Far Beyond The Stars: The Archives

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

This message is for all of the new readers out there. Over the last few weeks the number of people reading the work that I’m doing has expanded at an incredible rate, peaking recently with an interview that I did with Jeff Glor for the CBS Evening News.

If you’re here because you saw the feature on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, welcome! If you’re here because you saw me in any number of thousands of other places, on Twitter, or on Facebook, welcome!

[UPDATE! You can watch the CBS video interview with me about minimalism here.]

I hope there’s something I can teach you about how to pursue freedom in your own life.

(If you’re an long-time reader, a lot of this might bore you, so feel free to skip this blog post if you have better things to do with your life.)

Who is this Everett Bogue guy?

Oh, that’s me! I’m the author of two best-selling e-books. Right now I’m moving to San Francisco on November 1st 2010. I live with around 50 personal possessions and 88 total possessions. But I’m moving, so I’ll probably toss or sell some stuff before that.

Currently I’m enrolled yoga teacher training program at Yoga to the People in San Francisco.

Personal possessions are things I’d take with me anywhere I went in the world if I left tomorrow — mostly clothes, laptop, shoes, bag, etc.

Total possessions includes a couple of kitchen things and my bed — I’d ditch this stuff on craigslist if I moved somewhere else and buy a frying pan for cooking.

If you’d like to get an idea of what my possessions look like: here’s what I had when I had 57 things in July of 2010, what I had when I had 75 things in January of 2010, and what I had when I had 97 things in November of 2009.

Here are my e-books:

The Art of Being Minimalist — which teaches you how to stop consuming and start living. Published in February of 2010.

Minimalist Business — which teaches you start a zero-overhead online business so that you can live and work from anywhere. Published in May of 2010.

[*SIDENOTE*] The price of Minimalist Business is going up soon because I’m adding additional valuable content to the e-book on it’s sixth-month anniversary. If you’re interested in purchasing it now you’ll receive the additional content at no additional charge.

Alternatively sign up for free updates via RSS or EMAIL and I’ll be sure to notify you with the same offer before the price goes up.

I’ve also written two completely free e-books, which you can download now and read whenever.

How to Create a Movement

Minimalist Workweek: 50 Strategies for Working Less

A brief history of being minimalist.

I got started living a minimalist lifestyle in July of 2009. At the time I was unhappy working a day job that everyone told me was supposed to be super awesome (I was photo editing at New York Magazine.) I couldn’t figure out why I was unhappy sitting at such an awesome desk, so I started practicing a lot of yoga in order to attempt to discover the root of the problem. Slowly the answer came to me as I wandered around the Internet looking for better ways to live my life.

Around that time I discovered a blog by a brilliant fellow named Leo Babauta who was living with less than 50 things. After reading his blog from start to finish, I decided that being happy was more important than sitting at a desk, so I quit my job with $3,000 in the bank. I tossed 97 things into one backpacking bag, one laptop bag, and one camera bag and hopped on a plane to Portland, Oregon.

While I was in Portland I started blogging about how I was living with less than 100 things, and surprisingly a lot of people started to come and read my blog (which you’re reading now.)

My favorite blogs on living a minimalist lifestyle:

I’m not alone in blogging about minimalism, here are a few other blogs which offer you different perspectives on the movement.

If you can’t figure out why you can’t afford to pay your car payment, read Tammy Strobel’s Rowdy Kittens. Tammy and her husband Logan sold their cars and downsized to a small house in Portland in order to find freedom. Tammy has written a great e-book Smalltopia.

If you have two kids and live in a house in the suburbs, Joshua Becker’s Becoming Minimalist is for you. Then you won’t have to email me saying you can’t live this way because you have kids, Joshua does it so you can. Joshua has an incredible e-book Inside-Out Simplicity.

If you’re a steaming-hot 20-something year old lad or lady who likes adventure anywhere in the world, read Colin Wright’s Exile Lifestyle, and watch as he moves to a new continent every four months. Colin is the author of Networking Awesomely.

If you want to live and work from anywhere while supporting hundreds of entrepreneurs in 3rd world countries by raising tens of thousands of dollars for Kiva, read Karol Gajda’s Ridiculously Extraordinary. Karol is the author of How to Live Anywhere.

