You Don't Need to Quit Your Job to Make
I&#x27;m beginning to think (after nearly 30 years of failing) that succeeding as a maker may involve something larger than ourselves.<p>I think that we have major, structural, institutional problems throughout our society and culture that prevent any individual from accomplishing much of anything over the course of a lifetime that is outside the mainstream status quo of participating in a nuclear family.<p>I think a possible way out of this predicament is shining a light on the smallest of things that prevent us from moving forward.<p>For example, any student debt at all is a major setback. So our choice is either to not go to school or to work a lot and pay it back fast. This is a false dichotomy. If you flip the problem on its head, you see that this was orchestrated by the owner class to keep people locked into the system (any increase in ignorance being an inconvenience or even politically convenient).<p>The layout of our cities highly encourages car ownership, another huge cost. The fossil fuel industry gets billion dollar subsidies while renewables do not. We no longer have the room in population centers to grow our own food. We don&#x27;t have the disposable income to build robots to automate something like that. Even dating requires cashflow.<p>Everywhere we look, at every level, we are blocked. So I think something more useful than borrowing the hours and minutes of our leisure time for risky ventures might be to form a vision of how we&#x27;d like our society to be. Name each problem and attack it head on.<p>I don&#x27;t mean to downplay the article because it has very good points about self-discipline. But I would very much like to see us all start succeeding, because if we try to do it alone, we will fail.