Embracing the Pathless Path
Standing up for our lifestyle deepens our character and inspires in us a faith that we belong
— James Burgess, Sabian Symbols: An old adobe mission
The pathless path is a termed coined by Paul Millerd about forgoing the typical 9-5. In his book, The Pathless Path, Millerd writes:
The pathless path is an alternative to the default path. It is an embrace of uncertainty and discomfort. It’s a call to adventure in a world that tells us to conform.
I first heard about the concept of the pathless path from Youtuber Ali Abdaal. On Twitter, it was considered the norm to be unemployed or self-employed. Hustle bros were all against the idea of a 9-5. Meanwhile, I was still in my 9-5, trying to convince myself that I was providing value to society and that this was the path for me. Little did I know that things would soon change.
The pathless path is an interesting but scary concept for the working class. Asking someone to abandon their stable job in pursuit of their greater dreams despite not knowing where it will lead, is a concept that many still scoff at. The respect and acknowledgment only comes when someone has made it. The majority will not encourage you to pursue the pathless path and opposition to the idea is common.
The pathless path is scary not just because of the financial repercussions but because you’re on your own. It’s your own journey. Your reputation falls back to no one but only you alone, as Naval writes:
The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single-player.
Life does not feel like a single-player game when you’re working a 9-5 job, but it sure does when you’re on the pursuit of a pathless path.
Taking the Pathless Path Is like That of a Fool
In order to be wise one must first be content to be a fool. The fool is as its namesake, foolish. The fool is one of the many archetypes we see in stories and movies today, where the fool sets out on a journey that is unknown.
On the pathless path, one starts to get more well acquainted with one’s interests and passions. It is no longer possible to repress those lofty ambitions and big dreams that you have by working tirelessly for someone else.
One of the ways of making use of that spare time is by drawing pictures to concretise your reality. What happens in your inner world is of much importance as what happens outside of you. When you acknowledge what is within, you’ll get a clearer idea on the direction you should be taking. As Carl Jung once said in Visions Seminars, V1:
[Drawing pictures] helps one to concretize inner events. Most people suffer from the prejudice that [inner events] are not real because they cannot be handled, or even talked about in a logical way.
In such a case the drawing is invaluable. It concretizes; it makes a statement so that other people can see it. It is there in reality as if painted on the wall; one begins to think that it does exist.
If drawing is not your forte, I personally find that having a vision board helps. Taking inspiration from people you look up to can help to give you an idea of what it is you really want. It doesn’t have to be exact and identical but it helps. Borrowing inspiration from others does not make you a fraud. In fact, according to David Perell,
The surest sign of an amateur is somebody who is afraid to imitate people who inspire them
Along the pathless path, one starts to see the various contradictions in our circumstances and our psyche. This can wreck havoc on how we cope with the uncertainty and unpredictability of our situation. But contradictions and uncertainty are part of the package. They are there to guide and help us, aiding us in getting rid of anything that does not serve us. This pushes us to embrace who we are, which requires courage. The courage to accept who we are despite the cacophony of those around us who might disagree with the road we’re taking.
The reason why the majority finds it hard to process the concept of the pathless path is because in their mind, they equate being unemployed with being lazy. This sort of either-or thinking lacks nuance. And as Jungian analyst James Hollis once said:
An authentic journey will ask us to embrace contradictions, suffer ambiguity, and not fall into either-or thinking, which is so characteristic of the immature or the frightened mind.
If anything, taking the long road or the pathless path may in fact prove to be worthwhile when we look back with a deep sense of confidence that it is not something that was forced on us by anyone. In fact, "An Authentic path may take longer but the moves and impact are forever legendary."
Taking the pathless path saves us our precious time. If life truly is a single-player game and no one really has your best interest at heart despite their best of intentions, you might as well quit what is not for you.
In one of his Tweets, Naval wrote:
In physical domains (diet, workouts), consistency is king.
In intellectual & social domains, wins are rare, sudden, and nonlinear - 99% of effort is "wasted."
Once we find our ideal spouse, career, friends, we realize how much time we squandered by not moving on sooner.
This doesn’t just apply to time, as studies have shown the irreversible damage that stress does to our bodies. You can lose your money and earn it back again, but you can never buy back time and you can never reverse the damage done to your health. The time that we have spent on things that don’t matter just to buy things that also don’t matter would be better spent elsewhere.
