I think a lot of people who exit the traditional path or the corporate world, especially early on in their professional lives, are doing so because they've stumbled upon philosophy... whether or not they realize. Everybody goes through the same early life stages. You go to school, you collect achievements, you look up to your parents or other mentors and watch them go off to some professional pursuit to make ends meet. Depending on your family or upbringing the intensity of that pursuit might be different. If you grew up in a household that was achievement based, or you're second or third generation downstream from wealth, then the color or the flavor changes. But fundamentally it's the same path. Those early years are like a practice. Call them “life drills.” The issue is they aren't like practicing for a sport or studying for a credential… where every milestone is designed to lead up to the thing itself. In a sport the rules exist before you actually start playing. Someone invented them. You can't just decide a free throw is worth 5 points. You can't pass the MCAT by writing a poem. But life itself has no rulebook like that... nobody knows any of the "answers." All the accoutrements of modern life, whether that's status or prestige, your influence or your value to the community, or concrete things like money and material possessions, don't matter in any real sense. You have to invent its meaning yourself. But most people go through those early “drills” with the societal assumption that the rules are real. Then they get there. They played the game the way they were taught… they scored the points… and they're disgruntled to learn the truth... that there is no referee. No grand arbiter is judging their performance against the rules they played by, because there were never any actual rules. This is a brutal.. debilitating.. thing to swallow at 35 or 40 or 50 with decades of effort behind them. So they usually deny it. They convince themselves the rules they played by were in fact the real rules to life.. since the alternative is admitting they spent their best years practicing for a game that didn't even exist. It was an illusion created by social or economic forces long before their arrival… and they’re confusing mass adoption of these “rules” as proof the rules are real or “correct.” The people who leave the path early are usually the ones who catch on to this sooner. Somewhere in the middle of these life drills they start to sense there's no game at the end… just more drills with different descriptions. Most of them couldn't articulate it if you asked.. but they’ve begun to feel the gap between the rules they were taught and the fact that nobody was ever keeping any kind of genuine score… plus, nobody is ever really watching you play anyway. VEO out.