to work on the right problems, perhaps it can. But there are a few questions that we have to ask first.

Are the people behind the “lifestyle design movement” – that is to say, the people who are actually profiting from it – serious about solving real-world social, environmental, and economic problems? If all they’re interested in is cash and kicks, then there’s probably no point to this discussion. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, because I think there are at least a few among them who are earnest.

Beyond Growth: Towards a Socially Conscientiousness Lifestyle Design Movement

See also: My interview with Beyond Growth editors Duff McDuffee and Eric Schiller

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