1. Do not drop out. Instead, try to stop yourself from committing suicide until you can find a job that is so non-hellish that it does not make you suicidal, and then stay at that job, or an even better one if you can find it, for several decades. Grab what fun you can on the weekends, save up money, enjoy your retirement, and you will have lived a pretty good life.
Seriously, it's good to live differently, to take uncommon paths, to minimize your dependence on a society gone astray. But if I were to say, "Woo-hoo! Dropping out is so cool! Quit your job now and hop a freight train to Bolivia, and you will be ALIVE while everyone else is DEAD," then that might be worse than saying nothing. Motivational writing is a drug. If you require a motivational writer or speaker to live differently, then as soon as that external energy shot wears off, you will fizzle and burn out. But if everyone is trying to discourage you from doing something, and you do it anyway, then you have the internal motivation to persist and succeed. So: dropping out is not fun -- better not do it.
2. "Drop out" is a bad metaphor, because it implies you are either in or out. In reality, no one has ever been in or out -- everyone is somewhere in between. The most pathetic office drone still has forbidden dreams, and the most extreme mountain man still has commerce with society. Your mission is to find a niche, somewhere in this range, where you're not held over a barrel by a system that gives you no participation in power.
3. It's not about being pure. It's not about keeping your hands clean or avoiding guilt. Imagine birds living in a forest. Humans come and cut the forest down and build barns and plant crops. If some birds are able to live in the barns, or eat the crops, they don't say, "I'm not going to live in the barn -- that's cheating," or "I'm not going to eat the crops, because then I'm just part of the system." Of all the species on Earth, only humans are that stupid.
Now, that doesn't mean you should accept all gifts. Sometimes the "crops" are poisoned or the "barns" are traps. By all means, when you are offered benefits, use your full intelligence to see what strings are attached. And if you reject something, reject it because you see that it will do you more harm than good, not because you have some silly obsession with purity. Here's a test: when Thoreau was living at Walden Pond, he would often go into town for dinners with his family. If you see anything wrong with that, read this section again, or read this piece about the myth of self-sufficiency.
4. "Out" is relative and not absolute. It is a path and not a destination. And you walk the path not by disconnecting from the rest of the world, but by engaging it in an intelligent and creative way, instead of in one of the disempowering ways that are made to look like the only ways. The myth of the pure and total outsider is one of those disempowering ways. It's a trick designed to make you set an impossible goal, get discouraged, and give up.
5. Do not try to find a job doing what you love. This is my most radical advice. There are some people in the world who have jobs they love so much that they would do them for free. If you become one of these people, you will probably get there not through planning but through luck, by doing what you love for free until somehow the money starts coming in. But if you make an effort to combine your income and your love, you are likely to end up compromising both, making a poverty income by doing something you don't quite love, or no longer love. For example, if you decide to become a chef because you love cooking, it will probably make you hate cooking, because cooking will become linked in your mind to all the bullshit around the job.
What I recommend instead is to separate your money from your love. Get the most low-stress source of income that you can find, and then do exactly what you love for free. It might eventually make you money or it might not. "Do what you love and the money will follow" is a lie. The real rule is: "If you're doing what you love, you won't care if you never make any money from it -- but you still need money."
6. When you begin to get free, you will get depressed. It works like this: When you were three years old, if your parents weren't too bad, you knew how to play spontaneously. Then you had to go to school, where everything you did was required. The worst thing is that even the fun activities, like singing songs and playing games, were commanded under threat of punishment. So even play got tied up in your mind with a control structure, and severed from the life inside you. If you were "rebellious", you preserved the life inside you by connecting it to forbidden activities, which are usually forbidden for good reasons, and when your rebellion ended in suffering and failure, you figured the life inside you was not to be trusted. If you were "obedient", you simply crushed the life inside you almost to death.
Freedom means you're not punished for saying no. The most fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing. But when you get this freedom, after many years of activities that were forced, nothing is all you want to do. You might start projects that seem like the kind of thing you're supposed to love doing, music or writing or art, and not finish because nobody is forcing you to finish and it's not really what you want to do. It could take months, if you're lucky, or more likely years, before you can build up the life inside you to an intensity where it can drive projects that you actually enjoy and finish, and then it will take more time before you build up enough skill that other people recognize your actions as valuable.
7. Hard work is satanic. Our nature is to be lazy -- primitive humans have moments of extreme exertion, but they don't go through life in a hurry, they don't push themselves, and despite the popular myth, they don't live in great stress on the edge of starvation. Even medieval serfs worked fewer hours, and at a slower pace, than modern industrialized workers. Ivan Illich has written that at the dawn of the industrial age, they would put a man in a pit that gradually filled with water, and give him a pump, and he would have to pump constantly all day to not drown. Humans are so naturally resistant to hard work that it took something like that to train people for industrial jobs. Now they do it with the schooling system, and with the religious doctrine that hard work is morally virtuous.
The opposite of hard work is quality work. Quality work may be done quickly, but it is never pushed. It arranges itself around the goal of doing something as well as it can be done, and it finds its own pace.
Another opposite of hard work is playful work. Like quality work it may be done quickly but is never pushed. But playful work is indifferent to quality, or even to success. When you're doing playful work, you don't care if it ends in total failure, because you're having such a good time that you would look forward to doing the whole job again.
8. There are no easy rules. This is a tangential point. If you're interested in dropping out of society, you are also likely to reject society's rules, and try to replace them with counterculture rules or rules of your own invention. Humans are map-making animals, and we're always trying to make a map so good that we no longer have to look at the land. This is a mistake, and if you reject the dominant map, it's best to learn to not use any map at all. There is one rule that's very simple, but not easy: observe reality and adjust.