If you’ve got tons of crap sitting around your house, and you want to sell it all in order to live and work from anywhere and pay off your debt, Adam Baker of Man Vs Debt is your man. He wrote an e-book too, Sell Your Crap.

There are of course hundreds of minimalist blogs popping up all over the world, these are just some of my favorites.

Where I’ve lived because of my minimalist lifestyle.

In the last year I’ve moved all over the United States in search of a cool place to live.

• I left New York after living there for 7 years in August of 2009
• August-November 2009 I lived in Portland, Oregon.
• December-January 2010 I lived in Chicago, Illinois
• January-May 2010 I lived in Brooklyn, New York
• May-October 2010 I lived in Oakland, California

Next week (November 1st 2010) I’m moving to San Francisco’s mission district.

Why have I been able to move so much?

Minimalism is a remarkable tool for anyone who wants to figure out where they want to live in the world. Basically, I can move anywhere I want for the price of a plane ticket. In May 2010 I moved from New York to Oakland for only $125 + a few basic set-up costs of getting a new apartment and finding a bed to sleep on.

If I felt like leaving to live in South America at the end of December, I totally could, if I wanted to. The minute I’m bored of San Francisco (it hasn’t happened yet!) I could totally skip town and go wherever my heart leads me.

This freedom is the beauty of minimalism.

How to automate your income by building a zero-overhead business.

The other decisive element to my success has been the pursuit of automated income. Basically, the Internet has given us the ability to produce valuable content that teaches people how to live better lives. When we do this, it gives us the freedom to work on producing more value. This is a continuous feedback loop that leads to financial freedom.

When I released The Art of Being Minimalist, I found that I suddenly could support my minimalist life simply with book sales. I had no idea this was possible until I did it, but once I did an entire new world opened up for me. Then I started receiving dozens of emails a week from people wanting to learn how to employ this business model themselves.

I wrote Minimalist Business to help people achieve what I achieved.

It is so much easier to create an automated business when you’re living a minimalist lifestyle with less than 100 things. Why?

I’m not the only person on the Internet who teaches you how to automate your income in order to live and work from anywhere.

The technology just keeps getting better and better, automation is so much easier than it used to be, anyone can work toward creating a business that runs itself using the tools I’ve put forth in Minimalist Business.

Want to learn how to live and work from anywhere from someone else?

Chris Guillebeau is a remarkable country-hopping individual who’s authored a slew of products that teach you how to achieve freedom by creating an online business that works. I’d recommend starting with his An Unconventional Guide to Working for Yourself. If you’re feeling incredibly ambitious, he has an epic (and expensive) e-course called The Empire Builder Kit which teaches you to build an online business by simply doing one thing every day for a year.

Corbett Barr, aside from being one of my chief online business advisors, runs a blog called Think Traffic which teaches you how to build an audience for your blog the right way. If you’re a complete beginner at selling products online, his Affiliate Marketing for Beginners is an amazing resource.

There are of course others teaching you these skills, these are just my two favorites at the moment. I’ve learned so much from reading their blogs and digesting their products.

How to get started reading Far Beyond The Stars.

I’ve written a number of articles over the last year. A lot of them are pretty good, but some are more awesome than others. If you have the time and want to get more acquainted with my work, check out these articles below.

Here are my top 5 favorite articles to get you started on journey towards a minimalist lifestyle:

1. The True Purpose of Simplicity

2. How to Imagine Your Ideal Reality (because it matters)

3. 24 Hours in the Life of Everett Bogue

4. How to Live Like a Prince on Less Than Six-Figures a Year

5. The Minimalist Guide to Leaving Your Soul-Crushing Day Job

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Thanks for reading all of this! If you’re interested in being notified every time I post something new (about once a week), feel free to sign up here to receive updates in your email or RSS.

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

Over the last two months I’ve met a lot of incredibly amazing people who are living with mostly nothing.

These are brilliant and beautiful people who are living out of bags, with Macbook Airs plugged into coffee shop outlets wherever they find their home to be next.

