Tag: freedom

It’s Not About Working for Free, It’s About Being Free

I recently posted about trying to be in a position where you could do awesome work with great people, even if for very low or no pay as it is more likely to lead to better results than doing work you don’t care as much for.

Many people said this was a luxury only the elite or wealthy could afford.  I couldn’t disagree more.  In fact, as I’ve written elsewhere, lack of income can be an asset.  We tend to live up to our earnings.  Those with a less costly lifestyle are more able to jump on opportunities that don’t pay well upfront.  The whole point of the post was that it’s good to be in a position where you are most free to seize on opportunities even if they don’t have an immediate paycheck.  Avoid or reduce debt, cut expenses, maintain a minimalist life, be productive so you can do more with less time, try to save some money, etc.

You may have to or want to work a job you don’t care for and earn money for 60 hours a week but that still doesn’t preclude you from going to that awesome local marketing firm you’re interested in and begging them to do 20 hours a week of work even if they can’t pay you.  I contend that the latter will be more beneficial to you long term than the former, and if you work hard and well might turn into more pay as well.

The post was not about working for free.  The post was about being free.  The freer you are to jump on great opportunities the better, and the more things that make that hard you can eliminate the better.

Why Not Go Work for an Awesome Company Now?

Many people can’t get paid jobs because they lack experience.  Most will go pay a lot of money to buy a credential in hopes that it gets them access to the jobs, or take a different job.  You could also just see if you can do the job for free as a way to get access.  Apparently, this is a controversial suggestion.

Today I posted the following on Facebook:

Young people: if you have the choice:

Work with awesome people on interesting stuff for no pay

-or-

Work with average people on average stuff for a salary higher than most of your peers

Which would you take?

I suggest the former will pay off 5 or 10 tens more over the short term psychologically and over mid-long term financially as well.

Avoid anything that makes taking the former opportunity more difficult. (Debt, obligation, geographical restrictions, pressure from others, promises you wish you hadn’t made, etc.)

And this:

Imagine your favorite existing company or your dream startup idea. If someone there came to you and said, “We want you to work with us! We just can’t pay you right now.”

Could you do it? Would you?

If you’re 15-25, I’d say a major goal should be to be in a position where you can afford to say yes.

I was baffled by the number of comments and private messages I received from people who passionately disagreed or found these posts dangerous, ignorant, or offensive.  You never know what things will rile people up on the internet.  Didn’t expect this to be one of them!

No, the posts are not anti-work.  No, they are not anti-money or anti-capitalist.  No, they do not claim in any way that everyone should share the same time preference or risk tolerance.  No, they do not imply that working for free is morally or practically better than working for pay.

The posts are making a point about the particular position of young people early in their careers.  They spend tens of thousands of dollars and several years attempting to gain credentials they hope will grant them access to jobs they like and that can sustain them.  My question is, why not just go get that job now?  Work for free if it’s the only way.  Working for free at a great company is probably better than paying to not get paid at a university so that you can hopefully work for enough pay to cover your debt later.  It’s probably more likely to lead to more money and happiness in the long term.

Do it when you’re young and inexperienced your opportunity cost is low and your financial obligations are few.  Invest in yourself by trading pay for great experience if you can.  That’s what many people think they’re doing with school.  What’s different about working instead?  In many cases, it’s better.

But let’s say you’re out of school already.  I think the same question applies.  Ask yourself, if a great opportunity came your way that didn’t have a lot of money with it but it did have a lot of long term promise, would you and could you take it?  You don’t have to in order to be a good person.  It’s your life, not mine.  But if you wish you could but think you can’t because you have a lot of financial or other obligations, the point is to consider ways in which you can reduce those obligations.  Be in a position to take advantage of the best opportunities (measured on all fronts, not just by pay).  The golden handcuffs are real, and they can hurt.  I’ve written before how debt can limit your options, and how lack of income can be an asset.

If at an incredibly young age you already find yourself having to take a job you don’t like because nothing else will cover your expenses, you might try to find ways to reduce the obligations.  I’m not saying don’t work hard.  I’m not saying money doesn’t matter.  I’m not even taking a side on the follow your passion/don’t follow your passion debate.

