The Life Problem
How to escape being a cog in the machine, attain freedom, and live your purpose
There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village.
As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a small boat towards the shore having caught quite few big fish.
The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?”
The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.”
“Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished.
“This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said.
The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?”
The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink — we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.”
The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman.
“I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches.”The fisherman continues, “And after that?”
The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.”
The fisherman asks, “And after that?”
The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!”
The fisherman was puzzled, “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”H/t Paolo Coelho.
The Problem Defined
Every day, you wake up naked and alone in the wilderness. You just don’t realize it because you’re surrounded by soft sheets, a warm room, and that new air fryer you got for your birthday but haven’t bothered to use yet.
To survive, you have two options:
Figure out how to get food and shelter on your own
Learn a narrow skill (i.e. become a cog) and take your place in the machine that produces things like bed sheets, heating, and air fryers.
But realistically, this choice was made for you long ago: to survive in the modern world, you must focus on a narrow skill and trade with others (now with money as an intermediary) for the rest of your survival needs.
Something called division and specialization of labor.
This was a significant stepping stone in our progress.
But it also came at a steep cost: we no longer possess the skillset for survival and have become entirely dependent on the machine.
Hence, we now live on its terms – not our own.
The average person spends eight hours per day or more plugged into the machine just to sustain themselves and have a reasonably comfortable “life” in the few hours they get to stay unplugged.
This is the proverbial treadmill…
But really, it’s modern-day slavery.
There is an old phrase that perfectly describes the fate of the average person today: proletarian.
It has strong connotations, particularly to do with the “lower” social classes. You’d be forgiven for thinking that it mostly belongs in history books, and doesn’t really apply to the affluent world we live in today.
But you’d be wrong.
In his classic book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper reveals the word in its truest definition:
“If the numerous sociological definitions and terms are reduced to a common denominator, the result might be expressed in the following terms: the proletarian is the man who is fettered to the process of work.”
That means that even most of the Macbook-slinging, Patagonia vest-wearing, inner-city intellectual workers of today are indeed proletarians!
And this is the first part of the Life Problem:
Most of us are born into a world that forces us to become cogs in a machine. But this is not how humans were meant to function. We organically rebel against the monotony. So our natural instinct is to escape this fate.
Escaping, of course, is notoriously hard to do.
The force of the machine’s grip pins us down, especially those who are most dependent (say, a single mother going paycheck to paycheck).
But even the financially independent are not automatically free.
First of all, our culture ensures we remain psychologically fettered to the process of work. It has beaten out of us the ability to accept and enjoy the simple abundance of nature.
Secondly, our place in the machine provides an important source of meaning – no matter how trivial or unstimulating the job. This is something humans can’t live well without.
Which leads us to the second part of the Life Problem:
In our instinctual pursuit of freedom, we often fail to realize that freedom is not what we really want. To solve the problem fully (and experience the beauty of what life can truly be) we have to create our own purpose and cultivate our own sources of meaning.
The Two Life Paths
Those who attempt to solve The Life Problem generally pursue one of two paths:
Do anything to get rich so you never have to work again
Find work you love so the line between work and freedom blurs
Unfortunately, neither offers a complete solution.
Let’s start with the first path: doing anything to get rich so you never have to work again.
We all know the classic example of someone who chases wealth only to find their life empty once they get there.
Again, this happens because wealth doesn’t actually solve The Life Problem.
It frees you from wage slavery, sure.
But you need to spend your time each day doing something, and for the vast majority, living your “best life” does not mean perpetual beach vacations without struggle, learning, or growth.
Besides, there are no guarantees for attaining wealth.
If you try to get rich while neglecting to find meaningful work – and fail – you’ll have wasted years of your life with nothing to show for it.
What about the second path: finding work you love so you will “never work a day in your life”?
If you get paid to do what you would have spent your time doing anyway, then you don’t have anything to escape from.
