I am going to disagree with Aaron. Not on the minimalism: keeping your expenses down is always a good idea. And having autonomy in your job and activities allows you to think about good ideas.

And allows you to develop them. When your time is micro managed, you cannot think laterally and sort out problems. And that environment is to be avoided: avoiding the corporate drones is one reason I work for a university, in a job which is not normal.

Authors and anecdotes aside, the truth is that if you’re constantly occupied with a 9-to-5, mind-numbing job, you won’t have the time, energy, or desire to pursue any dreams you might have. But if you are a minimalist, working barely 10 hours per week, the human mind will find something else to do with the remaining 30. And usually what it picks isn’t mind-numbing or boring, but your hobby, your interest, and your passion. And in being your passion, it will inspire you to dedicate even more time to it than you would a normal job, thereby ensuring its uniqueness and quality. And it is high-quality, unique things that act as a lightning rod to riches.

There is no guarantee, of course, that you will make it rich sitting inside your studio apartment, drinking Weasel whiskey, smoking cigarettes, contemplating the next great work of fiction or “Angry Birds” app for smartphones. But it is a guarantee that you stand better chances of becoming a millionaire than the mass-produced MBA slaving away 80 hours a week, hoping for that promotion, as his employer secretly files for bankruptcy

I would add that if you get one really good idea every two to three years, you are doing well. If you are able to take those ideas and make something of them, you are doing very well, and if you can make money from them you are rare. For most of us, doing some kind of work is needed, if for no other reason than to keep our brains from rusting. Says me on holiday.

While I am looking around the net (I will walk in a while, when I will not be burned to a crisp — which is what happens at the moment when I go to the car) consider this from Henry Dampier, who has the SJW to rights. They want to be the elite without the responsibility.

The American caste that Moldbug calls the Brahmins does this for a living: agitating for equality, and earning a cut of the enormous transfer payments that shuffle from person and institution to person.

The notion that the better classes have obligations to the poor, and that the poor have obligations to their superiors, combined by legal rights appropriate to each, is a self-stabilizing system. Since many of the factors that separate rich from poor are determined by nature and fortune, it’s a sanity check for everyone involved to relate to one another appropriately as befits our real capabilities and duties to one another. Even aristocrats revert to the mean, and all great houses crumble to nothing over time, which humbles all of us.

Extending these rights and duties beyond what a sovereign can provide — the tendency of universalism — is another topic, but I won’t get into it here. Suffice to say for now that law isn’t free, each legal right has a cost, and since we want to preserve civilization, we ought to use all the mechanisms that worked in the past to reduce the costs of law enforcement as much as possible.

One of the things that the elite manage to give themselves is time out. Be it better work hours, a less noxious boss or none at all, sabbatical time, or a trust account — they have time to agitate, time to organize, and time to work out how best to regulate the productive classes into impotence.

We should not be like them. We need to run our budgets with enough time to take a day out every week: to recover, to think. We need to cherish our humanity more than our bank balance. This is the proper method of honouring the Sabbath: for if we take not the time to recover and think we will be forced into this by being doxxed out of our jobs, our health breaking, or our now remarkably unproductive economy imploding.