I think people overestimate the long term value of money early in their career, and underestimate the long term value of time well spent early in their career.  The latter has greater returns.  I’ve talked to many stressed out new employees who are thinking about not taking a job they love because it pays $27,000, instead of the $31,000 they’re making at the job they can tolerate.  I’ve been there myself more than once.  The thing is, in a few years, and certainly in ten years, that extra money will mean little to you, as much as it feels like right now.  But your time and how well you spent it will mean even more, not to mention the network and skills you build along the way.  Odds are that not just in happiness, but in long-term financial rewards, you’ll do better going with the one that is more up your alley vs. a few thousand bucks.

I’ve never worked for free except on side projects and launching my own company.  I’ve never had an internship.  I’ve always been a paperboy or grocery clerk or golf course go-getter or construction worker or something else to earn money.  The sooner I was able to merge my interests with my income the happier I was.  That’s not for everyone.  But I can tell you many of the best decisions I’ve made were saying no to well paying jobs.  I could have been a pharmaceutical rep at age 19 and had a company car, benefits, and starting at $50-60k.  I couldn’t be happier that I picked a series of jobs with a higher ceiling and more in line with the kind of people I wanted to be around and the kind of stuff I really love doing.  That extra $25k in starting salary seemed like a million bucks at the time.  Now it seems like it would have been more than foolish to take it instead of the path I chose.  If you’re doing great work and working hard at it, the financial rewards will come.

I am not preaching dependence.  Far from it.  This is a message of independence.  Don’t just take internship after internship and live with mom and dad until you’re 40.  Heck no.  Don’t be dependent.  Be independent of as many things as possible – debt, promises, other people, and even a certain income level.  That’s the point.  Pick things that take advantage of your strengths even if the pay is low upfront because of what it can be down the road, and because of the fulfillment you’ll get.  Don’t get locked into an income level that your friends think is cool if it limits your options.

Get paid if you can and as much as you can.  But the idea that schooling is the only way to invest in yourself for greater future gains is absurd.  As is the idea that a better salary is always the best long-term payoff.  Why not give up income to gain human capital on the job?

If after all this you still don’t get my point or think I’m somehow against work, or money, or subjective value, or rainbows and hugs and everything lovely, this post is not for you anyway.  If it resonates with you as similar advice and thinking did with me many years ago, take it to heart.

Time and money are both valuable.  One of them you can create more of, the other you can’t.

Who is College for?

Slightly modified from the original publication on Thought Catalog.

It is commonly assumed that everyone who can should go to college. Sure, maybe a few super-brilliant techies or people with a crystal clear path can skip it and do well, but everyone else needs to go, just to be safe. This is completely backwards. Most people can do a lot better than college. There are really only a few groups for whom college is the best option.

The legally-bound
Sadly, a number of professions have lobbied to secure barriers to entry in order to keep out plucky young upstarts who might undercut monopoly pricing. If you know beyond a shadow of a doubt you want to work in one of these professions, you’ll need to get the magic paper. Just be careful not to let the paper do all the work. For the sake of your customers, try to get more than just the legally required credential. The most common jobs with degree requirements are lawyers, doctors, and CPAs. If that’s you, bite the bullet.

The well-to-do, insecure partier
College is a consumption good for some people. It’s a four (or five or six) year party covered by mom and dad. If you’ve got stacks of cash and your major goal for your early twenties is to chill at frat houses with a Solo cup, maybe you should go to college. Let me take that back. You see, you can move to a college town and party without enrolling. But if you’re really insecure and worried about not having official student status at parties, you’ll need to pay the piper. Tuition and sitting through classes are a small price for a well-off party junkie who can’t think of non-credentialing methods of having a good time. Go for it!

The parental pleaser
A lot of parents will be mad at you and ashamed to talk about you to their friends if you’re not in college. Luckily, most parents don’t care too much if you’re actually getting value out of the experience, as long as you’re enrolled and passing. If keeping mom and dad reasonably happy without challenging them to rethink what happiness means to you is your top priority, go to college. There’s nothing else with the same mystical power to elicit parental pride.

The college professor
If your dream is to be a professor, you’ve got to do your time. In fact, the entire education system top to bottom is optimized for the creation of professors. Every other profession to emerge from 20+ years of institutional education requires a deschooling process, because only academia plays by the same rules and incentives as the school system. All other industries are remarkably different, what with their accountability to customers and emphasis on value creation. If the system is your first love, and doing research and teaching within its walls your sole dream, do it. You can be an intellectual without a degree, but not a university-sanctioned professor.

