Individuality is a funny thing, quite often the people who seek it the most end up having the least. As humans, we have been endowed with free will, yet we bypass it with surprising frequency to follow the herd. You can see it everywhere: high school kids who want to stand out and be different do it by joining a group of Goth kids all dressed in black who are subsequently indistinguishable from each other. College kids wanting to rebel and show their independence and individuality do it by getting the exact same tribal tattoo of the year as 15 of their friends.
Nowhere is this herd mentality as apparent as in the Lifestyle Design community. After reading The Four Hour Workweek, the kids must have figured that apparently the way to show your individuality was to move to some piss poor, tropical country and make a living selling e-books about moving to some piss poor tropical country to sell e-books. Soon enough, hundreds of kids in their early twenties gather like lemmings to live on the beach in some piss poor tropical country, trying to sell e-books about writing e-books about selling e-books about living in a tropical country selling e-books. Nice work if you can pull it off, though I suspect there’s a limited market for selling e-books filled with truisms, old platitudes and other profound wisdoms amassed over a long life of.. eh.. 23 years? (more…)
