Let's get started now with our deep dive, which I am calling "Work vs. Meaning." So this is something I've been thinking about a lot recently, is the history of our, let's call it, tumultuous, maybe, relationship between work and finding meaning in our lives. I've been thinking through this history, mainly in the American context, going back to about the post-war period, so starting in the 1950s.

So what I've done is I've put together a timeline of what I think are the major milestones in our culture's evolving thinking about work and meaning, starting in the 1950s. So if you're watching this episode on YouTube, so at youtube.com/calnewportmedia, you're going to see this timeline on the screen right now.

If you're just listening, don't worry, I'll walk you through what's on here. So the first element of this timeline is the 1950s. So in the 1950s, I call this the "Organization Man Period," which I describe as the period in which work is a substitute for civic life. So if we look at this immediate post-war period, what you see is a move away post-war from urban living as well as, let's say, rural, countryside, agriculture-related living, much more of the rise of suburban living.

So as that occurred, people began looking towards their employers, which at this point were typically very large. We had the rise of the very large corporation. The US had emerged as a superpower. Our country and economy had not been destroyed by war, so we had this 20-year period of just basically dominating every sector.

So we have these giant companies rising, these giant headquarters, and people moving to the suburbs, and the meaning they might have found before being involved in, let's say, civic leadership of the small town where they had a farm got transferred over to "my work is my family," "I'm very loyal to the company that I work for," "I will be there for my entire career." So I see this period as an expression of civic identity through work.

So that's the way we were thinking about work then. Then we move to the 1960s, and we get the first backlash. So we did the 1950s, so now we get to the 1960s, we get the first backlash, which I call the counterculture backlash. So this is what we see in the beat movement followed by the hippie movement.

And the way I describe this is work is now conceived as an obstacle to meaning. So the younger generation, the children of the World War II, the children of the greatest generation, so what's known as the baby boom generation, sort of had enough of this idea of the man in the flannel suit or organization man concept of, "I go and work at IBM my whole life and this is where I get a big sense of my civic meaning." So we get in the 1960s, a backlash in which work is seen as an obstacle to really figuring out meaningful lives.

So we had a lot more individualistic, utopian lifestyle experimentation happening. This is where we had radical changes, let's say, in dress and attire, radical changes in living arrangements, we had communes, the back to nature movement, the voluntary simplicity movement. So everything we associate with that Woodstock generation, I'm conceiving now my sort of simplified trajectory here as a backlash to the 1950s organization man period.

All right, so we're moving right along. Now we get to the 1990s. So this is when the older millennials like me or Jesse are in elementary school and junior high and high school, so sort of a formidable period for millennials. And here we get the rise of what I call passion culture.

So I see this in some sense as the compromise that was created by our baby boomer parents. So our baby boomer parents had rejected the really straight laced organization man model of their parents. I get my sense of civic duty through a lifelong connection. They went very counterculture. Culture sort of fell apart in the 70s as drugs and sexually transmitted diseases sort of ripped that apart.

And so they found the compromise to teach to their children, which is this passion culture. OK, you do have to work. Don't go live on a commune and just engage in free love and a lot of hardcore drug use. But your work can be your primary source of meaning.

Follow your passion. This was the phrase that emerged in this period. As I document in my 2012 book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. Follow your passion emerges in this period. We see its first appearances in the late 1980s and it's really in the 1990s that this idea that follow your passion is a good piece of career advice.

This emerges in the 1990s. And so this is how I understand the passion culture period is basically the baby boomers trying to figure out how to balance between these two extremes of we don't want to be fully countercultural. We know a lot of people that just burnt them out and kind of destroyed their lives.

But we don't want just everyone to put back on the flannel suits and commute out to the, you know, the headquarters and just have this soulless type corporate existence. So what if work is your passion? So we got that culture. I was raised on it. You probably were you exposed to that a lot, Jesse, with the same age, the follow your passion, right?

This was our childhood. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That and the interesting you go back 20 years, you're not seeing that you go back even 10 years before us. You're not seeing a lot of that. So that rose in the 1990s. All right. So then we get a backlash. See the cyclical nature of this movement backlash, new movement backlash.

