Tim Ferriss was thirty years old in 2007 when he published The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. Now, a decade later, the book has sold over a million copies and catapulted Ferriss from mere Ivy-educated tech entrepreneur to chart-topping life-hack guru and Silicon Valley angel investor. People continue to buy what Ferriss started selling ten years ago: a one-way ticket out of interminable white-collar servitude.

Lord knows how, but the elite young author had his finger on the pulse of the average middle-aged deskbound office worker, and The 4-Hour Workweek was a clever play on their fears, frustrations, and fantasies. People don’t want to languish beneath fluorescent lights, hearing only clacking keyboards, smelling only microwaved soup. People want to master a craft, get a natural tan, watch their children grow up, and visit Rome. People want to be free, and they fear that at the end of the day, despite capitalist maxims about individual choice and liberty, they aren’t.

The genius of Ferriss’s book is that it resonates with a suspicion nearly everyone harbors deep down: that it doesn’t actually have to be like this. Surely it’s not an inviolable rule that to afford a place to live in the world today or achieve financial security in old age one has to relinquish entire decades of one’s waking life to corporate control and market discipline. Must we endure miserable commutes and repetitive stress injuries fifty weeks a year in exchange for two weeks of vacation? Says who? The 4-Hour Workweek affirms people’s intuition that the rules are arbitrary, and tilted in someone else’s favor.