The Pointless Revolution! - The Economics of Doing Whatever You Want

By Paul Ransom

If all you really have left is time – how will you spend it?

'The Pointless Revolution!' is the ultimate lifestyle heresy. It turns economics, self-help and philosophy upside down. It promises neither enlightenment, salvation or utopia; nor does it require purity or genius. Yet, by striking a new bargain with time and re-evaluating our most primal fears, it paves the way for everyday freedom and genuine self-authorship.

Audacious and counter-intuitive, this personal and cultural revolution overthrows commonplace fantasies, fairy tales and addictions. By switching off the legislated lifestyle megaphone and challenging the authority of gods, brand ambassadors and social norms, 'The Pointless Revolution!' is pure existential weight loss, an intellectual and spiritual de-clutter that will get you spring cleaning your entire life.

A playful, irreverent and timely rebellion against the 24/7 ‘musts’ of consumerism, status seeking and spiritual correctness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Everytime Press
• Release date: Sep 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781925536751

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The Pointless Revolution! - The Economics of Doing Whatever You Want

The Pointless Revolution! - The Economics of Doing Whatever You Want

by Paul Ransom

An Everytime Press eBook

Everytime Press logo

COPYRIGHT

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The Pointless Revolution! copyright © Paul Ransom

First published September 2019 by Everytime Press

BP#00082

ISBN: 978-1-925536-75-1

Everytime Press

32 Meredith Street

Sefton Park SA 5083 Australia

https://www.everytimepress.com

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

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Cover design copyright © Matt Potter

Hourglass image copyright © OpenClipart-Vectors

Author photo by Guy Phillips

PHI image by Michelle Cahill

Also available in paperback / ISBN: 978-1-925536-74-4

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Everytime Press is a member of the Bequem Publishing collective  http://www.bequempublishing.com/

CONTENTS

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Preface

Introduction

1   Hourglass Economics

2   The Dodgy Mathematics Of Potential Happiness

3   The Attainment Fetish

4   The Narrative Palliative

5   Time For Living

6   The Emancipation Equation

7   The Belief Brief

8   The People’s Republic Of Pointlessness

9   Ethical Investment In A Meaningless Void

10   The Authenticity Channel

Bonus Material / Appendices

1   {Not Quite} Random Yet {Kinda} Relevant Other Bits

2    My PHI

3   My Beautifully Pointless Existence

ALTHOUGH THIS BOOK

is called

THE POINTLESS REVOLUTION!

THE ECONOMICS OF DOING WHATEVER YOU WANT

if you prefer, you can call it

HOW NOT TO BE A SLAVE

THE MEANINGLESS LIFESTYLE GUIDE

EXISTENTIAL ECONOMICS & THE MATHEMATICS OF HAPPINESS

‘MEANING’ IS A PRISON:

SLAVE NARRATIVES, SYSTEM BLAMING & THE KEY TO FREEDOM

HAPPINESS IS POINTLESS:

HOW TO LIVE A LIFE OF MEANINGLESS PLEASURE

KICK THE BUCKET LIST: LIFE WITHOUT MUSTS & SHOULDS

WHY NOT TO BOTHER (AND JUST BE)

or even

LIVING LIGHTLY: SHED THE SHOULD, LOSE THE LIST & BE FREE

NB: The author actually wants you to re-imagine & personalise the ideas in this book;

so feel free to tear off the cover and re-brand the whole thing.

WARNING!

*

This book contains counter-intuitive ruminations on the related topics of freedom and happiness. Sacred cows will be (humanely) euthanised, passive assumptions challenged and standard meaning tropes usurped. Dogmatists, economists and spiritualists alike will likely have their safe spaces invaded. There will also be frequent references to death, human frailty and meaning-less voids.

PS: Silver bullets, system blaming excuses and enlightenment pathways not included.

PREFACE

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A point to consider before proceeding: I embarked on the process this book outlines without knowing what the outcome would be. May the revolution deliver for you as it did for me.

*

I am manifestly unqualified to write this book. I have no formal training in economics, psychology, neuroscience or philosophy. In fact, as I type, it would be fairer to suggest that my real qualification is as a failed artist. Despite decades of effort I have no best seller or cult classic to my name and I am yet to direct my much dreamt about debut feature. I live in abject obscurity. I am small fry. Make that tiny fry.

