The Death Of The 9-5 Job (Why Everyone Is Quitting The 40 Hour Workweek)

The 8 hour workday is all we know, but it was only invented in the 20th century to fuel economic growth. This letter is long, save it to read later.

Everyone is quitting the 40-hour workweek because they are tired of the lies they’ve been sold.

They’re tired of always being on the verge of replacement.

They’re tired of having no ownership in the work they are doing.

They’re tired of prioritizing work they don’t care about over their health, relationships, and mental well-being.

They’re tired of putting on a mask as soon as they step into the office. It’s exhausting not to be yourself every day for 40 years.

They’re tired of paying tens of thousands of dollars for an education that does not guarantee the ability to repay that debt.

And most of all, they’re tired of sitting around doing meaningless work, feeling as if they are wasting a third of their day that drains them for the other third, which makes them want to stay up late to “get the most out of their time,” which ruins the last third.

We’ll label all of that as “meaningless work,” and people hate it.

When you pair that with the internet (giving access to opportunity), social media (giving access to people), and AI (giving access to intelligence), you get the perfect recipe for individuals finally seeing it as possible to take control of their work, and thus their life, as we will find.

A pattern I’ve noticed in successful people (who didn’t sacrifice their life for success) is that they physically worked very little, yet people see them as hard workers. Mentally, they were always thinking, plotting, and scheming. They worked in their mind. And once they were clear on their idea, they executed with speed that others couldn’t compete with.

The problem here, even when small bursts of intense work (on a project of your own) are scientifically, psychologically, and philosophically superior to sustained long working hours that modern hustlers see as some kind of distorted status symbol, is 3-fold:

• Since birth, you are conditioned to pursue society’s version of success at all costs. It becomes a part of your identity, and anything that attempts to change that is seen as a threat. (See: Survival letter)

• Anyone can sit down at a desk for 12 hours and act like they’re doing something useful. Since social media is a memetic desire machine and people love to brag about feeling productive, you feel as if you want the same thing, and you barely question it. (See: The death of social media)

• True creative work vastly decreases in quality after mental resources have been drained during focused work. And since mechanical work you can do for extended periods of time will not lead to meaning or greatness, you are wasting most of the time you spend “working.”

The new status symbol, in my eyes, is the ability to achieve more, in less time, and make it seem effortless. People shouldn’t believe you when you tell them that you only work 3-4 hours a day. You have the technology and access to knowledge to do this, you’ve simply been trained to need someone to provide you with a clear plan for your life.

In this letter, I want to provide an argument for why short workdays are superior for those who don’t want a mechanical life.

Then, we will discuss practical steps you can take to replace your 40-hour workweek with meaningful work you enjoy.

But first, we need to understand why the 9-5 job is dying.

Artisans, Assembly Lines, and Bullsh*t Jobs

There is something special about working on a project of your own. I wouldn’t say exactly that you’re happier. A better word would be excited, or engaged. You’re happy when things are going well, but often they aren’t… So why do it at all? Because to the kind of people who like working this way, nothing else feels as right. You feel as if you’re an animal in its natural habitat, doing what you were meant to do — not always happy, maybe, but awake and alive.

– Paul Graham

The modern 8-hour workday and 5-day workweek did not exist until the 20th century.

Prior to that, and after the era of hunting and gathering, work was mostly dominated by self-employment. Farmers and artisans. Work was self-directed. Their labor was not assigned by a boss. They chose what to produce, set their own schedules, and bore the full responsibility for the outcomes. This embodies the Jeffersonian ideal of the “independent individual” who directs their own labor.

The 40 hour workweek is all we know today, but in my opinion, technology is soon going to allow us to return to what is most natural. That is, to what is engaging, exciting, and meaningful - if the individual decides to pursue that path, because they’ve always been able to. It just hasn’t been the default path.

The Industrial Revolution moved millions into factories and large organizations where work resembled an assembly line. It turned society into a society of employees. This led to the birth of the 9-5 workday.

• Rigid schedules controlled by factory bells and time clocks.