The bureaucrat
Government isn’t known for rewarding merit, but it’s great at rewarding rule-following and form-filing. If you dream of reviewing building permits or vehicle registration documents, you’ll need a degree of some kind. The nice thing in this field is that the things you’ll do in school are pretty similar to what you’ll do at work. Comply and complain about the non-compliant. As an added perk, you really can’t be fired for being rude to everyone once you’re in.

The frightened 9-5er
If security sits atop your personal hierarchy of needs, and working for a big corporation with a massive HR department that specializes in sameness and risk-avoidance sounds like the life you’ve been waiting for, go to college. It’s changing, and a little faster than you’d probably like, but most big companies still filter out non-degreed applicants for entry level jobs that require a heavy dose of repetitive process-oriented labor. You’ll be competing with machines and software, but for the time being, there’s still a slot for you.

Everyone else
If you don’t fit into one of these categories, college may still provide some value, but it should in no way be considered the default option. There are myriad ways to tailor your own learning experience or gain skills, knowledge, and a network to discover and do what makes you come alive. College should be treated as one option among many, and no more or less valuable or open to scrutiny and cost-benefit analysis.

Are You Living on Purpose?

Humans are not like other earthly creatures.  We cannot live for only the biological imperative to survive and procreate.  Humans require purpose.  Lack of purpose is the greatest disease against which all of humanity must daily fight.  It is the one disease that will not and cannot be overcome by advances in medicine.

You can’t have purpose on accident

Our existence is couched in a series of accidents.  That we were born, when, where, and to whom are accidents (they were not accidents to our progenitors, but from our own point of view).  Our genetic structure is an accident.  The first language we hear, and therefore learn, and the first beliefs to which we are exposed, and therefore predisposed to, are accidents.  Purpose can not come from accidents.  We do not discover or live with purpose naturally, the way we grow physically.

None of these accidents are good or bad.  The simply are.  In your exploration and creation of purpose you may find that a meaningful life demands radical differences from the norms and beliefs in which you were raised.  You may find that it demands beliefs and norms almost identical to those in which you were raised.  Whatever the end result, the one consistent demand is that you choose it.  You cannot discover and live a purposeful life by simply following rules handed down to you, taking the path of least resistance, and sitting idly on the conveyor belt you were plopped on.  It’s not where it takes you that matters as much as who decided to go there.  If it was not your decision, you will never find fulfillment from it.

Suffering with and without purpose

Suffering is terrible.  It can also be valuable, in the same way the physical sensation of pain is valuable.  Without it we would soon die of unattended wounds.  Because pain is valuable doesn’t mean it’s noble or to be sought.  Psychological suffering is the same.

To suffer is no noble deed.  If the suffering is avoidable it’s a worthless or even cowardly thing to suffer.  If the suffering is unavoidable your response to it can be heroic.  There is nothing heroic about the suffering itself, but heroism can be found in someone who chooses to respond by finding meaning in unavoidable suffering.

Do not mistake your suffering for heroism.  If it’s at all avoidable, the heroic thing to do is to escape from it.  If not, create purpose in it.

There is no right decision

There is no decision that will give you purpose.  Your life is not a series of binary choices, with the door on the left leading to meaninglessness and the door on the right leading to purposefulness.  What you choose at each juncture of your life matters little compared to the fact that you, not someone else, choose.  You can’t find a perfect version of your purposeful life.  You have to create it by the undivided, definite choices you make.  Consciously choose to do things you value and find meaningful.  Consciously exit those that aren’t.  It doesn’t matter what you choose so much as that you choose.  Complaining about a path someone else pushed you down and against which you did not resist will not do.

Purposeful living is a process of exploration, experimentation, feedback, adjustment, and joy in the midst of it.  There is no pressure to get it right because there is no right.  There is better and worse, as determined by you.  It requires self-knowledge and self-honesty to find your own scale of better and worse.  It requires courage to abide by it.

Are you the 2%?

At any given moment 98% of us will choose – or rather not  choose – to live by default.  It is only the 2% who decide with definite purpose to act according to their own wishes who are really living.  How often are you among them?

The Limitations of Cost-Benefit Analysis

It’s easy to assume a simple cost-benefit analysis is always in order for every important decision.  I’ve found that the more important and radical the decision, the less valuable c-b analysis is.  It’s often little more than a way to complicate things, stall a decision, add stress, and provide cover for a choice your gut tells you is wrong but you fear to pick otherwise.