And yet … I enjoy an abundance of liberty. Indeed, I am one of the richest people I know. For I do not own an alarm clock. Nor a tie. I get up when I like, do cool arty things that I mostly enjoy, go to my favourite café more or less whenever I choose and rarely ever need to endure the rush hour. My total debt is below a thousand and thus far my health has been kind to me – steadily failing eyesight* notwithstanding.

(* Although I was born with a basket of herditary eye problems – myopia, cone dystrophy, colour blindness and others – I was diagnosed as being ‘legally blind’ in 2017, part way through writing this book.)

True, I don’t have a lot of stuff; nor do I have the funds for exotic travel, fancy dinners or guitar pedals. I’ve been cutting my own hair for more than a decade and I’ve taught myself to prepare a range of relatively tasty, low cost vego soups and sauces for when things get really tight.

And of course, I could never afford a girlfriend. Let alone the latest iThing.

But the fact is, I love the lightness of living this way. I love that my time is principally my own; and I shake my head and smile when people tell me how assiduously they’re working their arse off for the better life they’ve imagined. For their name in lights or their comfy retirement villa. So they can tick items off their bucket list. Or worst of all, so they can attain a pristine state of enlightenment or vibrate themselves to nirvana.  

Whatever else you may glean from this book, I can assure you of one thing only. Namely, that the approach I will outline herein works beautifully for me. And really, all I’m doing is sharing it with you. Because maybe it will work for you as well – and then you too can afford to be free.

After all, isn’t that why you’re reading this?

PS: A note on language.

I have deliberately chosen to use provocative terminology and to sprinkle a few profanities throughout. (So fuck yeah, to some degree I am trying to jolt you.) In addition, I have also employed ‘parentheses’ quite a bit, if only to dilute the tendency of pedants and semantic purists to take up a deliberately narrow view. Where you see ‘quote marks’ I invite you to take a broader view and connect with the spirit of what I’m saying, rather than limit yourself to dictionary definition.

INTRODUCTION

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It’s the existential economy, stupid! Because getting the life budget in the black is a matter of time; and happiness is the heretical bottom line.

*

The spark for this book came from a throwaway comment. My father and I were talking on the phone and I happened to make reference to an earlier episode in my life, right after the meltdown of my fourteen year marriage.

I had skipped the city and gone to live in the tropics, leaving a safe job, a great house and nearly all my worldly possessions behind.

Gee, that was a waste of time, wasn’t it? he said casually, as if the truth of his assertion were self-evident.

Generally I allow such things to pass without much more than a grin and a (hipsterish) eye roll but on this occasion I felt moved to challenge. Really? Why’s that?

His response predictably rested upon assumptions about the primacy of career, the notion that achievement is a merely vocational outcome and, of course, the all-conquering pragmatism of money.

My comeback went something like this: I dunno Dad, three years walking barefoot on a beautiful palm fringed beach and strolling about in the pristine rainforest, whilst never once needing a house key, a jacket or a pair of sensible shoes doesn’t sound so bad to me.

To his eternal credit, Dad got the point and the conversation moved on. But the gist of it remained. A lid had been lifted. A fundamental question accidently asked. What does it mean to waste time; and furthermore, what is the true value of time?

That evening I continued to ponder the underpinning values that fuelled my father’s critique; to tease out the often unchallenged beliefs that lead so many of us to choose work over play and to pursue status and success so relentlessly that we are prepared to sacrifice ethics, health and relationships to the gods of power, wealth and acclamation.

Of course, there are explanations aplenty for this. Insights exist in evolution, psychology, neuroscience and in the way our societies are organised. Even New Age salvation junkies and their doomsday prepping cousins in the conspiracy scene have ‘reasons’ to offer. Indeed, thousands of practical, critical and nominally rational narratives exist to make sense of our almost universal submission to a set of received values that most of us – when we stop to think about them – don’t actually believe.

Then again, if we’re honest, we all sacrifice privately held values to publically approved ones. We do this because we’re scared. Of disapproval. Of failure. Of going without. In a world where fame and fortune equal fuckability, where being endlessly busy is a badge of honour, and the Joneses not only have to be kept up with but thoroughly gazumped in the ‘must have’ stakes, it seems more prudent to play along than to nick off to a rainforest and risk getting your feet dirty.

