Excuses

me, walking unsteadily in Zion National Park after not sleeping properly for a week

I want to sustain my lifestyle as an adventurer and creator without a full-time job. So why haven’t I tried very hard to make money over the last year?

The fact is that I know web development and machine learning, I’ve sold physical products before, I have a good eye for design, and I can draw fairly well. I should be able to make money without learning any new skills. I could experiment with writing one-off web apps, running ads, integrating AI, and so on. But I don’t. Instead, I come up with excuses.

Some are simple: it would never work, nobody needs it, I don’t have any good ideas anyway, the market is saturated, and so on. Some are more insidious, and play on my identity. Two tweets I wrote recently:

when I work on something I want it to be a piece of my soul outside my body, a pure projection of who I am at that time, and this seems to be the main reason I've barely made an effort to make money since quitting my job

greater men than me gave their names to theorems and machines and philosophies. god forbid people ever associate my name with a web app or grifty online course. I would vastly prefer to be ignored entirely and forgotten

These, like most excuses, are increasingly elaborate distractions from the underlying reason that I don’t feel motivated to pursue any of those money-making schemes: I don’t find them interesting at all, and wasn’t the whole point of quitting my job to do things that interest me?

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Being intentionally unemployed is like living in a mirror dimension where the true dangers are the paths that promise safety. Demons like money, loneliness, and anxiety will nudge you imperceptibly until you are so far off course that you have forgotten who you are and what you came here to do. You will watch the stars traverse the sky and wonder why you are always standing still.