The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

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I generally consider books on three criteria, being how I felt when reading them, how I felt when finished, and what I take away from the book. For the first and third, I give the book top marks. Life is. There is no one living it. It is not ‘my life’. There is no ‘me’ that lives. But I am Life. This ‘I’ is not a personalised ‘me’. It is not an assumed separate person. There is no implied separation between the writer and the reader. This ‘I’ is ‘you’. This ‘I’ is all that is. I am Life itself. Jim O'Shaughnessy: We made a mistake and by that, I mean my generation and my parents' generation. The mistake we made was thinking that the period from 1946 to 1980 was the norm. No, it was not! It was the anomaly! We had just wiped out the manufacturing capabilities of anyone who could challenge us. So, the idea that you had the job with the gold watch, and you could work there for your entire career and raise a family of four and all of that, that was an anomaly. I've been a big fan of the energy he's brought to his writing over the past couple of years. But he didn't set out to have a popular newsletter. His real plan was to launch an in-person community. The natural story for a digital‑native world in which nothing can stop us from finding others who share our desires, ideas, and questions. I’m in an indie economy, where over the long‑term I’m competing on learning, developing skills, and my reputation. This is a lot harder but also a lot more rewarding. You simply do the work first and then decide if you want to continue. In sum, the goal of being on this path is: Being able to get to a state of being where I can spend almost all my time helping, supporting, and inspiring others to do great things with their lives.

Behind our money fears are existential fears, like the fear of death or the fear of not being loved, respected, and admired. These fears are likely not solvable but we can learn to coexist with them. This is also why financial worries can be infinite and people can chase more and more their entire lives. The flip side of this is that if we can learn to coexist with our financial insecurities, we can turn them into a secondary concern. This opens you up to the real secret: the opportunities of the pathless path are infinite too. You have to ask yourself the question ‘Who am I?’ This investigation will lead in the end to the discovery of something within you which is behind the mind. Solve that great problem and you will solve all other problems.While I’m still saving for retirement, I’m not putting all my faith in reaching certain financial milestones as the most important thing. I’m much more focused on spending time and money now to experiment with different modes of living such that when I reach the latter stages of my life, I won’t be making a dramatic shift in life priorities, but continuing on the pathless path.” Being at the frontier of your current reality is disorienting. Deep down you might have a sense that you should keep going in a certain direction, but you never know why.” After a month spent in Taiwan and 6 months into parenthood Angie & Paul share their thoughts and take some deep dives into various other topics. a mantra to reassure myself I would be okay (after spending the first 32 years of my life always having a plan, this kind of blind trust in the universe was new, scary, and exciting). Don’t get me wrong. On a human level, it’s crucial to have some kind of guiding “roadmap” and practices to carry out because it helps to settle, ground, and orient the mind and heart.

makes commitments (to a type of work, ways of living, creative projects, or a “conversation” with the world; finding ideas and principles worth committing to and seeing where you end up). People, including myself, have a deep desire to work on things that matter to them and bring forth what is inside them. It is only when we cling to the logic of the default path that we fail to see the possibilities for making that happen. The author starts living a phase of "non-doing" in Taiwan and starts to embrace a way of living that is not filled with anxiety and tension, but reflective and open. Paul interacts with other people online through his writings and mentions that there are communities of people you can connect with going through the same journey. You should find them and connect with them. In thoughts about the future, worry is traded for wonder. People stop thinking about worst‑case scenarios and begin to imagine the benefits of following an uncertain path. They get curious about who they might become if they embrace discomfort and are filled with a sense of urgency that says, “if I don’t do this now, I might regret it.”

What Curators Say

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". We come to discover that we’re not our thoughts. We’re not our feelings. We’re not our preferences. We’re not our bodies. We’re not our experiences. Who we are is always shifting and evolving.