On some village cart path in iron age China, two saplings are growing.  One on the north side of the road, one on the south.  The northern sapling, being well nourished in the full light of the sun, grows as straight and as tall as it can.  The sapling to the south, in rocky soil and shaded by a farmhouse, grows low and twisted.  Years pass, and the trees grow in their respective fashions.  All the people passing down the road admire the northern tree for its strength and impressive straightness.  The crooked southern tree goes mostly unnoticed, serving occasionally as shade for weary travelers.  More seasons pass, until a travelling woodsman pauses between the trees.  With an expert’s eye, the woodsman notices the fine qualities of the northern tree.  After a moment resting beneath the low hanging branches of the southern tree, the woodsman uses his axe to harvest the fine northern tree for its straight and true timber.

As Zhuangzi describes, this is “the peril of being good lumber.”  When the ambitious tree is nothing but a stump, the crooked tree remains, offering lazy shade:

No ax will ever cut short its life, nothing will ever harm it. If there’s no use for it, what hardship could ever befall it?

Zhuangzi’s words emerged during the Warring States period in China.  As you might expect, it was a dangerous (Abunai: 危) time to be alive, and an incredibly good time to keep your head down.  Military leaders faced constant danger, and government ministers could be executed for a single misunderstanding.  In this context, Daoism makes a lot of sense.  The best mode of self preservation was to fade into the background and let the conflicts rage on without you.

Some scholars dismiss the ambition-less credo of Daoism as belonging only to a particular time and place.

The problem with this argument is that it assumes that the contemporary moment is a less dangerous time to be alive.  In the developed world, death often seems abstracted and distant.  But, the real consequence of death (the very thing worth avoiding) remains ever present.  Carefully considered, death is merely the robbery of time. When a middle aged office worker goes into cardiac arrest at his desk, observations about it being “too soon” and that he was “so young” are passed around amongst the bereaved.  A shorter than anticipated life is the thing to be upset about, not that we never expected him to die.

Ultimately, dying an hour earlier and wasting an hour of life are roughly equivalent. Mortality is about utilizing the handful of moments we have to play with.  In this way, mortal danger is ever present in the modern condition.  Every worker trades their precious time for commodities. Most workers trade as much time as they can for as many commodities as possible. Some people enjoy “burning the candle at both ends,” effectively living a shorter life (Nama: 生) for more widgets and excitement. Just as some iron age Chinese embraced the dangers of combat and political conflict, the modern working man has chosen to lead a dangerous life.

Your hours in an a cubicle are an emergency. Rush hour traffic is a fire that needs to be put out immediately.  Your job is killing you, one minute at a time. Don’t let the iphone 6 and a luxury sedan put you in a cage.  The skills and experiences section of your resume is baiting the trap.

It is the patterned pelts of tigers and leopard that attract the hunters; it is the agility of monkeys and dogs that attract the leash-bearing captors.

Free yourself from the cage: Disguise your talents, hide your abilities, fade into the background.  Let other people fill out forms and submit reports, you have 10,000 breaths of mortal life to savor.

Don’t trade your precious few heartbeats for widgets.  Let go and want nothing.  Enjoy each and every breath in the shade of crooked trees.

Working life is often defined by the idea that more agency is freedom, and that power will be earned with hard work. Resentment (Ura: 怨) of the control of superiors and supervisors is rampant, and, we are told, relief comes with promotion and greater responsibility.  For some (me included), letting go of the material wants that require a career can be easier than suppressing the ego and ambition that define a careerist.  But, just as easily as a mortgage, traditional attitudes about ‘success’ can fit you into those wage-earner shackles.  Helping to shift my perspective, Lao Tzu provides a quick summary of the situation:

善用人者，為之下

To best make use of someone, work below them.

While this ambiguous passage in the Daode Jing has translations that differ from my own, the following chapter is much more straightforward, and spells things out pretty clearly (#66, Red Pine’s Translation):

The reason the sea can govern a hundred rivers is because it has mastered being lower.

Though I sometimes slip into the old habits of ambition and measuring myself against other people, for the most part, my resentment for bosses has turned into sympathy.  I see their busy meeting schedule, I read their late-night emails, and I can hear the stress in their tired voices.  Their ‘success’ is doing me a favor.  Their flourishing careers are setting me free.  Fretting over quarterly profits and company transitions, they leave the simple tasks for me. Paying a premium for goods and services to unwind, their lifestyles drive down the cost of my simple pleasures.

Someday, not so long from now, I should be lazily weeding my modest garden on a sunny weekday afternoon.  Meanwhile, there will still be the quarterly profits and late-night emails to fret over, and I am sure that someone else will climb the ladder to greet them.

My arrival on the path (Dào: 道) to financial independence and early retirement was unnecessarily round-about.  Like walking east around the globe to go west one mile, it can be done, but why would you? But, to be fair, my egg-shell-white suburban upbringing gave me a certain set of values that took awhile to slough off.

Undergrad helped jump-start the transformation, but lots of humanities majors from pricey private schools own pinstripe power suits, so the B.A. can’t take full credit.  The unequivocally un-vocational graduate degree bares a certain amount of the blame for some of my “hippier” perspectives.  However, many of my grad cohort, armed with Derridean post-modernity and third wave feminism have made a vice of knowledge, even if most still brush shoulders with those who carry more commercial values.

No, in the end, it was all those easy days in Asia that did me in.  Making that final turn into the marrow that the likes of Thoreau, Foucault, and their ilk could not penetrate, it was a drawn-out confrontation with Eastern thought that sent me reeling:

知者不博，博者不知

Knowledgeable men aren’t wise, Wise men aren’t knowledgeable.

This sort of palindromic logic is common in the Daode Jing, and this line might be the Cliffs-notes version of East Asian philosophy.

Certainly not all at once, and definitely not the result of any single encounter, the East was my undoing.  As a culture, as a place, and as a thought, Asia unfurled the hems in me.  But, even if you’re coming apart, letting go is hard to do.  Those college buddies want their square footage and season tickets, and all those academic connections demand dazzling erudition.  Wanting nothing (Mu: 無) , or even very little, out of life can be a surprisingly controversial thing, and leads down a solitary path.

However, as things turn out, I am lucky enough to have a spouse that has been with me for much of the journey, and who shares the healthiest parts of my insanity. On top of that, we are both still young and capable enough to let go of many things and attempt a well-examined life.  If living abroad taught us one thing, it was the arbitrary nature of all our values (and yours too!).  In my own self examination, my love for knowledge was (is) the hardest thing to let go of.  Maybe I had to take the winding path to get here, to glimpse what knowledge is like to earn, and see plainly how little it pays back in kind.