The more I read and the more I write, the clearer things become. There was a moment in which I thought reform would be sufficient… that incremental change would lead to the fulfillment I seek. Maybe that time was yesterday, maybe it was a million years in the past. The delineation of moments is no longer clear. At this very moment, I find clarity only in revolution. I have grown weary of nihilism. The former modus operandi has destroyed itself without my assistance rendering nihilism irrelevant in any case. No proof of its self-destruction is required beyond the universal awareness that a thousand impulses in each of us are restrained and muted each day of our lives.

I have a confession to make; I have never cared for culture and society. As a child I remember being conflicted with the question of my occupational goals. That conflict was repressed to some extent by socialization, but it has always lingered. At times, the romantic current of the “American Dream” swept me through life. At times, I found temporary solace in telling myself that “I work to live, not live to work.” I deluded myself with the axiom “work smarter, not harder.” Ultimately, those images were revealed as facades and those words of wisdom reduced to mere platitudes. Everything made sense for a time. Unfortunately, it only made sense while I maintained a framework of assumptions. You are reading the words of a man whose framework of assumptions has been reduced to ashes. The internal conflict I felt as a boy will not subside. That conflict was rooted in purely subjective human instinct bereft of any assumptions. I now know that the conflict I felt was not related to a laziness toward work, but a fundamental desire to experience life directly… an experience only possible without the assumptions our culture so lovingly provides. I have given into the fact that culture is no friend to me. I have never felt better.

There is no reform. Too many of the rules of the game are based on painfully misguided tradition. Too many of the rules of the game are rooted in myth and mysticism that was itself born of myth and mysticism. The problem is, this is not a game. This is my life. I don’t have time to change the world one rule at a time just so I can avoid the alienation and walking dead mentality offered by culture.

Where does that leave us? Anarchy? After spending hours defining that maligned word we still wouldn’t agree on a definition and some of us would still have images of insane individuals dressed in black smashing windows. No… Anarchy is not the answer. My solution is summed up in the domain name. The rules each of us choose to live by are optional. I’m not talking about some “rules are made to be broken” nonsense. I’m not talking about laws. The rules of society and culture that all of us live by are pervasive. They are so deeply ingrained in our minds that we seldom consider them there to be broken. I’m not on a rampage. I don’t care about breaking the rules. However, I’m only going to follow the rules that stand up to scrutiny. The rules that don’t stand up to scrutiny will simply be ignored. Someone else can follow them.

This post is already running longer than I’d intended, but is merely a fraction of what’s racing through my mind. I’ll be cranking out content here regularly. I may indulge and diverge from strict adherence to my goals once in a while, but my focus will remain on revolutionizing life relating to the context of work and the construction of individual subjective frameworks that allow us to live. Please join in the adventure by commenting below or messaging me on Twitter @rulesoptional.

Why is this titled “Inaugural Post” when there’s content published before it? All preceding content philosophically outgrew sailtotrail.com. I made the decision to pull content over place that makes more sense thematically. While those previous posts were written first chronologically, they were written with the spirit of this post in mind.

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