So in the 2000s, we see this emerging in the first decade of the 2000s into the second decade of the 2000s. We get a new backlash, which I'm calling the minimalist slash fire slash lifestyle design backlash. So I'm grouping together multiple movements that were all trying to do the same thing, which I describe as seeing work as a means to an end.

So this backlash, I think, got some fuel from various financial crises throughout this period. You get the minimalist movement really comes out of that first dotcom boom and 9/11 recession in the early 2000s, and then you get the lifestyle design came at the tail end of that Tim Ferriss, the fire movement built on both of those.

That was sort of more 2008 financial collapse. So it sort of emerged out of there. So there's a series of financial issues in the economy and these issues, these movements came out of it. So quick summary of each, I kind of have not quite in the right order here.

I think the minimalist movement was probably first. We start getting this in the early 2000s and it's a move towards greatly simplifying your life. And there was the sense that if you greatly simplify your life, then you don't have to be working all the time. One of the best proponents of this movements are friends of the show, the minimalist Ryan and Joshua, who run the minimalist website and the excellent minimalist podcast.

They were in this early. I've known them for a long time. I think they're probably one of the best exemplars of this movement, but they have this great backstory about how they were, they were, you know, really overloading themselves with work. Joshua, I think it was Joshua, maybe it was Ryan at some point had bought this massive house, even though they lived alone and it was full of boxes of stuff that they had boughten and they simplified everything.

There's a while there when I knew them where they lived in a cabin, they'd gone through different living arrangements, but minimalism was about simplifying your lifestyle and that indirectly connected to simplifying what resources you needed from work. So simplifying your work life, lifestyle design came in that same milieu.

This is Tim Ferriss saying, let's be more systematic. What you really want to do. Why don't you go do these fun, like interesting experiences now in your life. Don't wait to retire when you're in your sixties. And you can do that if you're careful about remote work and geo arbitrage, earning money in euros while living in a South American country with a depressed currency, et cetera.

And then fire arose, financial independence, retire early. That movement arose in the second decade of the two thousands that really started to pick up steam. And that was this idea. We've talked about it before on the show, where if you have a good salary and live very cheaply, you can save a lot of money, you're saving most of your salary.

And the amount of money you need to save to be financially independent is also small because you're living so cheaply. So if you're willing to continue living so cheaply, it's possible in about 10 years. And if I remember the math, right, if you have like a hundred thousand dollars, $150,000 your tech job, and you're living on a quarter of it, something like this in 10 years, you're financially independent as long as you're willing to keep living cheaply.

So all of that was work as a means to an end. So it's a reaction to the passion, the passion culture, which was saying work is your source of meaning. And this backlash that happened in the two thousands was saying, no, I'm going to go create my own meaningful life work just services that.

And so I'm going to figure out how work can service what I want in my life with a minimal footprint. Again, each of these is pretty different. Now we get more recently, we get to the 2020s, we get to the post pandemic period. And here I described the current moment as the sort of quiet quitting, anti-capitalist Twitter moment.

So we talked about quiet quitting in a recent episode. Anti-capitalism Twitter, this is really popular among the blue check sort of coastal crowd on Twitter. Lots of tweets about, you know, we basically have to re-engineer capitalism or get rid of capitalism. Work, all workers exploitative. And why do we even have to work in the first place?

And there's this sort of classic sort of early 20th century sort of leftist tinge to that. So here I described this move, this final movement as work as a target for online activism. So it's work really being at the center of a conversation, the sort of online crowd based heavily in Twitter.

All right. So that's been the trajectory, 1950s to today. Movement backlash, movement backlash. What do I think about our current situation? Well, here is the bold claim I'm going to make is number one, I am going to call this current movement with some trepidation, this quiet quitting anti-capitalist Twitter movement a red herring.

Now I could be wrong about this, but this movement seems to be as much about the acquisition of social influence as it is a serious, I think, reform in the structure of work. It really is built around algorithmic reinforcement about what is getting views. I think this is a lot of what's driving quiet quitting.

We talked about this before. There's some core frustrations which are very important, but also these TikTok videos are doing well. So more and more people are going to do these TikTok videos. It's going to inflate then the influence of this idea. Same thing with anti-capitalist Twitter. There's all these people on Twitter who are, you know, hey, all work is exploitative at the same time, desperately trying to get you to sign up for their sub stack and make a living doing online work.

