System Boundaries and Inheritance

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7Wannabe5
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System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

When I started my 7 year perma-culture project in conjunction with plan to achieve FI, I arbitrarily constructed a boundary that defined successful completion of my project as demonstrated production of human-preferred food-crops or livestock by weight/mass (not necessarily calories or complete range of nutritional components due to easy access to trade with others in urban-surrounded-by-fertile-farmland/hunting/fishing setting) adequate to provide for needs of future me and one theoretical grandchild in system requiring 10 or fewer inputs of human labor hours/week on average on my 1/3 of an urban acre.

In a world, or culture/population, tending towards uniform zero-population growth, I (and everybody else) would have 4 grandchildren. My DD25 (XNTJ) currently has a serious BF, so I could theoretically plug in his parents, along with myself and my ex as the 4 grandparents for their theoretical 2 children. In the case of my currently unattached DS28 (attractive, but very INTP), I will just imagine some upwardly-mobile middle-class Brazilian or Bengali couple as co-grandparents for his theoretical 2 children.

However, it is my rational expectation that this is a false model, because for a variety of socio-economic reasons, it is more likely that I will have fewer than 4 grandchildren. Maybe just 1 or 2. Maybe zero. My half Irish Catholic Aunt who married a totally Irish Catholic man had 8 children. Her 8 children had a total of 13 children. I have 3 sisters. My youngest sister is now over 40, and made final decision to not have kids herself, so official total is only 5 children in that generation.

Anyways, it has been my observation that the majority of the individuals who participate in this forum either do not plan on having children themselves, or if they do have or plan on having children, they plan on raising their kids to be resolutely financially independent at an early age. IOW, the lifestyle systems being designed define FI as either achievement of rational expectation of ability to support future-me financially and rational expectation of ability to provide financial to support current/future dependents until they achieve state of basic self-reliance. In the course of the few years I have participated in this forum, my children have achieved incomes that exceed my own (ok, that's not saying much-lol-but still...), so I've noticed that recently I've been losing some motivation due to it's kind of like I am still out in my workshop building a dollhouse for a child who is now more interested in lipstick and acing the SAT, and/or a child who just received a brand-new doll-house with all sorts of high-tech extras as gift shipped to her from more affluent grandparents.

So, my question for the group is what is your expectation for the eventual dispersion or inheritance of your accumulated wealth? IOW, who or what is "your baby?" (if any) , and do you have any intention to provide service towards these same persons, place, ideal or ? with some of your acquired free time or life-energy? Also, are you considering this sort of boundary, or eventual flow, in your systems-thinking based lifestyle design?

daylen
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Re: System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by daylen »

Keep in mind, I am young enough to be your kid :P, but this is my line of thinking.

I don't plan on having kids or even a wife, though I am not against the idea. If the right girl comes along, maybe. If the girl wants a kid, maybe.

My idea of a "baby" (at this point in my life) is the community. What I really want to do is to help reinforce a small, local, sustainable community. I would like to educate people in this community on permaculture, systems theory, passive home design, and so forth.

BRUTE
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Re: System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by BRUTE »

interesting question. with regards to withdrawal rate math, humans in the FIRE community seem to generally assume they'll live forever - or at least plan for it. brute has always thought it pretty inefficient to retire with a stash of $1,000,000 when that same principal is not going to be used up at time of death. why not work less and burn down the principal during FI?

unless there really is a "baby", or something else that will survive and can benefit from the extra cash.

being a cynic, brute doesn't really believe in any ideas that will outlast him, nor is he currently interested in a legacy. maybe he'll end up finding something, or maybe not. maybe he'll burn down the principal once he's FI, maybe not.

classical_Liberal
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Re: System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by classical_Liberal »

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Last edited by classical_Liberal on Thu Feb 04, 2021 10:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Myakka
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Re: System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by Myakka »

@7Wannabe5 -- I like your questions about thinking intergenerationally about our ERE wealth and how to keep motivated when it looks like ones efforts aren't of interest to anybody likely to take them into the future.

I have half an answer -- one that forms part of my growing admiration for the cultures of India. In those cultures they have a process whereby a guru takes on students who learn from him/her and take that knowledge forward and perhaps add a bit to it. Over the course of centuries this can grow into a complex system of knowledge of how to do the thing in question.

Maybe that is what you are wishing for-- people to learn from you and build upon what you have done an bring it into the future. Unfortunately, I personally do not have a clue how to actually do that in this culture that has no understanding of such an intergenerational system.

OTCW
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Re: System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by OTCW »

If my SO outlives me, she will get all of it. If I outlive her, I will do my best to blow it. If I die before I blow it all, it seems like a moot point.

