CAREER CONTRARIANS by Candi Strecker Part 1 of 2: Published April 21, 1997
Nobody hands you a piece of paper spelling it out, but by the time you're eighteen you pretty much know what's expected of you in this society. You're supposed to grab some education and buckle down to work for the next thirty or forty years, with no breaks except for weekends and tiny slices of vacation time parcelled out at intervals. Keep your nose jammed to the grindstone, and maybe you'll live long enough to grab the carrot of retirement they dangle before you. Play by the rules, and you'll get paid more than enough to take care of your basic needs, though it will never seem like enough to cover all the things you want. But thousands of people are finding other ways to play the big economic game of life. Instead of traveling the traditional road of continuous, linear employment, they map out a start-and-stop path that alternates periods of paid work with time spent pursuing their own interests. Who are these people? Call them Career Contrarians. Quite simply, they're people whose identities aren't tied up with the jobs they sometimes fill. Some are artists and writers who have things they want to create. Others expand their horizons through education or travel. Still others focus on improving the world, by devoting time to political causes, volunteer programs, or just their own families. What they have in common is an understanding that in life, there's always a trade-off between two scarce commodities: Time and Money. Career Contrarians re-think their relationship with money in order to gain control of their time. The trick is to spend the least possible amount of time working for a living, freeing up the maximum amount of time for reaching personal goals. Three basic strategies can contribute to a successful Contrarian Career. Separately, each is powerful, but their real force comes when they're employed together. The first, FRUGALITY, begins with practical activities everyone can understand: thrift-shopping, clipping coupons, repairing things instead of replacing them, begging or borrowing things instead of buying them. But at a deeper level, being frugal means separating your true needs from the wants that society tries to program into you. It means choosing ten dollars' worth of function instead of one hundred dollars' worth of status. And it also means learning to recognize when you're using the experience of shopping — whether it's for a car or a cookie — to fill emotional hungers.
Running up debts is the surest way to shackle yourself to a lifetime of continuous work.	Once you decide not to want a lot of stuff, you won't need as much money, and thus won't need to spend as much time pursuing it. As Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, puts it, "Living below your means is a cheap way to be rich. It's the only easy way to be rich." If you can live below your means — spending less than you earn — you create a surplus with every paycheck. If you have any debts, start paying them off now, while avoiding taking on new ones. Running up debts is the surest way to shackle yourself to a lifetime of continuous work. (I don't recommend going into debt for anything except an education or a home mortgage.) Once you begin creating savings, you're on your way to buying time for yourself. At this point you can start planning to apply Strategy Two: ALTERNATING periods of working and saving with periods of non-work, during which you live off of your savings. It's a working life built from a series of sprints, not a single forty-year endurance marathon. By keeping out of debt, buying smart, and living frugally, most single people can save enough from several years' work to cover their expenses for a year off. This strategy requires both self-discipline and self-awareness. Budgeting for future time-off begins with a realistic knowledge of how much money you need to live on. (Besides food, clothing and shelter, don't forget to include the cost of health insurance.) And the best way to estimate your future living expenses is by paying close attention to how you're spending money now.
The best way to estimate your future living expenses is by paying close attention to how you're spending money now.	If you're not sure where your money goes, follow the corny but classic method of carrying a pen and notebook everywhere you go and noting every single penny spent and taken in each day for several months. The information you gather will reveal your true living expenses, giving you a sense of how much you have to sock away in the bank to finance your self-imposed sabbatical. This procedure will also provide eye-opening evidence of bad spending habits you need to work on. If the notion of skipping out of the work world for a year is too daunting, consider alternating work and personal time on a smaller scale. If you can live on the income from four days' work per week, you gain an entire day to use as you see fit. Or defy the unwritten law of the workplace and spend 40 hours a week at your full-time job — and not a minute more. You might have some energy left at the end of each day to devote to the things you love.
Now read the conclusion: Want to drop out of the rat race forever? The final Career Contrarian strategy could make it happen for you! Raised on a gladiolus farm in Ohio, Candi Strecker now thrives on double lattes, Vietnamese food and flea-market shopping in San Francisco. She is currently a freelancer for publications including the San Francisco Bay Guardian and SLANT, after many years of polishing her writing skills on her zines, Sidney Suppey's Quarterly & Confused Pet Monthly and It's A Wonderful Lifestyle (the definitive zine on the 1970s). © 1997 Candi Strecker, All Rights Reserved.