Stop Trying to Hustle. Live Slow.

You weren't born to be enslaved on a hedonistic consumer treadmill.

Hustle culture is a cancer on society.

Ever since the rise of social media, we've normalized the idea of always being plugged in - available, online, and working.

Guys like Hormozi amass millions of views shaming people, convincing them they're poor because they don’t work hard enough.

If you're not hitting $10K months, posting 50 pieces of content across every platform, and living off bean burritos while sleeping under your office desk, you're a lazy piece of shit.

The internet is littered with contentless content - things that feel good to hear in the moment, but don’t actually improve your life.

I've wasted many hours comparing myself to online creators who seem to never stop creating content, programs, and offers.

I end up paralyzed thinking, "If only I had more discipline or motivation, then I would finally be as successful as they are."

But then I’ll read some classics from Thoreau or Epictetus and am reminded of how utterly stupid it is to define success by how much money I make or stuff I accumulate.

Hustle culture has created a generation of people sacrificing the most important aspects of life for shallow, meaningless, and empty pursuits.

The same people hustling for financial freedom and independence to "escape the matrix" ironically become the most generic hyper-consumers.

They're corporate cuckolds who are trapped on a treadmill of endless consumption, not realizing they're trying to fill a gaping hole in their soul because they are living a pointless life.

Even before the internet, the greatest minds of history knew that spending your life hustling is a guaranteed path to misery.

Thoreau was talking about this in the 1800s:

"Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them."

Keep chasing the superfluous bullshit, and you are bound to miss the sweet fruits.

Epictetus was talking about this 2000 years ago:

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”

The wisest men of the past understood what mattered in life and what didn’t.

All of them embraced living slow, which allowed them to live extremely productive, rich, and impactful lives that are still referenced hundreds and thousands of years later.

In this letter we’re going to explore why living a slow life is more important than ever, and four strategies you can implement today that will actually make you more a productive and happier human than 99% of society.

Let's dive in.

1) Optimize Work Around Your Life, Not the Other Way Around

The 40-hour work week is bullshit.

It was created for manual laborers during the industrial revolution in the mid-1800s - a time when people were basically used as extensions of machines.

At the time, most people were working for 80-100 hours a week doing hard labor.

Workers began to revolt, and over the course of the next century, a bunch of laws were put in place to reduce that number to 40.

Though cutting the working hours in half was a huge advancement for hte average person, the reality is for 99% of our time as humans our ancestors worked an average of 15 hours a week.

Those 15 hours were solely dedicated to acquiring the basic provisions needed for survival, like food, water, and shelter.

The idea of working more hours than necessary was seen as a complete waste of time and effort.

It wasn’t until the agriculture revolution and the ability to store crops and build armies did we transition to the indebted slavery system which our modern culture is built off of today.

Our ancient ancestors spent the majority of their time connecting with their community, exploring new land, enacting ceremonies and rituals probably with the help of magic mushrooms, and ultimately doing what humans are meant to do - enjoying life.

We were not created to be slaves to a system where our primary goal is to make other people absurdly wealthy.

It is fucked up that people feel scared to put in vacation requests or fear the repercussions of getting sick and missing work.

If you’re an entrepreneur, feeling so anxious that you can't step away from your business for more than day at a time isn.o way to live.

Our work should be designed around our life, not the other way around.

Earlier this year, I started blocking off 11:30 AM to 2 PM in my calendar every single day.

I take this time off to lift weights, train jiu-jitsu, or go for a hike. Anything that gets me off of screens and into my body.

I don’t care how much work I could be doing or what opportunities I miss.

If I want to take a longer trip that I know would be good for my own development and make me a better man, I make time for it.

I just returned from a 10-day Qi Gong seminar in Houston where I did absolutely nothing work related.

The immediate gut reaction for most people is that this is impossible given their circumstances.

They can't just walk away from their job in the middle of the day or for weeks at a time.

They have responsibilities, money to earn, a family, and people to report to.

But even before I was self-employed, my life looked no different.

I sacrificed money, job security, and wealth to live a life how I wanted.

Sometimes that required downsizing my expenses significantly.

It often meant working seasonal jobs where I could front-load my working hours so I could have months of unstructured time to pursue whatever I wanted.

This seasonal approach to work allowed me to go on long trips regularly and take my life slow.

During these years, I had to live very frugally. There was a period of time I lived in a tent and traveled by hitchhiking.

The truth most people don’t want to accept is that their circumstances are a lot more flexible than they let on.

They just aren't willing to give up their luxuries and lifestyle they've worked so hard to build.

They're stuck in the consumer hamster wheel - believing the more they consume, the happier they'll be.

This is the trap that keeps you enslaved.

1. Work hard to afford a particular lifestyle

2. Be miserable because you work too much

3. Attempt to consume your way out of your misery

4. Return to step 1

Making money is great, but not if you’re a slave to it.

Your goal should be to design your work around your life.

That means making some sacrifices.

Leaving your place in the expensive city.