I think a lot of this gets inflated when we throw in the reinforcement loops of algorithmic content curation. So I think that those particular movements might be a red herring. Again, more about what happens to be gaining social credibility online right now than it is maybe some sort of serious challenge to what work should be.

There's not really a clear, pragmatic, optimistic proposal for where we need to be, which is what we've seen in the past backlash movement. So I'm going to put that aside for now again with trepidation, but I don't use Twitter. So to me, I don't run into this as much.

And I'm going to go back to the 2000s movement, the minimalist fire lifestyle design backlash movement, because what I think should happen and might happen next is instead of a brand new movement emerging, we're going to see a reform of what was broken about this work as a means to an end approach.

Because I think this is probably going to be the dominant approach for career thinking for the next 10 or 20 years. There's just some corrections that we have to make. So here was the issue with the existing work as a means to an end philosophy that emerged in the 2000s.

It was too technical because it came out of tech circles, which makes sense because it was being spread in the early days of web 2.0, who was more comfortable with those technologies, tech savvy people. So it came out of technical circles so that we get too much fiddly technical engineering detail.

Minimalism suffered from this. I think the downfall, like why that movement deflated with the exception of a few exceptions like Josh and Ryan who are doing well, is that it got so fiddly about things like how many items you own, how many things can you fit into a backpack, what color do you have a white kitchen with just three appliances.

It got too obsessive over these technical details. Fire had this same issue. Fire arose largely among engineering types because it was the engineering types who had the income in their 20s to actually put this type of plan into action. Because the key to fire is you have to survive on a relatively small fraction of your income, roughly 20 to 30 percent.

For that to really be possible, that first income has to be pretty big. And so who's in the sweet spot of making a big income but not yet burdened with mortgages and families and school expenses and everything else that comes later in life is basically was computer programmers. So the fire movement arose among computer programmers and it got super technical too.

It got super fiddly about tax loss harvesting and the exact right way to move your money around. And it really focused like a laser on the spreadsheets and on the mathematics of how you achieve this particular goal. So it got lost in its own specificity. And I think that was alienating to a broader audience and probably rightly so.

So I think that was the issue with fire. And then as we talked about last week, it's been destabilized by that. And now even its proponents are trying to back away from it because it's under attack from the online crowds. Like this is elitist, it's all just engineers. Everyone is just being privileged.

And so now they're kind of retreating and that's why that's losing steam. Lifestyle design sort of had the same issue. Tim Ferriss will talk about this. People got so fiddly in the details of lifestyle design. I had a friend who knew Tim well, and I remember back then he was getting really into lifestyle design and it was all about the automation and the tech.

And he had the setup. I remember this clearly. He was showing me, here's what's going to support me as I live. He was living in Brazil, I think at the time. You would click a button. There's no reason to automate this other than it was just a cool factor.

You would click a button and it would somehow go through one of these Google AdSense tools to find keywords that were making a lot of money. Like people were bidding a lot of money to sell ads with those keywords. It would then automatically send those keywords to copywriters in the Philippines, because I guess the Philippines, they have good English, to write a ton of pages for like HubSpot or one of these online page hosters that was big 10, 15 years ago.

That could then be a good receptacle for ads for those words. And he was showing me some example of homemade rocking chair. It was something like this. That is a word that people were bidding a lot of money on, because I guess there was particular people that sell plans for homemade rocking chairs and are willing to pay for those clicks.

So then his copywriters in the Philippines would then write 50 pages of content about homemade rocking chairs with all these links so that they could get those ads on there and try to maximize their money. And it was all this like minor arbitrage of $50 here, $100 there. That's what had that way down lifestyle design, too fiddly, too narrow, too technical, seemed too bro-y and it alienated sort of everyone else.

My argument though is that this general approach, work as a means to an end, this general approach is salvageable. And what I'm recommending, what I see salvaging this philosophy is introducing values into it. What I mean by this is starting before you get to the fiddliness, starting with a vision of a life well lived.

You cultivate your own understanding of the different aspects of your life, what you want your life to be like, what's important to you, what's your code, what's your definition of the deep life buckets, however you want to do this. But you start with this image, this vision of the life well lived that you feel in your bones and resonates.

