Bootstrapping Independence

As humans, we have two kinds of currency to spend at our leisure. The first is given to us at birth, a sum stored in a bank vault with a number on it, but we are never told what the total is. This is called Time. The second we start at zero, but can measure very precisely, and we call Money.

As we grow, we are at first able to spend time on whatever we choose, until slowly the freedom leaches away in society, school, and social obligation. At some point we realize that we have a lot of time, but aren’t very satisfied with the state of having lots of time and nothing to spend it on (or maybe we are, but authority figures tell us we shouldn’t be, and we listen), so we trade away time for money. This is the beginning of the end.

The interesting thing about money is: once you have some, you forget how to live with less. Somehow, over time, additional income begins to feel a lot like the lower income, and nothing has changed. This is why people making $20,000/year struggling to make ends meet can be in the same situation as people making $250,000/year struggling to make ends meet.

How could they possibly end up in the same place?

The answer is not hard for us to comprehend, but it is a simple truth many people don’t ever realize – that the entire modern system is setup such that you will be entangled to the proper degree. Every dollar you earn is another way to become entangled. It doesn’t have to be that way, but that is how most people end up.

Entanglement starts with a need, or a desire. Often, these are valid things that every human desires: love, freedom, security. Fundamental human desires are simple traps to entanglement. If we follow one of the most basic human needs, the need for water, it is easy to see how society has manufactured various levels of entanglement.

I need to drink about 8 glasses of water per day. My only real requirement is that it is fresh and disease free – that meets my needs as a human, so I drink from the tap. My wife’s friend read a book about how tap water contains cancer causing things like fluoride and copper, so she bought a filter for $20 and replaces it every month. Now, when she comes to our house, if I offer her tap water she asks for filtered water, so of course I also need to have a filter for her, of equal quality (or else I’d be cheap?). Thus I, also, pay my dues to the water filter companies. I drink tap water, but I am entangled to filtered water because of social graces, though the entanglement is weak since I have no problem stopping (it is stronger for my wife’s friend, who believes tap water causes cancer. I guess it might, I honestly don’t know).

Another friend of ours decided that filtered water was not quite good enough, so looked around for the proper water to drink and found Evian. He decided that this would be the only water he would drink, and began holding days worth of drinking water at his house, in the form of Evian bottles which he brings everywhere. He probably consumes $20 per day of water now.

To feed habits like this, we must pay one of our two currencies, Time or Money. We could spend time if we wanted to – collecting rain, digging a well – but almost no one does that anymore (why not?) Or we could spend money in various amounts (“market segmentation”) through tap water or bottled or whatever. How has a simple and easily satisfied need, which could be satisfied for free (and was for thousands of years) turned into a $20 a day habit?

Societal Entanglement has brought us to the point where every minute must either be increasing entanglement through desire fulfillment, paid entertainment, or working to pay off our manufactured addiction to it. In the end, eventually, it leaves us only with The Mundane Existence.

Gulliver from Gullivers Travels

I often feel like a slave in the modern world. A machine repeatedly doing slightly different tasks. When visualizing how life makes me feel, I often visualize a large number of soft velvet ties pulling me down with increasing pressure. Each thread is so soft it can barely be discerned, and alone could be removed with little effort. But over many years the number of small threads has built up to be an almost unbreakable series of tangled rope holding me firmly down.

I am, thankfully, not the only one who feels this way, and some people have been able to articulate it better than I. See on elevating humanity and are most americans debt slaves. The term slavery appears repeatedly, and it approximates how I feel, but isn’t quite the right word for it. To find a better way to describe myself, I tested the idea of modern slavery by contrasting traditional slavery and modern ideas of corporate slavery:

I also considered the idea of debt-slavery, which I also think falls a bit short. Although a person can rent themselves for a number of hours (at a given rate of dollars per hour) to make up for a debt, I don’t see it as the default paradigm in the modern world. Instead, I see the rise of salaried company-persons and independent contractors. Both are expected to complete a body of work by a given deadline rather than a rate of work at $x/hour independent of work produced.

With that in mind, I considered how the current system differs from economies of work in the past, such as slavery economies or serfdom economies, with the more modern industrial and information economies.

Some traits of modern work-life:

• Work is governed by government laws, social norms, and company policy
• Work performed is determined externally by the organization (rather than internally by the worker)
• Time is generally used as the primary measurement of value. Payment is given in return for hours or weeks of labor performed.
• As a general rule, finding a method of completing work in half the time results in double work being assigned, not in half as much work for the same reward.
• Time for non-work is strictly allocated (To weekends and holidays). Variances to the schedule must be justified within company policy.
• Appearance and other non-work related factors are dictated by the organization. This includes time spent within the organization working, and outside the organization, though to a lesser extent.

