Just for fun I recently asked Erin, “Now that
the kids are in summer school, don’t you think
it’s about time you went out and got yourself a
job? I hate seeing you wallow in unemployment
for so long.” She smiled and said, “Wow. I have been
unemployed a really long time. That’s weird… I
like it!” Neither of us have had jobs since the ’90s (my
only job was in 1992), so we’ve been self-
employed for quite a while. In our household
it’s a running joke for one of us to say to the
other, “Maybe you should get a job, derelict!” It’s like the scene in The Three Stooges where Moe tells Curly to get a job, and Curly
backs away, saying, “No, please… not that!
Anything but that!” It’s funny that when people reach a certain
age, such as after graduating college, they
assume it’s time to go out and get a job. But
like many things the masses do, just because
everyone does it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
In fact, if you’re reasonably intelligent, getting a job is one of the worst things you can do to
support yourself. There are far better ways to
make a living than selling yourself into
indentured servitude. Here are some reasons you should do
everything in your power to avoid getting a job: 1. Income for dummies. Getting a job and trading your time for money
may seem like a good idea. There’s only one
problem with it. It’s stupid! It’s the stupidest
way you can possibly generate income! This is
truly income for dummies. Why is getting a job so dumb? Because you
only get paid when you’re working. Don’t you
see a problem with that, or have you been so
thoroughly brainwashed into thinking it’s
reasonable and intelligent to only earn income
when you’re working? Have you never considered that it might be better to be paid
even when you’re not working? Who taught
you that you could only earn income while
working? Some other brainwashed employee
perhaps? Don’t you think your life would be much easier
if you got paid while you were eating, sleeping,
and playing with the kids too? Why not get paid
24/7? Get paid whether you work or not. Don’t
your plants grow even when you aren’t tending
to them? Why not your bank account? Who cares how many hours you work? Only a
handful of people on this entire planet care
how much time you spend at the office. Most
of us won’t even notice whether you work 6
hours a week or 60. But if you have something
of value to provide that matters to us, a number of us will be happy to pull out our
wallets and pay you for it. We don’t care about
your time — we only care enough to pay for the
value we receive. Do you really care how long
it took me to write this article? Would you pay
me twice as much if it took me 6 hours vs. only 3? Non-dummies often start out on the traditional income for dummies path. So don’t feel bad if you’re just now realizing you’ve been
suckered. Non-dummies eventually realize that
trading time for money is indeed extremely
dumb and that there must be a better way. And
of course there is a better way. The key is to
de-couple your value from your time. Smart people build systems that generate
income 24/7, especially passive income. This
can include starting a business, building a web
site, becoming an investor, or generating
royalty income from creative work. The
system delivers the ongoing value to people and generates income from it, and once it’s in
motion, it runs continuously whether you tend
to it or not. From that moment on, the bulk of
your time can be invested in increasing your
income (by refining your system or spawning
new ones) instead of merely maintaining your income. This web site is an example of such a system.
At the time of this writing, it generates about $
9000 a month in income for me (update: $ 40,000 a month as of 10/31/06 ), and it isn’t my only income stream either. I write each
article just once (fixed time investment), and
people can extract value from them year after
year. The web server delivers the value, and
other systems (most of which I didn’t even
build and don’t even understand) collect income and deposit it automatically into my
bank account. It’s not perfectly passive, but I
love writing and would do it for free anyway.
But of course it cost me a lot of money to
launch this business, right? Um, yeah, $9 is an
awful lot these days (to register the domain name). Everything after that was profit. Sure it takes some upfront time and effort to
design and implement your own income-
generating systems. But you don’t have to
reinvent the wheel — feel free to use existing
systems like ad networks and affiliate
programs. Once you get going, you won’t have to work so many hours to support yourself.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be out having dinner with
your spouse, knowing that while you’re eating,
you’re earning money? If you want to keep
working long hours because you enjoy it, go
right ahead. If you want to sit around doing nothing, feel free. As long as your system
continues delivering value to others, you’ll keep
getting paid whether you’re working or not. Your local bookstore is filled with books
containing workable systems others have
already designed, tested, and debugged.
