This is not nothing. It took considerable preparation. Other men simply stop showing up. You required three professional schools and a sovereign-debt portfolio to establish that staying home was the intellectually defensible outcome.

First there was OCI. The legal profession examined the possibility of employing you and declined to proceed. You responded by acquiring an MBA, apparently reasoning that the difficulty had been insufficient exposure to another recruiting process.

Then came OCR. Different employers. Different interview vocabulary. An opportunity to determine whether the original result was specific to the practice of law.

It was not.

At this point you got an LL.M. Two labor markets had declined to purchase the product, so you returned to the institution that would accept money to continue developing it.

Admissions had always believed in you. Admissions had a different business model.

The Prep can suffer a professional setback and telephone someone. The Jock can encounter a former teammate. The Nerd can produce a thing that works. You investigated whether the underlying problem might be a missing postgraduate qualification.

Eventually there was Curation.

Here, finally, was work proportionate to your sensibility. Other people watched films. You understood what was happening to Cinema. You could distinguish a merely successful production from an important failure, an ability employers inexplicably declined to reward across the rest of the economy.

Then Curation fired you.

This was a more substantial finding than OCI or OCR. Those people had rejected an interview. Curation had access to the full product and discontinued the subscription.

You subsequently arrived at extremely lean leanFIRE. Not ordinary leanFIRE. The additional lean is necessary to communicate that the first one had been permitting certain extravagances, such as absorbing an unexpected expense without revisiting the philosophical foundations of the arrangement.

A paid-off trailer. Approximately $280,000. Treasuries. An afternoon so empty it can accommodate another complete account of why employment is beneath consideration.

The Absolute State.

There is nothing wrong with the trailer. The Scumbag in the next trailer likes his. He has somewhere to sit, his belongings are there, and no further intellectual justification has been requested.

You have required yours to constitute a successful withdrawal from the ideological machinery of work.

The Scumbag lives in a trailer. You inhabit a conclusion.

He can leave for an afternoon without compromising its significance. You need to return with evidence that the people outside are still making the fundamental error.

The Treasuries are particularly elegant. At last, an institution will send you money without conducting an interview.

No fit questions. No discussion of the résumé. No pleasant initial conversation followed by an email about the unusually competitive applicant pool. You supply the principal. The government supplies the payment. Your personality is not a consideration.

You have found this arrangement considerably more reliable than the labor market.

But a coupon payment is not an endorsement, cowshit. The Treasury has not reviewed your account of what went wrong at Curation and sided with you. It has not concluded that your talents were wasted or that the interviewers lacked the intellectual equipment to recognize what was sitting across the table.

You purchased an obligation to pay you. You keep presenting it as an obligation to agree.

The arithmetic can work without proving the autobiography correct. This is the distinction your retirement accounts have been unfairly required to resolve.

A $280,000 portfolio is money. You keep asking it to be a verdict.

And because the lifestyle is so extremely lean, every preference must carry evidentiary weight. You did not merely decide against an expense. You perceived the emptiness of consumption. You did not lack a reason to go somewhere. You escaped the compulsive mobility of the wage-dependent population.

You cannot just have a cheap Tuesday. It must demonstrate that everyone else has misunderstood adulthood.

The trouble is that Tuesday does not appreciate the assignment. It remains several hours long.

This brings us to the State of Gaming.

Gaming is not your only interest. It is the industry to which you have assigned responsibility for making the other decisions feel sufficient.

Having successfully eliminated the commute, the supervisor, the workplace, and the possibility of another performance review, you require something to happen in the space they formerly occupied. Preferably something ambitious, mechanically sophisticated, respectful of your intelligence, and available at a substantial discount.

The Nerds get to work.

Years pass. They deliver an enormous imaginary world. You examine it from the trailer and detect a shortage of ambition.

The characters are unconvincing. The progression is unsatisfying. Too much of the experience consists of performing repetitive tasks to obtain nominal improvements in status.

You are particularly severe on this last point. A law degree, an MBA, and an LL.M. have made you sensitive to padded progression systems.

You write that the developers have lost their way.

Perhaps they have. But notice how agreeable it is to be on this side of the evaluation. They are presenting the work. You are determining whether it meets your standards. They must justify the years and money. You can issue a verdict and go make lunch.

You have finally located a recruiting process in which you conduct the interviews.

The game fails. The next game fails. The industry is in decline. Your discrimination becomes more exacting as your participation becomes less enjoyable, until your remaining advantage over the ordinary customer is that he can still have a good time.

You regard his enjoyment as a lack of context.

Meanwhile, the State of You receives no comparable review. OCI was a defective process. OCR selected for the wrong qualities. Curation misunderstood its own purpose. Employment is an indignity. Consumption is a trap. Modern Gaming has abandoned the people who understand it.

Every institution has failed an exacting examination administered by the man it did not retain.

If only you knew how much you sucked.

The trailer is paid off, cowshit. The bonds are there. You may have enough to sustain the arrangement. But the arrangement keeps requiring an explanation, and the explanations keep requiring new defendants.

The coupon arrives. The acquittal does not.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5902615&forum_id=2ค1¤7PHPSESSID=188a95202f833e097d78c96d76bac3f6#50128898)