• Complex artisan-level work was broken into simple, repetitive tasks that stripped the soul from the work

• Workers only performed one small step in production (they were kept dumb to the entire process, so they couldn’t replicate it on their own - this is why generalists always beat specialists)

• Workers owned neither the tools nor the products

• Workers sold their time rather than products - wage labor

• Managers monitored the workers constantly

This may help you understand why I am adamant about viewing a 9-5 as a stepping stone. A quest in your storyline. They can be useful and allow you to survive, but if you simply observe society, you will realize that they rip the creative spark from you. You must hold a greater vision in your mind and constantly strive for it.

Industrial work led to the peak of meaningless work, best characterized by Marx’s theory of alienation. Workers were alienated from the product, the process, their potential, and their collaborators. Work was repetitive and mind-numbing. Effective workers still worked the same amount and were paid the same amount. Work was about mere survival, not fulfillment.

In the early American economy, around 80% of free workers were self-employed, but today only ~10% are self-employed.

With AI, social media, and an internet filled with people and knowledge, I do not see why artisan-level work cannot be what more people shift into, especially with all the talk about jobs being replaced.

Of course, this will require a critical shift.

Self-directed work requires people to control their own schedules and methods. It is skill-intensive and specific, meaning you will need multiple years of public practice paired with an apprenticeship (today, this comes in the form of courses and content from great thinkers, unless you find someone who is willing to dedicate time to you). It emphasizes craftsmanship. And last, the work moves at a leisurely pace. There is time for rest and thinking.

As an aside, this is what I’m attempting to implement and maintain in our small team at Eden (second version of Kortex, rolling out to Kortex users very soon :))

I hate the thought of ending up like every other company. I want team members to feel as if they are entrepreneurs who choose and direct their own projects in alignment with a company vision that they share, and I want them to be paid accordingly for the value they bring. Once I have more experience with this work style, I’m sure I’ll write a letter on it.

Why Working Less Will Make You Substantially More

Those who come to me and say, “You know, I work 15 hours a day,” I say, “I am not interested.” I am interested in the quality of working hours, not the quantity. The brain of the human being. Do you think that during the first five hours of the day you are the same as you are in the last five hours? No way. You’re tired, and if you’re tired, you stop listening, and the decisions you make are risky.

- Brunello Cucinelli

AI solves utility so humans can transcend to meaning.

We hate long lines at the DMV. We hate when a server gets our order wrong. We hate meetings that could have been a 5 bullet point email. AI and automation solve the necessary work that humans hate. On the other hand, we crave the potential for failure. We love the final batter in the 9th inning. We travel across the world for a 5-star dining experience. We cry at a wedding as the bride and groom read handwritten vows.

Machines are for speed, repetition, and necessity.

Humans are for story, novelty, myth, and meaning.

Most people identify with the traits of a machine (the schooling, the job, the mundane tasks), and that’s exactly why general fulfillment is abysmal.

So what can you do about it?

First, understand that great work is not bound to time.

Great work is the combination of a useful idea, the right amount of skill, and the ability to inspire others to care about the end product.

That leads to a few key points:

• You do not need to work 16 hours a day to have a great idea. In fact, your brain will not allow novel ideas to emerge when you are in the narrow-minded “productive” state. It’s ironic, but constant work destroys how impactful your work can be.

• Your level of skill determines the level of ideas you can have. If you do not acquire a unique and overlapping skill stack, you are limited to ideas that have already been exhausted. You must create a vision and trek through the unknown if you want to achieve any form of uniqueness.

• Most people fall into two camps: (1) They work a job that disconnects them from how the product is sold and thus generates revenue, so they do not understand it. (2) They cannot possibly see how “selling” can be a mutually beneficial act, so they virtue signal themselves to death because they want to “focus on their art.”

If you understand these points, you understand that one person can work for 2-4 hours per day and can get substantially more results than someone who works 8+ hours per day.

Take Charles Darwin. Yes, the guy who created the theory of evolution. He wrote upwards of 19 f*cking books in his life. Very few people do that. Did he work 16 hours a day? No. After a short walk and breakfast, he began a 90-minute session of deep study. After an hour break, he would return to his study until around noon, and would often remark “I’ve done a good day’s work.”