When I first started living with less than 100 personal possessions, I thought it was a fringe lifestyle. I even thought that maybe minimalism was simply rebranding poverty, for a moment or two. This idea is obviously wrong, because when you make way more than you spend and never have to worry about money anymore, you’re obviously NOT living in poverty.

The reality of the situation is these minimalist digital vagabonds are positioned at the forefront of our society’s future evolution.

We’re creating a new level of freedom that hadn’t existed before. A legendary group of worldly explorers that are exempt from certain burdens of society. This is freedom at the highest level.

Imagine if Kerouac, Thoreau, or Goethe had the ability to separate their location from their income. Wouldn’t that have changed everything? Well, this digital-tribal generation really has fundamentally rocked the idea of how to qualify for a fully-lived life.

Last week I met up with a remarkable girl who I’ve been following on Twitter for a long time, Crystal Silver — Crystal’s been living nearly out of a bag for years. She’s been formulating a way to save the world, and the plans are solidifying. Now she only needs to act. She will do this by acknowledging that her plans will never be perfect, that the world doesn’t need perfection, it needs leaders. People who see the future, people who can see how all of the pieces fit together. Crystal is one of those people who actually has attained this freedom lifestyle.

Why? Because she knows the secrets of how to live a life where you don’t have to report to anyone –bureaucracy is crap of the past.– She doesn’t have to worry about a steady $5,000 paycheck from doing busy work all freaking day long. She doesn’t have to mindlessly conform to the idea of what society wants you to be, because she strategically decided to embrace the future evolution of humanity.

Here’s the real deal about the future of the humans on this planet — a very real future that you can have if you don’t make the decision to join us.

• What if you lived in a world where man-kind lived in harmony with nature?
• What if you lived in a world where you didn’t have to work 40-60 hours a week in a job you didn’t care about?
• What if all of your income was automated, so you could spend your time practicing yoga or raising the money necessary to loan $11,000 to entrepreneurs in the 3rd world via Kiva?

These things are possible, but it all starts with a choice.

Do you choose artificial consumption, are do you choose true freedom?

The truth is that we don’t need anything. I know this because I don’t have anything, I haven’t had anything for way more than a year now.

Not having anything is actually having everything. When you’re not caring about junk, you’re opening a world of experience that previously was completely unreachable. You blocked that world out with your unconscious consumption of crap you did not need.

The reality of everyone’s situation is that artificial desires are crowding out our ability to see the true purpose of our lives. You’re lost at the shopping mall, searching for happiness in plastic pieces of crap and mass-produced “designer” clothing lines from China.

When really, all you needed to do was stop and drop everything. Look up at the stars and realize that you’re just a small little piece of the puzzle, and the smaller you can be the more the ultimate truth of why you’re here will speak to you.

I realize this is hard to hear, but someone has to say it. Wake up, you’ve been duped. Reality is broken, we need to fix it. The way to fix it is simple, and you already know the answer.

The only action left is to act — the only person left to act is you.

Why should you eliminate artificial desires?

Because our evolutionary path begs of us to find a way to make life easier for everyone. We didn’t always sit at desks, we didn’t always build massive fortresses of solitude far away from each other in the suburbs. We didn’t always eat melted down corn (which is basically a hugely deformed grass that took over the human race) formed into corn patties, flakes, and fed intravenously to animals which were intended to eat only grass.

So, we had no choice but to change. No pill regiment will cure the aching feeling that you feel deep inside you that’s telling you that you need to wake up to this idea of a new world that’s forming in the collective subconsciousness.

A new world where we share with each other freely. Where we treat every fellow human as they ought to be, instead of who we think they have been. A new world where we live in green cities, and allow the countryside and forests to regain the energy we’ve relentlessly mined from them.

The remarkable element to all of this we actually want this digital-tribal dream of our generation. I’ve spoken to thousands of people directly over the last year about the pursuit of this world, and our minds are in alignment.

We all want an easier world, where artificial desire has been vanquished, where the health of our human body and mind are paramount and in alignment with the continued health of the planet.

Yes we can do this.

One by one we’re starting to demonstrate that it can actually work, by beginning to live this new idea of a world-wide dream.

As the only way to demonstrate a better way of living is to actually pursue a life worth living.

Will you stay behind in a dying world of fake-plastic-desires or join us as we create a new, easier, better future?