The standard issue response here is ‘I have no choice’ but, let’s be frank, for the vast majority of us living in the comfortably complacent First World, this is an excuse. More than that, it is an abdication. A way to avoid responsibility. A psychological sleight of hand that lets us blame others – parent, partner, boss, bank, etc – for anything we don’t like. If we wake up every morning and find ourselves on a treadmill it is because we have chosen the rat race; because we have opted to place a higher value on looking the goods and getting the stuff than we have on living in other ways.

That said, I am prepared to concede that this is a very easy thing to assert. I will also allow for the fact that so much of what passes for ‘alternative’ is little more than a pose and that most of the self-righteous bullies who bore the rest of us senseless with their endless crusading and knee jerk oppositional stance on everything are in fact propping up the very status quo they claim to be questioning. Because, just like the weary commuter/consumer who feels they have no choice, they too are arguing for their own slavery and blaming others for their ill-fitting chains.  

Thus, you will doubtless be glad to learn that this book will not seek to convince you that everything you know is a lie. Neither will it look to mandate a pathway to paradise or implore you to give up blue cheese, beating off or watching the footy.

Instead, these pages will offer you a bunch of pretty simple ideas culled from personal experience and propped up by stuff I’ve co-opted from economics, psychology and politics. (With a dash of armchair Existentialism for added spice.)

All of which brings me back to my dad and his ‘waste of time’ comment; and in particular the cultural and economic imperatives underwriting it. What Dad really meant was that ducking off to a small town in the hotbox of the tropics interrupted the linear momentum of my sensible city-based career and cost me thousands – and he was dead right about that. It did. Decamping to the Coral Sea was, to some extent, financial and professional suicide. In fact, I have still not recovered the lost ground.

But here’s the thing. I no longer care to. Or not so much anyway. The reason is simple. I value something else more highly.

Time.

In other words, the days and nights I have left until … well y’know, that time. Given this, I am, at fifty three, not so keen to waste much more of it. Rather, I now prefer to spend it wisely. (As I’m sure you do yours.)

Whilst this may seem little more than cosy fireside hokey, there is an opportunity waiting for us in the wording. Spend it wisely.

Okay, so let’s park the ‘wisely’ part for the moment and turn our attention to the ‘spend’ bit. How would it be if we placed an economic value on our time? God no! I hear you scream. Keep your commodifying hands off my mortality.

But before you close the cover and send this volume to the ‘later’ pile, let me assure you that what I am proposing here is not for you to sell your soul to the bank but to have the banker recognise your soul’s value; and to do so by co-opting their belief system. In other words, I am going to plant a freak flag on Wall Street and run the risk metrics over the most valuable asset any of us have.

Just as we now believe it appropriate to price pollution and to recognise the so-called triple bottom line – fiscal, social, environmental – this book will investigate what might happen if we genuinely priced our time. (And I don’t mean just jacking up our hourly rate.) How differently would we invest the ever decreasing supply of this asset if we could rescue it from the cotton wool clutches of what we loosely call ‘spirituality’ and give it a measurable value?

On one hand this is a relatively simple conceptual adjustment, on the other a double-sided heresy; injecting humanity into the economy and much needed rigour into the intellectual void of spiritual cliché. My expectation here is that both the hippies and the corporates will have their respective feathers ruffled.

Indeed, in this book, I will treat economic rationalists and suburban shamans in the same way; as ideologues wedded to a framework that imposes a narrative on the world. And of course, I too will indulge in a little creative framing; it’s just that my frame will seek to strip away the excess baggage of meaning and morality and flesh out a much more straightforward proposal for potential happiness.

Yes, happiness. Not simply the pursuit of fun, thrills and other sugar highs but a longer lasting sense of living the life you would prefer rather than the one you believe you have to. Call it joy or contentment if you wish. Or, if you’re the more philosophical type, a life of meaning. Hell, you can even call it enlightenment, if you insist. Point being, this book aims to present a way of thinking about the rest of your life that is devoid of religious waffle, righteous pressure and supernatural agency. 

NB: A note on happiness.

Before we go any further, let’s clarify what I mean by happiness and why I’ve elected to use this word instead of terms like wisdom or wellbeing.

Clearly, I am attracted to happiness because its use ruffles people. Happiness, it would appear, has an image problem. It is widely regarded as the idiot cousin of healthy, wealthy and wise – the shallow but good looking friend of love and other noble endeavours. My deliberate employment of the term has, I’m pleased to report, already stirred the sediments amongst the early readers of this book. Looks like happiness isn’t a lofty enough goal for them. Their preferences have fallen more into the ‘life of meaning’ basket. Happiness obviously didn’t sound like a sufficiently serious and uplifted objective. Too low brow maybe. 

