> Most people are not risk-takers and are mainly status-seekers. They live their lives in ways to reflect this and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But there is always the niggling feeling for many (I am one) that while I may be making the "smart" choice the real reason I don't do something like this is that I am afraid.
This very much resonates with me. I've built up healthy bit of equity (few hundred thousand), earn double the average wage, and own my own home (mortgaged), I'm still young and have no kids. I really do hold all the cards to take more risks, but I don't. And I very much feel like a status-seeker, not in the social media popularity contest sense, but in the sense that I don't want other people to see me as a failure. That makes the status of a senior job at a big firm, living in an own house in the capital city something to be afraid of losing.
It also resonates with me that trying to iterate on my quality of life, e.g. finding a bigger purpose, passions etc, probably isn't going to happen while working the job that I do. It consumes much of my week and energy, and I find I have little energy or interest to seriously pursue 'big thoughts'. I still enjoy my life quite a bit, but it feels pretty mundane.
So I can very much imagine that quitting my job would be the only realistic path to a different life.
I'm not at all hostile to these ideas, in fact I support them. And I'd gladly read about them in a succinct article. Yet I found the writer to come across as overly intellectual, self aggrandizing, and at times downright weird and full of nonsense.
Here's a direct quote from the article, I'm sure that it speaks to something and to someone, and I'm sure I can find meaning in the analogies and examples, but it's not the type of writing I appreciate:
> Yes, even the bane of Darwin’s faith—the humble ichneumon wasp that lays its maggots inside the living bodies of caterpillars to eat them from the inside and burst out on maturity like some alien xenomorph—is a beautiful creature with a sacred task. Like many parasites, its role in the great chain of being is to test the health and defenses of its caterpillar host population. Its predation weeds out the sickly, preventing the much uglier injustice of collective weakness and disease, and spurring the evolution of stronger and even more beautiful life. Even fearsome Nemesis, born from chaos via night and darkness, is ultimately the hand of God and the minister of justice. Even the supposed exceptions to justice prove its rule.
There's seven references to God, for example. I'm not just interested in this type of writing style or type of magazine. I think that's what most people trip over, not the basic message, nor half of the philosophising surrounding it.