Nobody is born knowing how to start a
business or generate investment income, but
you can easily learn it. How long it takes you to figure it out is irrelevant because the time is
going to pass anyway. You might as well
emerge at some future point as the owner of
income-generating systems as opposed to a
lifelong wage slave. This isn’t all or nothing. If
your system only generates a few hundred dollars a month, that’s a significant step in the
right direction. 2. Limited experience. You might think it’s important to get a job to
gain experience. But that’s like saying you
should play golf to get experience playing golf.
You gain experience from living, regardless of
whether you have a job or not. A job only
gives you experience at that job, but you gain “experience” doing just about anything, so
that’s no real benefit at all. Sit around doing
nothing for a couple years, and you can call
yourself an experienced meditator,
philosopher, or politician. The problem with getting experience from a
job is that you usually just repeat the same
limited experience over and over. You learn a
lot in the beginning and then stagnate. This
forces you to miss other experiences that
would be much more valuable. And if your limited skill set ever becomes obsolete, then
your experience won’t be worth squat. In fact,
ask yourself what the experience you’re
gaining right now will be worth in 20-30 years.
Will your job even exist then? Consider this. Which experience would you
rather gain? The knowledge of how to do a
specific job really well — one that you can only
monetize by trading your time for money — or
the knowledge of how to enjoy financial
abundance for the rest of your life without ever needing a job again? Now I don’t know about
you, but I’d rather have the latter experience.
That seems a lot more useful in the real world,
wouldn’t you say? 3. Lifelong domestication. Getting a job is like enrolling in a human
domestication program. You learn how to be a
good pet. Look around you. Really look. What do you
see? Are these the surroundings of a free
human being? Or are you living in a cage for
unconscious animals? Have you fallen in love
with the color beige? How’s your obedience training coming along?
Does your master reward your good behavior?
Do you get disciplined if you fail to obey your
master’s commands? Is there any spark of free will left inside you?
Or has your conditioning made you a pet for
life? Humans are not meant to be raised in cages.
You poor thing… 4. Too many mouths to feed. Employee income is the most heavily taxed
there is. In the USA you can expect that about
half your salary will go to taxes. The tax
system is designed to disguise how much
you’re really giving up because some of those
taxes are paid by your employer, and some are deducted from your paycheck. But you
can bet that from your employer’s perspective, all of those taxes are considered part of your pay, as well as any other compensation you
receive such as benefits. Even the rent for the
office space you consume is considered, so
you must generate that much more value to
cover it. You might feel supported by your
corporate environment, but keep in mind that you’re the one paying for it. Another chunk of your income goes to owners
and investors. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. It isn’t hard to understand why employees pay
the most in taxes relative to their income. After
all, who has more control over the tax system?
Business owners and investors or employees? You only get paid a fraction of the real value
you generate. Your real salary may be more
than triple what you’re paid, but most of that
money you’ll never see. It goes straight into
other people’s pockets. What a generous person you are! 5. Way too risky. Many employees believe getting a job is the
safest and most secure way to support
themselves. Morons. Social conditioning is amazing. It’s so good it
can even make people believe the exact
opposite of the truth. Does putting yourself in a position where
someone else can turn off all your income just
by saying two words (“You’re fired”) sound like
a safe and secure situation to you? Does
having only one income stream honestly sound
more secure than having 10? The idea that a job is the most secure way to
generate income is just silly. You can’t have
security if you don’t have control, and
employees have the least control of anyone. If
you’re an employee, then your real job title
should be professional gambler. 6. Having an evil bovine master. When you run into an idiot in the
entrepreneurial world, you can turn around and
head the other way. When you run into an idiot
in the corporate world, you have to turn around
and say, “Sorry, boss.” Did you know that the word boss comes from
the Dutch word baas, which historically means master? Another meaning of the word boss is “a cow or bovine.” And in many video
games, the boss is the evil dude that you have
to kill at the end of a level. So if your boss is really your evil bovine master, then what does that make you? Nothing but a turd in the herd. Who’s your daddy? 7. Begging for money. When you want to increase your income, do
you have to sit up and beg your master for
more money? Does it feel good to be thrown
some extra Scooby Snacks now and then? Or are you free to decide how much you get
paid without needing anyone’s permission but
your own? If you have a business and one customer
says “no” to you, you simply say “next.” 8. An inbred social life. Many people treat their jobs as their primary
social outlet. They hang out with the same
people working in the same field. Such
incestuous relations are social dead ends. An
exciting day includes deep conversations
about the company’s switch from Sparkletts to Arrowhead, the delay of Microsoft’s latest
operating system, and the unexpected delivery
of more Bic pens. Consider what it would be
like to go outside and talk to strangers.