9. Don't rush it. Getting free is not like walking through a magic doorway -- it's like growing a fruit tree.
Seriously, it's good to live differently, to take uncommon paths, to minimize your dependence on a society gone astray. But if I were to say, "Woo-hoo! Dropping out is so cool! Quit your job now and hop a freight train to Bolivia, and you will be ALIVE while everyone else is DEAD," then that might be worse than saying nothing. Motivational writing is a drug. If you require a motivational writer or speaker to live differently, then as soon as that external energy shot wears off, you will fizzle and burn out. But if everyone is trying to discourage you from doing something, and you do it anyway, then you have the internal motivation to persist and succeed. So: dropping out is not fun -- better not do it.
2. "Drop out" is a bad metaphor, because it implies you are either in or out. In reality, no one has ever been in or out -- everyone is somewhere in between. The most pathetic office drone still has forbidden dreams, and the most extreme mountain man still has commerce with society. Your mission is to find a niche, somewhere in this range, where you're not held over a barrel by a system that gives you no participation in power.
3. It's not about being pure. It's not about keeping your hands clean or avoiding guilt. Imagine birds living in a forest. Humans come and cut the forest down and build barns and plant crops. If some birds are able to live in the barns, or eat the crops, they don't say, "I'm not going to live in the barn -- that's cheating," or "I'm not going to eat the crops, because then I'm just part of the system." Of all the species on Earth, only humans are that stupid.
Now, that doesn't mean you should accept all gifts. Sometimes the "crops" are poisoned or the "barns" are traps. By all means, when you are offered benefits, use your full intelligence to see what strings are attached. And if you reject something, reject it because you see that it will do you more harm than good, not because you have some silly obsession with purity. Here's a test: when Thoreau was living at Walden Pond, he would often go into town for dinners with his family. If you see anything wrong with that, read this section again, or read this piece about the myth of self-sufficiency.
4. "Out" is relative and not absolute. It is a path and not a destination. And you walk the path not by disconnecting from the rest of the world, but by engaging it in an intelligent and creative way, instead of in one of the disempowering ways that are made to look like the only ways. The myth of the pure and total outsider is one of those disempowering ways. It's a trick designed to make you set an impossible goal, get discouraged, and give up.
5. Do not try to find a job doing what you love. This is my most radical advice. There are some people in the world who have jobs they love so much that they would do them for free. If you become one of these people, you will probably get there not through planning but through luck, by doing what you love for free until somehow the money starts coming in. But if you make an effort to combine your income and your love, you are likely to end up compromising both, making a poverty income by doing something you don't quite love, or no longer love. For example, if you decide to become a chef because you love cooking, it will probably make you hate cooking, because cooking will become linked in your mind to all the bullshit around the job.
What I recommend instead is to separate your money from your love. Get the most low-stress source of income that you can find, and then do exactly what you love for free. It might eventually make you money or it might not. "Do what you love and the money will follow" is a lie. The real rule is: "If you're doing what you love, you won't care if you never make any money from it -- but you still need money."
6. When you begin to get free, you will get depressed. It works like this: When you were three years old, if your parents weren't too bad, you knew how to play spontaneously. Then you had to go to school, where everything you did was required. The worst thing is that even the fun activities, like singing songs and playing games, were commanded under threat of punishment. So even play got tied up in your mind with a control structure, and severed from the life inside you. If you were "rebellious", you preserved the life inside you by connecting it to forbidden activities, which are usually forbidden for good reasons, and when your rebellion ended in suffering and failure, you figured the life inside you was not to be trusted. If you were "obedient", you simply crushed the life inside you almost to death.
Freedom means you're not punished for saying no. The most fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing. But when you get this freedom, after many years of activities that were forced, nothing is all you want to do. You might start projects that seem like the kind of thing you're supposed to love doing, music or writing or art, and not finish because nobody is forcing you to finish and it's not really what you want to do. It could take months, if you're lucky, or more likely years, before you can build up the life inside you to an intensity where it can drive projects that you actually enjoy and finish, and then it will take more time before you build up enough skill that other people recognize your actions as valuable.
7. Hard work is satanic. Our nature is to be lazy -- primitive humans have moments of extreme exertion, but they don't go through life in a hurry, they don't push themselves, and despite the popular myth, they don't live in great stress on the edge of starvation. Even medieval serfs worked fewer hours, and at a slower pace, than modern industrialized workers. Ivan Illich has written that at the dawn of the industrial age, they would put a man in a pit that gradually filled with water, and give him a pump, and he would have to pump constantly all day to not drown. Humans are so naturally resistant to hard work that it took something like that to train people for industrial jobs. Now they do it with the schooling system, and with the religious doctrine that hard work is morally virtuous.
The opposite of hard work is quality work. Quality work may be done quickly, but it is never pushed. It arranges itself around the goal of doing something as well as it can be done, and it finds its own pace.
Another opposite of hard work is playful work. Like quality work it may be done quickly but is never pushed. But playful work is indifferent to quality, or even to success. When you're doing playful work, you don't care if it ends in total failure, because you're having such a good time that you would look forward to doing the whole job again.
8. There are no easy rules. This is a tangential point. If you're interested in dropping out of society, you are also likely to reject society's rules, and try to replace them with counterculture rules or rules of your own invention. Humans are map-making animals, and we're always trying to make a map so good that we no longer have to look at the land. This is a mistake, and if you reject the dominant map, it's best to learn to not use any map at all. There is one rule that's very simple, but not easy: observe reality and adjust.
9. Don't rush it. Getting free is not like walking through a magic doorway -- it's like growing a fruit tree.
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