However, aside from using it to poke at your assumptions, my choice of the H word stems from a profound yet astonishingly simple question. Is it the enlightenment or sense of meaning we crave or is it, rather, the feeling states we imagine they will engender? What, for instance, is the pay-off of meaning? What is it that enlightenment delivers? In the end, what is all our striving for? What the fuck do we actually want?

Even though this opens up a chicken/egg discussion, not to mention the possibility that we’re really just quibbling over language, I pose these questions now because they point at a bedrock issue for many of us, which is not really how rich or clever or groovy we seem to be but how we actually feel about ourselves and the life we are currently leading.

Throughout the book I will keep coming back to this. What is our reality, as opposed to our various fantasies about how it once was or might one day be? Fuck it, am I happy doing this or not? Quite aside from whether you think your life is meaningful, does the pursuit and realisation of that so called meaning bring you a deep seated, ongoing sense of happiness? Is the time you’re investing in your wisdom/meaning project netting you the dividend of doing whatever you want?

By using the dreaded H word I am also looking to ‘keep it real’. Hang all that nonsense about the soul’s journey to ultimate understanding or the virtuous trinkets of self-improvement – let alone the obvious vanities of socially visible status and the righteous stench of apparent purity. In the end, I’m much more concerned with how it feels. I mean, really feels.

So why, you ask, turn to economics?

It’s a good question. After all, economics is a cobbled together, pseudo-science which often lurches into vicious, anti-human reductionism. At the altar of the economy we have disrupted the balance of the ecosphere that sustains us, reduced democracy to an infantile farce and produced a brain dead, plastic coated celebrity culture that insults us all. In addition, economists have an abysmal record of predicting stuff – surely a huge KPI fail for them – not to mention a well-documented tendency to over-rely on ‘modelling’.

Yet, when we strip away the hubris, greed, and Machiavellian manipulation so often associated with the world of finance, and we look past the failings of the theorists, we find an amazingly useful conceptual skeleton.

In its marrow, economics is about human behaviour. More particularly it is a way of analysing choice. It is also a way of understanding the aggregation that is society. In a very real way, the economy is a map of our co-existence and, in the case of credit, a measure of our trust in one another. Whatever you think about the state of the world right now – good, bad or apocalyptic – remember, we bought it. Individually and collectively.

Economics also provides a powerful way of thinking about uncertainty. Its focus on assessing risk and reward is more useful and honest than anything on offer in any of the world’s much cherished spiritual traditions.

Then there is the question of value. What do we actually mean by that?

How and why do we value some things more than other things?

What are we prepared to trade-off in order to attain this apparently valuable stuff?

Are there quantifiable ways of measuring and comparing different kinds of value that can help us to make smarter decisions about an uncertain future?

To me, these are incredibly useful tools for thinking about life. Partly, they are wasted on something as monochromatic as money. Maybe we should raid the economists’ toolkit and use their intellectual infrastructure to talk about the big stuff. What do we really value? How can we reform our personal ‘economies’ to create what the boffins might call optimal utility? In short, can we use the economic mindset to help us live happier, more deeply rewarding lives? 

Absolutely yes we can. And in this book I will endeavour to explain how. Hence the subtitle, The Economics Of Doing Whatever You Want.

The simple (but not so silly) suggestion contained in these pages will be that if we include time remaining as a line item in our overall ‘life budget’ we will reckon the competing values in our lives very differently and this, in turn, may well lead us to a radical re-structure. Hell, we might even start doing what we truly enjoy.     

Thus, my father was both right and wrong. Time can indeed be wasted but if quitting your safe job and moving to a beach house in the tropics brings more joy to you than a promotion, a new car or the approval of your peers then it may well be that your most economical choice would be to shrug off those corporate shoulder pads, go without the next iFetish and leave your so-called friends to their superannuated servitude.

Gee, wouldn’t that be nice?

1 – HOURGLASS ECONOMICS

or

Understanding the true value of your time

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You know damn well that a shiny new car or luxury apartment won’t fulfil you. That being top dog won’t bring you the love you want. That fame is a vanity – a tacky star on a footpath somewhere – and that power comes hand in glove with the fear of losing it. So why are you spending your time chasing it?

