Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered, the podcast for people trying to figure it out.

Martha Beck:
So, Rowan, let’s just get right to it. What are you trying to figure out?

Rowan Mangan:
What am I trying to figure out, Marty? Oh, well, I don’t know. Life, the universe and everything. I think a lot of my time these days I spend trying to figure out what the world must look like to our two-year-old daughter. She’s quite new to planet Earth. And every now and again, I get a little glimpse into her psyche. And I had one the other day, it was quite interesting. We went to the park and we were in New York and we went to the local park and she came upon a sign that said, passive lawn.

Martha Beck:
Passive lawn.

Rowan Mangan:
Passive lawn. As opposed to the active kind, which is really frightening.

Martha Beck:
Terrifying.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s like horror movie stuff. That’s where the hills are alive with the sound of music is wrong. That’s an active lawn. So, it said no ball games, blah, blah, blah. And I saw Lila over there by herself pointing at the words. And I said, “What does it say?” And she pointed to the words while she said it, “Waila, Waila, Waila.” And so, I thought, wow. So, in her universe, we go to a park and there are just signs scattered about announcing her existence.

Martha Beck:
I actually think that we all do that. We’re always looking for our self. And I saw something once with a bunch of literary figures called, Why I Write. And somebody got up and said, I think it’s all in the vowel sound ai, ai, ai, Why I Write. And Emerson said, the good writer seems to be writing about himself, but he is actually looking for what he is common to him and his readers. So, that the readers are always reading about themselves. Lila’s just ahead of the game.

Rowan Mangan:
We’re all completely solipsistic is what you’re saying.

Martha Beck:
You don’t exist. But yes. I imagine you saying that.

Rowan Mangan:
There we go. So, there’s a lot a to figure out there.

Martha Beck:
There’s a lot to figure out. Waila, Waila, Waila. Passive lawn.

Rowan Mangan:
What are you trying to figure out, Marty?

Martha Beck:
Oh my gosh. In all seriousness, I have the ADD.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s not bad.

Martha Beck:
A bad case of the ADD.

Rowan Mangan:
Got a touch of the old ADD.

Martha Beck:
So, I’d been told, had my brain wired and everything. And so, I made a fatal blunder. I decided that in order to prove a theory about creativity, I was going to allow my creativity off its leash for a month. And I did, as you know.

Rowan Mangan:
I do know.

Martha Beck:
The change in me was bizarre. I became an early morning riser. I mean 4:00 in the morning early riser. Constantly excited. Basically, just seeing Marty, Marty, Marty, Marty everywhere and drawing pictures of Lila because I felt like a two-year-old let out of its cage. And my month is up, Rowie. Oh. And she doesn’t want to go back in her cage.

Rowan Mangan:
Does she have to go back in her cage?

Martha Beck:
I don’t think so. Maybe we could just retrofit it. So, it’s more like a doghouse.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Let’s make her a kennel.

Martha Beck:
Because she wants a passive lawn and a widdle house.

Rowan Mangan:
A widdle house.

Martha Beck:
I don’t want to push her back away because I had to stop being just that creative self quite … We all do. We get swallowed by the culture, that is why we make this podcast. And this is a fun thing. But my whole thing is how do I reappear into the culture? Because it’s like I’ve got 12 friends that I should have texted or emailed and I just dropped off the face of the earth. And I don’t know if our listeners have this same thing, but I come back and I’m like, “Ha, ha. Hi. I was busy for a month.” And then they say, “What are you doing?” And I’m like, “Oh, I did 17,000 watercolors and I threw all of them away, but I didn’t have time to call you.”

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, dear. Yeah. We might have to-

Martha Beck:
They take umbridge.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. We’ll have to finesse the language there a little bit, I think.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. They take umbridge. If it’s just been a couple of days, it’s been a month, I’m afraid I’m going to get … Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
You do truly disappear into your artist mode. You’ve got your robe with kind of paints along the sleeves of it.

Martha Beck:
That’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
Especially around the cuffs. You live on peanut butter sandwiches and there’s just this, there’s an absence around you.