7Wannabe5
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Re: System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@daylen: In biological terms, you are actually almost young enough to be my grandson-lol. However, it is not unlikely that I will live another 40 years. Since I had and stopped having children at a relatively early age for my peer-group, my focus, like yours, and that of author Vicki Robin (old enough to be my mother and your great-grandmother!) has simultaneously narrowed in on "just me" and broadened out to include more interest in "community" over the 10 years since my kids first flew away from nest. I guess it is my take that just taking care of yourself, although efficient first use of resources, is a bit too easy for a healthy, competent human adult. Taking care of yourself and a newborn infant all on your own might be too difficult. One healthy, competent human adult taking full responsibility for self and a healthy human 3 year old might be appropriately challenging. Achieving financial independence for future-you over the course of 5 to 7 years might be the equivalent of taking full responsibility for another human from age 1 to 8. Therefore, after FI is achieved there will still be this flow of life energy that can be otherwise invested.

Beyond offering possible explanation for absence of many single parent participants in this forum, what I am getting at is that absent legal or strictly observed social obligations, the boundary of the "purpose" or extent of responsibility/authority of our system can become very fuzzy. For simple example, will I be content that I have successfully completed my perma-culture project if I have not given some further measure of life-energy to prevention of expansion of hazardous waste storage facility within biking distance?

@BRUTE: Yup. I ran the same equation, but consider possibility of time to spend in service to "baby" as well as funds for "baby" to eventually inherit. For example, an individual can save more than enough and then leave money to save wildlife or an individual can choose to retire earlier and volunteer with wildlife agency. Maybe you aren't quite there yet, but I think you may eventually find yourself in some sort of caretaker/leadership role or legacy mode simply because your level of competence will dictate it.

@classical_Liberal: Totally agree on beneficial aspects of "hormesis" as motivation towards service/productivity. LOL- at your realization of likely flow of your finances if your death is premature. I believe that taking a minute to think about inheritance can be an exercise that reveals true values, and could lead to a bit of "tweaking" of current life-energy budget.

@Myakka: Very interesting perspective. I should note for the record that my sister burst into laughter when I was discussing the topic of this thread with her, due to utter unlikelihood that either of my children are counting on anything resembling an inheritance from me and/or experiencing any desire to ever inhabit my urban-camper-garden. My thought that I might turn-key it to one of them in Autumn of 2022 was partially constructed in order to overcome my fear of being fully locked into any commitment myself. "I shall dwell simply among the cherry blossoms and the pumpkins." gives me a pleasant feeling, but if I add the word "forever." ...eh, not so good.

@OTCW: I might suggest that if you visualized or made a list of what you would "blow" your money on once you realized that you had extra to blow, this might point towards a part of your budget you might tweak upwards, or satisfy in some other manner, towards greater happiness currently. For instance, if you imagine 72 year old you getting a diagnosis of heart problem and then going out and buying a bright red convertible, you could figure out what values that bright red convertible represents (excitement, mastery of powerful engine, bling, ?) and get you some of that now.

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Ego
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Re: System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by Ego »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Sat Apr 08, 2017 9:38 am
So, my question for the group is what is your expectation for the eventual dispersion or inheritance of your accumulated wealth? IOW, who or what is "your baby?" (if any) , and do you have any intention to provide service towards these same persons, place, ideal or ? with some of your acquired free time or life-energy? Also, are you considering this sort of boundary, or eventual flow, in your systems-thinking based lifestyle design?
Inheritance is one of the many tools we can use in the vain attempt to circumvent the ultimate, uncircumventable boundary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Hi1C4NNnV4

7Wannabe5
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Re: System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Ego: True, but somewhat irrelevant. Do you think that birds court, mate, and co-operate to build nests and feed young because they are driven by avoidance of facing psychological fear of death? Our tendencies towards the neurotic do not transcend the basic exigencies. Any or all variations on "le petite mort" may distract or relieve us of consciousness, but the relief of our consciousness is not the purpose of the act or the urge or the drive to pass along some part of our life-energy.

IlliniDave
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Re: System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by IlliniDave »

Well for me it is primarily my kids/grandkids who will get most of my money/property, a little to go to any surviving siblings I might have. Given they are all family I do intend to provide "service" during my retired years as long as I'm able. I am considering purchasing a piece of remote property what is mostly wetland and if I do it will be donated/bequeathed to a public land trust for preservation.

I don't know if anyone affected gives 2 $hits about my money or my cabin or the downsized house I'll have for winter living some day. Although having a legacy for the kids is part of my plan (and something I would like to do) it really isn't a driver, just the likely result of a wide swath of potential future outcomes; so even if I knew they were all going to take it all out at once in cash to set on fire to roast weenies over I wouldn't do anything substantially different.

