Running with Chickens - Steve Peak

A quarter-life crisis had crept into Steve’s whitespace while he sat, coding in his ergohuman chair at a successful biz-tech company in Silicon Valley. He was about to turn thirty and his simple life of work, alcohol and music festivals was being body-snatched by an unknown entity.

Steve says that when you hit your late twenties, you will likely go through the five stages of leaving your twenties, all of which include various manifestations along the anxiety continuum: 

1 - Denial, alcohol, and gaming

2 - Anger, getting high on weed, alcohol, and gaming

3 - Bargaining and travel to Peru to live simply and take ayahuasca

4 - Introspection and discovering shrooms

5 - Reluctant outward acceptance and denial resulting in assorted anxiety disorders

And with that, you are an adult. Have a nice day.

Running with Chickens is about a journey—a hysterical, witty, and charming exploration of the disillusionment and enlightenment that drove a monumental life-change. Take a ride inside the irreverent and mutinous mind of a thirty-something tech coder-guy that decided to get off the hamster wheel, buy property in Costa Rica and turn it in to a farm—all with little money but a lot of will.

At a young age, he realized he had to grow up fast as a tumultuous divorce broke up his family, the diagnosis of ADD disrupted his school life, and the challenges of growing up with non-conforming attitudes and ideas impacted his daily existence. He says now, that adaptation is the new sim card and that it is the only way to survive in a radically changing world.

Steve calls the book a data-dump of randomness exposed while trying to define the reality of his insecurities and anxieties. He provides his take on your Facebook posts, his own theory of enlightenment, managing his crazy family, millennials vs. baby boomers, women, men, and topics that will amuse or offend just about everyone. He adds a few words of caution: If certain words not found in the dictionary are offensive to you, he suggests you don’t read the book and asks you to go back to playing with the dog.