In some cases, this can almost be enough to solve the problem, especially considering that if you love your work you will probably be good at it, which means it will probably pay well, which means you can work less (if you so choose).
All in all, it’s probably a better path than chasing wealth for its own sake.
But in the end, it is not enough – and comes with numerous problems:
It’s not as enjoyable to do the work you love when you have to in order to make a living (i.e. you’re still fettered to the process of work).
You also have to ask yourself; out of all the things you could do with your time, how likely it is that you will get paid for that specific thing?
And I’m not talking about choosing between the standard cookie-cutter jobs on offer. I’m saying if you were completely free to choose what to spend your time on, how likely is it that you’d get paid enough to live well?
Besides, something can always happen that prevents you from doing the work you love. Then you are left without a leg to stand on (perhaps literally).
The Way of The Modern Hunter
A complete solution to the Life Problem can be found by going back and studying the time before the machine.
Because humans haven’t changed much, we can find ways to mimic the conditions that made our ancestors thrive.
First of all, you must realize that having to do some amount of work each day is completely natural. Our ancestors needed to hunt, maintain their shelters, move camps, etc.
But “work” then was way different than today. If you take the few still-existing hunter-gatherer communities as a proxy, they work around 3 hours per day and spend all day outside.
There are ways to recreate such dynamics in the modern work environment. But that requires you – not the machine – to set the terms of your labor. And the way you achieve this is through Entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurs are Modern Hunters. As an entrepreneur, you eat what you kill. The more lethal you become, the more freedom you’ll have to set the conditions of your life.
But we’re not just talking about any kind of entrepreneurship here. There are certain conditions that must be met.
To lead the tribe back then, you not only had to be competent – you also had to be fair, liked, fit, strong, and a good role model overall.
You had to earn your place as a leader.
So, the first step as a Modern Hunter is to develop yourself into all you can be.
“Succeeding in only one area of life is the biggest failure of all.” – Zig Ziglar
Our ancestors had a tribe that would provide for them if they got injured or sick, i.e. the tribe was the trust fund. Increasingly, we don’t have that anymore (but you should try to recreate it to the extent possible). Neither do we engage directly in the survival activities that are inherently meaningful to us and provided our ancestors with a day-to-day purpose.
The abundance, security, freedom, and deep sense of purpose enjoyed by our ancestors are all fundamental to TWMH.
To achieve this today, you must pursue both wealth and meaningful work at the same time.
What you are looking for is described well in this tweet from Nat Eliason:
You don’t want a 4-Hour Workweek.
You don’t want Financial Independence to Retire Early.
You don’t want to strike it rich and chill on a beach.
You want to find work that excites you, pays the bills, and can compound over time.
“Something that can compound over time” is the key differentiator in TWMH compared to the unconditional pursuit of your “passion” – it is what will allow you to build wealth.
Wealth Defined
To work as little as our ancestors is not that unrealistic even if you are selling your time (simple example: charge $200/h per hour and work 3 hours per day on average ≈ $150k per year).
But, that’s not what wealth is.
Contrary to popular belief, wealthy people don’t walk around with a wheelbarrow full of cash, grabbing a fistful whenever they need to pay for stuff (lottery winners do that, which is why they go broke).
Wealthy people take the money in the wheelbarrow and invest it in assets that generate interest or profits, then they use that to pay for things.
Wealth is when the interest or profits from your assets cover the expenses of your ideal life.
In other words, financial wealth equals passive income.
I’m telling you this because money is a notorious mindfucker. People have all sorts of ideas about it. Some assign way too much value and emotions to their bank account. Others secretly hate money, which is why it will always escape them.
Truly successful people don’t make a big fuzz when they attain wealth. And they don’t treat it like the end goal. Instead, they view it as the foundational layer on which they can build an interesting, ever-expanding life.
Find Your Type of Entrepreneur(ship)
Entrepreneurship happens to be the best vessel for attaining wealth, and for finding your life’s work.