When I think about all the biggest decisions in my life they all had a moment of crisis where c-b ceased to bring any clarity and I was forced to answer one simple question – the only question that really matters – do I want to do this or don’t I?

Whether considering marriage, moving to a new city, having a child, starting a business, or any other major life-altering action, c-b analysis is probably distracting you from being honest about what you want and doing it.  It’s possible analyzing the pros and cons can help you discover what you really want, but far more likely you know with your knower already, but what you want is scary or unconventional or hard to explain or justify to others, so you look for additional ammunition or an out.  Push all the clutter aside.  Throw away your two columned pros and cons list.  Sit down with yourself in the quiet and ask, “Do I want to do this or don’t I?”  Sit in it.  Imagine what choosing no feels like.  Imagine what choosing yes feels like.  Which do you know deep down you want?

Once you honestly know the one-word answer to “Do I want this?”, commit.  Resolve to do it.  Take some action that holds you accountable to your commitment. (Tell someone in private, make it public, etc.)  The rest will follow.

Cost-benefit analysis is great for picking a web-hosting service or a tagline – decisions that don’t affect the core of your being and that have a lot of small differences worth exploring – but it’s woefully insufficient and even counter-productive for deciding which bold steps to take on your life journey.  None of the pros or cons can really be known with any degree of certainty, and all the best decisions have more unknowns than knowns, thus fewer items that can fruitfully be put on the ledger.

Trust your gut.  If you want it, go get it.  There is no such thing as the perfect choice, or the right choice.  There is only what you want to take a chance on and what you don’t.

Three Unpopular Beliefs

I have a number of beliefs that are outside the mainstream.  Probably the three most controversial are listed below.  These beliefs were hard to arrive at.  None of them came naturally or intuitively, and all of them are a fairly significant departure from what I once believed.  In many ways it would be easier if I did not believe these things.  Still, these three unpopular beliefs play defining roles in what I do, and how and why I do it.

  1. The deliberate instruction of children is a net-negative. (Unless they seek and choose it themselves.)
  2. Government is unnecessary.
  3. Efforts to improve your own life do more good for the world than efforts to do good for the world.

It’s Not About GDP

I’ve been thinking lately about GDP, and common ideas of economic progress more generally.

I just attended an event about the causes of and cures for poverty in the poorest countries.  So much of the discussion utilized comparisons between countries based on measures of GDP, GDP growth, and the like.  The more I thought about it, the less sense this made.  Not that GDP doesn’t decently correlate to overall wealth, opportunity, and progress – it does – but that it does less and less as technology and markets change.  GDP charts would fail to show, for example, the tremendous progress made in many poor countries by the fact that nearly everyone now has access to cell phones.  In fact, GDP does a bad job at measuring the progress of information/communication/data in general.

Consider MOOC’s and the abundance of free online learning.  Since the education industry is a chunk of GDP, putting it all out there for free can actually bring GDP numbers down, even as human well-being and human capital increase.

Think about other areas of misleading measures.  What you can do with a computer or smart phone in terms of sending data across the globe means fewer freight ships, the things easily measured in GDP calculations, but not less progress and opportunity.

Automation, information technology, decentralized networks, open-source…these make the world better and increase human flourishing, though they don’t do much for old-school metrics like employment and GDP.  Being listed as on the payroll of a company doesn’t always equal being better off (depending upon what else you might be doing of course), and having a larger number of physical objects to count doesn’t either.

For this reason, I don’t take much stock in those who lament slowed economic growth and fear it will bring an end to the complex market systems in countries like the US.  We used to consider farming the only thing that really mattered for economic well-being.  Then manufacturing.  As machines can do more of both of these, we humans can be redeployed in myriad ways previously unimagined.  Think about all the micro entrepreneurship going on today.  Think of crowdfunding for one-off projects.  I know authors who probably aren’t technically “employed” most of the time, if at all, and don’t produce GDP enhancing widgets, but they live wonderful lives by pitching book ideas on kickstarter, raising the money, travelling the world, doing the writing, and selling ebooks.  They may make aggregate data appear we’re economically worse off, but they’d rather not trade their life for one hoeing rows or assembling buggies.

The fact that no one quite knows how to calculate the value of the internet and other information age technologies probably causes us all to underestimate just how well-off we are today, and how bright the future is.  It’s the perfect time to seize the opportunity and do something new.  Carpe diem.

