College graduates raised on the internet looked around, collectively said, "fuck this," and got jobs they could work from anywhere. Many smart, capable young people felt they had been sold a bill of goods about what college would get them. An implosion in the job market, a dearth of affordable credit for houses, and an average student loan debt higher than ever before meant that the safe, cushy, lifelong jobs people had expected to come after college since the baby boom just did not exist any more. Already back then, there was an explosion of people, mostly millennials, who had what I called lemonade lifestyles. I was pretty prejudiced going into reading the book. Beyond that, the book serves as the most recent interest development in a centuries long debate about how to decide what to do with your life. On its own, the book has a wide range of interesting and useful ideas to offer concerning careers, the nature of work, leisure, society, and how we measure our lives. Through summary, review, context, and memoir, I want to make the case that the book, The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd, is immensely important because of both its content and its context. Luckily, I was completely wrong. The author pulls a lovely bait and switch: it’s not really a book about careers at all. The vagueness of the marketing materials, uniform positivity of the reviews, and my familiarity with the subject matter made me explicitly skeptical that I would enjoy the book, and subtly skeptical that I could learn anything from the book at all. The descriptions and blurbs I could find were somewhat vague, like this one from Amazon, “ The Pathless Path is about finding yourself in the wrong life, and the real work of figuring out how to live.” It seemed like the book was about picking the right career, a topic about which my own job search and years of teaching at a university have made me an armchair expert. Last month on Twitter, several people I consider smart, unconventional thinkers recommended a new book by an author I had never heard of.
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