What is the Pathless Path about?

The Pathless Path offers an alternative to the default career path many of us walk on. Most commonly, this looks like picking an industry then climbing that ladder full-time, until retirement.

Although this works for some, I would argue that for most this doesn’t bring the fullest level of satisfaction we desire from our lives. Criticisms are:

Predictability to the point of dullness
Atrophy in our cognitive functions outside of our job specifics
Feeling like life is on a train track

Why would we work a job we don’t like? For one:

There is a societal narrative that tells us this is what is expected of us
Even worse, many of us ultimately resist the responsibility which freedom from this tunnel would grant
Worse than worse; we don’t believe that we deserve to have the life which we dream of

Paul Millerd very successfully explores, explains and describes what a life outside the train tracks can be like. I highly recommend this book for anyone feeling stuck with the daily grind. Below are my favourite questions it raised. Reading this article will give you a good overview if the book will gel with you.

Globally, Only 26% of Us Work Full-Time

Go to school, become an employee. This is where me and all my childhood friends went. I have very few examples of life that doesn’t look like 9-to-6, Mon-Fri. Coincidently, do you remember when it was 9-to-5? I DO!

But statistically, this is actually what the minority is doing. I find this shocking. Here I am finding it hard to imagine a life where I am not trading the majority of my day to earn money, on repeat for most of the week – and it turns out that’s the minority!?

Having a job is great. We become independent. We start understanding how we can provide value in the world. We meet new people and learn new things. We are challenged and grow. But where having a job isn’t cool, is when we’re not exposed to the different ways of working. And because we learn at an early age that we must fit our lives around this “box” we never begin to imagine or explore a life unlike it.

Why I Didn’t Like Working Full-time

Here is an excerpt from my diary become I left my full-time job in IT:

I don't feel good about life. It’s supposed to be different and fun. I don't do anything different or fun.

Within the Pathless Path you will find a plethora of quotes from seekers. Howard Gray mentions how when life stops moving, it solidifies and that’s bad. He thinks it best when life is formless and evolving.

Millerd writes “When everyone you know builds their lives around a steady paycheck, it is easy to lose track of what we give up for that paycheck, and forget that for most of history this was not a normal state of affairs.”

It turns out that employment on the scale we see today wasn’t a thing until after World War II. It was likely spurred by a generation whom were scarred by war and wanted comfort and certainty. This was criticised by their elders, who until then, had never seen such mass conformity and predictability.

What Expression do You Wear on Your Commute?

Millerd noted on his morning commute in NYC “Each day I searched for signs of life. I would force a smile and look around to see if anyone noticed. No one ever did. So I gave up and adopted the neutral uninterested smirk that everyone seems to understand was the proper way to be.” That is exactly what my commutes looked like! A train full of gloom, no one happy to be there or excited for where they are going. I felt like I had to blend in with the crowd and also adopted this soulless façade.

A Joseph Campbell reference in the book asks that instead of focusing on voting for the right people in power, we need to make the world come alive, and the only way to do that, is to become alive ourselves.

Money is certainly important but even more interesting is the question: what brings you alive? Indeed, the goal should be to feel alive, rather than to be financially rich.

What About Money?

Do you measure your self-worth in how much you earn? Paul quotes a story where an attorney called Kenneth Feinberg set the salaries of executives following the 2008 financial crisis. His task was to explain to the executives who made $5 million last year that in the upcoming year, they would only make $1 million. Despite being in a position to understand, most were furiously outraged. Feinberg realised he hadn’t lowered their salaries – he had dealt a deathblow to these exec’s because they viewed their compensation, as the sole barometer of their self-worth.

How would you feel if you find out that a friend of yours is getting paid double to do the same job you are? I would be outraged too, if that happened to me. Making the big bucks is great, but you can taste how rotten the idea of judging our worth as people, to be tied to how much we earn. The alternative however, is unclear, unstandardised, but critical in exploring.

More money cannot cure you from being afraid that money will run out. It dawned upon me one day when hearing comedian Russell Brand off-handedly share some money concerns he had. I realised if someone as well off as him still worries about money, then it isn’t a fear you overcome by having more of it.

