Update: 2025/26

I recently published a book on work entitled Chop Wood, Carry Water: The Yoga Of Work (2025). If you’d like an EPUB version and if you’d like to support me directly, then you can proceed to give $5 (include your email address with the PayPal offering [follow the same instructions as those listed below]) and I’ll send you the EPUB directly. If, however, you’d like a paperback, then you can order it via Amazon.

E-books on Offer

The following eight e-books were written in the spirit of generosity and in the way of friendship. These include Money Rules for Simple Living (2016), How an Artist Can Hack a Living (2015), The Good Life and Sustaining Life (2014), Awakening to Philosophical Life (2014), Cultivating Discipline Lightly (2013), Manners and Mores (2013), A Guidebook for Philosophical Life (2012), and The Art of Inquiry (2012). Each leaves my hands as gently as the words that first came to my fingers; each is offered to those who bend their ears to hear.

E-book Collection: $5 for 1, $8 for 2, or $15 for all 8 books

If you’d like to receive an e-book, simply offer $5 via PayPal. If you’d like to receive two e-books, offer $8 via PayPal. If you’d like to receive all eight, you can offer $15. Please include your email address when you use PayPal as the latter doesn’t always make it readily available anymore.

Expect to receive your copies via email the same day or the following day.

Money Rules For Simple Living

A VERY BRIEF GUIDE

September 2016 | e-book | 69 pages

Perhaps you’re someone for whom scarcity has loomed large. You may have accrued some debt over the years, some of it on your credit card, the rest used to pay for your college education. You may not have much money now, and you’re beginning to wonder whether struggling just to get by is what will always be in store for you. The future may not be looking gloomy, only exceptionally trying. Added to these worries is the fact that you fancy yourself a creative person, someone closely or loosely associated with the arts, someone who has lived quite unconventionally at that. This fact makes it even more difficult for you just to “take any job,” to “just grow up,” “to just be a sell out,” or to even be qualified to do the sort of work that is well-paid, though nauseating. For you, knowing what is enough remains as elusive today as it did some years ago.

In this book, I seek to ask and answer two basic, everyday questions about our relationship to money:

How do we best consider what we should acquire?
How do we use well the money we have?

I imagine that you the pupil are a young money practitioner who is setting out on the path to learn how to use money with proper care and ease. Accordingly, I outline four stages of learning how to become a “master” in the right use of money:

Grasping a fundamental set of rules associated with what is necessary, unnecessary, and superfluous.
Coming to an aesthetic appreciation of what you have.
Being properly generous when you have more than just enough.
Being magnanimous when you happen to have greater abundance.

Read a 12-Page Excerpt: Money Rules For Simple Living.

How An Artist Can Hack a Living

2015 | ebook | 34 page report

This report was born of a query sent to 30 friends on April 30, 2015. I asked whether they knew of anyone making a living at making art. The response was wintry.

Virtually no one knew of anyone who fit that description, yet nearly all expressed curiosity about reading my findings. This 34-page e-book details what I’ve discovered since that time.

A Factory or a Hustler?

To eke out a living, most artists have turned themselves into “factories” or “hustlers.” But being a factory or a hustler is at odds with the reason why artists wanted to become artists in the first place. Might there be some other way to live artistically?

4 Models for Making a Living

In this short e-book, I don’t concern myself with the personal failures of particular artists, the burden of history, the rise of the precariat class, the perils of neoliberalism, or with waves upon waves of economic recession. Rather, I investigate what is possible for artists living today.

Counterintuitively, I show that there are four models that artists can use to live artistically:

They can become excellent Warriors, Merchants, and Priests.
They can forget about scaling and learn to love elitism.
They can become masters who offer their wares at a premium.
They can redefine the very nature of “being an artist.”

10-Page Excerpt

You’re welcome to read the first 10 pages: How an Artist Can Hack a Living (Excerpt)

The Good Life and Sustaining Life

AN INQUIRY INTO OUR GREAT VEXATION

September 2014 | e-book | 73 pages

The question of the good life, I argue, must come before that of sustaining life. From this starting point, I systematically inquire into (1) which conceptions of the good life are available to us in modernity, (2) what ways one can make a living during ‘unsettled time,’ and (3) how one can make a living in such a way that accords with leading a flourishing life.

There may be no greater vexation in our time than the question of how to make a living in a way that accords with leading a good life. Yet if nearly every thinking person has faced this vexation at one time or another and doubtless throughout most of his adult life, virtually no one has ventured to think it through in a well-considered, systematic fashion.