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I know this goes without saying, but the only way my blog reaches more people is if you share it, tweet it, Like it on Facebook, link to me from your blog, and email it to your friends. Thank you! You’re awesome!

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Oh, FYI! The notorious Leo Babauta, owner of less than 50 things and resident leader of the exploding San Francisco blogging scene has a new book out — Focus: A Simplicity Manifesto in the Age of Distraction. (Not an affiliate link, Focus doesn’t have an affiliate program.)

Leo generously allowed me to contribute a chapter on creating distraction free workspaces anywhere in the world — I think you’ll find that article surprising. One of my personal heroes, Gwen Bell also contributed an incredible chapter on taking digital sabbaticals — a skill that all of us need to master if we’re going to successfully avoid insanity in the digital world.

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

When I walk into the world, I walk. I look around, I see the faces. Most of the faces are somewhere else.

They’re on their iPhones, checking to see if someone ‘Likes’ what they said on Facebook. They’re planning drinks for next weekend with people who will probably bail. They’re sitting at the bar or over a coffee, reacting to the noise instead of enjoying their beer and noticing the faces around them.

This is the attention epidemic of our age. Everything is calling us to be somewhere other than in the moment, present with ourselves.

The deepest problem with this is that the people are basing their happiness on some far off moment in the future, perhaps with people they haven’t actually connected with in a long time.

Memories are a powerful thing. Hope is a powerful thing. But the best of planning now will still deny you the moment that you’re in right now. You’re walking down the street, you’re looking at the sky, you’re smiling at the faces. Occasionally someone looks up, smiles back, and there’s connection. Sometimes you’re sitting right across from someone at dinner and they’re checking their Twitter when they could be telling you a story.

I suppose this is one of the fundamental messages of Minimalist Business. Building a business that runs itself, so you can be present in your own life. So you can be focused on what needs to happen with the action that is happening right now.

The message is simple: if you make the space to have insights worth sharing, you can be paid for them. This frees up more time, and the cycle continues, until you no longer have to work so hard.

None of this happens unless you disconnect for a moment, to be in the moment.

Yes, a lot is going on. The messages in the ether keep flying, and they will forever, speeding up ad-infinitum. I’m especially conscious of this, because there are so many people competing for my attention.

Sometimes you just have to say no, I can’t do this right now. I need to turn everything off and focus on this moment, right now, because it’s beautiful.

So, take a moment and turn it all off. Maybe just for 15 minutes. Go get a coffee, and just drink a coffee. Appreciate the flavor of the soft, delicious texture. Appreciate the farmer who grew these fair-trade beans from Nicaragua. Appreciate the roaster, who managed the temperature perfectly at Blue Bottle Coffee. Appreciate the cute little Barista at The Summit SF who made the coffee just for you — single-made drip coffee is a gift.

Because this moment will never come again.

You’re here now, and now you’re seeing it.

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

One of the most common emails I get is from people who have difficult decisions to make.

“I want to live the minimalist freedom lifestyle, but I can’t decide if I want to keep my house and my car.”

This message is for all of those people out there who have a hard decision to make.

If you’ve already made hard decisions, congratulations! Now go enjoy the remaining summer days in the park.

The difficulty of hard decisions.

Whether it’s leaving your wife, destroying your car, burning the bridges at your high paying job you hate, or running away from your childhood home. It’s all the same, and it’s all hard.

The truth is that you deserve to be happy, and something is in the way.

For years you couldn’t figure out what the problem was, instead you had this raw aching feeling that something/somewhere was terribly wrong.

Somewhere along the way you figured out that society as we know it was broken. It actually died a long time ago. In the wreckage of suburbia, the desolate sprawl of decay and discontent, you found the answer.

Everything they told you about the life you were supposed to lead was wrong.

• Building walls doesn’t bring safety.
• Buying a car doesn’t get you chicks.
• Watching TV news actually makes you paranoid.
• Having a good job at a desk didn’t make you happy.
• Eating chicken nuggets didn’t stop you from starving.

So you kept searching, and now you’re here.

The future of our society is now.

Our society is being reborn, but in order to follow the path we have to make tough choices. There will have to be yes or no answers. You can’t keep it all and have freedom too.