As an entrepreneur, you build your own machine. It’s like stepping out of the matrix.
True entrepreneurship is a genuine reflection of the founder. It is the only thing that allows them to show up as 100% themselves.
You need to find what that looks like for you.
A common mistake here is to try to walk before you can crawl. Personally, I’ve certainly underestimated how hard it is to build something people truly want and be competitive in the market (or preferably escape competition altogether).
If you’re new to entrepreneurship, you probably won’t be able to build your big dream (or even envision it) until you have tried (and likely failed) at a bunch of smaller projects.
Another somewhat temporary solution is to align yourself with the right entrepreneur and join their tribe for a while.
The best companies today are not soulless machines. Because they are led by other Modern Hunters, they’re more like a close, collaborative, and respectful tribe than an oppressive hierarchy.
I believe we will see more and more of this type of organization going forward.
The beauty of our times is that it’s becoming easier to use fewer human cogs and more code-based cogs when building your machine. This opportunity is unprecedented in human history.
With the rise of AI in particular, I believe we’ll be able to almost entirely move away from the oppressive nature of industrial-age productivity and into a world defined by freedom, beauty, curiosity, and creativity.
Many businesses will be just a few more or less equal partners and collaborators, and the leverage that would be built on the backs of workers will be largely replaced by other forms of leverage, i.e. capital, media, and technology.
As Naval wrote:
“There are almost 7B people on this planet. Someday, I hope, there will be almost 7B companies”
Plan of Action
In summary, you want to pursue wealth and meaningful work at the same time. You want to find something that excites you, pays the bills, and compounds over time – all while working to develop yourself into all you can be.
In a practical sense, I believe the ultimate goal should be to:
Do work you love for three hours each day (on average)
Frequently work a lot more because… well, you love it
Always have the option not to work at all
What you need to do to achieve this depends on your situation.
If you have already found work you love, you likely just need to leverage that via entrepreneurship into wealth.
If you’re not familiar with leverage, think of it in the literal sense, like a physical lever: the bigger the lever, the more force you get out on the other end when you apply your weight to it.
The more leverage you have on your work, the more exponential value is produced for every hour you put in.
As mentioned, the types of leverage available to you are capital, media, technology, and labor.
If you haven’t yet found your life’s work, realize that it’s OK to start building wealth while you are searching.
Personally, I haven’t truly found my life’s work yet. Or rather, I suspect I have – I just can’t see how it will fully manifest yet.
In the meantime, one thing I’m doing is building an AirBnB business. I’m selling my apartment in Sweden and buying one in my favorite surf spot in Portugal to rent out. From there, I will slowly expand to more locations. It’s not my life’s work but I do enjoy it. And it does have the added benefit that I can go surf whenever I want (whoever said not to get high on your own supply needs to live a little).
Finally, it’s important to keep questioning cultural norms around money. Lots of people have jobs they hate, where they make a lot more money than they really need. And yet, they sell a huge portion of their time (again, they are psychologically fettered to the process of work).
I’d like to end with a reminder that The Life Problem is a hard problem.
Solving it is kind of why we’re here…
So, to bring you some kind of balance along the way, I’m including this beautiful passage from an essay by the great Evan Armstrong:
”When we focus excessively on productivity, when our biggest concern is on how to ‘scale ourselves,’ we miss the point of work—and, really, life—which is to find meaning in the daily tasks that consume our time.”
He continues:
“What I am instead arguing for is something more expansive. The thing you should work hard at is everything. Finding ways to imbue each moment with meaning and purpose and effort is the only path to long-term happiness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, ‘The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well’.”
Thanks for reading.
//Seb
Additional Resources
Here is an epic practical video on the topic of solving The Life Problem. It’s a crime that this only has 250k views.
This is a primer on Entrepreneurial thinking vs. Conventional cog-in-the-machine thinking, as well as some practical tips on starting a business:
Awesome stuff