By nature I'm a financial conservative and take stewardship seriously, so trying to arrange it so I'll die shortly after pulling my last $20 out of an atm means my last years would be miserable via being a betrayal of my nature. I get the sense people resent me for that sometimes, but their hangups are not my problem. :) Of course circumstances may conspire against me and despite a robust plan and restrained behavior I might die broke anyway.

halfmoon
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Re: System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by halfmoon »

Interesting questions, 7wb5, especially when framed as life energy. My perspective:

1. Our life energy has always been focused toward wildlife habitat (and empire building, which doesn't strictly have to be incompatible but occasionally is).

2. Though I used to believe that offspring should make their own way, more recently we've also focused on providing for DH's son because he obviously can't do that for himself. I discussed this ad nauseam in another thread.

Our imperfect solution to 1&2 is leaving everything to a wildlife charity, to be liquidated for the purchase of a charitable gift annuity payable monthly to DS. On his death, the remainder goes to the charity.

3. We have less than zero feeling about our corpses after death. We've both signed up to donate our bodies to medical research. They want DH's body to analyze effects of multiple cancers and treatments, but mine will undoubtedly be hacked apart by med students. :P

I completely get your desire to pass the permaculture project to your kids, because it's a legacy of your ideals and direct embodiment of your energy. We used to think the same thing with DS, but he told us one day years ago: 'This is your dream, not mine.' Can't argue with that.

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Ego
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Re: System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by Ego »

@7w, We are not birds. We understand our biological drives. We understand their purpose. We understand our own mortality.

So, yes, one of the reasons to create an inheritance or to decide to procreate (vs. unintended pregnancy) is the desire to quell the existential discomfort produced by the understanding that we will die. We cope with the knowledge of our inevitable death by creating elaborate fictions that we convince ourselves will live on after we are gone.

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C40
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Re: System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by C40 »

That reminds me of something I head on NPR - some show about death. One of them went on about how maybe the moment you really die (or leave the world?) is the last time someone says your name. And they went on and on about it. Whatever..

IlliniDave
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Re: System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by IlliniDave »

@Ego--I'm not so sure about the procreation thing. People are pretty hard-wired to do that in general. I suspect relatively few people truly recognize their mortality at the age they start having kids. Although I "knew" I was mortal from a young age, it really wasn't until well into midlife that I really understood it in a way that began to affect my behavior, and my kids were late teens early twenty-somethings by then. It seems reasonable that people who find a yearning to have children late in life might have their mortality in mind. It might be more common not so much with simple inheritances but with the sort of bequeathals that are essentially memorials, where people use their assets in such a way as to be remembered explicitly by name after they are gone. I suppose the commonplace passing of property to descendants could be thought of as a type of transferal of life energy to a time beyond life, but in its inception I think it is a gesture with motives much simpler than the spinning of an elaborate fiction of defying death.

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Ego
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Re: System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by Ego »

@IlliniDave, I agree that we are animals so we certainly have a biological imperative to reproduce. But we are human animals, so there is much more than the simple biological imperative driving us in that direction. The fact that we recognize it as a choice is evidence of the complexity. The extreme reaction to those who decide to not have children shows that it is more than biology.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 084924.htm

"Consistent with many personal anecdotes, participants rated voluntarily child-free men and women as significantly less fulfilled than men and women with children," Ashburn-Nardo said. "This effect was driven by feelings of moral outrage -- anger, disapproval and disgust -- toward the voluntarily child-free people."

Also, if you were to dismantle the biological imperative you might find that buried deep down there with the mindless desire to pass on genes is the conscious desire to pass on genes. Look at that desire under a microscope and ask "why" a couple of times and it might reveal a desire to live on after death.

halfmoon
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Re: System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by halfmoon »

@Ego, methinks you generalize too much. ;) The subject of inheritance isn't simply about procreation, fear of death or (dare I say it?) ego. Sometimes it's about giving, nurturing or acceptance of limitations. I also was young once, and I had all the answers. Over time, I became less certain and possibly kinder.

BRUTE
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Re: System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by BRUTE »

humans nurture because it makes them feel good about themselves. still ego.

halfmoon
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Re: System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by halfmoon »

BRUTE wrote:
Sat Apr 08, 2017 10:54 pm
humans nurture because it makes them feel good about themselves. still ego.
Too easy, Brute. One could say that we do everything to feel good about ourselves, but what would it prove? I'll opt to stretch a little into my anxiety zone rather than shrug everything off as a defense against caring. In the end, it's all about what gives us peace of mind...and feel good about ourselves, of course. ;)

IlliniDave
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Re: System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by IlliniDave »

Ego wrote:
Sat Apr 08, 2017 10:17 pm

...

Also, if you were to dismantle the biological imperative you might find that buried deep down there with the mindless desire to pass on genes is the conscious desire to pass on genes. Look at that desire under a microscope and ask "why" a couple of times and it might reveal a desire to live on after death.
Well, if it's buried so deeply in the subconscious all we can do is speculate about it, functionally it probably isn't much different than the aforementioned birds.

