“Yeah,” he replied cheerfully. “These are all kids I hung out with at Westlake.” Julia knew they were getting close, as she could see the orange embers of a fire spitting into the air in front of a small house. “I’m really excited to see them all,” Ross said as he slowed the truck.
Ross had returned to Texas a few months earlier, settling back into life in Austin as if he had never left. He hadn’t expected to end up back there, but his college obsession with the libertarian club had come at a cost. He had been so focused on the exploration of his new ideals that he had failed the candidacy exam for his Ph.D. program, where he was supposed to continue his research in the “growth of EuO thin films by molecular beam epitaxy.” But there was some serendipity in his failing the exam. All those hours talking politics had made him realize that there was, at least for him, more to life than physics. So he took his master’s and went south again. He had persuaded nineteen-year-old Julia to drop out of school and follow him. Yet for both of them the transition had been bittersweet.
For Julia, leaving Pennsylvania, where she had lived for so long, and going to a state that seemed—largely and without apology—racist and staunchly Republican had been jarring. But Ross’s corner of the Lone Star State was (mostly) different. While a majority of Texas backed George W. Bush, and were against gays and abortion, the Austin area was more liberal and aligned with her own values, filled with Ron Paul supporters who believed that the government was too big, too powerful, and too in people’s business.
For Ross the reintegration had been surprisingly hard. He had left Penn State without any idea of what to do next. He wanted desperately to do something in line with his libertarian ideals. He wanted to do something that would make him money. And, maybe most of all, he wanted to make his parents proud. Finding a career that met all of these goals was, it had become apparent, all but impossible. But that didn’t stop him from talking about his new belief system to anyone who would listen.
When he bumped into childhood friends at old local bars, rather than revel in distant memories of the past, Ross wanted to talk about America’s future. On a recent visit to Shakespeare’s Pub in downtown Austin, he had spent most of the evening holding court with an old high school friend, describing Austrian economics and arguing that the current political system in America was designed to let the rich take advantage of the disadvantaged. He explained how wonderful it would be to build a seasteading experiment.
Seasteading, Ross had expounded, was an idea that you could create a community out at sea, away from any governments or regulations, where people could live in open waters without laws and with a free market. Some people had the idea to do this on an abandoned oil rig in the middle of the ocean, with none of the rules and laws that existed in America or elsewhere. After Penn State, Ross had tried to build a video game that would help demonstrate these theories. But it had gone nowhere. Just like all of Ross’s other ideas.
Julia had been present for a number of these political discussions, and while she sometimes argued clever counterpoints, often she just let Ross have the stage. Tonight, though, as they neared the house with the bonfire outside, there would thankfully be no talk of politics or lawless countries in the middle of the ocean.
Ross steered off the road and onto a long dirt driveway toward a single-story clapboard house with warm yellow light glowing from the windows. “It’s been a couple of years since I’ve seen some of these friends,” he proclaimed as the truck wheezed off. The sun had set and darkness consumed the surrounding mountains; the smell of cinders filled the air as they walked toward a group of revelers.
“Rossman!” a friend yelled as he embraced his old high school chum.
“This is my girlfriend, Julia,” Ross said proudly.
As they joined the group around the fire, people popped open beers. A joint was lit and passed around, and the friends reminisced about high school. “Remember the time Rossman talked his way out of getting in trouble with the cops for smoking that joint?” one story began. It ended with “Ross loved his weed.” Laughter erupted as Julia noted, “He still does.” More stories; more joints; more beers; more laughter. Ross and Julia were having a blast. That was, until the conversation turned to careers. One friend offered up that he was working for the government now; another said he was an engineer. One talked about starting his own business.
“What about you, Rossman?” A Texas drawl came from the other side of the fire. “Where are you working these days?”
Ross was silent for a moment. Tension consumed him as he peered at Julia. This was the last question on earth he wanted to deal with right now. “I don’t really have a job,” he said.
“That’s cool,” a friend sassed. “How’d you pull that off?”
The entire group around the fire grew quiet, listening.
Ross explained that he had taken on a part-time job managing a nonprofit called Good Wagon Books, where he was helping out his old buddy Donny. Good Wagon went door to door through Austin collecting old books, then sold them online. Whatever couldn’t be hawked on the Internet was donated to local prisons. It didn’t pay much, so he subsidized his few expenses trading stocks, and had some more money saved from selling a small rental house he’d bought while he was at Penn State. (His frugal lifestyle, in which he spent most of college essentially living for free, had enabled him to save up enough money from his job as a teacher’s assistant at Penn State to purchase, then sell, a tiny home in town.) Around the bonfire he told his friends that he’d been living on those winnings for the past few months.
What he didn’t tell them, though, was that he had given up day-trading because it wasn’t profitable, and the few times he had made some money, he had hated the inordinate regulations and taxes that Uncle Sam applied to investors. He also didn’t tell them that he had failed his Ph.D. exam or that he had despised renting his house out to college students because of all the inconsequential problems that he was forced to deal with as a landlord. And he certainly didn’t tell them that the gaming simulation he had been building for months, which would simulate a seasteading project, had failed, as no one wanted to purchase it. He didn’t mention all those odd jobs he had done off Craigslist to make a few dollars, including editing science papers. He didn’t say that everything he had done had felt like a complete failure to him. One brilliant idea after another that no one else thought was brilliant.