That’s 3 hours of work.

19 books and a theory that changed how we understand the world. *Taps sign*

After that, he replied to letters for 1.5 to 3 hours. Then he took rest and read. Then he played games, read more, and listened to music, often with his family.

I’ve found that my own routine has almost taken this exact shape, composed of intensive work intervals, systematic correspondence, regular breaks, and social interaction.

I walk first thing in the morning, sit down for 1.5-2 hours of writing, go for another walk, complete other needle-moving tasks for the day, go to the gym, reply to messages from partners and team, often take a nap, read, and then spend time with friends and family.

My reasoning behind the routine is this:

• In the morning, entropy is constrained. There are minimal distractions when the world is just waking up, so I place my most important tasks then.

• Since I am always focused on a project (a book, product, newsletter, etc), and projects are magnets for novel ideas, I go on a walk and have my notes ready to jot down what comes to mind.

• The gym marks the end of my intensive tasks, and I do not work on those later in the day, because I know the quality will suffer. If I have an idea, I write it down and refer to it in the morning.

• Now that people are up and communicating, entropy is slowly released, and this is when I begin checking messages to reply to. It’s a different style of work that probably shouldn’t be done in the morning if you care about the quality of your creative work.

By simply adhering to this routine, I feel as if I’ve been able to accomplish quite a bit in my life at the age of 28. 2 books down with one more in the works. A little under 200 newsletters and YT videos. Thousands of posts across socials. Various products and services. A software company that’s going through a revamp, and a few other secret projects slowly picking up steam.

I really just focus on people and product.

I try to create products that would help my past self and put effort into their quality. Then, I write content to attract people who may benefit from those. If I were to build the product for 1 hour per day and write content for 1 hour per day, that’s more than enough work, considering the fact that products can be sold while I sleep, and 1 piece of content can reach millions. More time worked does not equal more results in today’s world. There is a point of diminishing returns, and outsourcing too much of those two levers may hurt you.

How To Quit The 40 Hour Workweek

You live in the most permissionless time in history.

You future-proof yourself when you just do things without permission. You pursue something you deeply care about, learn new skills, build the project, package it up, try to sell it, and attract a tight-knit tribe of people who share your energy.

You don’t future-proof yourself by sticking with a skill set that was an asset then but is a liability now. A liability that allows someone else to determine your value, cap your income, and control your attention for most of your day.

You can learn any skill faster than anyone in the past.

You can find the knowledge you need to do almost anything.

You can do more as one person with less time, work, and money than an entire business could do in the past.

You don’t need a degree.

You don’t need a certification.

You need to be able to get results.

This is called permissionless leverage.

And it blows my mind that people still opt for the conventional path.

They’ll go through 4 years of university, stack up miles of debt, and lock themselves into one area of study not because they have the experience to make that choice, but because it promises to give them a stable income rather than experimenting with their own path, error correcting for 1-2 years, and cultivating a mindset and skillset that allows them to earn as much as they want.

But now…

Now the power lies in the individual.

Now, future success boils down to skill, agency, critical thinking, and a healthy relationship with fear, failure, and embarrassment.

And if you believe otherwise, read the last sentence over again, because a lack of belief in yourself signals that you have none of the above.

But that can change:

1) You Can Drastically Change Your Life In 365 Hours

I’ve used this quote in like 3 out of the last 5 letters, but I will continue to use it because it’s that good:

You and I are not like cows. We’re not meant to graze all day. We’re meant to hunt like lions. We’re closer to carnivores in our omnivorous development than we are to herbivores. As an intellectual athlete, you want to function like an athlete. Which means you train hard, then you sprint, then you rest, then you reassess. This idea that you’re going to have linear output just by cranking every day at the same amount of time sitting… That’s machines. Machines are meant to work 9-5, not humans.

— Naval Ravikant

Person A can work 12 hours a day and make $50K a year.

Person B can work 1 hour a day and make $5 million a year.