Martha Beck:
Only it’s not an absence. There’s an absence around me that you feel, but what I’m present with is massive. It’s a massive force of energy that I’ve gone into. I’ve gone into some kind of other dimension.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I know.

Martha Beck:
So, you say I’m gone and I like, “Oh, I looked gone.” But for me, it’s like everything just explodes from black and white into color and it’s on some kind of wonderful drug and it’s very psychedelic. Who wants to reappear for that? And then I’m like, “Oh, I’m so sorry I didn’t answer your text.” And I have to pack in this extra dimension of the universe that’s in color and go back to black and white and go, “I’m so sorry I didn’t get back to you two weeks ago.”

Rowan Mangan:
I got one of those Facebook memories things that comes up. You won’t know what I mean, but our listeners will.

Martha Beck:
I know what you mean. I’m not that bad at it.

Rowan Mangan:
It was from, I think about four or five years ago when we’d had a conversation that is just so startlingly familiar right now. So, you had said to me, “I have to do really scary things today.” And I said, “What are they?” And you said, “Mostly replying to kind texts from people who mean me no harm.”

Martha Beck:
That’s true. That’s the worst kind because I feel so bad about it. So, I went from getting up at 4:00 just like – I know exactly what I’m doing today to texting you at 8:30 to say, “All right. Where are you in the house? Can I get some cover here?” And there’s nothing to be covered from it. I just like, I want to hide behind you from the world.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, dear.

Martha Beck:
I haven’t figured it out at all. How to reappear? I know how to disappear. Just don’t know how to reappear.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ll see. We’ll get there. We’ll get there.

Martha Beck:
You’re such a kind lady.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ll be right back with more Bewildered. I have a favor to ask. You might not know this but ratings and reviews are like gold in the podcasting universe. They get podcasts in front of more faces, more eyes, more ears, all the bits that you could have a podcast in front of, that’s what they do. So, it would help us enormously if you would consider going over to your favorite podcasting app, especially if it’s Apple and giving us a few stars, maybe even five, maybe even six. If you can find a way to hack the system, I wouldn’t complain. And a review would be also be wonderful. We read them all and love them. So, thank you very much in advance. Let’s just go out there and bewilder the world.

What was that fight about, Marty? Oh, you are like, “I’m such a visual person.” And then I was like, “Eh, I’m such a visual person.” And then you are like, oh no, that was upstairs. That was an earlier fight. And I said, “Eh, I’m such a visual person. Dear diary, my name’s Martha. I’m such a visual person.”

Martha Beck:
You scum sucking pig.

Rowan Mangan:
And then you said, “Eh, my name is Ro. And if my desk isn’t exactly the right way, I have a nervous breakdown.”

Martha Beck:
Both of us were right. No argument we can give. I know.

Rowan Mangan:
We actually aren’t very good at fighting even when we-

Martha Beck:
No.

Rowan Mangan:
Even when we insult each other, we’re both like, no, that’s fair actually.

Martha Beck:
I know. It comes of having a third person because you know there’s a referee going, no, no, she said that.

Rowan Mangan:
Nonsense.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Nonsense. We’re just delightful human beings.

Martha Beck:
That’s also true. But everyone is delightful. Everyone is delightful under all that malice.

Rowan Mangan:
So, listen, I don’t know if you are aware of this, because I’ve just recently been made aware of it again, but we’re doing a podcast right now.

Martha Beck:
What?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah. We are.

Martha Beck:
Since when? Oh, I have to reappear. Okay. Actually, this is a Bewild files episode, right? What? Don’t laugh at me. I like to play with the sash of my velvety robe that I wear all the time over my clothes. And Lila calls it Muffy’s tail and she’s always trying to steal my tail.

Rowan Mangan:
And Marty’s just for the first time ever in all the time I’ve known her, she’s just taken to doing a little like pizzazz move. She does this little, she shakes the edges of her tail.

Martha Beck:
It’s the ADD.

Rowan Mangan:
This is a strange episode already.

Martha Beck:
Move forward. No one can see me twirling my tail.

