The way to get out of wage slavery: more work?

[StarStruck]

So you have the start your own thing, that will require more work than a normal wage slave job, and then what? The only way to work less so one has time for spirituality and fun is make your business so big that you can hire people, let them work for you so you can work less. No? 

I’m in IT so I can’t do that anyway. It will be an one man thing. I will need at least 10 years of experience before I will have enough capital and experience to start my own gig. 

Even working for myself in IT has a lot of risks. Perhaps if I develop very high skills I could work 3 days per week. That would be ideal. The remainder of the week could be used for self actualization. 

[Razard86]

1 hour ago, StarStruck said:

So you have the start your own thing, that will require more work than a normal wage slave job, and then what? The only way to work less so one has time for spirituality and fun is make your business so big that you can hire people, let them work for you so you can work less. No? 

I’m in IT so I can’t do that anyway. It will be an one man thing. I will need at least 10 years of experience before I will have enough capital and experience to start my own gig. 

Even working for myself in IT has a lot of risks. Perhaps if I develop very high skills I could work 3 days per week. That would be ideal. The remainder of the week could be used for self actualization. 

You can be a freelance web designer, video editor, coder, in fact coding would probably be the best field maybe go into Machine Learning...

[supremeyingyang]

Hello @StarStruck
you described concerns I have as well as I work also in IT. You need to work harder to flee the plantation, but you can only work a certain number of hours. You can only level up via learning, meaning real quality study time. Even then the odds are not too good that you make more and very unconvincing that you make enough to get out of the whole game in, lets say, 5 years.

Paul Graham wrote in an Essay (idk which) that to get rich you need to compress the work of 20 Years into 2 Years. You do this by work insane long hours and by being more effective. However, in many companies that's already kind of expected and you won't get rich from it as you need to spend more. Recently a colleague asked me why I would not wear a suit all the time. I mean I could, but it would cost more than the cloths. You need to iron the shirts, go to the dry cleaner... and buy more suits. Younger people in my company start this trend to buy E-Bikes and E-Cars and fancy houses. And I? I live still like a student, except that I afford to eat much better and buy better/more learning material. What I want to say is this: It's cool where I'm at, but I won't be financially free even if I would work the insane hours and skill up.

And I'm still 3+ Years from being skilled enough to do freelancing, then I would need to do that for some years... what if the opportunity to build a business slips by? If it becomes too comfy to leave? Scary. I honestly can't sleep some nights because it freaks me out, the idea to become a fat man in a SUV, who hates live.

You get me?

Edited July 26, 2022 by supremeyingyang

[thepixelmonk]

IT is one of the best fields you can be in lol, I'm super glad it's where I'm at, I can work from my laptop anywhere in the world and make enough money to live on with part-time hours, almost any other industry I'd be tied down to some shit office job somewhere.

[Ariesleith]

@StarStruck I was thinking about this by chance, and I think that it is entirely the wrong way to think of wealth generation-true abundant wealth that is-as simply working really hard. I came to think in my line of reasoning that it is more likely that uber successful people in fact work less and less hard than average wage slave. It is not that they are working hard at all. It is that they are almost doing the opposite of that: thinking. One cannot sit down and work really hard on thinking, it comes through leisure and relaxation. We can see historically that this is validated with the Greeks and the Romans (they had clear achievements not only in wealth) both of which had a huge percentage of slaves in the population. Close to or actually half of the people, while the masters where able to spend plenty of time relaxing. With Thales the first philosopher being also a great Entrepeneur, there is to my mind a deep similarity between entrepreneurship and philosophy-philosophy being love of wisdom or the pursuit of truth. Through relaxation, counter intuitively, we can make way more money supposing that we don't simply watch tik-Tok and eat hot Cheetos. We should obviously be disciplined, but the real question is discipline enough? I say absolutely no. We need more than hard work to be intelligent and independent in our thoughts. To do that is not simply a matter of working hard alone, it is almost like an indifference that allows us to pursue what we want to create regardless of the practicality or even our own immediate survival. For Elon Musk to say we are going to colonize mars is the kind of indifference to practical concerns I mean. Although hopefully it goes without saying that you need to 'work hard' also, whatever that really means. 

[Vision]

On 27/07/2022 at 7:56 AM, thepixelmonk said:

part-time hours, almost any other industry I'd be tied down to some shit office job somewhere.

@thepixelmonk How many hours do you work?

Is IT the only industry where you can have this much flexibility?