Lifestyle design needs an intervention, and you just walked into a room full of familiar faces. Interventions don’t make friends, but they do save lives. I’m about to tap your ego, but I might just save your life.

Everything ahead is based on personal experience. Though it’s bursting at the seams with judgement and condescending criticism, it’s also my own massive ego-check after rugged experimentation. It’s my realization that location independence is simply not enough and move back to the drawing board with unshakeable resolve for more.

First off, I want to tell you I’m doing this because I care about you and don’t want to see you destroy your life. This is a safe space, free of judgement. I’ve organized this intervention because I’m seeing a pattern. I’m seeing you fall short of your potential and lose sight of what you set out to accomplish.

Now, onto the unsafe space full judgement, where I’m going to say what no one else will…

Location independence is a weak compromise & it’s absolutely not awesome.

When was it decided that mobility was a good place to throw our hands up in victory? We all set out to climb Everest, and you’ve planted your flag at base camp, perfectly geared up to suffer the cold.

Look around. We’re claiming achievement and expertise in a space we haven’t actually figured out. Labeling a compromise doesn’t change the fact that it’s a compromise.

The Unsolicited New Rules of Lifestyle Design

What follows here is not for everyone. If you are content working constantly or do not have genuine passions which demand total time ownership – this is not for you. This is only for the dangerously ambitious who demand absolute independence, of both mobility and time.

1) Mobility is not Independence: Stop blurring the lines.

Mobility is as admirable a start as it is pathetic a finish. It is not wrong – it’s simply incomplete. Wireless isn’t freedom – it’s an extended leash. Call it whatever you want – it’s glorified telecommuting giving you an ever-greater sense of how big a world it is that you’re missing.

Mobility is nothing more than logistics. Connectivity, communication, visas, timezones, itineraries – it is all just infrastructure supporting your portable job.

You need to have an unquenchable thirst for life and absolutely refuse to just take little sips between client work.

Mere mobility leaves no room for full immersion in passion-pursuits. It’s an admission that you will always have to work to deserve your lifestyle. The beast must forever be fed.

2) Perpetuation is not Elimination: Stop whoring your time for mobility. You deserve both.

Designing new lifestyles around old work is ass-backwards and entirely broken.

When did we stop demanding time and mobility? Nearly half of all location independents work 40-50 hours a week. That’s a ridiculous number of people working absurd hours. When I was doing the same, none of those hours were focused on eliminating that problem. Are yours?

3) Mobility is not Fulfilling

If you ever want an unforgettable case of nomadic blue-balls, try travelling the world working from your laptop.

Photo credit: Flickr User Cybjorg

When I’m in a wild new place, doing passionless work, I feel extreme resentment. I feel like a failure that only solved half a problem – which is precisely the case. We need to stop telling people to become a freelancer, travel the world and suddenly life will be amazing. Why? Because it’s fucking cruel. Leaving an office and taking your work somewhere exotic does not eliminate frustration - it inflames it.

Doing something you don’t love in an office feels oddly acceptable – it feels right. Yet somehow when there’s an elephant sanctuary 5 minutes away or a raging cultural parade marching down the street, sitting in a cafe designing some logo isn’t as glamorous. It stops feeling like an enabler and starts feeling like an obligation.

A raw sampling of the work-supported location independent lifestyle…

• Ireland: You lose your debit card and have $8 cash. You pawn your possessions to cover a hostel for the 6 nights it takes to get money wired. On the flight out, you realize the pawn shop sold you back the wrong external hard drive. Goodbye 2 weeks of client work, hello 8 hours of explicit amateur Russian porn.
• Stockholm: After a flirtatious exchange with two of the most stunning blonde girls you’ve ever laid eyes upon, you’re unable to accept their invitation to their normally all-girls fondue pajama party, due to your extended client work review session that evening. For the first time ever, you actually feel a dream die.
• Melbourne: You stand on a 6th-floor balcony stealing wi-fi, uploading critical revisions for a presentation halfway around the world. The girl you flew all the way there to visit enjoys a crazy night with other guys at a pub. You communicate via text message. Emoticons are used.
• Mexico: You cross the border for tequila, tacos and tanning. Two weeks later, you’re welcomed back across that same border with a $950 mobile roaming bill from all those leisurely conference calls you were so smugly taking from the beach, cocktail in hand.
• Santa Monica: You’re finishing a massive demo for the CIA/NSA/FBI in 4 days. Your keyboard & trackpad dies. You do not sleep for 72 hours without progress. You have had a date with this yoga instructor you met. Clock ticking, you spend $2,000 on replacement gear. You are the guy in Coffee Bean with 2 computers, wires everywhere, surrounded by boxes. You leave without surfing once.
• Prague: One minute, you’re the guy in a pink boa entertaining a German bachelorette party – the next, you’re learning harshly that absinthe before conference calls is a very poor decision.
• Bangkok: You don’t turn on your laptop for 2 weeks. It is the single greatest 2 weeks of your life.

Lesson? Mobility without time ownership simply creates extraoardinary opportunity for unexepected experiences – which is right when obligation walks in, punches you directly in the face, drops you to the ground and steps on your back while you watch potential walk away, unrealized and forever lost. I demand more.

4) Logistics is not Ingenuity: Stop saying anyone can do it.

Even very smart people work constantly from one place. Slightly smarter people can travel the world working constantly from any place. The ingenious ones eliminate non-passionate work entirely to make room for experience.

Absolute independence is significantly more difficult than mobility. It requires you rethink how you fuel your lifestyle and demands ingenuity and tremendous risk tolerance. Few people talk about this because so few people have figured it out. It was easier to just slap a label on settling.

5) Enabling Passion is not Passion: Stop lying to yourself about loving what you do

There’s one thing I became extraordinarily good at after leaving the corporate world: lying to myself. The huge mistake we make is confusing what we’re doing with what it enables. I’d always tell myself that it’s acceptable to not love every minute of my work, because it was enabling me to have wild experiences and travel. That’s a compromise we should no longer we willing to make.

Listen. Before you argue that you “actually love” what you do, think very, very hard – harder than you’ve ever allowed yourself before. Would you do it if there was no prospect of it ever making you money? It should feel uncomfortable, because you’re asking yourself to question a part of your identity. Do you remember the feeling when you realized your old job wasn’t as signficant as you pretended it was? We need another round of introspection. The freedoms of mobility and self-employment gives us an entirely fresh set of things to justify doing passionless work to sustain.

If you say you love something as inhuman as search engine optimization, and don’t have a Google logo tattooed on your ass: I don’t believe you. You’re either repressing your true passion, or haven’t discovered it yet.

Just because you’re doing something from a bungalow in Thailand doesn’t make it something you love. You just love that it lets you chill in a bungalow in Thailand. You would never rationalize like that if you were doing it from a dank Scranton office park.

So enough of that. It’s time to talk about changing this and turning a demand for more time into something real.

Announcing Sourcecontrol & the MuseModel Challenge

We are concerned with one thing only: creating more time. Can you totally re-think the way you currently support your lifestyle in a way that gives you more free hours in the day? Can you outsource, productize, or otherwise streamline what you do? There’s a flight (and more) in it for whoever has the sharpest idea…

Click here for the full details on the MuseModel Challenge