Taking the pathless path is also a form of self-respect when you’re still young. Not enough has been said on the exploitation of young workers in companies that seek to hire them because of the abundance of energy they have given their age. Quitting in most cases is the ideal solution for someone who is being exploited, but many hesitate and delay transitions simply because change is always uncomfortable and hard. When we were young we were taught to not talk to strangers but really, much has changed in society that talking to strangers isn’t the worst case scenario. What we’ve never been taught is the value of walking away when a stranger becomes a threat to our being. And so it is when our jobs become a threat to who we are as individuals, do we know when to walk away?
This links to the next point of walking away from our jobs when it no longer fulfils our needs. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, when our physiological needs are met, there is a need to get our other needs satisfied. You can pay someone a hefty sum of money but if their other needs are not being met, you can bet that they will eventually leave.
The Pain of Starting Over
Walking away from a 9-5 job can be daunting especially when we’ve invested time and effort into a role that we’re familiar with. But the fact is, the longer you stay in a job or a relationship, the harder it is to leave, which also means that you will be making the same mistakes and repeating the same cycles throughout your stay.
As Paul Graham mentioned in one of his Tweets:
Mistakes become very hard to fix once they're embodied in jobs. The people whose jobs they are become highly motivated advocates for the continuance of the mistake.
Changing your way of doing something is hard when you’ve been so accustomed to how you’ve been doing it for the past few years. More so when there are systems in place that are not forgiving to new methods of doing the same tasks. Most of us do not realise how restrictive and mind numbing our jobs are because we’ve never cared to envision a role where we are not told what to do and how we should carry out our tasks. You’d think that envisioning such a role would be freeing and liberating but the most common reaction is fear.
So instead of confronting our deep seated fears of never fulfilling our potential or achieving our dreams, we settle for our comfortable cubicle and rationalise with ourselves that this is a better option. Most of us feel a great sense of adventure about venturing into the unknown before we are again plagued by the horror of potentially failing. Most of us have a blurry vision for what we want out from our lives, but as Dean Abbott said:
It's not that you have no direction in life. It's that, deep down, you don't feel adequate to pursue what you want.
For years, we’ve been conditioned and programmed to listen to or follow voices that are not our own that we’ve gradually learnt to silence our own voices. Before you quote some cliché saying like “follow your dreams”. You must first be sure that that dream is truly yours and not of someone else.
Stepping out of our comfort zones while listening to our inner voice takes courage, but it’s easier said than done. You need the gradual stirring and churning of something within you to nudge you into action. The masses are unlikely the ones who will heed this call, but a small minority will. The urge and instinct to heavily rely and depend on something outside of yourself for validation and acceptance is the opium of the masses. As mentioned by Naval:
To me, the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don’t even play the game, who rise above it. Those are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness, they need nothing from anybody else.
The first step is to stop listening to everyone. When I was in Jungian Analysis, my then analyst pointed out that I was constantly echoing what everyone around me were saying. I was subconsciously allowing others to dictate my choices and I didn’t know it. I thought I had an independent mind and a strong sense of self. Well, it wasn’t strong enough. I knew what I wanted, but it was so hard to untangle the different things I was hearing. Learning to pay attention to what my soul wanted was the first step, and the next step, was to stop listening to everyone and everything else.
Books like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck have gained mainstream popularity because the masses really care about how others perceive them. Contrary to the norm, someone who is more rebellious and cares less about what others think of them are also more likely to pursue a pathless path.
As stated by Betrand Russell in Power: A New Social Analysis:
Something of the hermit's temper is an essential element in many forms of excellence, since it enables men to resist the lure of popularity, to pursue important work in spite of general indifference or hostility, and arrive at opinions which are opposed to prevalent errors.
As always, some people do have more advantages or shall I say, privilege over others where quitting a 9-5 job would be an easier decision than others. If you’re young with minimal obligations, there are less hindrances in the equation. Particularly if you’re a nobody with nothing to lose. Years ago, someone told me a joke by a backslidden Christian who said: “I’ve already backslidden, now I’m just sliding on the floor.” At that level, a backslidden Christian has technically got nothing to lose (besides their life). And so it is with the pathless path, that “if you start from a position of loss, you have nothing to lose further.”
At the end of the day, like Jonathan Bree sings, we should:
Find solace in the privilege to pursue
Most people are crushed into servitude