Escape

When was the last time you escaped?  I mean fully escaped into a wonder-inducing, awe-inspiring landscape, or sci-fi, or song?

Humans are meant to escape.  We are driven by the impulse to escape.  It’s what led us to multiply, fill the earth and attempt to subdue it.  It’s what drives us to space travel and interplanetary colonization.  It’s what allowed us to discover mind-altering substances and rituals.  It is not the avoidance of living, it is living.

We all have a deep longing for escape.  Escape is a kind of homecoming.  We all feel slightly out of place; we all have an urge to return home, whatever that might mean.  It is the drive to do this which lies at the back of all of our other impulses.  It’s a beautiful motivation.  It is making peace with life and death.  It is seeing beyond time and space.

I do not mean escape motivated by fear.  That is hiding.  I mean adventure motivated by the desire to escape in and of itself.  Escape requires boldness, persistence, vision, and integrity.  It is not cowardice but courage.

What are you escaping into?  What are you enraptured by?  Do you have the courage to follow it?  Your point of origin is not your destination.  Living is escaping.

Three Dangerous Words

“Must be nice.”

My friend and I have a longstanding joke where, no matter what reason one of us has to end a phone conversation, the other one says these three words with faked jealous anger.  The point is to get as absurd as possible and apply it to the worst situation.  “I’ve gotta run, the kids have smeared a dirty diaper on the walls!”….”Hey, must be real nice to be you man.”

It’s obvious how misplaced the sentiment is when purposely applied to extreme and negative circumstances, but the thing is, it’s always a misplaced sentiment.  A famous comedian (I can’t remember who) once said that he could have a giant brain tumor visibly protruding from his head and people would still claim he had it easy because of the millions he made on the last movie.  We don’t and can’t know the struggles of others.  We have no idea if their life would be nice.  It might be hell.

The worst part about the mentality that views others as having it easy is not that it misses their struggles, it’s that it increases your own.  At the heart of this sentiment is a mimetic desire – we want what we imagine other people want, simply because they want it.  This kind of desire blocks us from discovering our own true desires.  It clouds our vision and dampens our pleasure.  You assume that what they have is better than what you have.  When you dig down, the reason is more because they have it than any quality of whatever it is they have.

This reflects an abandonment of self and one’s own core values.  It means you are moving towards ‘be like others’ as a goal, and using other people as a measuring stick or standard against which to judge.  This is envy, and it is probably the most pernicious and destructive force in human society.  If you really make yourself discover what personal fulfillment looks like for you, and set that as your goal, devising your own standard to measure, you  will gain more from your own life and find that the apparent success of others adds to your life, rather than creating competitive pressure.

When you find yourself saying, “must be nice”, stop and consider what you actually know and what you mean.  Do you know that person is living a great life?  Would you actually want what they have and all the challenges that come with it?  Do you even know what it is you do want?  Unless they inspire you to discover and do what makes you feel alive, these three words aren’t doing you any good.

The Problem of School

The great problem of school is that it’s a constant search and effort to teach children all the things they’d learn naturally if they were not in school.  School removes children from the world – the natural learning environment – hence kids don’t pick up the skills and knowledge they need and want. Schools then struggle and attempt all manner of convoluted methods to replace the knowledge they prevent kids from acquiring.

None of these methods work as well as freedom. Remove kids from schools and the purported purpose of schools – educated children – will be realized.

Of course, it will be realized in great abundance, depth, and diversity. This flowering of individual plans and ideas is messy and threatening to moral busybodies and power hungry social planners. It prevents mass control and threatens the status quo with wild beauty and innovation. Liberty upsets patterns. That is precisely why it is so important.

Why I Don’t Care About Income Inequality

AbundanceSmartPhone

In the 1980’s if I told you for only a few hundred dollars anyone could have a $1 million asset in their pocket you’d call me crazy.  But here we are.

The chart above (actually a picture of a chart taken with my iPhone and uploaded to this blog with an app to further emphasize the point) is from the book Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler.  It illustrates why I think worry about and policy efforts aimed at changing differences in income between rich and poor are dumb, destructive, and miss the point by being stuck in a dead paradigm.