Altogether, this is still not a very satisfying state of affairs, but definitely better than previous economic systems such as slavery or serfdom. Instead of trying to figure out how my life relates to an antiquated system, I decided to take a look at the current system instead and see what a more apt description might be. I started with what we currently call ourselves in the everyday: employees and employers. Employees are everyone who works for an organization, which is the employer.

One key thing I want to point out – generally an employer is not a human. It is almost always an organization – common examples include corporations, government, and non-profits. Every employee, including CEO’s and presidents, can be ejected by the organization and replaced, generally without material harm. The topic of organizations is too large to cover right now, so for today, I want to focus on the humans and the proper way to think of them – the Employees.

Employee, a word which derives from Employ, came about for the first time in the 1850’s, coinciding with the industrial revolution. Employ has been around since the 1500’s and consists of the following definitions: “make use of, apply; increase; entangle; devote”. It also derives from the word imply – indeed employ and imply started as the same word – which has remained largely unchanged as “to involve something unstated as a logical consequence”.

I would take this one step further with the observation that the word employee also has a common synonym  – resource. The company I currently work for often refers to employees as “Resources”. Though not often mentioned consciously, this term is codified in all companies due to organizational departments known as “Human Resources” which manage aspects of adding and reducing human resources (employees).

From these background definitions, a better understanding of our current situation and why we call ourselves, universally, employees, emerges. The synonyms making up the word are good descriptors of the modern workplace and the humans participating in it. One stood out to me however as a superior word to use to describe ourselves, with a larger meaning embedded within it: Entangled.

Entanglement

As our productivity grows, we must increase our work output to compete. As our debt load or lifestyle spending increase, we become further entangled in the industrial complex and less able to extricate ourselves from the system: we must work more to buy more, and work harder to compete. The more we buy into consumerism as a lifestyle, the less we are able to see clearly and become independent, as our social stature begins to depend on our consumerist successes. We are not bound by chains as in slavery, or by law as in serfdom, to a particular master or landowner. Rather, we are bound by the system in an ever increasing complex web of entanglement, from which the further we delve the less likely we are to escape. This explains why even CEO’s and entrepreneurs find themselves devoid of balance in their lives, unable to find satisfaction without the office, striving for ever increasing monetary value and property. They are as deeply entangled as the lower classes, albeit with more ability to escape if they so choose.

Consumer products at all levels are designed to reflect this phenomenon, striving to bring new consumers under their grip in a self sustaining spiral, simultaneously increasing entanglement of workers.

Consider products such as iPhones, which come out with a new model every year, encouraging pricey upgrades. The social pressure to have the latest one, coupled with the high cost of the device, ensures that a person must sustain income levels to match this pattern of behavior, or be threatened with social ostracism. The same product practice can be seen across the spectrum, from car re-models every three years, to fashion seasons or home decoration fads.

The traits I mentioned describing modern work fit nicely into this definition as well. They are either a direct result of entanglement, such as being able to choose a master but not go masterless, or a direct consequence, such as any behavior which benefits an organization and thus reduces the chances for someone to become dis-entangled.

The Rise of Entangled Persons

As laws supporting slavery in all its forms were being abolished worldwide, the industrial revolution was in full swing. The loss of traditional slave labor, coupled with a new way to mass produce consumer items, led to a system of entanglement emerging naturally. Organizations fight for their own survival, and because they are larger than a single person, they generate rules and systems to maximize survivability. By design, those who run the organizations are brought to believe that they are the organization, since the most powerful members have the greatest ability to harm an organization. In reality, they are not anymore able to escape entanglement than the common employee, and perhaps even less so since they must generally be highly entangled to reach such a position of power in the first place. Consider the kinds of perks CEO’s get, in general. Why are these needed in place of increased pay? Simply put: they greatly increase entanglement of someone into a certain lifestyle when increased monetary compensation is no longer enough to fuel increased entanglement at the same rate as other benefits.

Thus we have entered a system where even the perceived most powerful members of society are as deeply entangled as the average worker is, albeit using different mechanisms. Entrepreneurs, CEO’s, politicians. Each are entangled using intricate webs to decrease their likelihood of escape. Law, debt, equity, contracts, and property are the tools which can be used to tie someone to an organization and thus into the system. Only a few people have found ways to check out of the system and dis-entangle themselves.

Which brings us to possibilities of living which decrease entanglement instead of increasing it. I have recently begun to strive to dis-entangle myself as much as possible, and I have seen a number of people who have found ways for themselves to escape the system. The myriad ways to accomplish this, and how they work for individuals, are a post for another day.

