Help my wife not stress while I start writing

(EDIT: OK, I was confused by GoFundMe's form when setting this up (the form asks "are you setting this up for you or someone else?" so I checked "someone else," then it asks for name and details for who should be able to receive the money, so I entered Casey's name and details. I didn't know that it would display this way! I, Alex Leaman, am organizing this and I am the one asking for donations. But the money isn't for me, because I don't need this money to feel OK with my decision to quit my job and focus on writing. Of course, we share finances, so the difference is academic, but below I will make clear why this is an important distinction. Sorry for the confusion. Thanks y'all.)

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I'm Alex Leaman. Hi.

I have had a hell of a few years. I almost drank myself to death in 2022. At the very beginning of this year, I checked into a rehab facility. Some of my friends already know this. Some of them don't know I was gone for a month. Some people think I was at a trade show or something, but I was in Colorado getting help with a problem that was consuming me at an accelerating, at ultimately breakneck pace.

Coming back from rehab the very day before my wife's birthday, I was a changed person, still on wobbly baby giraffe legs as far as feeling confident in my sobriety, but I grew stronger and more confident throughout the year. And today I am light years beyond what I dared to hope was possible just a year ago.

Coming back to life has involved a career change that was already overdue. I gave up looking for a job in my former field around April, and got a job making a fraction of what I previously earned, but one that I could get immediately within days of deciding to quit looking in my old career. Not nearly enough to get us back to real security, but enough to stop the financial bleeding before we went fully into the red.

My wife, Casey, has been a champ through all this. I didn't really want to get this other job, I wanted to restart my life doing what I always thought, and everybody else told me, I should be doing: writing. But she was deeply stressed out about money (we weren't near my freak-out point, but her appetite for risk is much lower than mine, as is absolutely typical among men and women and is perfectly reasonable). So I took the job, happily, to give her some relief from worry. And I loved doing the job, while I figured out the writing thing (and dabbled with some old craft hobbies with an eye to opening an Etsy store). Then the job got less busy and I started feeling depressed about going - not because I don't like work, because I hate shuffling through a day trying to stretch 2 hours of work to fill an eight-hour day, so they don't send me home. Other people there do just fine, but when I work I like to work. Pretending to work and get paid for it makes me feel guilty and drives me crazy with impatient energy, a very bad headspace for a recovering addict to spend his day in. So when I say I hated going in to work, please understand my problem was the exact opposite of laziness. Anyone who knows me, especially those who have worked alongside me, will confirm this.

But over the holiday weekend, amidst the tempestuous thought-storm that I've been doing in the off-hours this year, practicing something called self-therapy that I learned about in rehab, I stumbled on the idea that I really want to, have to write about. And I can't stop writing except to take brief naps since having that epiphany. I'm very excited to explore it and share it with the world.

But it's going to drive me bonkers if I have to go into work and mope through eight hours of half-assed working before I can come home and work on this. So I told Casey I need to stop going in, now.

And it's freaking her out, which I do not blame her a bit for. Maybe years ago, before I put her through the wringer with my drinking, and lying about drinking, and acting erratically because I either had been drinking or was white-knuckling a diabolical urge to run to the store and get a bottle to drink, before I had to leave her alone holding the bag while I sat on a beanbag chair and talked about my poor little feelings for a whole month just to get my head close enough to right to be trusted loose on the streets again, maybe before this last year of my sobbing revelations about my past and heartbreaking confessions to her about what all I had got up to while drunk - maybe before that, I could have asked her to put some blind faith in me and eek out a couple more extra-tight months while I get this bird off the ground. But not now. That would be an obscene request.

So I've got my hand out, not for me, but for her. Literally for her, because part of my big idea, my grand revelation, is that part of what was driving me batshit crazy the last 20 years was that I never wanted to make money, to be successful in that way, and I had been trying to be someone I'm not to try to please her.

Because I'm a natural minimalist, a moderate ascetic if you will. My dream, my honest to God dream, is to own two pairs of pants and five shirts, a couple of pairs of shoes for different types of weather, a bicycle, a laptop, some tools and a big-ass pile of books, and not much more. That's exactly how I was rolling when I met Casey, and I was happy and fun, so much so that I got one of the finest women in the world to fall for me despite the fact that I was living a step or two above hobo.

So as part of my redefinition of myself, to be happy and true to myself and be the man that she deserves, is that I am renouncing an interest in material possessions or wealth beyond the barest of essentials. And the modest proposal I hope to lay out, the case I am going to make to the world, is that this might be the way a lot of men would enjoy living, if they were not burdened with the obligation of providing for a woman.

Which is not to say that I do not intend to provide for my woman and our child, or that I think other men should not provide for theirs. Far from it. I believe, in fact, that I can provide for them far better than I have so far. But I want to do it without the obligation to do it in a way that she approves of, that satisfies her need for guaranteed security.

I want to be obliged to provide for them because I oblige myself, because I love them and they are all that matter to me in this world. I want to ask her to take on the responsibility of providing for herself and him, so that I can go out and try for big bucks, on my own terms, doing what excites me to do. Not to toil away in an office doing someone else's bidding in exchange for a guarantee of decidely medium bucks.

