The Escape of Wolf Tivy

People miss that escaping this meaningless servitude to our own capital was Thoreau’s main point in Walden. You don’t actually need the money; in reality, the money needs you to give it a worthy purpose, but everyone gets this backward.

You’ve all got to check this out. It’s a classic escape story, well articulated, along with the philosophy (of one man) behind it. Thanks to friend Marcus for sending it our way.

There’s some God stuff in it, but you can read this as Nature if God’s not your jam. It veers into the “libertarian tech bro” perspective too (I think the guy knows Grimes) but I promise there’s some widsom in here and that the story is good.

EDIT: Since posting this earlier today, reader emeritus Radhika found that the magazine founded by Wolf after his escape is financed by Peter Thiel. Gross! Thiel is a billionaire venture capitalist and an exacerbator of many of the world’s problems, not least via the very existence of Facebook. Friend Tom’s classic essay, With Friends Like These, tells you most of what you need to know about him. I won’t take this post down or discourage you from reading Wolf’s essay but please go into it knowing what world you’re on the edge of when doing so.

We’re talking about one Wolf Tivy here. He quit his job with with clear and quite modest goals:

I quit my engineering job in 2014. I was good at it and it was good to me, but it wasn’t the future. I was still working out my plans, so I hit the gym, pursued the most interesting and important ideas I could find, and started looking for a wife.

Quitting your job to find meaning is already unorthodox, an act of good faith and personal strength. But once he’d taken the leap something really interesting happened:

When I wasn’t lifting and courting, I was building a network of intellectuals interested in problems of governance from beyond the established liberal democratic paradigm. I didn’t know why it was interesting. In fact, I thought it was a vice. “This is bad for your career,” said the little wage-slave voice in my head, “you should be focusing on more lucrative projects.”

The little voice was wrong. It was through those intellectual networks that I got my next job and built the social capital which allows me and my friends the freedom to pursue the important problems we have been tasked with.

He set up a magazine, which looks succesful. Isn’t this an example of what I always say will happen? Give up the prescribed life of drudgery, live a little, and the ideas will start to come. Not just £hey that would be cool” ideas but also how it would function, how it would reach people, a sense of the staying power that would be necessary to run with it.

Almost exactly four years after I quit my last real job, we launched Palladium Magazine as the discourse center and beacon by which we would develop our intellectual project and attract more talented collaborators.

“Beacon” has long been one of my key words. I finally talked about it in The Good Life for Wage Slaves. Intead of looking for “a gap in the market” like a dreary businessman or forcing a product nobody needs onto an unsuspecting public like capitalism (or marketing?) wants, create “beacons” that broadcast a signal on a particular frequency to attract the people you want to talk to and the people you want to know. Even if that frequency is strange and niche, it’s big world and you’ll find your people. Or rather, they’ll find you.

A lot of what Tivy writes here is centred around the luxury of free time or, as he points out, what the Romans called ottium.

There are investments you can’t make from a structured, nine-to-five, narrowly teleological environment. You have to let your life go fallow sometimes, like a crop rotation giving the land time to bring forth new fertility. […] 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. You are cramped by your job, unable to make the class of investments that is necessary for a life beyond the existing tracks.

Once again, this is classic Escapological wisdsom. Take a break, let the mind wonder, figure things out. Work out what you want, how you want to spend your hours, what your priorities are, what would be good for your community and for the world.

It’s hard to think about things like that when you’re stuck behind a computer screen in someone else’s office or digging holes in the street for a gas company. You need time. You need to be able to watch the clouds form into animal shapes in the sky and then fall apart again. You need to dream.

I won’t quote any more because I’d be running the risk of copy-pasting the whole essay wholesale, which would be pointless. Give it a read.