If your job is fine, just keep doing it for now. If it is a dumpster fire, leave it. In either case, consider a sabbatical or DIY sabbatical to increase the speed of your crowbar phase.
If you job is anywhere between meh and great, just keep doing it for now. If you can just cruise along at your job while you crowbar the rest of your life, that’s the best strategy.
If you job super sucks, or you don’t have an income and you’re broke, then that is an emergency and should be a top priority.
If your job is just kind of lame because you have to show up on time and you have a boss who tells you what to do sometimes and you don’t super love that, that’s not actually a problem. That’s just what a job is. Getting free of the need to show up to a regular boring stressful potentially bullshit etc job is part of the long game we’re playing, and is not an emergency. So just keep on with your job situation for now if it’s only just a bit lame. Improving this dimension of your life is the subject for a future volume.
What I mean by ‘if your job sucks’ is: is it super toxic? are you self medicating because of how awful it is? Is your supervisor or colleagues or customers doing real emotional, psychological, or physiological damage to you? Are you burnt out, depressed, a shallow whimpering husk of your former or potential self? This is an emergency, and I do not recommend trying to crowbar the rest of your life while showing up to a toxic dumpster fire of an employment situation.
I don’t have advice about how to do that beyond obvious platitudes. I know that “just quit and find a less terrible job” is easier said than done. This manual isn’t about how to fix this problem, because I couldn’t possibly do it justice. The move here is to find help that does do this problem justice. (If you go to the ERE forums and start a journal, you will receive a lot of advice from a wide diversity of intelligent, out-of-the-box thinkers from all over the world.)
If you can find the energy required to radically reduce your expenses, then you’ll need the shitty job less, and maybe buy yourself time to quit and find a less shitty job. But that can be a catch-22, I know, if the job is sucking you dry of the internal resources you need to crowbar your life.
One possible strategy here is to save up a few months living expenses and either negotiate a sabbatical or execute a “DIY sabbatical”, which is where you quit your job and then either rehire at the same place or just get a different job when you run out of money. During the sabbatical you crowbar your cost of living way down. When you go back to work, you have a much clearer idea of what you actually need from employment and you’ll be on better negotiating terms.
Another circumstance you might be in is that, if you’re being honest with yourself, you are just kind of cruising along at a mediocre position with mediocre pay because you’ve been kind of lazy and avoidant about seeking a better position. If you can put in a little bit of effort and get a raise or a better position or take some training to get on a better track, just do it.
Again, this is not to shame people who are in a genuinely terrible situation or dealing with legitimate internal or external barriers to advancement (neurodivergence and prejudice being the top two examples that come to mind). The long game solution I’m suggesting here when it comes to internal or external barriers is to crowbar your cost of living way down (this volume), develop broad stoke-directed skills that build resilience and usefulness (the next volume), and tie everything in your life together with systems thinking (the third volume), which will result in living life on your own terms, terms that play to your unique strengths and desires and doesn’t require the permission or accommodation of an insane and dysfunctional world system.
A Note on Antiwork
One piece of advice I’ll give to anyone, regardless of how much their job sucks, is to ditch the #antiwork attitude that the billionaire capitalists are exploiting us and make it structurally impossible for anyone to have a good life. I don’t care if it’s true or not. The antiwork attitude is toxic. It’s internalized victimhood. It’s a rationalization for helplessness. It’s giving up your own agency without a fight.
Look, yes, the system is designed to make it impossible to win. But it’s designed to make it impossible to win at the game the system convinces us is the only game worth playing, which, surprise surprise, is rigged. That game is also lame, so you shouldn’t want to win it anyway! That game requires hordes of the world’s best and brightest humans to engage in relentless propaganda to convince you that the game is worth playing, and to convince you that all the other possible games are either evil, stupid, or a figment of your imagination. If a game requires that much effort to convince people to play it, that alone should be sufficient reason to do anything else.
Your choices are to
- try to win the rigged game, and lose, because it’s rigged and you weren’t born into the Winner class.
- give up trying to win and complain about how the game is rigged, and lose, because even if it weren’t rigged, you weren’t even trying to win anymore because you’ve accepted your fate as a member of the loser class.
- play a different game, and have a chance of winning.
Spending any of your cognitive bandwidth on antiwork memology is a) a waste of time and b) actively harmful because it encourages you to believe that agency is a waste of time. Agency is NOT a waste of time, not if you engage it in service of your own life rather than the shadow world of the game the billionaire capitalists want you to play.
Anyway, if you stick with the path of post-consumerism, then you won’t need a bs job for much longer, because either you’ll be financially independent or you’ll figure out some activities to be engaged in that you really enjoy that also happen to bring in some money. But for right now, I don’t recommend trying to get overly clever with your job situation. You want to be focused on reducing your expenses and clearing out the junk in your life, not trying to YOLO some half baked scheme.
For most stably employed people, the best move for the early crowbar phase is simply to keep on keeping on at work while you radically change the infrastructure of your non-work life and set yourself up for future success on your own terms. We’ll discuss what to do about employment in much greater depth in the following volumes.
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