And then you work backwards and say, great, work services, work services this vision. And then all of these ideas that arose in the early 2000s about if I live simpler or if I live cheaper and save at an expansive rate, or if I use some like automation or really leverage remote working like Ferris talked about, all of these tools are in a toolbox that you can start pulling out of, but you're not pulling out these tools just for the arbitrary exercise of building something to some specs that have become increasingly refined online.

You're building towards a life well lived, a vision of a life well lived that is specific and bespoke to you. So this is what I think is going to happen. Value based lifestyle centric career planning. This is going to be, I think, the big corrective, not whatever this stuff is, is going on online, not this let's reform capitalism and do TikTok videos about quiet quitting, red herring.

The next big movement, I think, is going to be that shift of what was the minimalist fire lifestyle design backlash that's going to evolve into look this long acronym I'm writing here, values based lifestyle centric career planning, VBLCCP. If I'm anything, I'm a very savvy marketer. We're going to hear that phrase all the time.

What's he up to, man? Hey, I'm just VBLCCP. You know what's going on? Like, yeah, I hear you, man. I'm in a VBLCCP life. We need a better acronym. But I think that is what Gen Z, I think that is what is going to fuel Gen Z. I think this is what's compatible with Gen Z.

I think this is going to be the next, I don't know how long it'll last. I think this is going to be the next big movement. It's also, of course, the philosophy that we're preaching all the time. So we'll get more into this. We have some questions in today's show that will dive into some more technical details.

But I just wanted to do this overview. Let's place our current discussions in this long trajectory. And what we see, we see movements, backlashes, movement, backlashes. And I think we're in this interesting time where we're taking a backlash that emerged over the last 20 years. And with perhaps the help of the pandemic and disruptions that caused and the way that that mainstreamed the idea of lifestyle design and engineering, maybe we're going to see a refinement of a backlash and finally get one that might actually have some legs.

So VBLCCP, value space, lifestyle centric career planning. Take my word for it. That is going to hopefully be one of the dominant ideas in the ongoing debate between work and meaning in the years ahead. Was the organization, man, that going on in the 40s and 30s too? I mean, it was a book.

So I'm taking that from the book that came out in 1956. And I think it's post-war. I think really you don't get these large corporations and people subjugating their sense of civic worth to corporations. I think that's really like a mid 40s and on type of phenomenon. Though I could be wrong about that.

So then the counterculture backlash lasted for a good 30 years? Let's say that picked up steam mid 60s. I don't know, not really 30 years. I see the counterculture backlash picked up steam in the mid 60s. I mean, you had the beat movement emerging in the late 50s. That doesn't really start to catch on wider until the 60s.

Mid 60s, you get the bigger countercultural backlash. Vietnam, of course, like explodes the whole thing because now you have this huge sort of generational divide and protests going on. But I think by the disco era that had kind of flamed out. I mean, a few things happened, right? I mean, sexually transmitted diseases, drugs, like the mind, you know, people started having LSD freakouts.

Like the things were happening with the drugs that weren't happening before. So I think that was that became a big part of it. Like people were burning out and frying out. And so by the disco era, by the late 70s, that was really dying out. And then the 80s, you got this sort of rise of let's all go make money.

And that was going on. And then but it was the same. It was the same generation. The yuppies were the same people who were part of the counterculture backlash. So they kind of ended up going and making money. And I think they were guilty about this. So for us, they taught us, well, don't be a hippie, but get a job you love.

And so I really think that was just the compromise. And I wrote a whole book. So if you're new to the show or new to me, my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You is a takedown of the passion culture idea, why it doesn't work, why just telling someone to follow your passion is not a sound bit of career advice.

It sounded good, but it doesn't work in practice. We'll see. And there could be something else new. But I think there's a lot of power to this work as a means to an end model. And I haven't really seen a major alternative. A lot of the stuff I'm seeing that's gaining traction, people resonating with people is really still in this framework.

I think people are just refining it, trying to understand how to get away from, you know, computer engineers doing spreadsheets about their admiral shares in Vanguard and what their overhead fees are and get towards something that the rest of us might actually see as viable. Thank you.