the Four Hour "Lorem Ipsum"

What would I do with the extra thirty-six if I only had to work for four hours, every week?In Tim Ferris' book, The Four Hour Workweek, the answer to that question is given less attention than the 'how-to' guide for finding oneself in such a quandary. As he recounts his own experience, the author presents the alternative 'new rich' lifestyle of time spent dwelling nomadically through Europe, learning languages, and adopting several new 'kinesthetic' activities per year as the alternative to cubicle-dwelling wage slavery.For a creative mind, some of the ideas might be poisonous to accept - Ferris proposes a 'physical product' driven business as the only path to a life of R&R; he argues that selling widgets, gidgets and gadgets is the easiest framework for removing oneself from the day-to-day operations of a financial enterprise. Artists, singers, athletes, counselors, teachers, beware - there are no four hour workweeks in your future, if you can't outsource the manufacture & fulfillment of your muses to virtual assistants in India.After drawing up thorough instructions on how to pick a market and jump in to the sales fray, Ferris takes a moment to reflect on what it will feel like, when you've done enough outsourcing to travel leisurely around the world and spend only brief moments checking email to run your business: 'It will be hard at first.'He says it's in this extra downtime when you'll come face-to-face with big questions - 'What's the meaning of everything?'  Ferris asserts that dwelling on the intangibles may be avoided by frequent jiu-jitsu or tango dancing lessons.The motivational and analytical quotations peppered into the text are enriching, and appear so often that readers may subconsciously find them as one of the most compelling reasons to keep turning pages. From Machiavelli:“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.” The wealth of quotes are thoughtful, and despite the book's overall ridiculousness, they complement several other useful tidbits buried in the impossible mission of spending only four hours per week doing actual work. For example, the few paragraphs on speed reading were unexpectedly helpful.With his big plan and fancy quotes, Ferris seems all set to kick up his feet with an umbrella drink and live the dream. But hasn't this question of one's obligation to forgo personal pleasure in the name of societal duties been around for a while?In the publishing industry, for hundreds and hundreds of years, the Latin text 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...' (attributed to Cicero, 45 B.C.) has been used as placeholding filler for typesetters to use before final copy was ready. In translation, Lorem Ipsum states...'We denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue.'Uncountable drafts of novels, newspapers, and magazines have used this quote in their creation process. Gutenberg himself may have plated it out. Whatever reason one chooses to argue for its selection, its ancient dictum is stark: Concentrating only on pleasure is bad.Yet, here is Tim Ferris, flying in the face of 500 years of publishing tradition with an entire volume dedicated to enriching the lives of 'men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms and pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire...'I'm searching here for some thread of irony in The Four Hour Workweek's reliance on quotes from big thinkers (Seneca, Thoreau, Bruce Lee...) yet in the end, the author repulses at 'coming face to face with the big questions.' And as a reader, after completing the book, you might be wondering whose advice to follow...Tim Ferris, with a few years on the best seller list under his belt, questing for 80% pleasure and only 20% work?  Or Cicero, and his thousands of years of placeholder-text wisdom: "in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted."Perhaps it's a bit demanding to expect that The Four Hour Workweek will match the lofty ideals set forth by the people whom it quotes (or who its typesetters quoted.) Its presentation is gimmicky, but underneath the goo, there lives some valuable advice and reasonable calls for reflection on the profit-driven and time-crunched modern lifestyle.