Sooner or later the moment will come when you can’t hide from the things we’ve done anymore.

…and you’ll have to make a choice, which I really believe is between life and death.

Look around you. Can you tell the difference between those who are the walking dead and the ones who are actually alive? I can, and the living surround me. Every day another one of you wakes up and realizes the journey to the future is this way.

The difference between that life and the life you want to lead is a choice. You either choose to live, or you choose the opposite.

I chose life. That’s why you’re reading this blog.

You might have choose already, and that’s amazing. You might not realize that there is a choice, someday you will.

If you’re at the crossroads, you have a decision to make. Freedom or prison? A slow death at the hands of the crumbling remnants of corporate America or building your own path to freedom.

You can’t have it both ways, I’m sorry. It just doesn’t work that way, there is no middle way.

The time to decide to choose life is now.

Here’s a quick guide to making hard decisions, I hope it will help you make yours.

1. Don’t ask everybody if it’s okay.

The sad reality is that most of the people you surround yourself are the walking dead. They’ve given up and don’t understand why you want a better life for yourself. If you ask all of your friends who are stuck in the perpetual cycle of consumerism, you’ll get a standard antiquated response. They can’t understand what you’re going through, because they don’t know. Surround yourself by successful people to become successful.

2. Instead ask people who’ve done it.

I’ve met a lot of successful people over the last year, and every single one of them would encourage you to dream big. Why? Because they’ve done it. So, here’s what I want you to do. Run your courageous dream by some enthusiastically successful people. You don’t have to look far to find them — and I’d encourage you not to restrict yourself to uber-successful unreachable individuals. Just find someone who’s making over $100,000 doing what they love and ask them how they got that place. Chances are it was because they dared to dream big and embrace a new reality.

3. Kill your babies.

You’re going to have to make some sacrifices, this much is inevitable. Nothing comes without a trade. You can’t have it all and have minimalist freedom success too. Sell your house, donate your car, restrict yourself to less than 100 things, break up with your loser of a boyfriend, say mom I’m never coming home again. The answer is that every action you take has infinite actions that you will never explore. Your actions will be more successful if you kill as many alternate actions as possible and focus on the important.

4. Focus on your priorities.

What do you actually want to achieve? Focus on that. You need to dedicate at least 80% of your time to achieving that goal. That means you’ll probably need to kill some other paths of action. You can’t maintain your big house and still travel the world, it just doesn’t work that way. Everything must maintain balance, and it’s easier to balance yourself if you only do a few things.

5. Jump.

At some point you need to burn your bridges. I know your uncle told you never to burn your bridges, but that’s false. In order to take one path you must burn all of the others. Take a leap into the lake and see if you sink or swim. You’re sinking all already, you have to give up all of your junk in order to fly. The only way you’ll learn is to jump. Jumping is scary, and yes, you might fail.

But ultimately success doesn’t come without 10,000 failures.

If you aren’t willing to fail at things, you won’t succeed at anything.

Meditation in action.

Take a moment and meditate on this for 15 minutes. Turn off your computer, sit in silence and think about everything in your life that you wish wasn’t a part of your life. These are the hard decisions you have to make. Live with the consequences of your actions, or be free of everything that haunts you.

Your current situation, your past, your anger and your jealousy. It’s all useless.

What matters is now, and the decisions you make to free yourself.

Yes, this is hard, but ultimately it’s harder living with all that you can’t leave behind.

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

I keep talking about saving the human race on this blog, and I realize that a certain number of you don’t really realize what that means.

So, I figured I’d explain.

You see, the way we’re living isn’t sustainable for two reasons:

1. We’re very unhappy.

2. We’re destroying the planet.

One of the main reasons that I’m so into minimalism, is it solves both of these problems.

Why your friends are unhappy.

Someone emailed me the other day and asked “do you really think people live the way you describe?” Meaning Hummer-driving TV-watching coca-cola-sucking dumb people that I talk about all the time.

YES! They do. In fact, most people are living this way in America right now. The average TV watched by Americans is 35 hours a week. That’s like a second job dedicated entirely to a medium which convinces you to buy stuff.

