The Risks of Early Retirement, Featherbedding and The Law of Conservation of Religion
💌 The Roundup // 023
Welcome to the latest issue of The Jungle Gym – the newsletter that helps you build a fulfilling career by integrating work and life.
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Friends,
You all seemed to like last month’s shortened version of the Roundup, so I’m going to keep it going.
In the land of personal updates: Ash and I are spending the month in Sonoma. We’re treating the trip as something of a Babymoon, since starting in April we need to stay in San Francisco, in case Brussels Sprout decides to emerge early.
I’ve been spending the month going on long walks while listening to audiobooks, thanks to my new knowledge capture setup which includes:
Kindle’s Whispersync feature – allows me to listen to an audiobook and highlight the text at the same time.
Otter.ai – makes it easy to take quick voice notes.
Two of the best books I consumed this month were:
The Science of Storytelling –articulates the psychological principles behind compelling stories.
Living from a Place of Surrender – an audio-course that has completely reframed the way I view the world and how I show up to it. More on that in the future.
In this issue of the Roundup, I’ll be reflecting on:
🏖 The Risks of Early Retirement
⏱ Diminishing returns of productivity culture
🛌 Featherbedding knowledge work
📖 Abandoning narratives
🙏 The Law of Conservation of Religion
⛵ Whether free will should be a tenant of our worldview
Riffs & Recommendations
Some reflections on the best content I’ve been consuming lately.
🏖 The 2021 early-retirement update
43-minute read from Living a FI
Imagine having enough savings at age 38 to be able to retire for the rest of your life. Should you do it?
This post, written by a FIRE movement (Financial Independence/Retire Early) devotee chronicles his experience exiting the workforce early. If this sounds like a dream scenario to you, I’d encourage you to read his post to get a realistic sense of the risks.
Here are five lessons I took away:
You can't predict what challenges life will bring. Cutting off your cash flows early in life can leave you fragile to unexpected shocks.
Having a portfolio of meaningful activities (work, family, creative pursuits) can protect your psyche when unexpected hardships arrive.
The way you perceive your lifestyle inevitably depends on the relative affluence of your peers.
Commonalities are a bedrock of friendship. If you choose to make a big change in your lifestyle, it may be hard to maintain your existing friendships.
No lifestyle can guarantee happiness. Happiness only comes from changing the way you perceive your reality. Doing the inner work to change your mindset is the most important investment you can make.
To be clear, I’m a big proponent of the “financial independence” part of this movement. Frugality is a great way to protect yourself against volatility. I just think the end goal of early retirement is pretty short-sighted and reduces late-life optionality.
⏱ The diminishing returns of productivity culture
5-minute read from Anne Helen Petersen
While I’m a devotee of time management techniques, I recognize that productive people don’t always reap the rewards of the time they’ve saved. Often, open calendar slots earned through productivity just get filled with meetings and extra assignments.
This is the dystopian reality of productivity culture. Its mandate is never “You figured out how to do my tasks more efficiently, so you get to spend less time working.” It is always: “You figured out how to do your tasks more efficiently, so you must now do more tasks.”
To keep employees enthusiastic about driving productivity, companies should strive to be more intentional about distributing the gains of saved time to ensure productive workers experience a benefit.
🛌 Slack and the Imaginary Economy
5-minute read from Dror Ploeg
In the face of rapid technological change, governments have protected workers from displacement through a process called featherbedding. This typically involves hiring more workers than needed to perform a given job or adopting time-consuming processes in order to increase employment:
For example, trains were required to employ “water tenders” — humans who shoveled coal to keep steam engines going — long after locomotives were equipped with diesel engines.
As automation comes for knowledge workers, what socially acceptable ways will companies use to featherbed our displacement? Enter Slack:
In a world powered by human concentration, giving every employee the power to “grab” every other employee’s attention is the ultimate form of featherbedding. It keeps everyone distracted just enough to make sure we’re not innovating too quickly.
And by offering this experience as-a-service to multiple companies within the same industry, Slack ensures that everyone can afford to be a little less productive.
📖 Against Narratives
10-minute read from Ava
As a former screenwriter, I tend to view life from a narrative perspective. While this frame can provide a sense of romance and meaning, it can also create expectations that – when left unmet – can drive deep dissatisfaction.
What is the alternative?
Rather than living life ruled by the expectations of a narrative structure, you view every experience you have on its own merits. This isn’t easy to do, but it can make a big positive difference in how you experience the events of your life.
🙏 The Holy Church of Christ Without Christ
11-minute read from Antonio Garcia-Martinez
While identification with organized religion has been declining in recent decades, our collective religious impulses have not gone anywhere. We secular moderns think of ourselves as rational and empirical, when we are really seeking new beliefs to fill the God-shaped holes in our minds.
Take the common trope from the progressive Left: “I believe science.” This phrase, which has been used by politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang, betrays how we actually use science – as a believable form of scripture. We form beliefs based on our tribal affiliations and select scientific research to confirm our beliefs and identities.
To explain the consistency of humanity’s religious impulse Garcia-Martinez posits The Law of Conservation of Religion:
Religion is never created nor destroyed, in any society, merely transformed from one form to another.
⛵ Final Thoughts on Free Will
43-minute listen from Sam Harris
Free will is a core tenant of many belief structures. It helps us decide what kind of behaviors worthy of rewards and which ones are deserving of punishment.
While it certainly feels like we are the authors of our thoughts and behaviors, there is not much evidence that, upon revisiting a decision, any of us could have made different choices than the ones we did.
In a reality that is governed by cause and effect, what evidence is there that human behavior is any exception?
If this question intrigues you, I’d strongly recommend you listen to Sam’s thoughts on the topic.
Friends of the Newsletter
Some great pieces of writing from friends of the Jungle Gym:
Power to the Person (by Packy McCormick) – explores the fascinating implications of individuals gaining leverage and larger audiences.
How I bought a business for $0 (by Justin Mares) – chronicles Justin’s sharp approach to micro private equity.
Negotiating your startup job offer (by Rishi Taparia) – offers must-read advice for anyone who is about to negotiate a new job offer.
Minimalism is Boring (by Nate Kadlac) – shares advice on unlocking your creative taste.
Building an online persona: “Be yourself” is incomplete advice at best (by Stew Fortier) – advises audience builders about how to balance interestingness and authenticity when creating an online persona.
How to Find Your Tribe (by Adrian Alfieri) – explores the required mindset to build relationships online.
Stuff from me you may have missed
Here’s what I wrote about since the last Roundup:
The Rise of Platform Brands – one of my more popular essays that covered how brands are partnering with their employees to capture attention.
The Creative Professional: How Liz Fosslien remains prolific with a full-time job – this profile of Liz provides a pretty nice case study into what one of these platform branding relationships actually looks like in practice.
The Canonical Silicon Valley Blog Posts – A friend recently asked me for my list of iconic Silicon Valley blog posts. These were the twelve I came up with.
Building an Audience that Serves Your Career Goals – I gave a talk at On Deck this month based on my post from last month about Audience as a Career Moat. While I don’t think there’s a public recording of the talk, one of the attendees made this awesome visual summary.
You can always search the back catalog of this newsletter by topic, or find a curated list of the best essays I’ve written.
Thanks for reading. Do you have a friend or a co-worker who would enjoy this issue? I’d be honored if you shared it with them.
Until next time,