Maybe it's my growing mental frailty as I age, but I increasingly rely on Occam's Razor. There are so many simple, immediate reasons why the vast majority of children are born that ascribing it to deep subconscious trickery seems unnecessary. More likely the shallow conscious reasons reflect humans imposing mental order on the simple biological imperative the birds respond to, which is enough to get the job done.

At the same time, out of billions of births, there are probably all manner of things people think a priori they'll gain by having a family. Some may indeed think they gain immortality, but I don't know that you can point to them as the general case.

And there's even more stuff people can invent after the fact. It's much easier to see an old person looking death in the face seeking comfort through philosophizing and saying, "Well, I'll be gone soon, but I suppose you could say a small part of me sorta lives on through the kids and grandkids," than it is to ascribe the same rationalization to the subconscious of the impassioned young.

7Wannabe5
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Re: System Boundaries and Inheritance

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Ego: I agree that one of the motivations to procreate and/or create a legacy and/or leave an inheritance could be the desire to "live on." However, since I got knocked up when I was 22, that certainly wasn't my primary motivation. Truth be told, part of my motivation to have kids was the same one that drove me to breed mice for my 6th grade science project, and makes me want to attempt to grow new varieties of vegetables now. I test as the type on the Enneagram (MBTI) known as the Enthusiast or the Inventor. If you mix the Enthusiastic Inventor with just a bit of Feminine/Nurturing energy, you get something like the Breeder. It is way cooler if you are born with all the parts your Visible Woman -Learn Anatomy!-Paint by Number- Model Kit came with than the boring Visible Man Kit, because you can do more things with your own body, because it's like you have your own built-in greenhouse.

Also, it's not that nurturing makes me feel good about myself. It just makes me feel good. I enjoyed being in the moment with a 4 year old and a picture book on my lap. I felt happy and amused and a pleasant sensation of physiologically release and relief when a sated baby fell off my breast with sleepy, milk-drunk grin on his face. I find it rewarding to make full use, even hard use, of my body at times. However, I am not a huge fan of the part of parenting our culture demands that involves exerting moral authority related to such matters as school attendance on a 12 year old, so I stopped at two. I have a great deal of empathy for females, like two of my sisters, who decide to not make use of their own Visible Woman Kit Optional Womb/Expanded Belly, because it is a f*ck-load of work and responsibility raising kids to the point that they are independent and/or likely to be viewed as contributors to general society, and there are endless options for otherwise enjoying nurturing in the moment or being creative with feminine energy. Obviously, males don't really have a choice about whether of not to have a child, they can only decide whether or not to take responsibility for a child. So, that is different, and perhaps more likely to be felt as psychological rather than physiological motivator, or lack thereof. Dunno.

Anyways, this discussion has gotten off the track of the direction of my curiosity in this moment. This is likely due to the fact that my comprehension of systems theory is still too weak to form my question clearly. It has to do with the difference between money and resources, and the difference between economics and ecology. I just read books by Harry Browne, the Moneyless Man, and Vicki Robin in rapid succession, and Jacob offers yet another perspective. If you attempt to draw a systems design of your lifestyle based on the stocks, flows, and boundaries defined or deemed most relevant by Libertarian Economics/Philosophy, they are not the same as those defined or deemed most relevant by Human Surviving/Thriving in Ecological System. The boundary between ME and everything else is much more narrowly defined by Harry Browne than it is by the Moneyless Man, and Vicki Robin and Jacob would fall somewhere in between. MM, VR, ERE, HB, would be the spectrum, as I read them.

The reason why I started thinking about inheritance is that I remembered something somebody had posted about how anthropological studies reveal that humans only tend towards offering true no-strings-attached gifts to their offspring. Some sort of reciprocation, however distant or diluted, is otherwise assumed. So, the Moneyless Man's ideal of local-gift-based economy is more selfless than known human patterns, but Browne/Randian theory is more selfish than known human patterns. IOW, any intelligent alien observing our planet from a distance would note in journal "much energy spent in extended care for vulnerable young" under HUMAN. This urge to provide care for the vulnerable can't just be excised from our psychology because convenient, but it can't be infinitely extended either. It has been my observation/experience that for some men, especially older men tending towards introversion or grouchiness ;) , just having a wife or girlfriend is all the "baby" they need or want, but many people feel the urge to share or create circles of interdependence or creative nurturing more widely. And, since we are self-aware, we can consider how to design our lifestyles to best fulfill this urge/drive/desire as well as any other. So, I am asking "Who/what is your baby?" or "Who/what are you choosing to care for beyond yourself?" because I am interested in how other intelligent humans are making self-aware choices about how to incorporate the desire to care-take/nurture/leave-it-better-than-you-found-it-even-though-nobody-can-see-what-you-are-doing-camping-in-the-woods into their own lifestyle designs.

Whew...

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