When I was a child, I used to wonder why adults seemed so foolish. I would look around and wonder why adults did things that were so incomprehensible. Why did they do the same things every day, even though it didn’t make them happy, repeating the same routines day after day. They spent all their time frowning, creating wrinkles, and worrying about this or that, always serious and sad.

Over time, I have become one of those adults. I hardly ever play. I walk around all day with a frown on my face, worrying about one thing or another for no good reason. I do things that don’t make me happy and ensure I won’t get there anytime soon. But even though I am one of those adults, I am still not a whole lot closer to figuring out the why of it, or a different way of living. Although I like to imagine otherwise, my life is not all that different from anyone else’s. I started creating detailed logs of my days, in the hopes it would give me some insight about how to shift my thinking or activities. Each day doesn’t differ substantially from any other. A generalized version of my day:

5:30 AM: Alarm goes off. Hit snooze repeatedly. I had hoped to stretch and meditate for 30 minutes, but I fail to get out of bed.
6:00 AM: Force myself out of bed. I get up only when I know I will need to rush to make it, and have a good shot at being late to work. Even so, I don’t really start moving until 6:15.
6:45 AM: Done with shower, and various things surrounding it. Dress for work. Prepare to take out the dogs.
7:00 AM: Dogs have been out and fed . Make breakfast. Pack lunch. Brew coffee.
7:10 AM: Eat breakfast. Read a book, the paper, or blogs.
7:30 AM: Get in the car. Drive to work. Spend ~30 minutes in traffic.
8:00 AM: Arrive in the office. I might be late, sometimes up to 20 minutes late, sometimes up to 10 minutes early. Walk to my desk, settle in. I usually have 30 minutes to respond to emails and finish work before my first meeting. Plan for meetings at least 3 out of the next 4 hours.
11:45 AM: Meetings coming to a close. Feeling de-motivated. To-do list has doubled. Projects are behind schedule. The list of things to complete is too much to handle. If I can leave for an early lunch, I will. If I can’t, I piss away my time by reading blogs/news/technology articles for 15-30 minutes.
12:00 PM: Go to car. Drive to coffee shop, usually caribou or starbucks depending. Buy a coffee even though it won’t make me feel any better. Sit in the parking lot and eat the lunch I packed. Listen to the radio. Try to relax. The hour goes quickly.
1:00 PM: Back in office just in time for next meeting. Stay on the phone 3-4 of the next 4 hours. When not listening to the meeting, work on to do list. Respond to the 100+ emails that come in during the day. Try to be pro-active instead of reactive. If I can find 20 minutes free on my calendar, sometimes I go for a walk.
5:00 PM: Meetings are done, so I can get real work done. Start running down the to-do list in terms of priority. Sometimes, I can’t motivate myself to work. My job is just not that interesting most of the time, but I can’t imagine a better one without working for myself.
6:30 PM: The cleaning people have arrived at the office. I pack up. Go home. Either I pissed away my time reading interesting articles or accomplished something depending on my mood. I feel burnt out.
7:00 PM: Arrive home assuming no after work errands. Say hello to those living with me. Change out of work clothes.
7:15 PM: I would like to spend some time unwinding, but I have to be social. Spend time with family. Eat dinner.
8:30 PM: Dinner is done. I am the only one who doesn’t enjoy TV, but I feel obligated to watch it to be social. One or Two nights a week I will work instead. Occasionally I will work on my startup for an hour. Chances are I will take flak from my family if I don’t spend enough time with them.
10:00 PM: Everyone else is going to bed. I crack open the laptop to continue work. Either startup or office, depending on the need. Sometimes I write.
11:00 PM: How am I feeling? If I am groggy, I get ready for bed. If I am ok, I work for one more hour.

My weekends don’t differ much. I will spend more time on my startup, and the rest of it trying to catch up with family, doing errands, yard work, house work, paying bills, or whatever else needs to be done. Relaxing almost never occurs on the weekends. Bonus: I sleep until 8 or 9 in the morning Saturday and Sunday.

I want to escape what I see as my life prison. This blog is an effort to document my attempts at dis-entangling. A lifestyle business seems to me the best way at this point, but after more than three years of trying and not being materially closer to my goal, I have some concerns about my approach. Other lifestyle designs don’t appeal to me or seem realistic in my current situation. I consume enormous amounts of content and ideas, and though I see examples of people who live differently, I don’t see how to apply their lessons to my own life and situation without sacrificing the few things that make my life worth living.

I have become incomprehensible to myself. I live the mundane existence from which I can find no escape.