Millerd recommends instead of focusing on making those worries disappear, for us to develop the capacity to live with those fears in a harmonious way. The solution is to do the inner work and re-write the trauma you learned from your parents and society such as:

“There is not enough money”
“It is hard to earn”
“You should save in case it runs out”

I imagine that is why billionaires haven’t fixed the world yet. They too, need to embark upon the inner work required in order to be comfortable with that fear.

Coping Strategies

I noticed a culture in England that might be called “living for the weekend.” It is one were you bash away at a job you dislike for 70% of the week, so you can go nuts for the other 30%. You try to disguise your discomfort by getting wildly intoxicated. Perhaps this helps catching up on having some control as to what you do with your time, even if it’s self-destructive. Others go on holidays, or stay so busy, that they have no time to be aware of the unsatisfaction.

Thomas J. Bevan calls this a misery tax. A significant portion of your income is spent on things just to keep you going back to the office. The way I’ve justified this to myself looks like:

“Hey I’ve worked hard, I deserve to go to X, buy Y, have Z.”

This is a slippery slope however, as you might find that your misery tax becomes the reason you end up working so much, in the first place.

Is change so scary? Perhaps so. It would mean accepting that you can have more, than you currently have. To admit that you’ve been selling yourself short, for all these years.

Uncertainty

Millerd compares ambition vs aspiration. An ambition is where we already know what we value. An aspiration is intrinsically more uncertain because it’s focus, is on discovering what values we will adopt along the way. Therefore, it’s perfectly normal to feel uncertainty towards developing a new relationship with work.

The uncertainty is desired even, because we are learning to see the world in a new way. You could even say the more uncertain you feel – the more you are growing. You are giving yourself new and exciting challenges which you haven’t dealt with before. The fear comes from thinking you could fail. Do you remember that same fear from your first day at work? Look at how far you’ve come now. We must believe and develop faith in our ability to overcome new challenges. The world is counting on us.

Where are You Heading?

Millerd writes that retirement was introduced in the late 1800s to provide support for the small number of people who lived past the age of 70. Let me know in the comments what your next goal regarding work is. If your waiting for retirement - are you basing your life plan on an idea that is from the 1800s? Our computers don’t even have CD players anymore.

We make a grave mistake by thinking that once we retire, that is when life will start. Momentum. Everything we do, carries with it certain momentum. Here are some examples:

Pushing really hard at work / being bored and waiting for the day to end
The way we treat others / the way we let others treat us
The way we take up responsibility / the way we blame others

If we’ve been working in a certain way for 40 years, it will take another 40 years to slow down and change that momentum. By the time we reach retirement, it is certain we will have changed, and therefore certain we will no longer want to do, the things which we are currently planning to do in retirement.

Millerd writes “On my previous path, I was more than on my way to a magical retirement number but was also making great progress in undermining the spontaneity, creativity and energy that would enable me to enjoy life once I got there.”

Isn’t it better, instead of waiting for retirement, to experiment and live the life you want live, now? So that once you do retire, you can keep living/doing/making whatever is important to you. The world’s longest living people have some kind of part-time work in retirement to keep them active and thinking. The brain and body are muscle-like. You will have to keep using them or you will lose them.

A poster I put in front of the bathroom door of my parent’s house.

What Could I Do Next?

Something Millerd recommends is to create a list of your values and have that list pop up on your calendar every morning as you wake up. Some examples might be:

Health
Relationships
Fun
Creativity
Career
Adventure

Please also share your list with me in the comments!

The Pathless Path isn’t telling you what to do, only you can best decide that. But for those of us feeling like there should be more to life than the 9-to-6, it offers an essential starting point. It is not only a book. It's an encyclopedia of people who have posed the same question in more than the last 100 years. Not only will you read a incredibly well-researched and insightful opinion of someone who lives what he preaches, you'll be introduced to more then enough thinkers, writers and poets who will inspire you to keep going. You are not alone, your questions are part of a bigger movement.

Only through action, will we learn, and only through learning will we discover what we want.

Thanks to my dear friend Petar for sharing this book with me.

Is Work the Most Important Thing we do with our Lives?