Thoreau, Walden - simplicity, rejection of societal expectations. The chapter on economy is delightfully technical. Toffler, Future Shock - the danger to socie

Thoreau, Walden - simplicity, rejection of societal expectations. The chapter on economy is delightfully technical. Toffler, Future Shock - the danger to societal cohesion and human wellness caused by constant, rapid, paradigm-breaking change. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and its Future - like the two above, but more modern, frighteningly prescient, and with some unfortunate baggage attached. Still, it's short, and worth a read. While not originally books, solar.lowtechmagazine.com now offers POD versions of their essays. They routinely introduce dead-end technologies to the reader that are often simpler and easier for a person to create and maintain at home, and which often confer a greater degree of independence than their mass-market analogues. I don't necessarily recommend wading through countless pages of psuedomythical waffling, but Crowley's Thelemic concept of True Will - that is, the real goal you want to achieve, rather than whatever pure hedonism happens to have caught your brain-corvid's attention at the moment - is a useful framework for prioritizing. Does it further the goal directly, or indirectly, or does it hinder the goal? In this way, you can avoid wasting time and effort. I found good stuff in Heidegger, but I don't think it's worth your time to grind through it. Just look up the Cliff's Notes for 'Sein und Zeit.' So what did I get out of all that? -I started to question what it was I really wanted to get out of life. -I decided I wanted more independence and liberty. -I decided I didn't like the direction tech was going, and wanted out. -I stopped being quite as materialistic. I'm still extremely materialistic, but I'm working on it. -I refocused my effort on amassing something like "F-U money" (for about ten years). -I spent a lot of time flailing for what to do next, but eventually became obsessed with small-scale, high-intensity regenerative agriculture, and decided that was it. -I spent a bunch of the saved money to buy myself a farm in Ireland, and will eventually pivot to full-time farming and part-time anti-materialism-- and away from tech. (At the moment, I'm still milking my Swiss job to fund startup costs and avoid the need to bootstrap or raid my nest egg, but the pivot day is in sight.) -I have something to look forward to that isn't just constant obsolecence of skills and an ever-accelerating race to the bottom.