The above chart only scratches the surface.  It’s hard to comprehend just how much wealth (not income) we have today compared to 20, 30, or 50 years ago, let alone a century or two ago.  Anyone who complains that income gaps are growing misses the miracle under their nose of wealth exploding, and more accessible to individuals at any income level than ever before in human history.  50 years ago, it could take a hefty sum to launch and run a basic advocacy organization, for example.  You would need a secretary, long-distance phone line, office space, filing cabinets, a travel agent, a print shop that you’d have to visit to approve runs of literature (at least several thousand at a time), space to store them, shipping cost, etc. ad nauseum.  Today you can setup a WordPress website, bid out for design work on Fiverr or 99 Designs, get VistaPrint to run a few hundred after proofing a digital copy, book your own travel, store your own files, run email campaigns with MailChimp, etc. ad nauseum for a few hundred bucks.

Anyone can write and record songs, publish books, start businesses, sell goods and services, learn anything in the world, or meet people across the globe for free or close to it with a phone and some WiFi.  These things are equally accessible to rich and poor.  Wealth – as measured in opportunities and fulfilled desires, the real end of money – is greater than ever and flatter than ever.

The biggest obstacles are those erected by the wealthy to stymie competition from upstarts taking advantage of all this accessible capital.  Licensing requirements, regulations, wage laws, tax laws, immigration restrictions, intellectual monopoly status on non-scarce resources, and subsidized education and idleness are the biggest hurdles to the poor seizing the newly available wealth and creating a better life.  It’s not about income or even net worth.  It’s about what you can do and the value you can create and consume.  The chart above and the world around us indicate that there has never been a more broad and deep spread of wealth.

GDP doesn’t matter.  Neither does income.  Opportunity matters.  Value matters.  Times have never been better across the board, which is exactly what most threatens those precariously perched at the perceived top.  Don’t worry about them.  Let the doomsayers and wannabe warriors of equality clamber for an illusive goal that doesn’t make anyone better off.  Take advantage of the exponential growth in opportunity all around you.

The Cure is Not the Cause

A friend worked at a company that instituted a no cell phone policy during meetings. Apparently too many people were on their phones instead of paying attention.

If you look at it from an authoritarian standpoint as an organizer, the cause for lack of engagement was cell phone use.  But put yourself in the shoes of an attendee and you see that cell phones were not the cause of the problem, but the cure for it. The problem was boredom. The cause was too many or too long or not interesting enough meetings.

We see cures blamed as causes everywhere. Schools routinely blame whatever form of escape, entertainment, distraction, or even real learning that kids conceive to cope with the rigid soul-sucking structure of the system. From a top-down, black-and-white rulers standpoint, the answer is always more bans and more rules.

What would happen instead if we assumed rationality and no malintent on the part of the cell phone users or students?  What might their behavior reveal about the system or process?  If you run a business you can get mad at customers who don’t do what you want all you like, but attacking or placing restrictions on them is not a long term strategy for success in a competitive market. You must try to understand why they aren’t doing what you want and adapt your offerings.

When people are looking for an escape don’t block the exit.  Instead try to learn why they want out in the first place.

If You Did Vote, Don’t Complain

Sometimes people say, “If you didn’t vote, don’t complain.”  Nonsense.  Everyone can complain.  Complaining about pompous politicians and oppressive regulations doesn’t require participation in popularity lotteries.  In fact, if one were to stipulate who has less reason to complain, it would be those who do vote, not those who ignore the charade.

To the extent that voting is a kind of ascent to the political process, those who do it are implicitly agreeing to abide by the outcome.  I don’t really think voters can’t complain or that voting means you submit to any outcome of politics, but for many who believe in the process, the ritual is an attempt to cleanse oneself of guilt.  Your show of support for thug A means you can feel self-righteous when nearly identical thug B advocates bad things.  Yet it’s the process, the institutional setting itself not those elected within it, that creates the bad things.

Voting is not the way to cleanse yourself from guilt or attempt to achieve social objectives.  Many people argue that voting shows you are civic-minded and highly engaged.  This is a lot of horse manure.  Voting makes you less engaged, less humane, less civic-minded, and less effective at creating the kind of world you want to live in.  There are three primary reasons voting is problematic:

1) Sometimes it works.  If your candidate wins and implements the policy you like, you might feel good because now people will be told to do things the way you prefer.  But consider what this really means.  It means violence.  It means your preferred social change is being generated by force.  That’s an ugly reality any decent person should want to distance themselves from.  If you can’t get there peacefully, maybe you shouldn’t try to get there at all.