Quitting your high-paying job for something that allows you more autonomy in the structure of your day.

Stop financing new cars, gadgets, and crap you think you need, and revert to buying things you can afford and own outright.

When I quit my tech job in 2019, I sacrificed a massive amount of money, stock options, benefits, and career potential to work on a farm growing vegetables and shoveling manure.

I paid $300 a month to live in a trailer and drove a $900 van that couldn’t pass a safety.

I lived too remotely to go waste my money on frivolous bullshit, so I spent my time off enjoying nature, cooking, reading, and living a slow life.

Even though farming was hard work, I enjoyed the work immensely, and I woke up excited for what the day would bring.

The two seasons I spent farming were some of the most fulfilling times of my life.

And this is because farming exemplified the next principle of living a slow life…

2) Work Slowly On One Thing At A Time

I was insanely excited when I first landed that tech job.

It was a lengthy and competitive interview process to get in at a very reputable company.

Even though it was an entry-level position the potential for career growth was immense.

At that time in my life, it felt like a dream job.

I worked in customer facing support.

I would spend my entire work day supporting merchants via phone, email, and text to solve problems related to setting up and running their eCommerce stores.

It required an immense amount of training on a ton of different software tools, extreme levels of focus, and constant multitasking all day.

I would often be having three separate conversations with customers at once, flipping back and forth between dozens of tabs with no downtime.

By the time I wrapped up for the day, my brain was completely fried. All I could do was lay around and recover.

After a year of working there, I began to notice some significant shifts in my thought patterns - even when I wasn't working.

The constant multitasking was affecting the way my brain processed information.

My attention span became absolute trash. It was like I was on meth all the time (not that I’ve ever done meth - but one can imagine.)

Staring at the screen all day trying to constantly improve my performance metrics was sucking the life out of me.

I started to become anxious and depressed.

I knew I needed to quit.

I dreamed of getting away from screens and doing something slow, methodical and meaningful.

Even though it made zero sense financially or career-wise, I decided quit and take a job at a small-scale organic farm.

I went from juggling tasks and spinning a dozen plates at once to doing one slow, deliberate process at a time.

Sometimes I would spend an entire day weeding a bed of carrots, moving a few hundred feet over the course of eight hours, completely absorbed in what I was doing.

You know those moments where you are so engrossed in a single task that time disappears?

This is called flow state.

As opposed to multitasking, which often leaves you feel frazzled and burnt out, flow is of the most serene experiences human beings can have.

Ironically, focusing on one thing at a time not only makes you more efficient, but the quality of your work increases immensely.

You cannot think deeply or produce anything groundbreaking when you have thousands of bits of data coming at you at once.

Farming takes focusing on one thing at a time to the extreme.

In early season, how consciously you sew each seed in the green house determines how healthy your seedling becomes.

How you carefully you plant that seedling determines how healthy your crop will be.

How healthy your crop is determines the quality and quantity of your harvest, which of course, determines how much money you make.

I left farming years ago, but took the slow and singular focus with me.

These days I’m not in the middle of nowhere picking kale.

My life is full of distractions. Because of this, I utilize tools to help keep me focused.

When I sit down to write, I use a small $40 pomodoro timer I bought off Amazon.

I set the time for an hour, put my phone on do not disturb, open the Hemingway App (an amazing writing tool that blocks all distractions), and write completely undistracted until the timer goes off.

I find these moments of deep work and complete absorption not only extremely productive, but they actually give me energy.

We often equate focus with willpower, strength, and discipline. All of this is seen as exhausting - but my experience has primarily been the opposite.

Knowing I only have one thing to pour my energy into is deeply relaxing and cathartic. My subconscious softens as it lets go of all millions of threads that could be pulling at it.

The more I pursue my life in this fashion, the deeper I groove those pathways in my brain, starting a positive feedback loop that makes sitting down to write exciting.

To not be lulled by the pointless use of our phone, emails, apps, and all the other nonsense pulling us away from a deep and meaningful life is a revolutionary act in this day and age, and one that is absolutely crucial to living a slow life.

3) Own Less, Experience More

You can’t disembark hustle train if you are are still addicted to consumer culture.

The only way off is to prioritize experiences over possessions.

When I was 25, I sold everything I owned and spent nearly a year traveling across 3 continents and 8 countries.

There is no other period of my life that I reflect on more fondly than that trip.

It fundamentally changed who I am.

After a few years of judiciously saving up money, I bought a one-way ticket to Madrid, Spain, with no plan other than to explore the world.

A few days before I left, I sold my car so I could have as much money in my bank account as possible.

At that point, that car was the biggest purchase I had ever made. I paid it off within a year of buying it and thought I would own it for at least another five years.

But the call to wander the world for as long as possible was more compelling that having the security of a car waiting for me when (or if) I came home.

I hindsight, it was the right choice - I have never spent one moment reflecting on it, missing it, or cherishing memories of that car.

But what I do reflect on is all of the amazing experiences that selling that car afforded me.

That $13K extended my trip significantly.