On the TV you see happy smiling faces walking out of the mall with three bags stuffed full of junk, and you think you’re supposed to act this way.

Now, obviously you don’t live this way, but your friends do, right?

The problem with mass consumerism.

The thing about this whole equation is that buying a lot of stuff radically decreases your ability to be a happy person.

When you buy stuff in order to be happy, you get addicted to the little jolts of adrenaline you get when you drop $259 on a pair of shoes. Then you go home and realize you already have seventy pairs of shoes and you start to feel sad immediately. So you jump back into your human wheel pod and drive back to the mall to drop more money on shoes, instantly feel happy, until you drive home again.

Repeat and repeat and repeat. It’s the endless cycle of consumerism, and it’s why your friends are on anti-depressants.

How did we get here?

The TV was the ONLY way to get information short of reading actual books and going to college before the Internet. Television studios make more money when they put more ads that convince you to buy more stuff in between their shows. This makes you want to buy more shoes, because OMG you absolutely must dress like SJP <– who is being paid to wear the clothes you see her on the television wearing.

Most magazines are supported by the same consumerist craptastic situation.

In fact, magazines were invented to sell you crap by balancing valuable information with brief psychological stimulation that will make you want to run out to Louis Vuitton and drop your monthly salary on a handbag.

It’s all crap, and you know it. This is why you’re reading this blog, because you need someone to tell you that the televised life you imagined yourself having was a joke from the beginning.

You’ve been conned into trying to live like the cast of Friends, when in reality you’d be much happier not buying stuff.

How to cancel the apocalypse.

Alright, so the world is coming to an end. We’ve burnt our way through so much oil that the only way we can get more is to occupy foreign countries and kill millions of people in order to keep the price of oil down.

Yes this is true. I know they don’t tell you that it’s true on the news, but the news just wants you to keep watching so you’ll buy more crap during the commercial breaks. This leads to the news concentrating on stories such as how you might get mugged if you go outside your house or leave your car, what Obama wore to work today, and the stock marketing going up and down instead of dealing with real issues.

Believe me, you won’t die in a gunfight in the hood. You’re going to die from boredom, depression, and on the highway when you get sideswiped by an SUV. Go ahead and google “most common ways to die.” Believe me, they involve driving and sitting on your butt too much.

The Internet changed how information flowed on a fundamental level. If you turn off the garbage on your TV, you’ll start to realize that the world is more than what they told you on the radio.

Where your TV needs to go.

Take your TV up on your roof, and drop it off. Trust me, you’ll feel much better after that.

Don’t forget to first look down to make sure no one is going to get hurt when you drop your TV.

Unless your car is parked down there, then I give you permission to just go ahead and drop it.

This doesn’t mean you can’t download a TV show that you really want to watch. I’m downloading the season premiere of Dexter right now. But you know what? I paid for it so that I don’t have to watch the ads. I actually want to watch Dexter, because I actually like the show. I’m not just mindlessly sitting on the coach for 35 hours a week wondering why there’s nothing on besides infomercials.

Your happiness is in direct harmony with the happiness of the entire human race.

Despite the fact that my girlfriend just broke up with me a few weeks ago, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. Why? Because I have a simple uncluttered schedule that allows me to pursue important things in my life.

The Everett Bogue happy schedule:

Here’s what I do with most days…

I wake up, and make a fruit smoothie.

I go get a coffee and write stuff.

I hang out in the park if it’s a nice day and watch cute San Francisco girls and boys walk by.

I eat something that tastes good and is somewhat healthy.

I go practice yoga at Yoga to the People in San Francisco.

I go grab a beer and write a little more, or meet up with friends.

I go home and sleep with a smile on my face.

I know, it’s not much of a schedule. There’s no running around like a crazy person or frantically cursing out people as I commute two hours to work in order to sit at a desk for 8 hours a day. To some of you this might even seem kind of boring, but believe me, it’s not.

The secret of happiness.

Happiness comes from working towards mastery in a subject you’re passionate about. Sitting at a desk is NOT working towards mastery, it’s working in slavery while your spinal column degrades before you’re old enough to enjoy your 401K.

