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Growing Up: the pathless path & emotional eating
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Hello! Oops it's been a while... just realised longer than I thought as I have four podcast eps to tell you about. wooo But first... I've started reading Paul Millerd's The Pathless Path. Paul worked in strategy consulting for several years before walking away to "embrace a pathless path"... In a ten‑year period, I worked for five companies and spent two years in grad school. I moved from job to job, convinced the next stop was always the final stop.
My restlessness was easy to hide because my path was filled with impressive names and achievements, and when you’re on such a path, no one asks “Why are you doing this?” It took me a while to recognise this blind spot and have the courage to start asking myself those kinds of deeper questions in a serious way.
Which led me to walk away. Scratch that – run away. I even gave back a $24,000 signing bonus and missed out on a $30,000 bonus if I had been able to stick it out for another nine months. I left with the intention to become a freelance consultant, but soon enough, that story started to show its cracks as well. It didn’t take me long to realise I had been on a path that wasn’t mine and to find a new way forward, I would need to step into the unknown.
About a year into this journey, I stumbled upon a phrase which helped me take a deep breath. It was the idea of a “pathless path,” something I found in David Whyte’s book The Three Marriages. To Whyte, a pathless path is a paradox: “we cannot even see it is there, and we do not recognise it." To me, the pathless path was a mantra to reassure myself I would be okay. After spending the first 32 years of my life always having a plan, this kind of blind trust in the universe was new, scary, and exciting...
The pathless path is an alternative to the default path. It is an embrace of uncertainty and discomfort. It’s a call to adventure in a world that tells us to conform. On why he wrote the book: I am inspired by what the writer Leo Rosten once argued was the purpose of life: “to be useful, to be honourable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” The pathless path has helped me see that quitting my job was never about escaping work or living an easier life, it was about using the gifts I received from my parents to benefit others.
Helping people live courageously so that they can thrive is one of the most important things in the world. I want to see people live the lives they are capable of, not just the ones they think they are allowed to live. I wrote this book to show you that this is possible. My journey on the pathless path is about slowly figuring this out and helping countless people from around the world realise the same thing.
In case you're wondering whether this is where I got my dangerous ideas from... (yesterday someone asked me if I had a job and I said I'm in my post-job era. (Hopefully I made that sound less obnoxious than it reads...)) ... it wasn't here exactly (unfortunately I've been on this non-parental approved path since before the book was published). But fun to know someone is on the same wavelength and can articulate it much better than I can... E.g. the part I've made bold... exactly how I feel... The best option available for my parents was the default path. This worked remarkably well for them, which is what made leaving it so damn hard. I know how much they sacrificed so that I would have better career opportunities. However, what they really gave me was so much more than the ability to succeed in school and work. It was space to dream, take risks, and be able to explore more possibilities for my life.
Another note for the boomers who may be reading on with horror: The modern version of the default path was born after World War II, in a period of unprecedented economic growth. This shift in thinking was led by the United States which, due to its financial and industrial advantages, achieved a period of success now known as the “long boom” during which annual GDP growth rates of at least four to five percent were the norm.
This economy generated full‑time jobs with good incomes, benefits, and career opportunities, enabling a broad middle class to reach new levels of wealth and material comfort. Professor Raj Chetty at Harvard found that nine out of ten people born right after World War II did better economically than their parents. Over time people came to expect constant advancement in their lives. John Steinbeck captured the sentiment in his book America and Americans in 1966:
No longer was it even acceptable that the child should be like his parents and live as they did; he must be better, live better, know more, dress more richly, and if possible, change from father’s trade to a profession. This dream became touchingly national.
...By the time I graduated from college in 2007, the idea that life should be built around a good corporate job was so sacred that almost everyone had forgotten that only 100 years earlier most people worked on farms.
Peter Thiel, born right after the baby boom generation, reflected on this mentality in his book Zero to One, saying, “Since tracked careers worked for them [the baby boomers], they can’t imagine that they won’t work for their kids, too.”
Asset manager, writer, and baby boomer Jim O’Shaughnessy argues that this approach to life is flawed and his generation’s mistake was to assume that the paths that worked for them would work forever:
We made a mistake and by that, I mean my generation and my parents’ generation. The mistake we made was thinking that the period from 1946 to 1980 was the norm. No, it was not! It was the anomaly! ... So, the idea that you had that job with the gold watch, and you could work there for your entire career and raise a family of four and all of that, that was an anomaly.
During that stretch of time, it would have been a mistake to opt-out of the default path because as Thiel points out, “whether you were born in 1945 or 1950 or 1955, things got better every year for the first 18 years of your life, and it had nothing to do with you."
Other factors here and could have a whole discussion... will leave it there for now. Thoughts, feelings & rebuttals always welcome xoxo This (and last) week on Growing Up with Delia Burgess Ep. 110 - Silba Staffler: making friends with food & why your therapy isn't working Ep. 112 - Joachim Brackx: post-achievement life Okay that's it folks. See you next time :) xx Delia P.S. I've only done half my homework from last time! Woops. I asked someone for the contact details and need to follow up and then write my thank you... (Read here if you missed it: Growing Up: thank you & what doesn't kill you makes you weaker) Listen to Growing Up with Delia Burgess on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Previous editions here. Forwarded this and want to subscribe? Click here. |
Hi! I'm Delia Burgess
Do you want to be more interesting AND attractive? That's exactly what will happen if you type your email address below.
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