Rowan Mangan:
Move forward. No one can see me twirling my tail. So, today listeners…

Martha Beck:
We’re going to be talking about weird work because we had an interesting message in a question.

Rowan Mangan:
A question. There you go.

Martha Beck:
A listener.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. It came in and it struck us when we listened to this message, question. This missive that came forth from the listenership.

Martha Beck:
The epistle as it were.

Rowan Mangan:
The epistle as it were, that sometimes there are cultural messages that are so powerful that we really, really don’t recognize them as stories, as culture, as fiction. We are so blind to those individual areas that we genuinely think they’re absolute reality.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Absolute truth.

Rowan Mangan:
And one area that Marty and I believe that we have actually uncovered is, are you ready for it?

Martha Beck:
Jobs.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. Jobs. So, I’m going to play Caroline’s message now and I want all of us to play and see if we can spot the blind spots.

Caroline:
Hi, this is Caroline and I am currently living in Western Australia. Martha and Row, I have a question about what to do when my desire to be in integrity with myself is hijacked by my reasoning brain? For example, I want to work around big animals like horses or big wild cats. I want to learn from them and experience them in their natural realm.

This feels wonderful to me. But then I get stuck on who would hire someone with no experience. If I consider finding a day job to help pay my bills, then my left hemisphere gets all out of whack and anxious, then I’m going to get sick again and be out of integrity. How do I keep from getting frozen by the fear of being out of integrity and my body falling apart again?

Rowan Mangan:
So, that is Caroline, and it’s an amazing question. Yeah. It’s filled with variations of topics. She touches on many things. Because this is our podcast, we’re just going to go down the rabbit hole that we were struck by right in this. So, sorry about that Caroline, if you really wanted to just go down, one of the other things. I love big animals also. Yes, 100%. But we are going to talk about work.

Martha Beck:
So, actually I want to unpack it a little more because she talks about I know what I love, but then reason kicks in. Yeah. Logic kicks in and tells me who would hire me? I start to question with my reasoning brain. That’s not reasoning. That is the cultural gospel coming in. And the cultural gospel always poses as reason or logic to the person who experiences it.

It is absolutely obvious to people who are raised, say in a culture that requires some sort of ritual tattooing or something that they have to do that, that’s just rational. So, when we get an idea that’s really sunk in and it feels true, we see it as reason when in fact it’s a value statement and it’s not necessarily true at all.

Rowan Mangan:
And isn’t it fascinating how the culture masquerades as reason like it is so clever, it’s so clever. And so, we are not picking on you, Caroline. We’re actually delighted to see that you are showing this thing that I think we all have done at one time or another.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I once heard this old timey British comedy duo, and they were doing this argument between a father and a son in a cannibal tribe. And the son was saying, “I won’t eat people.” And the father was like, “You’re crazy. What is it with these kids? Why will they not eat people? We should eat people.” And the son is like, “No, it’s wrong.” And at the very end of this argument, the father says, “You might as well say don’t stab people.” And the son is like, “Don’t stab people.” “Well, you’ve got to stab people.” And they have this as if.

So, the son still has this weird gospel that allows him to hurt people. And it’s just about how we position as that’s the way it is. And we call that reason and logic and it’s not at all. So, I just think that what we’re seeing here is not logic, but a brand of cultural fundamentalism in our culture.

Rowan Mangan:
So, what is the culture saying here? How do we pull that out and see what’s the message we are receiving about a job?

Martha Beck:
One of the biggest ones, and I thought ho, ho, I will call this very coyly, the Book of Job. Because it’s like the Book of Job in the Bible, which is about someone being tormented nearly to death for no reason. So, the Book of Job says basically, if you want to live the life of your dreams, you have to find an established job that exists out there that some corporate entity or person gives to you that absolutely conforms to your desires and lets you do the things you want.

Rowan Mangan:
And then if you are very, very good, if you’re a good little person, then you’ll be able to retire with a modest income at age 65. And maybe if you’re lucky, go on a cruise. Congratulations.