The difference is skill, leverage, and understanding – not how hard, long, or organized you work.

People are doing this right now, meaning it is possible, and you complaining about how unfair it is won’t change that fact. The belief that has taken me the furthest in life is that results are replicable. Anything that someone else has achieved, I can achieve. Maybe not with the same sequence of steps, but in the joy that stems from creating my own.

I made the most money in my life when I was working 2-4 hours a day.

Some people don’t believe me when I say that, usually because they lack perspective and skill, and like to close their minds to anything that doesn’t align with what their parents told them was possible.

How was I able to work only 2-4 hours a day?

Because I was quick to realize what my highest leverage tasks were. I quite literally ignored everything else. And I noticed that if I forced myself to work more on those tasks, the quality of the end result only decreased.

When I first started, I didn’t have 2-4 hours a day. I had one. And how I spent that one hour was incredibly crucial for where I ended up.

Most people think they need to grind out 12-hour days like the delusional archetype of an entrepreneur does.

First, most entrepreneurs don’t do that unless they want to.

Second, almost nobody can start with 12 hours a day. People have responsibilities. You need to start with 1 hour, and you can drastically change your life in 365 hours.

You need to dedicate 1 hour of work to a single task that will generate some form of result. If you don’t get the result, you need to iterate. Because it’s not that the action doesn’t get results, it’s that you aren’t good enough at the action to get results. If you can’t quit your job with 1 hour a day on weekdays and 4-8 hours of work on the weekends, it is best to believe that you are doing something wrong, and you must improve through learning and experimentation.

Now, for beginners, this wouldn’t have been possible even 20 years ago, so I understand why most people don’t believe it.

Cultural beliefs are dominated by the oldest generations, and those are the base operating system installed in the mind of the youth unless they decide to write their own code.

And, studies show that an adult’s brain crystallizes around the age of 25 unless they adopt personal development work as a part of their life (most people don’t, it’s not hard to see that).

So, the boomers control the majority of the global belief system by conditioning their children, teaching in schools, preaching in churches, and governing in politics. It’s not until they pass on that a major cultural shift will happen and work times will decrease across the board because people wake up to the fact that they don’t need to slave away for 40-100 hours a week on something they hate.

On the other hand, I was somewhat of a rebel as a teenager. I have a feeling a lot of you are too. Many of us share similar personality types. That’s why many of you follow and resonate with what I say.

I started freelancing to control how long I worked.

I realized I still don’t control my time with client work.

I saw the opportunity of social media to build an audience of people.

I acted like a one-person media company and started writing, then diversifying into video.

I built products with no marginal cost of replication, like ebooks, courses, planners, templates, systems, and now software.

So, people ask how I earn a few million a year working on average* 2-4 hours a day?

It’s not too hard to wrap your head around.

Over 5 years, I’ve grown to a few million followers across social media.

Very cool, I know.

To continue growing, I write posts and newsletters for an hour or two in the morning. I spend about an hour a week turning that content into a YouTube video as taught in 2 Hour Writer.

If you understand business, you understand you need people and a product.

Social media is where people come from in today’s digital world because that’s where the attention is right now. In the past, it was mostly in the newspaper, on the radio, and on TV.

If it takes me a few hours of writing to continue growing my audience, and I have products that require close-to-zero work on my end to fulfill, then yea, that’s all the work I have to do for the day.

If I can convert a small percentage of the 10-20 million impressions I get each month on a $150 product, I’ll let you do the math.

Seriously, do the math on .001% of that many impressions.

Now, tell me you can’t replace your income within 6-12 months with 1 hour a day of high-leverage work.

*There are times where I work longer than 2-4 hours. Like the early stages of Kortex (now pivoting into Eden), or when I’m building a new product, or when I just feel like it. 2-4 hours a day is an average number.

Building the right product that people want will take time, as will acquiring the skill to reach millions of people with a few posts per month, but if you simply focused on those two things and ignored everything else, yes, a few hours a day is more than enough.

2) At All Costs - Do Not Lose Focus On These 2 Priorities

You have two priorities:

• People – building an audience of or building a tribe of people to remove your dependency from your employer, government, and any other centralized entity that controls most aspects of your life.

