The Pathless Path

Highlights

• Researchers Dorthe Berntsen and David Rubin study what they call “life scripts,” which they describe as “culturally shared expectations as to the order and timing of life events in a prototypical life course.”⁠
• prestige is “a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy.”⁠6
• In Weber’s view, a traditionalist view of work is one where people work as much as they need to maintain their current lifestyle, and once that aim is achieved, they stop working.
• The ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn’t mean anything.
• A German report on burnout found that when burned out, people “may start being cynical about their working conditions and their colleagues” and may “distance themselves emotionally and start feeling numb about their work.”⁠
• In Aristotle’s own words, “we are not-at-leisure in order to be-at-leisure.”
• According to Taggart, living in a world dominated by total work undermines the “playful contemplation concerned with our asking, pondering and answering the most basic questions of existence.”⁠
• For me, I was finding that the act of creation was the reward itself. The philosopher Erich Fromm has argued that “creative union,” or when “man unites himself with the world in the process of creation,” is a way to experience love.⁠
• For most people, life is not based on all‑or‑nothing leaps of faith. That’s a lie we tell ourselves so that we can remain comfortable in our current state. We simplify life transitions down to single moments because the real stories are more complex, harder to tell and attract less attention.
• With wonder, the need to cope becomes less important and the discomfort on the current path becomes more noticeable.
• “If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”⁠
• Often we don’t notice our drift into a state of low‑grade anxiety until we step away from what causes it,
• We all have fixed points that we aim toward in our lives. Homeownership is one of the most popular, but others include paying for children’s college expenses, becoming an executive or partner, founding a company, or reaching a certain net worth.
• Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.
• If the default path is the story of the industrial world, then the pathless path is the natural story for a digital‑native world in which nothing can stop us from finding others who share our desires, ideas, and questions.