I want to do what all of our prehistoric male ancestors did, at some time. At some point, some guy got the idea to try taking down a mammoth for the first time. I am pretty sure his woman thought he was a fool and told him so, if women of then were anything like the women of now. Those things are too big and dangerous, she said, and besides, what will we even do with all that meat? And he ran off and chased that mammoth anyway, because I doubt that cave men were the patriarchal brutes of later history, but I very much doubt they went around asking women for permission for their endeavors, either.

I want to bring home that mammoth, and lay the whole big bastard at the foot of her cave. I need only a slice or two, the rest is hers. If it is more than she and the babies can eat, so what. They can call daddy a fool, as long as they do it with big grins on their faces with their cheeks stuffed with hot mammoth steak.

I also recently figured out that my minimalist lifestyle back when I was single was more than just being a cheapskate and choosing thrift store clothes and a bicycle instead of a car, so as to avoid having to compete in the rat race to make ends meet. It was that, but it was also because I've always been drawn to a minimalist lifestyle. As an atheist, I had no interest in anything with the taint of religion on it, but looking back I think I have always felt called to practice what you might call spiritual austerity, a renunciation of consumption and wealth-hoarding that is the hallmark of several spiritual traditions.

Spiritual austerity held up as a manly virtue, to replace hypercompetitive wealth-building, could do a lot to heal the world - both the natural world which is blighted by human overconsumption, and the social world which is blighted by wealth disparities that are an affront to decency.

And I say manly virtue because there's another component to this. Although I am a staunch gender egalitarian, I do not subscribe to the idea that women and men are in their natures fundamentally the same. I think the law should treat them equally, and people should treat each other with equal respect and consideration irrespective of gender, but I think our slightly different brains with different cocktails of neurotransmitters and hormones make us think and feel a bit differently from each other. I believe we differ, on the average, in our thresholds for comfort, security, risk-tolerance, and in our aesthetic leanings.

I believe, in short, that although we all could use to live more simply and use less resources, men are more suited to go to radical extremes with austerity, to compete with each other to show how minimally they can live content. Just as we have done with overconsumption, reckless resource exploitation, competition for wealth-hoarding, and rapacious empire-building over the last several thousand years, I think men are equally constituted to take this austerity thing to 11.

And I don't want men not to work and earn money. Not at all. I love working and I think most of my fellow men do, especially when they can choose the job they like doing rather than the one that makes them the most money. There are a lot of jobs that men are opting out of, leaving dangerous gaps in the workforce in essential services, because they don't pay enough to support a family and men won't bust their asses for jobs that provide the status and money women want in a mate. Because that's why we really want, or need, all that money. To support women.

But what if women didn't want or need our support, but were happy to support themselves? What if women paid their own way in the world, and expected only themselves to be responsible to pay for any children they might have? Then men wouldn't need to attract them with money. Men could busy themselves doing work that's useful and gets them outside, working with their hands, like a lot of them really like to be doing, with money out of the picture.

And if men competed for female attention not by hoarding wealth, but by living simply and using any surplus wealth to practice conspicuous charitable giving, then with all that extra loot going into the charitable sphere we could build a social safety net that ensured that no woman would need to fear for the security of her children. Without offending the libertarian mentalities of men, who generally have no problem giving to support and benefit women and children, but tend to dislike having wealth taken from them, by the state or anyone. Yes, if my idea catches on we can have a movement that is radically progressive socially, and radically libertarian economically - because I propose to pass no laws, only to drum up the voluntary support of my fellow men to lead the way and change the world, for the good of themselves and women alike.

And finally, I have some ideas about how the world might be better organized for peace and prosperity, with this as a starting place. I will be outlining a proposal for a revolution, but one that can be conducted without bloodshed, or changing a single law (at least not here in America, where the revolution would start). One that would use only the existing democratic and corporate institutions we have in place right now, and bend them through the will of the people to be more just and sustainable. And it could happen without changing anything except a lot of minds. I'll be putting that forth in the coming months.

So that's what I'm fundraising for. I intend to monetize my blog as soon as possible, but for now, it would really help out if some people could drop a few bucks in the kitty to help my beloved wife to feel good about the next month or so. And I need to keep writing about this, full-time, because I'm super revved up about this idea and my brain is fizzing with topics about how to make the case for it, faster than I can write them down.

If you want to read more and want me to write it faster, drop a dollar or two in the basket. If you like the idea of men adopting a low-consumption, high-freedom lifestyle for their own health and mental wellness, and competing with each other not to gather up wealth, but to heap generosity on the women and kids they love, and charities that benefit everybody, and show off their prowess and fitness as desirable mates in that way, drop a few bucks in to show your support for that idea. If you support an idea that could marry the best parts of egalitarian and libertarian philosophies, then give a little bit.

I don't want a bunch of money for this, just enough to put my poor, patient wife's mind at ease until I can get this thing making some money through merch, referrals etc.

And it all goes to her, not to me. I will pay myself from the monetized blog when that starts making a few bucks, I don't want any handouts for myself. I'll be posting my personal expenses as part of my blog project, to document how little I can live on, personally, and live a contented life. That will be part of making my case to men that they could be happy living that way, too. So, this transparency will also show the world that I didn't set up a GoFundMe to fund a big shopping spree for myself :)

Thank you,

Alex