Martha Beck:
Yay. Also, your workplace situation and the people around you, where you spend most of your waking hours, if you’re lucky, won’t be so horrible. It meant they make you want to kill yourself. And this is the only way to live your dreams. I’ve heard this a trillion times from clients and friends.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It’s fascinating. And it was interesting, only by getting a capital J job working with big animals, can I be in integrity? That’s just paraphrasing what Caroline was saying. And then she says, “But I won’t be hired without experience.” So, there’s this whole really complex, if this, then that equation that’s going on in Caroline’s head, and so many of us, oh my god, you are not alone.

Martha Beck:
Not alone.

Rowan Mangan:
And so, I want to spend my time with big animals. I don’t even think it’s necessarily that she needs to work with them, not today.

Martha Beck:
No. Let’s take out the work word because it’s so associated with this whole massive construct.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I think it’s probably fair to extrapolate that what Caroline wants is to spend time with big animals in her life and that feels-

Martha Beck:
In their natural habitat she said.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And that feels like integrity to her. And then past there, it gets very garbled. So, I think, well, let’s look at this job thing and figure out how we come to our senses about it. Marty, how do we come to our senses about it, Marty?

Martha Beck:
We will talk about that in just a minute.

Rowan Mangan:
So, to recap, Caroline’s blind spot and so many of our blind spots is that is this idea of that it has to be a job. My passion has to be my job. And this is not just a cultural story, but I also think is quite archaic, because we’re living in a really amazing time in so many ways. And it just strikes me, one of the things, Marty’s working on a book right now and her research and the conversations that we have, as she researches it, I keep getting this same message from them, which is where you find fear, the book is about anxiety. So, where you find fear, there’s the opportunity for creativity.

Martha Beck:
And when you said that, I was like, that’s amazing. You should write a book about that. Because I hadn’t actually phrased it that way. I had to text it to myself.

Rowan Mangan:
So, it’s so funny when you say something, Marty’s like, “I’m going to text that to myself.”

Martha Beck:
Oh really? You’d say it, I recognize it, then I write it again and text it to myself so I can put it back in the book from which you got it.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t want anybody else when I think about you, I text myself. Oh. I hope we’re not going to get billed for royalties. That was a stunning rendition.

Martha Beck:
That is literally true. Back to that topic. Where there is fear…

Rowan Mangan:
There’s an opportunity for creativity.

Martha Beck:
There’s an opportunity for creativity. We were afraid to say it and then we made a creative choice to say it in unison, like a Greek fricking chorus. All right.

Rowan Mangan:
And I just want to say that when it comes to the question of jobs, because downstream from job is earning money, which is survival, not dying of starvation, I mean the obvious, keep your family going, blah, blah, blah. So, culture will scare the living shit out of you on this topic. So, if you don’t think there’s fear around the job question, you are out of you goddamn mind.

Martha Beck:
So much fear. And the thing is that part of the brain that feels all that fear is designed to say, find food, escape the predator. That’s it. So, it’s very immediate, very visceral and feels incredibly strong. And also, that part of the brain doesn’t like to believe there are other options. So, it shuts down the other options. Add to that very primitive, I mean even sea cucumbers with 20,000 total neurons as opposed to our billions and billions, they still have that fear impulse.

And we take sea cucumber level fear and add to it something as elaborate as the structure of the materialist job in the 20th century, which is when it really came to be in the form we see it. We’re adding those together and making this poisonous brew of things to scare ourselves to death while blinding ourselves, to ways we can avoid danger and get sustenance there. I’m going to climb down off the soapbox.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s amazing how much that very basic idea can sprout, but still be in that same part of the brain where it’s like retirement savings, 401(k) investments, blah, blah, like all of that stuff, which is quite complex and quite secondary to survival. But all happens in that same scary brain place.

Martha Beck:
Yes. And this is mostly in the left hemisphere, which is also saying, this is logic, this is logic, this is just logical. I’m just giving you logic.

Rowan Mangan:
This is my reasoning mind. Yes.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah. This is a very big soapbox for me as well as you, I think.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, yeah. But so, Caroline, let’s just like, I hate this term, but it was such a fun term at university when you would go, let’s problematize this. Oh, it’s so bad and you’re so good.

