Two kinds of hustle

To get the kind of life I want, or anywhere close to it, I realize I'm going to have to hustle like crazy. But one thing that's become immediately clear to me is that working hard has profoundly variable effects on well-being, conditional on what the work means to the worker. This is, of course, Nietzsche's observation in that famous line from Twilight of the Idols:

Academia can be quite cushy after you work hard to secure yourself there, but if I now want something better, I have to hustle again in a way that I thought was behind me. Even after I got "the British version of tenure," I was still hustling more than I needed to, just because of how I am. For the next twenty years, I would probably hustle like crazy regardless, whether I'm in a cushy institutionalized environment or doing some weird combination of intellectual work and entrepreneurial activity. In academia, I was constantly irritated and depressed while hustling to get various tasks done, so that I could have some time each day to do the work that mattered to me. Since my academic employment was thrown into question and my time opened up, especially because we are trying to have a child, I am now hustling harder than I ever have to ensure we come out of this okay. But now, it actually feels great, because at least 50% of my effort right now, while I'm still getting a paycheck, is trying to figure out any possible way I can make my intellectual work on the internet financially sustainable enough to be my primary occupation. I have no idea what my chances are, and if it's not possible then whatever — I'll just get some new job — but basically I have like a 1-2 month(s) period where I can afford to test out every harebrained scheme I've ever had for achieving financial sustainability via independent intellectual work. I've brainstormed a lot of ideas over the past few years, but never had the time or energy to test them seriously. So now I have nothing to lose, and much to gain, by testing them all. It all boils down to the question of how I can leverage my new intellectual independence from academic institutions to create new kinds of value.

Experiment 1 is testing if there's greater demand in the public for these monthly seminars I've been doing for patrons. The patrons seem to value it so far, so it's not unreasonable to think there might be a handful of people floating around out there who would also want something like this. If I could get even, say, 6 new signups in the next couple of months — I'd take that as a very promising signal that that could become one part of a viable independent work model for me. It'd only be a start but I could reasonably expect to build it out and grow it. Experiment 2 will very likely be a self-published book. I've been reading about publishing trends and the subreddit r/selfpublishing and I've been watching many interesting self-publishing experiments over the past couple of years, and so I've been very excited about eventually trying something. Now seems like as good a time as any! As I discussed in my recent livestream, I would like to try writing and self-publishing a book about academia and the internet — compiling all my observations and experiences, telling my whole recent story (which I'm being told to keep confidential), weaving it with larger theoretical and empirical reflections on the semantic apocalypse, reality forking, etc. I would like it to be fairly short and punchy, fun to read, not a big serious tome or anything. I am excited about theorizing and strategizing a launch plan (entrepreneurship is pretty fun to be honest). I think I would either plan a Kickstarter campaign, or possibly just write the damn thing and sell it via Amazon or Gumroad (like Eli). What's a good title for such a book? Please reply if you think of one. I plan to do some A/B testing, but if you make a suggestion I like then I'll include it in my A/B tests. Here are titles I'm currently toying with:

1. Retard Vacation

2. How Academia Got Pwned

3. How to Pwn Academia

4. 12 Rules for Ruining Life (To Get a Better One)

This got me wondering if it'd be a problem for a book to have the word "retard" in the title. It's kind of fashionable to have curse words in book titles nowadays, but they usually use an asterisk for one of the letters. Would I have to do that if I called it Retard Vacation? I searched Amazon and it seems: no. The results are kind of funny.

It's a little frightening and uncomfortable, because I don't have much experience with entrepreneurship and I'm not strongly motivated by money, but despite the anxiety and ego-fear of failure it's really quite refreshing. As an academic, what you're "up against" is a thick web of arbitrary norms and social games, and your value is contingent on pleasing particular dispensers of cultural capital. One can be ruined if

a certain person simply dislikes you. What feels really great about my current moment of impending entrepreneurial experimentation is that I'm only "up against" the open market of cyberspace. The downside is that, if what I'm capable of producing does not provide enough value to people, then there's no way to paper over this unfortunate fact. I could be forced to get a normal full time job, and face the risk of losing a long-term intellectual life. But the upside is a most fantastic dream, the dream that perhaps everything I've invested into the constitution of a radically independent intellectual life is somehow worth it , not just to me, but on the brutally honest open market. That there might even be a 10% chance of this being true is how and why I'm now hustling harder than ever before while also enjoying greater well-being than ever before.

I am operating at the height of my powers, intoxicated by a dream, though aware that I'm dreaming. If it fails and I'm forced to work full time away from my research agenda and creative visions, well then perhaps I will be at peace with the brutal truth: that in fact my delusional obsessions have only ever been egotistical and anti-social wastes of energy. Perhaps the open market will teach me a hard lesson that academia never had the guts to teach me: that everything I know and everything I think and everything I can make is actually worthless. And if that's the lesson I learn from the open market, then maybe finally my grand visions would be destroyed but maybe then I could finally learn how to be a normal person and keep my mouth shut and just get on with a normal career. If that's what it would mean to fail, then it'd still be a huge blessing and a net gain relative to carrying on my intellectual fixations with the false insulation of academic prestige.

In short, I have nothing to lose and everything to gain by testing what are my honest intellectual capacities really worth? And then I realize that I'm so intoxicated by this dream — my engines are humming so smoothly at full throttle just by virtue of trying 100% for my ideal — that even if my intellect fails to float on the open market in the first 1, 2, 3, 4 test runs, and I have to get some other job, I can always keep trying what I'm currently trying. When I think about this — that on the open market there is no social authority that can end one's ability to try — it really comes home to me how insane it is to hang one's entire livelihood on an insular bureaucratic hierarchy, and I am reminded how good and true and necessary is my current line of flight.