The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd

The Pathless Path introduces the concept of the “default path” or life script that most people tend to follow, or aspire to follow. Get a university degree, a 9 - 5 job, marriage and kids. After a period of illness, the author Paul Millerd discovered that this path was not for him, and instead embarked on what he’s dubbed the Pathless Path.

As someone that got laid off from their tech job earlier this year, some of what he wrote really resonated with me. Generally humans see their job as a “worker” as a core part of their identity (heck, I still identify and call myself a “software engineer” since that was my job for so long). When you are making smalltalk with strangers “what do you do?” is a common topic that gets brought up almost immediately. Having gone to a couple of tech meetups after being laid off, it’s a pretty awkward feeling to say you are unemployed, or that you aren’t jumping straight back into the job search. Millerd notes that it can be scary to quit your job - as you don’t know how your friends and loved ones will take it, and I can resonate with that too. How would my husband feel about me being unemployed? Would he think I was lazy?

Millerd lays it out plainly that this book isn’t going to give you a solution for how to make the Pathless Path work, and it doesn’t. In that sense it’s not very realistic - people need money to survive. And moving away from the default path leads to a lot of financial uncertainty until you can figure out a way to make it all work. To do the work that makes you passionate and make a living off of it at the same time is a hard thing to figure out. I love blogging and going hiking, but do I make money off of it? Not at all.

But the point that Millerd tries to make is that taking time away from a regular 9 - 5 gives you the time to be more flexible, connect with new people, try new hobbies and be more creative generally. Rather than saying “yes” to the first financial opportunity that comes your way (i.e. a new job) you should say “no” and instead focusing on finding the work that you really want to do, rather than the one that brings in the most money.

He sums up some of his core beliefs at the end rather nicely:

• We are all creative, and it takes some people longer to figure that out
• Leisure, or active contemplation, is one of the most important things in life,
• There are many ways to make money, and when an obvious path emerges, there is often a more interesting path not showing itself.
• Finding the work that matters to us is the real work of our lives

I think jumping on the Pathless Path forever is rather a hard sell, but in the case of someone like me who is already unemployed anyway, the idea of taking a proper 6 - 12 month sabbatical rather than jumping straight into your next job sounds like a fairly reasonable take (depending on your financial circumstances). And even if you are employed, I think there is some merit in stepping off the default path once in your life, at least for a little while, in order to explore your options.