Martha Beck:
Let’s problematize.

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s problematize, Caroline.

Martha Beck:
I’ll problematize you.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, don’t to me. So, Caroline, does your integrity demand that you receive a salary for spending time with big animals? That is the question that I pose to everyone, including myself. Because I am just thinking a lot more in the last little while about how much I want to spend more time with big animals. Get paid for it. It’s funny how suggestible we can be.

Martha Beck:
And there’s a parallel to that, which means is getting a salary the only way I can support myself while being around big animals. Because if you went out to live off the land, you could be around the big animals and still be living. You know what I mean? You wouldn’t need money. You could hunt and forage.

Rowan Mangan:
All right. But that’s not where we’re going with it.

Martha Beck:
No, no.

Rowan Mangan:
We’re not going to … Just why aren’t you living off the land?

Martha Beck:
Caroline, go live on the land.

Rowan Mangan:
There’s big animals out there, I think. I don’t know what, skunks, I suppose, possums.

Martha Beck:
Have a brief exciting life. Go for it. Just train rattlesnakes. You’ll be fine.

Rowan Mangan:
No, but I think this is, it was cool that you said that the job is actually 20th century, because that is, yeah, it’s actually a relic in a lot of senses right now. And I had to think about this when we were planning this episode because I thought, I have very strong opinions about the creative possibilities of making money in this exact moment in time.

And I had to check my privilege a little bit. And I was like, is that true for everyone or is that only once you reach a certain level of economic prosperity and security, is that true? And of course you asked that question. But I think we can also use that kind of argument to just perpetuate our own fears, because I’ve heard so much amazing stories of 18-year-olds with a mobile phone in Ghana making something amazing.

So, I just think if this sounds like that, just make sure that you are sure that it’s a privileged thing because I don’t actually think it has to be because the means to be creative with how money flows to you I think is actually, we are reaching a point where it’s quite democratic.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I have so many stories about this, some of them I’ll tell later on. But here’s the bottom line. We live in a completely different economic landscape from the one that existed. When the traditional job was created, never forget that it was created as factory label.

Rowan Mangan:
Can’t say it too many times.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Go to a building, sit with other people, do a job you hate, go home. And it didn’t exist before the industrial revolution at all. And then the whole go to an office thing was all 20th century. So, what I always have done in my own life is I pull back and I say, “What do I want my life to look like? Not where is a job that will make me happy, but how do I want to spend my time on earth?”

And then that dictates to me my way of creating things and my way of finding sustenance. And that has added up to what people call a career, but it’s really been this weird, live off the new economic landscape from multiple tiny sources of income that all add up to something and that’s really workable. So, I’ve lived that.

Rowan Mangan:
It just strikes me to go often a little mini detour for a moment, but I was just thinking about what you were saying about the go into an office as the extension of the industrial revolution sort of thing and the factory. But it also strikes me that part of the relic of the 20th century model that we’re living in, I’m seeing a very feminist slant suddenly of this, which is that going into the office was the nuclear family where the man goes to the office and dinner is on the table and a martini when he walks in the door and the wife’s at home with the kids.

And so, actually this where I think we’ve got lost as a society in this cultural story, it’s the job itself is actually part of the crisis that we’re seeing in our media western whatever culture, because, excuse me, where all this they don’t just don’t work.

Martha Beck:
It was literally designed … This was my PhD dissertation topic, buckle up. It was the jobs we have today were literally designed for property owning wealthy males who in the early United States and in Europe, who had multiple servants, often slaves and always women doing full-time domestic labor. And we’re not even just talking every guy or even every white man, it was property owning white males. It was an elite privilege to do what we call a job so that you didn’t have to worry about anything else. And when I had little kids and fibromyalgia, I could not do a job.

Rowan Mangan:
And so, where we have women in particular who are still doing so much of the domestic work, there’s still all the studies showing…

Martha Beck:
Kin work.

