The “I Gave It All Up” lie | General Homesteading Discussion | Forums

interesting article 

This post will form a rough critique of The Guardian’s “I gave it all up” series, which puts a spotlight on people who chose to quit their life and “start over again”. From the series’ homepage: “From the lawyer who became a human cannonball, to the pharmacy manager who went to live on a desert island, five risk-takers share their stories”. I don’t mean to single out The Guardian as solely worthy of critique – similar stories crop up all the time in minimalist, travel and simple living circles, as well as other mainstream publications like Time – but the emphasis implied by the dedication of an entire series offers a pretty suitable target. Effectively, I want to be able to move past the series alone in order to critique the archetype in general.

Here’s how these articles usually run: “I worked as X for £Y, but gave it up for Z and here is what it has taught me” where X is a corporate job, Y is more than you earn and Z is something that appears, on the face of it, simple, marketable and liberating. In the case of the most recent Guardian article, Z is cycling around the world with a dog.

In order to get my teeth into this I’m going to reference Louis Malle’s masterpiece My Dinner with Andre: a film about two men making conversation over a meal. If you haven’t seen it, which I highly recommend doing something about, the two characters are Wally, a struggling playwright, and Andre, a successful mover in avant-garde theatre who gave it up to travel the world. For the purposes of this critique, Andre represents the people behind “I gave it up” and Wally represents the masses who find themselves reading it.

more https://tiredsounds.wordpress.com/2015/07/11/the-i-gave-it-all-up-lie/