Look around. Chances are that everyone – friends, family, colleagues, strangers – are living their lives the same way. Let’s call it the Standard Path. You know the one: finish high school, get a college degree or learn a trade, get a job, get married and have kids, buy a house and a new SUV, and accumulate a never-ending pile of stuff. As our career grows, our lifestyle and spending grow with it, often without thinking if it makes sense to do so, and what we’re giving up in return. Every dollar we make is spent year after year, regardless of income. So we have to work a full-time job for the next 40 or 50 years to pay for it all, because when you spend what you make, there’s no choice but to continue working. After decades of living this way, we realize that we haven’t built any real wealth. But by now it’s too late. We haven’t saved enough for even a modest retirement, and the only option is to continue working long into old age.

Why?

Why do we do this to ourselves? Isn’t it better to have options? To not be stuck on the Standard Path forever? This is the default way to live – the conventional wisdom – and if we want to change, it takes effort. Nearly all of us are funneled onto the Standard Path at first, and that’s understandable. We’re blank slates at birth, and we learn how to live via social conditioning: watching our parents and our friend’s parents, and they learned from their parents, and so on. And as we get older, the social pressure of keeping up with our friends and neighbors steadily increases along with our hard-wired status seeking, and of course, relentless advertising, designed to keep us forever discontent, compels us to desire and consume more and more stuff.

Some of Us Like Our Jobs, But Most Don’t

Maybe you’ve stumbled onto a career that you enjoy. You’ve built a nice skill set, have autonomy, and the work pays well, is fulfilling, and not overly stressful. Congratulations are in order, but you’re in the minority. For most of us, working day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year – running the Rat Race – grinds us down. There comes a point, often early in our career, when we’re working for the paycheck only. Maybe the work has become boring, unfulfilling, or comes with chronic stress: sitting, staring at a computer, talking on the phone, writing emails, and attending meetings for 8 to 10 hours a day. Our life becomes work, t.v., sleep, repeat, with a little down time on the weekend before the Sunday evening blues start to creep in.

Slip Away and Start Anew

At some point, we want to break out of this endless cycle. We want to slip away from the Rat Race and take some time off to rest and have some fun, explore our interests, work on our health and well-being, spend time with our friends and family, travel and see the country, and maybe find a vocation rather than a job, something more fulfilling and less stressful. But we can’t. The Standard Path locks us in – we can’t quit work because we’ve spent every dollar we made over the years, mostly on stuff we do not need, and so we’re stuck. And even if we’re burned out from all the years of work and chronic stress, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and we simply can’t take it anymore, we have no choice – we live paycheck-to-paycheck and there are bills to pay. So, when the alarm goes off on a cold, gray Monday morning in February, we crawl out of bed and head into the office for another day…

So goes the endless cycle of the Standard Path. For those of you that enjoy your job and are not caught in this grind, congratulations. But for the rest of us, it’s time to break out of this cycle and start a Private Revolution.