It paid for a yoga teacher training certification in Cali, Colombia, a 9-day Ayahuasca retreat deep in the Peruvian Amazon, and numerous treks, hostels, flights, and adventures from Morocco to Peru.

If I really wanted to, I could go out and by that exact model of car again, but I could never recreate the memories from that trip around the world.

These days, all of my money goes into experiencing more of life, and when I do need to buy material things, I treat them as investments in service of creating more and deeper experiences.

I know that whatever I own will take up mental real-estate that leads to a more frantic lifestyle, so everything is purchased with extreme intention and pragmatism.

My Toyota 4runner - which I bought with 120,000 miles on it - is super reliable, cheap to maintain, can go anywhere, is big enough to sleep in, and has insane resale value.

I buy clothes made of durable material that are triple the cost but last 10x longer than anything else. I have been wearing the same pair of Red Wing boots for 14 years.

Most people don’t realize you pay two costs for an item - the initial purchase, and the subconscious cost of having to manage that item for the rest of its life.

When we build a bloated life, we're constantly wondering where our things are, what state they're in, and whether we should use them or not.

When you have less "stuff" to manage, you can live a lot slower.

Your calendar isn’t full of tasks related to taking care of all your crap.

You don’t need to earn more money just to take care of your things.

You can pour all those extra mental and financial resources into planning and executing on life-changing experiences that you will never forget.

When you have less to manage, you have more space, and when you have more space, everything slows down.

If you’re committed to slowing down your life, take on these two practices:

Practice 1:

Put everything you own into boxes.

When you take something out to use it, leave it out.

After 30 days of living like this, get rid of everything that is left in the boxes - you don't need it.

Practice 2:

Make a deal with yourself that every time you buy something, you will sell or donate two things.

Not only will this significantly reduce the amount of stuff you own, but knowing you're going to have to make a sacrifice to get something new will require serious contemplation about what you actually need.

I’ve always preferred living in a nomadic lifestyle where everything I own fits into a few suitcases.

Every few years, I accumulate more than I need, wig out, and sell / donate a massive amount of personal items.

I always feel way better after doing this and have yet to miss anything I’ve gotten rid of.

I guarantee if you take on a more minimalistic lifestyle, and prioritize doing things instead of owning things, the quality of your life will improve immensely.

As a bonus, when you die, your family will be much less burdened dealing with all the useless shit you hoarded.

Which leads us to our last point…

4) Live Like You’re Going To Die Tonight

One of the stupidest things we do is assume we're going to have a long life.

I've had enough people around me die under the age of 30 to know that tomorrow isn't guaranteed.

If you were given a few weeks left to live, would you be satisfied with how your life is going?

Are you proud of the way you spend your time?

If you spent your life trying to hustle your way to success, never spending time with your friends or family or enjoying life, and then randomly died - could you honestly say you were successful?

I try to keep my mortality at the front of my mind every single day.

In Bronnie Ware's Top 5 Regrets of the Dying, the top two regrets from people on their deathbed were:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

You had a 1 in 400 trillion chance of being born - with those odds, do you really want to spend your life trying to be the best at consuming things, never stopping to take life in, letting it all become a blur while you hurtle towards your grave?

Take advice from people who have been here much longer than you.

The hustle, win-at-all-costs, try-and-look-cool, post-the-rad-piece-of-content-that-lets-people-know-you're-winning is a program you received from an extremely sick society.

It's not who you are.

It's a false expectation you inherited because you were told it will make you worthy.

But all it does is turn you into an anxious, fearful addict looking outside for social approval.

When you wake up tomorrow, assume it is your last day alive...

Would you still blast through your day without taking any time to slow down and enjoy your coffee?

Would you still waste hours looking for approval from strangers on the internet, eyes glazed over as the next Netflix episode loads in the background?

Or would you take a walk outside and enjoy the setting sun, knowing it might be your last?

Would you put your phone down for an hour and have a heartfelt conversation with your sister, or mother, or partner, really being with them for the first time without the endless idea that you could be doing something "more productive?"

The reality is, tomorrow could be that day.

Start treating it as such.

Final Thoughts

We all believe there are the same 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, and 365 days in a year.

But have you ever experienced those precious days, months, and years where time seems to slow down?

It's as if God himself took a foot off the gas and your life became a little quieter, juicier, and more serene.

For many people, the pandemic was this time.

With nowhere to go and nothing to do, time seemed to stretch out.

This is a great example that the speed at which our life passes by is not static - it depends on how intentionally we choose to live.

As the world gets faster and faster, slowing things down is the greatest gift we can give ourselves.

Because what makes life worth living is not the accomplishments, or the consumption, or the endless desire for more.

It’s those timeless moments that could never be recreated.

The mist of a waterfall hitting our face.

The setting sun on a beach after a perfect day.

The slow mornings where we have nowhere to be and nothing to do but right here, right now.

If you live a fast life, the only thing you are rushing towards is your guaranteed death.

There is nowhere to hustle to.

Are you going to finally allow yourself to slow down and soak it all in?