Boundless Reads #107

Greetings from Bali 🌴

#1 Stressed Out Elite: I've read many articles about the stressed out elite. They seem to make the same points. Status competition among peers, the endless good work options that trade success for time, and lifestyle creep.

The author offers this story from his friend:

“I feel like I’m wasting my life,” he told me. “When I die, is anyone going to care that I earned an extra percentage point of return? My work feels totally meaningless.” He recognized the incredible privilege of his pay and status, but his anguish seemed genuine. “If you spend 12 hours a day doing work you hate, at some point it doesn’t matter what your paycheck says,” he told me. There’s no magic salary at which a bad job becomes good. He had received an offer at a start-up, and he would have loved to take it, but it paid half as much, and he felt locked into a lifestyle that made this pay cut impossible. “My wife laughed when I told her about it,” he said.

His wife laughed because this is the path they signed up for. Its so easy to take for granted that building life around a successful work-life is the goal, especially in your 20's and early 30's when the path to success is easily marked by promotions, degrees and large raises and free time is not eaten up by social obligations, kids and other things you rather not be doing.

However, I don't the way we frame these tradeoffs is too simple. It is not purely a pay cut for more time and freedom. It also might be a loss of friends who are used to living and traveling a certain way, it might cost them their identity as high achievers who make a lot of money and it might cost them in the emotional turbulence from daring to live in a new way.

This is the downside of infinite options and something the author gets to by highlighting how going into journalism limited his options:

I didn’t need any courage in making the decision to go into the modest-paying (by H.B.S. standards) field of journalism. Some of my classmates thought I was making a huge mistake by ignoring all the doors H.B.S. had opened for me in high finance and Silicon Valley. What they didn’t know was that those doors, in fact, had stayed shut — and that as a result, I was saved from the temptation of easy riches.

The author missed a chance to explore what makes his path so different in terms of fulfillment than his peers. He may miss the fact that writing may be something he is drawn to do and is something he can do autonomy and contrary to his belief, likely something you need an elite degree for.

#2 Remote Work: Buffer releases their State of Remote Work 2018 report and finds that 99% of people want to be able to work remotely (at least some of the time) for the rest of their career.

#3 Monetizing Our Hobbies: (h/t Khuyen) I have been guilty of pushing people to monetize their hobbies and also have been on the receiving end of people telling me I should really "build a business" and stop helping people "for free." I think there is some wisdom on both sides, but the author hits the nail on the head with the central disconnect being when people compromise who they are to be "productive" in all aspects of their life.

It’s easier to stomach needing three jobs to make ends meet if we rebrand ourselves as hustlers. So we pour ourselves another cup of coffee, post an inspirational meme and abide by the national motto of Rise and Grind, ever on the search for a new “hack” that will help us get more done in less time. But if we choose to capitalize on all of our resources, when do we get to choose ourselves?

#4 Tuesday's With Morrie: I just re-read one of my favorite books about a dying man and his reflections on what matters. Here are a couple things I highlighted:

Mitch, if you’re trying to show off for people at the top, forget it. They will look down at you anyhow. And if you’re trying to show off for people at the bottom, forget it. They will only envy you. Status will get you nowhere. Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between everyone.

and his reflections on giving:

Finally, one Tuesday, I confronted Morrie. “I don’t understand,” I said. “If ever anyone had finally earned the right to say, ‘Let’s not talk about your problems, let’s talk about my problems,’ it would be you. You’re sick. It’s a really tough disease. Why don’t you just accept their sympathy?” Morrie raised an eyebrow. “Mitch, why would I take like that? Taking just makes me feel like I’m dying. Giving makes me feel like I’m living.” Giving makes me feel like I’m living. It is a profound sentence. And so true. Because the opposite, we know, is false. Taking never makes you feel alive. It may be the basis of marketing, commercialism, Madison Avenue—but we know what Morrie said about “not buying the culture.” Taking a new car, a new suit, a new flat-screen TV—none of it will make you feel alive. It’s a temporary thrill, gone quickly when the new smell (or the warranty) wears off.

#5 Decision Making: On the challenge of truly making "right choices" and how we should think about decision making. We must first acknowledge how flawed most of our decisions are:

In reality, we make decisions in imperfect conditions that prevent us from thinking things through. This, Johnson explains, is the problem of “bounded rationality.” Choices are constrained by earlier choices; facts go undiscovered, ignored, or misunderstood; decision-makers are compromised by groupthink and by their own fallible minds. The most complex decisions harbor “conflicting objectives” and “undiscovered options,” requiring us to predict future possibilities that can be grasped, confusingly, only at “varied levels of uncertainty.”

The article offers the reflections of philosopher Agnes Callard who argues that all decisions and transformation start with an aspiration to be someone else and also realizing that aspiring to transform does not guarantee a safe landing:

To aspire, Callard writes, is to judge one’s present-day self by the standards of a future self who doesn’t yet exist. But that can leave us like a spider plant putting down roots in the air, hoping for soil that may never arrive.

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