The Next 5 Years of Other Life (Part 1)

This month last year, I wrote you the following:

All of American high culture is up for grabs.

I said the Other Life community would focus on reading the greatest works, deepening our reading and writing, and continue cultivating genuine high-signal exchange across online and IRL events.

We ran a total of 21 distinct events in 2024—mostly focused on classical, philosophical, and theological texts. We explored Diogenes' cynicism, Seneca's meditations, Plutarch's biographies, Samuel Johnson's essays, and the fragmentary metaphysics of Heraclitus. We read Aeschylus, the entirety of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals and the entirety of John’s Gospel. And a few others.

Most of these meetings were online, but some were IRL. Unforgettably, about 30 people came to the annual meetup in Wyoming, at the Wagon Box Inn. Plus a few fun meetups in Austin, TX. Some members even moved here.

Also in 2024, I began publishing a monthly print newsletter. With these letters I’ve shared some of the biggest and best ideas I’ve ever discovered, in the most concentrated and fun-to-read format I’ve ever created. The response from readers has been extremely positive, Vox.com featured my letters in a recent story, and I’m quite proud of the pieces I mailed out. I spent about 20-30 hours on each one, researching and then condensing them artfully. But I missed many of the deadlines and failed to ship quite a few months. This was one of my biggest failures in 2024. But the reason is that I’ve been working overtime on something that will bring Other Life into a new level of professional stability for many years to come. I’m grateful for your patience and I think you’ll be pleased with what it means.

With everything we accomplished last year, I believe we are doing what I said we would do: we are becoming one of the most focused, thoughtful, and excellent private societies of thinkers, writers, and creators in America—building projects, audiences, families, and businesses together.

I continue to believe that what I call “the independent scholar” represents the future of the scholarly vocation—one that synthesizes technological leverage, economic autonomy, and pure truth-seeking into not just a new kind of business model, but a new form of life. After five whole years of wild experimenting—”moving fast and breaking things”—I’m now cementing.

But a few of the biggest and craziest lessons came in the past year (hence my radio silence for some big chunks of it), and I’ve hardly shared a word about them in public.

So in this three-part series, I’m going to bring you up to speed on WTF I’ve been doing the past year during my several prolonged interruptions of our regular programming.

Part 2 will send out Thursday morning, and Part 3 Saturday morning. By the end of Part 3, you’ll understand where I’ve been and where this whole thing is going.

At the beginning of 2024, a little bit of consulting work fell into my lap. Totally unsolicited. Media stuff, branding stuff, a little writing, etc. Incredible project, a cool assignment, great pay, just a little bit of time, it was a no-brainer “yes.” But it turned out I’m not bad at this stuff… I helped this company seed a little cult following, so that opportunity naturally expanded, and then before I knew it other companies were asking me for help. I realized there was a big opportunity here, I got very lucky to meet a great potential partner, and so about 3 months ago I started building a second company. With this company I can potentially serve any company that comes knocking, while also building capacity for the Other Life operation. This was a chance for me to build a team (and a larger profit engine) without forcing Other Life itself to grow big and fast.

I claimed victory for the indie scholar business model when I crossed $100k/year (2023). That doesn’t mean I want to stall at that income level, but it also doesn’t mean my own writing and teaching have to be exclusively load-bearing for my family’s entire financial future! The Other Life company (my own writing and teaching as a new kind of professor on the internet, and the business model around that) will continue to make good money, but the key insight I had in 2024 was that I don’t actually have to “scale” Other Life at all. I can just add essentially one new offering to the mix, which is expensive and geared to businesses. And I can build substantially greater wealth immediately, with a small team, while preserving Other Life as a relatively pure, personal vehicle for my own calling. I don’t need to become another hypergrowth content mill selling pop-philosophy insights to middle-managers or whatever. I can just keep pursuing my own weird vision in my own way.

I was too scared to write you in the past 3 months because I wasn’t sure if it was going to work. I’m writing you now because, well, it’s working. We only have a few clients and for the past month, we have been revivifying Other Life with a professionalism it frankly has never had at any time in the past. I’m now spending most of my time on Other Life while my partner holds down our client logistics, doing much of it himself and telling me what I have to do. I now believe—and I write about this in the book—this was the final boss of the indie scholar game all along: just include a business-facing offering, find a partner, and scale your income without having to scale your “content.” This way the indie scholar stays pure, maximally high-brow, maximally niche, and maximally free.

So I’m 100% convinced this was the right move for me. The next 10 years now look brighter than ever, but the transition was chaotic and I dropped a lot of balls…

If you pre-ordered the Independent Scholar book you’ll notice shipping has been delayed. Again I’m terribly sorry, I was cocky and quite sure it was ready to ship but a final review opened up a few cans of worms. It's 100% coming. I'm pushing to the finish line as we speak, I just wanted to write this update before I leave anyone hanging even another day.

To make good on the chaos of this year—since Other Life no longer needs to hit any particular revenue goal—I'm basically just going to take extremely good care of all current and past paying members and customers. I already told dues-paying members will get the physical book sent to them for free. But more broadly, in 2025 as we cement the core vision of this community and relaunch a few high-value initiatives, I’m going to send some free gifts and extreme discounts to pretty much anyone who’s paid for anything in the past. In honor of the fact that my biz operations have been so volatile in Stage One of this crazy adventure. Stage Two is cementing and cleaning up messes, and with that I’m just going to generally shower past and present supporters with generosity in 2025, as we re-launch all of our main initiatives (and money is not currently a priority).

In the next two installments, I’ll fill in some more details and sketch the vision for 2025—and beyond.

2025 is the year of the independent scholar. The experimentation stage is over. You will read more than ever, you will write more than ever, you will advance further down original research agendas than ever, and you will make more money than ever (but that won’t even be the most important thing).

Check your email Thursday for the next installment. And if you pre-ordered the book, just hang tight a little bit longer. Thanks everyone for your patience. It’s been a wild ride, but I think the growing pains are about to be over.

Sincerely,

Justin Murphy