Rowan Mangan:
… men are getting better, but the kin work, yeah, and the domestic work as well is when you have to get a job as well with this 9:00 to 5:00 expectation attached to it, you’re actually also signing yourself up. If you are a woman or identify as a woman or have that sort of heterosexual domestic setup, you’re also potentially signing yourself up for an eternal crisis of time.

And I think maybe that’s part of what Caroline’s thinking is that, well, given that, I will have to spend this much time dealing with kids, this much time dealing with housework, this much time dealing with writing cards to my husband’s mother about her hip replacement operation. Then the only way I will get to fulfill my dream is to fit my dream into the job. But I haven’t designed my whole life for that. I don’t have the experience, so I won’t get hired. Now getting hired is so 20th century.

Martha Beck:
It is.

Rowan Mangan:
Because we now have an economy where you create the thing and then they come to you. And just, sorry, I’m getting so excited, Marty.

Martha Beck:
It’s exciting.

Rowan Mangan:
But just to come back to the salary and trying to do that is work is the price that you pay in this model to have a good life or a good enough life.

Martha Beck:
A good evening, a good weekend occasionally, because most of your waking hours are at the job.

Rowan Mangan:
And so, it’s all the things that you need end up needing to give yourself because you’re so anxious and so depressed because your job is so miserable, is your consolation prize for having to go into your job but that’s also supposed to be the part of your life that you’re doing your job for, but you are just using it to recover from the misery of having this job. I mean, guys.

Martha Beck:
Gnarly.

Rowan Mangan:
We have got to look at this.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Change it, and your point is well taken to question the Book of Job, you have to question everything.

Rowan Mangan:
The whole Bible.

Martha Beck:
About gender, about child rearing, about the importance of relative occupations that go into a human life. So, again-

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry. So much of it is just about how we want to spend our time.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So, how do I want my life to look and how can I support myself, that goes to two different things. How can I do something that makes others’ lives better? Because that’s the source of value. If you can add something to the world that other people value and you can be a source of it, then you have a commodity, as it were. And what I had is I like talking to people about their lives, and it turned into a career that people I think I set out for and had business cards printed up and stuff. I just talked to people so much that they started paying me.

So, how can I make others’ lives better doing what I enjoy? And then, what do I want the day to look like? How do I want every day to look like? I’m not going to go to a job for 10 hours and then rest a little in the evening. What do I want a day to be like for me? And then shoot for that the way Tim Ferriss did in the ‘Four-hour Work Week’.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m going to say something.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
I want to say that how can I make others’ lives better? And then you said, that’s creating value. And we watched a really interesting TikTok video where someone was arguing for the virtues of diversity and saying, ultimately, this will affect your bottom line because of these reasons and these reasons you will end up with more profit. And then she said at the end, she’s like, “I should not have to resort to capitalist language and values to tell you to be nice to each other, but I can, but I shouldn’t have to.”

And in a way, I just want to sort of push back a little bit that, yes, I want to create value, but I also want to suggest that when we’re talking about our dreams and our integrity and all of that, that I think that becomes the byproduct of doing what is your passion, is that it will create value for others. So, I would almost prefer to ask, what is my dream? What is the way I want to spend my time? And then the next bit is how do I make it pay?

Martha Beck:
And you’ve always gone at it that way. And I think it’s really interesting because I had children really young, and you in your 20s were out on adventures. And so, mine was, oh my god, I’ve got to support these three kids. I’ve got to create value and sell it and get money for it. And yours was, how do I want my day to live?

Rowan Mangan:
I was like, can I just have fun? I’ve got no one to support, baby.

Martha Beck:
Then they crisscrossed at a point where you now create value doing what you love and I now get to have the spend a month painting because we both have both sets of structures in place, and they’re not cultural structures. They connect with cultural structures. This podcast is connecting with people, and I hope making their day a little better, but in really tangential ways that most people would not call a job.

Rowan Mangan:
Or creating value for that matter.

Martha Beck:
Or creating any value except our own delight in our fights.

Rowan Mangan:
Some of our reviews occasionally say that they’re a bit too delighted by each other and we’re like, sorry, not sorry.