Writing challenges me. Yoga challenges me. Drinking coffee or beer makes me smile. It’s a simple daily schedule that really rocks my world, no matter what happens. This schedule is not dependent on vast amounts of wealth to sustain it. In fact, it doesn’t really matter how much money I’m making. Coffee costs less than $2, and I can’t drink more than two cups a day without going insane. Yoga is only $10 (and it’s donation based, so if I happened to be starving I could still go.) I might have a burrito for lunch and that’s only $6. The fruit for my smoothie probably cost around $5.

Being happy doesn’t need to cost a lot of money.

But instead you’re told that you need a 5-bedroom house. You need to get a new car every two years. You need to pursue a career, and in order to do that you need permission from a University. If you can’t get a job after you graduate, they insist that maybe you just need to go back again for grad school. Still can’t figure out what you want to do with your life? Well, you could always get a P.H.D.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that neurologists have to study a lot before they operate on people. However, you’re honestly not going to learn how to write better while you’re pursuing your doctorate in creative writing. You’ll learn to write better by writing, and that doesn’t cost anything.

Most people just want to write stuff and do Yoga, right? Well, whatever you’re into, you’re into doing that, and not into listening to someone tell you what to do. Believe it or not, doing what you want to do doesn’t have to cost a whole bunch of money.

Saving the world can also make you healthier.

I realize that burritos and beer isn’t the ideal diet for a slim fit body, and yet I only weigh 160 pounds? How can I possibly be so slim and fit and yet enjoy life so much?

Well, the answer is that I don’t own a car and I spend my entire life in the world instead of sitting at a desk. In fact, I don’t even OWN a desk.

Believe it or not, walking all over the place really is the secret to weight loss. That and understanding that the television conned you into buying pre-packaged foods that are made out of hi-fructose corn syrup.

This is why everyone in San Francisco, Portland, and New York is so freakin’ hot. It’s because in these cities we have to walk everywhere, and no one owns a car or a TV. I’m sure someone will email me saying that all of the hotties move to the cities, but I don’t think that’s true at all.

Living without a car and a TV makes you attractive.

If you eat only food made out of whole ingredients, such as fruits, vegetables, meats, nuts, etc, you’ll be much healthier. I hear grains (especially refined ones) are bad for you, so I won’t recommend them. Most food you buy in the center of the supermarket is corn that’s been turned into goop and made to look like a food, when it’s really just a sugar lollipop. Cereal is a lollipop. Microwave dinners are a lollipop. McDonalds makes the soup they turn into burgers and milkshakes out of meal worms. Your friends are fat because they’re eating lollipops disguised as food, and meal worms delivered through a drive-through window. Oh, and they have cars. (By meal worms I mean corn mixed with meat that smart people would refuse to eat.)

Eat food. Mostly vegetables. Destroy your TV. Destroy your car.

Move somewhere where people are actually happy and can walk places like San Francisco.

Yes, I know you’re going to email and say that San Francisco wouldn’t be so happy if everyone lived here, because it’d be too crowded. But you know what? If everyone moved out of LA because they didn’t want to sit in traffic for 3 hours every day, LA would get a whole lot more walkable a whole lot faster and more people would want to live there.

So don’t email me arguing that we can’t change the world, instead take your TV and… you know the drill (if you skipped to this part, go back up and read “what to do with your TV.” Then do what I told you to do, trust me, you’ll be happier than you’ve ever been in your entire life.)

How does this save the world?

Happiness comes when we bring ourselves into harmony with our environment. When we has human beings are in harmony with our environment, we generally stop destroying it.

The TV and your car are taking you in the wrong direction. You need a car because you live in a place where you cannot be in harmony with your environment. You need a TV to entertain you because living where you’re living with a car is making you unhappy.

You’re unhappy because you sit in a car all day, and then come back and sit on your couch all night, which makes you want to buy a new car because you think it will make you happy. Really you’re just wasting thousands of dollars on a piece of metal that isolates you from the world — and thus happiness. When you spend 20-grand on a car, you have to work a gazillion hours to pay that off.

The world is unhappy because you have to work a gazillion hours to pay off your car.

The only solution is to stop driving, stop buying, stop watching TV, sell your crap, and start living your life.

The fate of your universe is in your hands. Will you take this opportunity to fix it?

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