Table of Contents. Preface: Our Great Vexation Day 1. The Question of the Good Life Day 2. The Question of Sustaining Life Day 3. The Question of Consonance Appendix. Ways of Life in Modernity: A Chart

Awakening to Philosophical Life

ESSAYS PERSONAL AND IMPERSONAL

March 2014 | e-book | 103 pages

The 46 personal essays selected for inclusion in this beautiful volume date back to January of 2011 and were written with no other intention apart from the desire to become a more excellent human being. They show the reader how-by paying close attention to examples-he can awaken to philosophical life.

The ‘basic questions of living’ occur to me but transcend my existence; they emerge in my time but go beyond my years; they shape my moral character but the nature of my character is poured from a general cast of mind. They enliven me-this is true-yet only by dint of coursing through my being; and while their beginning is contingent, their reason for being is necessary.

Table of Contents 1. Growing Up More 2. Old Laozi in New York City 3. Nature’s Silent Course 4. When I was With the Night 5. Manners, Mores, and Glorious Tongues 6. A Philosopher’s Parochial School 7. And is This not Mysterium Fascinans? 8. Horribly Bellowing Women, Manly Bowing Shoulders 9. Living Simply in Appalachia

Cultivating Discipline Lightly

A GUIDEBOOK FOR PHILOSOPHICAL FRIENDS

August 2013 | e-book | 107 pages

In response to our unsettled time, this humble guidebook provides the one so attuned with a way to build a small-scale organization consisting of guides and pupils. This beautiful trellis, delicate yet sturdy, light yet hardy, is held together by the pupil’s ongoing practice of lighthearted discipline.

Who is to lead? The guide. Then who is to follow? The pupil. By what authority? By that of inquiry, the pupil letting himself be led by the guide who does not know yet has some idea how to find out.

Table of Contents Rip Van Winkle: A Parable 1. Raising and Lowering Our Eyes 2. Acknowledging Our Unsettled Time 3. Trellis-Making 4. Inquiring 5. Cultivating Lightheartedness Of Ladders: An Imaginary Dialogue Appendix. Getting the Hang of Being Surprised

Manners and Mores

A TUTORIAL FOR FREELANCERS TIRED OF HUSTLING AND PRONE TO APOLOGIZING

August 2013 | e-book | 35 pages

‘The Freelancer’s Dilemma,’ as I call it, spells out the unpalatable choice between hustling to make ends meet and apologizing for running over one’s colleagues. Becoming well-mannered, I propose, is the way one withdraws from this dilemma in order to live more politely, civilly, and humanely. Each chapter consists of examples in these gentle, yet nearly forgotten, social arts.

Either he hustles, or else he apologizes. If he hustles, he grows to detest himself. But if he apologizes, he grows to detest himself. So, he grows to detest himself.

Table of Contents Preface 1. The Freelancer’s Dilemma 2. A Few Choice Words About Style 3. A Word or Two of Caution About the Ills of Talkativeness 4. Unregrettable Words About the Art of Invitations 5. Lovely Notes of Introduction 6. Pindarian Notes of Praise 7. Giving Beautiful Thanks 8. In Praise of the Open-Ended Conversation 9. On Hosting and Being Hosted 10. On Saying Your Graceful Goodbyes Supplement. Raising Funds in the Context of a Gift Economy

A Guidebook for Philosophical Life

THE SEARCH FOR RADIANT LIVING

May 2012 | e-book | 113 pages

This loving book, A Guidebook for Philosophical Life, is written for those with ears to hear. It seeks to provide a path to-as well as a radiant vision of-a good and beautiful life.

The philosophical life is, above all, the search for the most excellent way of being. And if ‘the most excellent way of being’ can be glossed, in a word, as ‘radiance,’ then it follows that philosophy just is the search for radiance.

Table of Contents 1. Genre 2. If Life is Brought into Question 3. Examined Life 4. Images of Philosophy 5. A Community of Inquirers 6. A Life of the Virtues 7. Living Simply 8. Ascesis 9. Eros 10. Gift Economy 11. Radiance Appendix: Transition to Philosophical Life

CHAPTER 1. GENRE here.

The Art of Inquiry

COMING TO UNIMAGINABLE CLARITY

August 2012 | e-book | 33 pages

The reader of this guide is the individual seeking to gain clarity about the shape of his life or the member of an organization who wishes to learn how he fits into the organization. Its chief aim is to acquaint him with how to inquire into the things that matter most.

An inquiry is a stroll through a garden, a game of philosophical improv, a mysterious adventure whose clues lead on to the final unraveling…

Table of Contents 1. Inquiry Illuminated Interlude 1: Meno’s Paradox of Inquiry 2. Confusion Interlude 2: Living Meanwhile – A Time of the Virtues 3. Clarity

CHAPTER 1. INQUIRY ILLUMINATED here.

Andrew Taggart, Ph.D.

Ebooks