Martha Beck:
Sorry, not sorry. Yeah. I almost said a bad word. Yeah. Because I respectfully do not care if you think we like each other too much because we do.

Rowan Mangan:
We do. And just to, we’ve sort of keep alluding to this idea of this new economy and this 21st century way of thinking. Obviously, what I’m talking about is the internet and the social web and the ways that we can connect with each other now, which is absolutely revolutionary. Every five years, it’s a complete revolution, it’s a completely new place to live.

Martha Beck:
And it’s speeding up every five years, every two years, every one year, every six months. That’s Moore’s Law of Development is going up faster every single year.

Rowan Mangan:
And every single development is an opportunity to reengage and get creative once again with this idea of jobs and working and supporting yourself. What was the CVS? What’s the thing happened?

Martha Beck:
Oh, yeah. Okay. So, I went to the pharmacy yesterday, and as I was buying two bars of ChapStick, not just for you, but also for Karen, out of my sheer generosity, there was just one person working the whole store, and she was running back and forth between these supposedly automated teller stands, but they always needed help.

And so, she finally got to me and I said, “Man, you’re short staffed today. That must be hard.” And she said, “Oh no, it’s like this every day.” And I said, “You’re kidding. This is a big store. There’s just you?” And she said, “Well, everybody else went home for the pandemic. They just left me here by myself. And everyone else in the intervening months found ways that they could make.” And she named a figure, “Forty, $50,000 just doing something on the internet. So, they decided not to come back to work.” And I was like, “What are they doing? Tell me everything.” And she’s like, “I don’t know. They just all found a way.”

And I’m assuming these are not, I mean, she seems to be a person who’s living pretty close to subsistence, and I don’t think these are highly skilled people with head hunters, executive search firms out gunning to take them away from the pharmacy to do their jobs online. But they were doing it. And they were in effect, they’d left the civilization. They’d gone out into the wild world of the internet and the intellect, and now they’re all doing something to support themselves, and they never had to go back to their job.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And it’s such a mystery to everyone who’s still scanning the newspaper, help wanted ads, because that’s just not how it works anymore. You know Marty, what if I was 23 right now, do you know what I’ll be doing?

Martha Beck:
Wait, but you’re not 23?

Rowan Mangan:
I am 23. So, I regret to inform you that I am going to now become a #vanlife influencer and travel around the country earning money that way, making TikTok videos with my dog that I don’t have.

Martha Beck:
You have a dog.

Rowan Mangan:
It used to be mine, but then Karen stole it. Claire Bear, Fair-Of-Hair, standing with a vacant stare. She couldn’t come in a van life. Are you kidding me?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. The van life thing, we once talked about how there are no lesbians in van life, and then you heard differently.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, my gosh. Our readers got back to me, and I now follow a lot of very cool gay van life people. They’re not even all white.

Martha Beck:
So, there’s even an example.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s awesome.

Martha Beck:
You put something out online about there aren’t people doing this like me. And bam, you get so many sources of information and you use them because you are, to me, the most interesting creature. After a year, after a year.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m like a large animal.

Martha Beck:
Decades of life coaching, you come along as the most interesting specimen because you are an economy scavenger.

Rowan Mangan:
Scavenger.

Martha Beck:
You’ve gone to different countries, you’ve been in different situations, and you never think who’s going to hire me? You’re always thinking, I could do that, I could do that, I could do that. And some of them are job-like things, and some of them are just things you could do that you know would be valuable to someone and you could help them with.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It’s funny now that you say that, I’ve got a sort of junk yard dog kind of thing where I’m always on the lookout for if I’m down and out, if I’m homeless and I need to, whatever, yeah, I do always think like that. It’s funny, I always feel like, okay, so there’s what I can do. And so, there’s the system and then there’s what I want to do, and then it’s like, how can I mesh them together? How can I Tetris what’s available with what I can do to make some money?

Martha Beck:
So, Tetris is a visual puzzle that you put together. You have these pieces, here’s what I can do. And then the objective is to fit them into the system in a place that the game will approve of.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. And so, if I were unattached now, I would go and I love travel, I love all of that sort of stuff. I even love multimedia. So, TikTok and mobile phones and van life, #vanlife, would be perfect for me because where does my joy meet the world’s need?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Who was it? Matthew Fox said, “Your mission in life is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Rowan Mangan:
There you go.