2) Whether or not it works, it has side-effects.  If your person or policy wins or loses, whatever political ploys are put into practice have myriad deleterious effects on the world.  Well-meaning minimum wage laws make the poor less employable.  Well-meaning environmental laws encourage waste, fraud, abuse, and price the poor out of many markets.  The list goes on.  You probably don’t know enough about the complex world to know the unintended consequences of top-down enforcement of any policy.  Let the more dynamic, adaptable, open social process figure out the trade-offs instead of a zero-sum either/or ballot box.

3) It reduces the incentive to engage in civil society.  When you vote for something you relieve the pressure to do something more meaningful.  Voting offers just enough satiation for your heart and mind so you can return to your regularly scheduled programming.  It makes people self-righteous and annoying.  It incentivizes signalling you care instead of figuring out how to really care enough to bring about change.  It turns friends into enemies.  It saps creativity by offering a brute, ham-fisted quick-fix.  If you get a bunch of kids together and they disagree about toys or rules of a game they’re less likely to find a creative solution if you also give them a magic authority hat that anyone who wins a vote can wear, thereby conferring the power to dictate all rules and dole out punishments and favors.  Voting makes us little barbarians.

Don’t let people tell you a good citizen must vote.  Quite the opposite.  Abstain, and get busy building your own life and world in a positive, productive, cooperative, and civilized manner.

The Problem of Forced Association

There’s a lot of ruckus over laws that either require or don’t require businesses and individuals to interact with each other.  Most of the discussion is focused on the identity of various parties in favor or opposed to the laws – gay couples, Christians opposed to gay marriage, liberal or conservative activists, etc.  It’s an ugly debate to watch.  Everyone is battling for control over the laws that determine who should associate with whom and under what conditions.  The real problem is not which people like and dislike which other people.  The real problem is the acceptance of forced association as a concept.

Forced association is any kind of social, civil, or commercial interaction that is hemmed in by force rather than choice.  It demands inclusion and exclusion based on rules passed down from authorities, rather than the free interplay of autonomous individuals.  Immigration restrictions are a form of forced association (in this case dis-association).  So are most anti-discrimination laws.  The idea that your social network must be determined for you is destructive of genuine community, and breeds hatred.  Everyone is left fighting over the rules and calling names instead of simply choosing to interact or not interact with whomever they wish.  How do you manage your Facebook friends?  Imagine if there were laws dictating certain people you were not allowed to friend, or certain pages you had to follow, or that you must treat all friend requests equally no matter who they came from?  A terrible recipe for genuine and meaningful interaction, friendship, and exchange of ideas.

Yet in society at large nobody seems to question forced association.  And why should they?  After all, most people have been conditioned since age 5 to accept a social scene tightly dictated by authority figures, not chosen by themselves.  School is forced association.  You must be with people the same age and zip code all day every day.  You can’t freely wander the halls and pop in and out of classes.  You can’t shop for teachers or friends or mentors across the entire community.  You get your cinder block cell with your pre-assigned seat and social group.  Better hope you find someone to get along with.

Bullying is a phenomenon borne almost entirely out of age-restricted groupings.  The response is never to allow kids to exit the cohort, or class, or school district, or school altogether.  That would work.  But it would mean free association.  Free association is too dangerous.  What if kids don’t become the widgets we want to fashion them into?  Instead efforts to stop bullying are just like the absurd efforts to curb rudeness in society with laws of forced association.  It’s a battle over who gets to define the bully, the victim, the reporting process, the burden of proof, the new rules, the banned items and words, the sensitivity training, the punishments, and who gets to be the ruler of the forced association.

Forced association is ugly, inhumane, and barbaric in all its forms.  As long as people are raised in environments of forced association it should come as no surprise that when they encounter a jerk they immediately begin a debate over what rules should force the jerk to behave differently and why.  Debates over who the real victim is erupt.  Some side with the jerk, some side with the others.  Crowdfunding campaigns and public debates and interviews and one-upsmanship and absurd hypothetical and real court cases emerge.  The whole spectacle is dirty, rude, vicious, and pernicious.

No one needs to make rules for who can or must associate with whom and in what way.  Free association can and will do a better job of sorting out all the conflicting beliefs and behaviors of members of society than any plan or rule.  Break from the mentality you’ve been raised with.  Apply the mentality you use on Facebook.  Forced association is never the answer.