Ooooh… scary! Better stay inside where it’s
safe. If one of your co-slaves gets sold to another
master, do you lose a friend? If you work in a
male-dominated field, does that mean you
never get to talk to women above the rank of
receptionist? Why not decide for yourself
whom to socialize with instead of letting your master decide for you? Believe it or not, there
are locations on this planet where free people
congregate. Just be wary of those jobless folk
— they’re a crazy bunch! 9. Loss of freedom. It takes a lot of effort to tame a human being
into an employee. The first thing you have to
do is break the human’s independent will. A
good way to do this is to give them a weighty
policy manual filled with nonsensical rules and
regulations. This leads the new employee to become more obedient, fearing that s/he could
be disciplined at any minute for something
incomprehensible. Thus, the employee will
likely conclude it’s safest to simply obey the
master’s commands without question. Stir in
some office politics for good measure, and we’ve got a freshly minted mind slave. As part of their obedience training, employees
must be taught how to dress, talk, move, and
so on. We can’t very well have employees
thinking for themselves, now can we? That
would ruin everything. God forbid you should put a plant on your desk
when it’s against the company policy. Oh no,
it’s the end of the world! Cindy has a plant on
her desk! Summon the enforcers! Send Cindy
back for another round of sterility training! Free human beings think such rules and
regulations are silly of course. The only policy
they need is: “Be smart. Be nice. Do what you
love. Have fun.” 10. Becoming a coward. Have you noticed that employed people have
an almost endless capacity to whine about
problems at their companies? But they don’t
really want solutions — they just want to vent
and make excuses why it’s all someone else’s
fault. It’s as if getting a job somehow drains all the free will out of people and turns them into
spineless cowards. If you can’t call your boss
a jerk now and then without fear of getting
fired, you’re no longer free. You’ve become
your master’s property. When you work around cowards all day long,
don’t you think it’s going to rub off on you? Of
course it will. It’s only a matter of time before
you sacrifice the noblest parts of your
humanity on the altar of fear: first courage…
then honesty… then honor and integrity… and finally your independent will. You sold your
humanity for nothing but an illusion. And now
your greatest fear is discovering the truth of
what you’ve become. I don’t care how badly you’ve been beaten
down. It is never too late to regain your
courage. Never! Still want a job? If you’re currently a well-conditioned, well-
behaved employee, your most likely reaction to
the above will be defensiveness. It’s all part of
the conditioning. But consider that if the above
didn’t have a grain of truth to it, you wouldn’t
have an emotional reaction at all. This is only a reminder of what you already know. You can
deny your cage all you want, but the cage is
still there. Perhaps this all happened so
gradually that you never noticed it until now…
like a lobster enjoying a nice warm bath. If any of this makes you mad, that’s a step in
the right direction. Anger is a higher level of
consciousness than apathy, so it’s a lot better
than being numb all the time. Any emotion —
even confusion — is better than apathy. If you
work through your feelings instead of repressing them, you’ll soon emerge on the
doorstep of courage. And when that happens,
you’ll have the will to actually do something
about your situation and start living like the
powerful human being you were meant to be
instead of the domesticated pet you’ve been trained to be. Happily jobless What’s the alternative to getting a job? The
alternative is to remain happily jobless for life
and to generate income through other means.
Realize that you earn income by providing
value — not time — so find a way to provide your
best value to others, and charge a fair price for it. One of the simplest and most accessible
ways is to start your own business. Whatever
work you’d otherwise do via employment, find
a way to provide that same value directly to
those who will benefit most from it. It takes a
bit more time to get going, but your freedom is easily worth the initial investment of time and
energy. Then you can buy your own Scooby
Snacks for a change. And of course everything you learn along the
way, you can share with others to generate
even more value. So even your mistakes can
be monetized.