Martha Beck:
And that’s not necessarily a job. Sometimes it will be job-like, or you may get a job that works. We’re not anti-job here.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh god, no. It’s just it won’t always connect but once in a while it will. Good luck.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Robert Louis Stevenson said, everybody lives by selling something. And this is after writing about a guy marooned on a desert island. And so, what he’s selling, he’s trading his energy foraging and hunting on the island for subsistence. And if you can back up that far as if you’re marooned on a desert island, walking through a city with you is like walking through the woods with a naturalist saying, “I could do that. This could work that way.” And I’m sorry, I know you don’t like to be praised, but you have Tetris’d together a really fascinating life doing what you wanted. And I did so because I had to, because I was too sick to get a job.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting because the analogy with the desert island though is that it’s always been fairly subsistence for me. And it’s almost like that’s the tradeoff, is that what the promise that the culture gives you with the job, and it doesn’t always come through on that promise, is that security, that sense of you’ve got more than enough if that you’re not living close to the bone If something happens, da, da, da. But I don’t think it does deliver on that promise.

Martha Beck:
I was really surprised the other day, I was listening to a book on writing, and he got to a chapter on self-publishing, which I expected to read that read in the 1990s, which was, there’s no money in it. It’s called vanity press for a reason. And you will never make a cent. In 2020s, the guy was saying, no, if you get some fans online, you can just put your novels out there in digital form and people pay for them, and you can make some pretty good money.

Rowan Mangan:
Because there’s no overhead.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And if you get enough of them, you can do really well. And that’s also true. We know a woman who does, she has three kids at home, and she started doing-

Rowan Mangan:
She was amazing. She’s in our family actually. And she had her kids, she’s very brilliant woman. And then she started, I don’t even know how she got into it, but there are all these products that you can get for newborns, for gifts and everything, and blankets, names in a frame.

And then, so she started using these online tools. And next thing I know, she’s doing tutorials for other people who are starting to use these tools because she finds that she can communicate how to use them really well or how to use them the most effective way possible. And she’s got a YouTube channel now, and she’s da, da. So, she’s using all the tools that are available.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And I’ll never forget the day someone told me, and this was right around 2000, you like talking to people about their lives, here sketched out on a napkin is a way that you can make a website for $150 where you could teach people that online. And I was like, “Oh my god, that would work.” And I did it for $150, went into the black the next day, that’s Martha Beck Incorporated. It was just a napkin and an idea and boom.

So, yeah, we’ve both kind of lived that way at subsistence level, and it’s turning out kind of above subsistence level. And I do think people can do this. I think it’s the most exciting time to be alive, maybe ever. But it requires a shift of attention away from that obsession with the job hierarchy of the 20th century. And it requires a willingness to disbelief the deepest, scariest, most emphatic obsessions of the culture.

Rowan Mangan:
So true, that is so true.

Martha Beck:
It reminds me of a time, another pivotal time, right before I had the cocktail napkin job or company. I was desperate and broke, and I had kids and I needed money. And I was walking on the beach and I was like, please, please, please let me get a job. And something from deep inside me said, almost audibly, what makes you think that your living has to come from a job? And I was like, huh.

Rowan Mangan:
And that’s what we want to offer Caroline, and all of you who are struggling with questions of work and jobs and money and your own integrity and your own dreams is just don’t forget to stay creative.

Martha Beck:
And stay wild.

Rowan Mangan: 
We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word ‘WILD’ to 570-873-0144.

We’re also on Instagram. Our handle is @bewilderedpodcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show.

For more of us, Martha’s on Instagram, themarthabeck. She’s on Facebook, The Martha Beck, and she’s on Twitter, marthabeck. Her website is, MarthaBeck.com. And me, I too am on Instagram. Rowan_Mangan. I’m on Facebook as Rowan Mangan. And I’m on Twitter as RowanMangan. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI.