The Next 5 Years of Other Life (Part 3)

Sorry my wife gave birth a week earlier than we expected! So that’s cool. And we have a new President now. Hopefully that will be cool. The vibes feel very off to me but let’s wait and see. Anyway, where was I?

Now that I don't have to force Other Life revenue growth, my goal for the next 5 years is to take the indie scholar lifestyle, which I’ve minimally validated, and perfect it. To simplify it down to its essence, to prune off all the conceptual and operational ‘debt’ it’s accumulated, to make the operations more stable and consistent and cumulative—and then to aim it as high as possible, and just keep pushing forward. But as slowly and tastefully as I please, since I no longer need Other Life to make significantly more money on any kind of schedule.

I fully expect that Other Life will grow into a 7-figure business. But it will be a work of art first; it will be the most correct and beautiful vehicle for what I’m here to do, and then it will grow at its own pace. But it will grow, and I don’t see any obvious ceiling on its potential. But for right now, all I care about is cleaning up the operation and making it the most excellent exemplar of the indie scholar lifestyle and business model.

The past two years in particular solidified for me what this entire post-academic adventure has been, especially since I wrote that post about a return to the masters. This was a major inflection for me personally and it produced great results in the community over the past year. Many of us together really did significantly increase our reading quality and quantity, some of the seminars produced genuinely original insights worthy of a top graduate seminar, and these insights came through in the long-form writing of members and also my own—even in print, totally DIY, through the print newsletter. It’s even turned out to be a pretty good business model. My shipping was very inconsistent, that was my biggest failure, but that’s fixed now. Once the book is shipped, I’m quite confident we’ll be running the most serious, dedicated, and steady little community for independent scholars in the world. A high-signal printed letter every month, a monthly book club / graduate seminar, and an active community with recurring online and IRL touchpoints dedicated to building what is essentially a new kind of lifestyle, identity, and habitus.

Though my own calling has always been clear to me, it’s really my core ‘service’ to others that I’ve struggled badly to figure out. At first I launched several courses and organized several lecturers—perhaps my service would be to create a structure like that—but for several reasons that turned out to be a wrong path. At many points I thought I’d play some pre-existing genre of ‘content creator,’ like maybe I’d go all in on being a newsletter writer or focus on being a YouTuber or podcaster or whatever. But I could never do it. Nothing ever clicked for me. I remember there was one year when the podcast was inflecting, and in the course of a few months multiple people referred to me as a “podcaster,” and each time my heart sank and I physically contorted. I don’t know why exactly. That’s just not who I am. I don’t want to be a podcaster or a Youtuber or any of these things per se; all I’ve ever wanted is genuine, untouchable mental freedom, a lot of time to read and write, some independently-owned ways to send my creative work to smart people around the world, and enough money to raise a family securely.

So I never settled in anywhere. I never slotted myself into anything. And the result is that I’m nothing, I’m a nobody. With respect to every currently existing category, I’m a non-entity. I have a hearty email list but it’s meager compared to the pro Substackers. I’m an author but my first book was just a warmup. I have fans on Youtube but I’m negligible in those terms, etc.

In stubbornly clinging to my life as a nobody—by refusing to be somebody—I have finally become myself. I took Deleuze and Guattari literally when they said:

I have largely achieved what I intended, and though I remain a nobody in every possible way, I am definitively the world’s leading figure in a category of my own creation. I’m the first indie scholar who called his shot in advance and lived to write the book about it.

And so my core ‘service’ to the world is now more clear. The Other Life Company has already been doing it, but now it’s more legible to me… The mission is simply to provide the educational, psychological, and sociological infrastructure necessary for the next generation of independent scholars to blossom. To bootstrap a new republic of letters, suited to the decentralized 21st-century cultural economy. The agency wing I described previously is effectively running the same playbook, but as a done-for-you service. It’s all essentially the same because—from now on—anyone who wants to earn a slice of high-status mindshare—whether they’re a lone thinker or a founder or a company—must be able to find, formulate, and publish some kind of real alpha on a regular basis. And indie scholars are essentially specialists in real alpha, though not always of the directly investable kind. Founders and investors bet on specific forms of big commercial alpha, but every serious organization in the world needs people who know how to regularly collect free-floating alpha and creatively publish alpha-laden works to some kind of audience or another. Indie scholars optimize for real alpha in precisely the same way that academics optimize for the citation index (a proxy for real alpha). What people have not realized yet is that even the most implicit and illiquid alpha—and even just the capacity to find and formulate it—now trades on the market directly. As a result, indie scholars will increasingly become high-status free agents in the economy, occupying fluid but well-paid and essential roles of the most creative and rewarding type, sometimes part-time, sometimes as co-founders, and everywhere in between.

OK… this 3 part series will actually be 4 parts... I have to run but I really wanted to publish something today. So I’m just clicking send.

And I’ve hardly even mentioned AI, crypto, or zero-knowledge proofs! Crazy times we’re in.

More soon.

In the final post, I’m going to share the specific agenda for this year. I’ll lay out the books we’ll be reading, discuss what’s happening with the course, etc.

But I’ll give you a hint... This year, I’m declaring war. I’m declaring war on the single most predatorial and cursed element in the modern academic system. Do you know what that is? It’s a sitting duck. It’s the most dishonorable specific thing in all of academia, and even most academics agree about this privately. It’s a scam in the multi-hundred-millions and I think I’m now at a point where I’ve earned the right to take aim at it. Can you guess what I’m talking about?

Sincerely,

Justin Murphy

PS: If you’re a paying subscriber you will receive the print book FOR FREE (don’t buy it), some very serious gifts later in the year, and a special print letter every month come Hell or high water. I’m grateful for your patience, I’ve used it wisely and as I’ve said I’m going to make this year really interesting and rewarding for anyone who has supported my work. The January issue going out soon is about the 12th-century monk who basically invented reading (what we call “reading” today is essentially communication with God and it actually doesn’t make sense any other way; I learned this insane fact recently from Ivan Illich’s In the Vineyard of the Text. You’ll see.