If I hear another business guru advising me to "disrupt the status quo", I may be driven to do something genuinely disruptive, possibly involving a chainsaw. The same goes for books proposing "radical" new approaches to branding or marketing, and "revolutionary" ways to transform your company, frequently by "challenging authority". Needless to say, such prescriptions are only ever radical, if they're radical at all, in terms of means rather than ends. The goal is always the same, the emphatically non-radical one it's always been: succeeding in business. Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, recently announced scholarships of $100,000 apiece payable to young people who agree to drop out of university in order to "challenge the authority of the present and familiar" by – wait for it – starting a business instead. (Thiel's plan also seems beset by a logical error: he appears to imagine that because so many famous entrepreneurs are college dropouts, therefore dropping out of college helps you become a famous entrepreneur.) I don't mean to suggest such goals aren't noble; I'm nowhere near enough of a radical myself to object to old-fashioned capitalist success. But they're not revolutionary. By most normal definitions of that term, they're precisely the opposite.
A parallel issue afflicts the ever-growing "frugality movement", which has – in an irony so unmissable it may come to be used by dictionary compilers as a definitional example of irony – itself become a profitable industry of books and blogs and speaker tours. Even the wisest, most sincere advice on saving money tends not to question that the goal is to live as similarly to a non-frugal person as possible, by means of clever tricks for holidaying, dining out and stylishly furnishing your home for less cash. Yet these are still the same ends that consumerism works so hard to inculcate in us; only the means have changed.
Then there's Jacob Lund Fisker, proprietor of the fascinating frugality blog EarlyRetirementExtreme.com, and a similarly titled book – which makes it sound as though he's offering another infuriating get-rich-quick scheme that would, if it actually worked, enable you to repair to your yacht and live lavishly. In fact, Fisker's methods really warrant the word "extreme": he lives with his wife in a 289 sq ft motor home and owns no car or mobile phone. (They recently stayed at his in-laws' apartment, an experience he says was like the motor home, except that "everything [was] strangely far apart".) His 21-day financial makeover plan, detailed on the site, is harsh: it asks you to save 75% of your net income. But that's because it's not aimed at getting the same lifestyle more cheaply, but at learning to want less. In a manner the ancient Stoics would have applauded, it targets what you can control – your desires – instead of what you can't: your level of success in making money, or how luxuriously those to whom you compare yourself manage to live. "There is satisfaction," he notes, "in beating the consumerist system at its own game."
You may have no interest in living like this, of course. (Fisker's full makeover is too radical for me.) The problem arises when you think you do, but then pursue only different means to the same, not-necessarily-happiness-inducing ends. Be a revolutionary, or don't. In rejecting the blurry, consumer-friendly notion of fake radicalism, you will already be disrupting the status quo.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