• Product – building a product so people can give you money in exchange for something that benefits their lives. This is the only way to take control of your income and stop relying on anyone else to make you money. This is what I will teach in Mental Monetization.

I find it quite funny that the one question all beginners ask is “How do I make money?”

And when they’re given the only answer that will actually make them money, they ignore it and go after “faster” methods of making money that are reserved for people with money like investing, crypto, startups, and the rest.

You make money by starting a business.

You make money by distributing a product with a price tag on it so people can pay you for it.

To think that you don’t have to build a product is idiotic. Especially in the context of this letter. If you don’t build the product, you work for someone else who did, plain and simple. In other words, you are still bound to 40+ hours a week on projects that were assigned to you. I know some of you will only understand this if I’m harsh with you… so, stop being a fucking idiot and finally realize that you need a PRODUCT and PEOPLE in the form of an AUDIENCE to PAY you for that PRODUCT.

THEN, AND ONLY THEN, ONCE YOU HAVE A MINIMUM OF $20,000 TO $50,000 A MONTH SHOULD YOU THINK ABOUT INVESTING CAPITAL AS LEVERAGE TO MAKE MORE MONEY FROM IT.

Cash. Flow. First.

Freelancing, agency work, information products, I don’t care. Everyone has their opinion about why those are the worst or best. Your success in any of them will be determined by your ability to block out the noise and understand that opinions do not determine value and sales volume. I recommend what I recommend, but just start something. You probably don’t have a few hundred thousand dollars (without destroying your life with loans) to get rich like the few who did in older generations.

We live a digital world with more resources, more efficiency, and lower costs so more people can generate wealth in that space, the digital space.

3) Build The Product You Want To See In The World

Once you feel like you have the hang of building an audience, you can start to use your 1 hour a day for building a product to monetize that audience.

Of course, if you have more time on the weekends, you can use that too.

Now:

You don’t need experience to sell a product.

A product is what helps you gain experience.

And no, you don’t need to create exaggerated promises that turn you into an unethical scammer.

Creating a digital product is no different from creating a physical product or providing a freelance service.

Let’s say you want to sell a planner.

Do you need experience selling planners in order to sell a planner? No, that’s impossible.

Instead, you:

• Buy a few planners and start using them to see which methods get the best results for you.

• Start taking the best parts of each to create a new method for better results.

• Test and iterate for a bit on yourself until you’ve solved a problem in your life.

• Manufacture, sell, and distribute to the audience you’ve built with content.

• Get results for your customers and continue iterating on the product until it pulls in the revenue you want it to.

This doesn’t change with a digital product. You can sell a printable planner, a Notion template for a planner, or just an ebook or course that walks people through how to use your system.

Since you’re not going the physical route, you can launch fast and skip the costly manufacturing and distribution.

The same goes for freelancing.

For some reason, when people start a business other than client work, their brain freezes up and they start whining about imposter syndrome.

How do you make money as a freelancer?

• You learn the fundamentals of a skill.

• You build portfolio projects to practice.

• You start working for free or very cheap.

• You gain experience in the real world.

• You start charging a bit more.

• You improve your skill and get better results.

This applies to absolutely anything you build.

You aren’t as skilled or successful as you think you are because you haven’t started selling a product. You’re afraid to sell a product because you have imposter syndrome. You don’t realize that selling a product is how you overcome that imposter syndrome and get results for other people.

My advice:

Build the product you want to see in the world.

Solve a problem in your life and sell the solution.

Take inventory of products that have changed your life, shaped who you are, and influenced your behavior. (I’m guessing these will fall in line with what you are already writing about to build an audience).

Make those problems better by creating your own system and selling it under the most unique brand you can find: yourself.

Start with information products to build cash flow.

If you feel like it, turn the successful information products into another business. That’s what I did with 2 Hour Writer. The course was a way to validate an idea without spending $4 million in startup costs (yes, I’ve spent that much).

I’ll leave it at that because you have a lot to do.

– Dan