*

In this chapter I identify the central denial at work in human cultures, examine the way in which it plays out in our personal lives and argue that by regarding time as our most valuable life asset and adopting the conceptual toolkit of economics, we can create a practical framework for happiness.

*

There are clues aplenty in everyday language about the fundamental value of time. Mostly we throw such comments away. They are clichés. We say them and soon forget what they are telling us.

Spending time.

Time is money.

Quality time.

Free time.

My time is valuable.

That’s an hour I won’t get back.

Yet at some point in our lives most of us will have our time monetised in the form of hourly rates, per diems, annual salaries, time in lieu, overtime, etc. The idea of time being a finite resource that should be paid for by those who wish us to use it up for their benefit – typically employers – is both universally accepted and utterly banal.

So why do most of us routinely waste it? Why do we offer up our best years to perform tasks we’d rather not for arseholes we don’t really like? Why does the professional so often take precedence over the personal? What drives us to keep postponing the life we would rather lead in order to uphold a Faustian pact with money, status and objects?

The reasons for this include personal, social, ethical, cultural and hardcore financial factors – and although each of us negotiates these tugs on our time differently, there exists an almost universal tendency for us to sacrifice the present to an imagined future.

How often have you heard the following kinds of narrative offered up as reasons – or indeed excuses? 

I’ll work hard now and live it up later.

If I make the money now I’ll be able to provide a better future for my family.

Just a couple more years and I’ll …

Once I pay off the house, I’ll …

Oh c’mon, honey, I’m doing this for us.

My intention here is not to blithely dismiss the notion of working and persevering – or indeed to minimise the very real and immediate pressure that lack of adequate finance can place upon people – but rather to underline our often unconscious costing of time and our frequently poor grasp of risk assessment.

These habits begin when we first come to understand that we will one day die – or when we discover that there is a real difference between the thing we call work and the thing we call play. Even as children we treasure our weekend and school holiday time. Then, as we move into adulthood and the decades tick by, we begin to notice the undeniable arrow of time. We see it and feel it in our bodies. We watch it speeding by as our parents decline and our kids grow. For most of us there comes a day when we can no longer hold back the idea that time spent has begun to outweigh time remaining.

Once again, universal and banal – except that as a species we have wrapped this realisation in layers of denial. We know we’re doomed but we act like we have forever. We understand that everything is in a state of flux, yet we dedicate ourselves to the delusion of permanence. Pretty well every spiritual and religious tradition offers its adherents a palliative for their mortality – afterlives, reincarnations, etc – and today science is increasingly holding out hope that we will one day be able to dodge time’s deadly bullet with pills, cryogenic suspension and other such fountains of eternal youth. And then there’s our penchant for grand monuments to ourselves – pyramids, palaces and pillars of stone – or the vain allure of immortalising ourselves on film, in song or within the retro-fitted realm we call history. As if these follies will somehow make us less dead. As if eternal life was actually a good thing. 

Therefore, to say that we have a fear-based culture is, in my view, a crashing understatement. Whilst fear certainly serves an evolutionary purpose and can operate as a useful psychological call to action, it is also the engine of denial – and in the case of our death, our dread powers what I like to call the ‘central denial’.

You may well argue that this is a necessary existential sidestep. I mean, if the fact of your death was constantly front row centre in your thoughts you might find yourself disinclined to pursue grand objectives; never mind getting up on bitterly cold mornings to do some spirit crushing job for nowhere near enough money. Indeed, you might even lapse into the kind of fatalistic, ‘fuck it all’ mentality that lends itself to the casual excusing of injustice and the ill-treatment of others. Clearly, a level of judicious forgetting is both personally and socially beneficial.

NB:

I will outline a more positive and liberating compromise with mortality in Chapter 5.

However, our culture and our economy have elevated this denial to the point of hubris. From the asinine, bourgeois arrogance of the New Age to the virgin-packed heaven of suicide bombers, we have concocted an array of death-defying narratives that have unleashed all manner of cruelty, greed and needless sorrow on the world. How many people have we put to the sword in the name of our favourite brand of eternity? How many cool millions have been banked by those selling this paradise or that paradigm to suckers and seekers everywhere?

Conspiracy nerds would say that ‘the system’ requires both the denial and the divide and conquer social