Bad Habits in ERE

[Henry]

Having written that, I now realise it has nothing to do with the subject of the thread. Sorry for the rant...

I disagree. Habits are intimately intertwined with options. I could always walk. Shithead bears aside, now that I can walk in the country, I walk every day. Conversely, now that I don't have a mailbox, I can't suggest to the local mailman that at the swift completion of his appointed rounds to fist his mother.

[Lemur]

@theanimal

yeah can relate to the being cheap part. I avoided a gym membership for years (even though I wanted to lift weights) because I did not want to pay the monthly fee. Only when I came to a head of my recent back issues and did a cost benefit analysis (I did not want to pay $40 a session for PT) did I decide to get the former.

If I had gotten the membership years ago, maybe I could have prevented present day problems.

Also turns out I really love the gym already. Its like my sanctuary. It would have been totally worth the costs.

[grundomatic]

I feel convicted.

Tell me about it. Both @jacob's post and @theanimal's post: guilty.

[Slevin]

Most things that run in the vein of “penny wise pound foolish”.

* Prioritising cheap foods over healthy foods (rice, corn, wheat, and other grains I’m looking at you)
* Not prioritizing learning to feed yourself well as the first major skill to learn
* prioritizing monetary health over physical health, social health, mental health.
* Not prioritizing physical health / social health when mental health is lacking. Rearrange these however (but I think this one is the most common, at least for people I know), they tend to cross influence heavily.

@zbigi, as someone who has worked (without pay) to maintain shared housing / etc I completely agree. In order of shittiness: Owners who rent the place out to short term tenants < Airbnb < multi month renters < Annual renters < owners who rent places out annually < very long term renters < Owner occupants. Hilariously owner occupier niceness tends to correlate inversely with wealth. People worried about money complain about the cost of maintainance. People without monetary concerns complain about the four weeds on the 300 foot long pathway in a multi paragraph email instead of just pulling them.

[jacob]

Most things that run in the vein of “penny wise pound foolish”.

More generally, ERE was designed for the "good and quick" corner of the engineering-triangle that is (good, quick, easy / pick any two). Since many adopters originate in the "quick and easy" corner if not by temperament then at least by culture, it is easy to bring the "quick and easy"-habit or framework along to what is really radically different except for the crazies who naturally enjoy doing things the hard (but right) way.

Examples include

• Seeing ERE as the magic solution or quick and easy fix to bigger and more fundamental problems. Little headway in the "good" direction is made, because most of the "spoon-energy" that should be directed towards improving "good" is still directed towards the "big problem".
• Using a cafeteria approach, only picking from the solution-space that one is already comfortable with. In the most extreme case, this typically means using money to solve most problems. This is basically picking "easy" over "good" and avoiding the hard work of learning new things.
• Related is the idea of speed-running the concepts, turning what I consider a transition to a complex "diet" (=right living, not 7-day weight loss hack) into a series of tips, tricks, hacks. A series of "deep dives" is not the same as living at the bottom of the ocean. This is picking "quick" over "good".

All this is not really "bad habits in ERE" but rather importing bad habits into ERE.

[chenda]

Strong fences make good neighbours.

[Slevin]

[*]Related is the idea of speed-running the concepts, turning what I consider a transition to a complex "diet" (=right living, not 7-day weight loss hack) into a series of tips, tricks, hacks. A series of "deep dives" is not the same as living at the bottom of the ocean. This is picking "quick" over "good".
[/list]

All this is not really "bad habits in ERE" but rather importing bad habits into ERE.

To stretch this metaphor way too far, you don't really "live at the bottom of the ocean" without pursuing many thousands of dedicated intentional improvements in a certain topic, learn many philosophies on the practice, be able to understand why to use one over the other, when why, etc.

You really start at the surface, with practice being taking dives that get deeper and deeper over time. You also stop returning to the surface after enough practice (a level of unconscious competence). So after a few weeks of consistent practice, your new "surface level" might be 5 meters deep under water or whatever. From all the experience behind you, you can also now dive 15 meters deeper when you go to practice similarly as before.

Eventually, when you go diving, you can touch the bottom (conscious competence). After much diving where you can touch the bottom, you might end up being able to stay there without trying, and you now live at the bottom of the ocean (unconscious competence).

I actually think this is a relatively decent metaphor for competency gaining tbh.

[oldbeyond]

Another type of failure/bad habit is being stuck in the specialist mindset and focusing to much on certain areas of your life, I guess money being the most common (failing into FIRE). What attracted me to ERE was taking all of life into consideration, and not pursuing something (money, or health, or inner work) and neglecting the other areas. No one will be completely balanced of course but it’s easy to pursue something where you are in the upper right part of the s-curve, leaving other juicier (but more uncomfortable) curves be.

[jacob]

Another type of failure/bad habit is being stuck in the specialist mindset and focusing to much on certain areas of your life, I guess money being the most common (failing into FIRE).

"Seeking community" being common in other areas/subcultures. For the same reason. Another variation of "if all you have is a hammer"...

[oldbeyond]

Yeah, also failing into careerism/empire building, health (gymrat/obsessive runner) or culture warfare to name a few. For me, failing into becoming a “dad” and only that is perhaps the greatest risk.

[AxelHeyst]

More generally, ERE was designed for the "good and quick" corner of the engineering-triangle that is (good, quick, easy / pick any two). Since many adopters originate in the "quick and easy" corner if not by temperament then at least by culture, it is easy to bring the "quick and easy"-habit or framework along to what is really radically different except for the crazies who naturally enjoy doing things the hard (but right) way.
...

To riff on this: I observed in myself a kneejerk aversion to 'hard' because I'd come to associate 'hard' with 'stooge of the system'. It seemed radical to stop doing hard things (and, well, it is). Insofar as ERE is seen as an antithesis to bs hustle w*rk culture (which is a mistake to leave it at that, of course), its an easy assumption to make that hard=bad and to be avoided.

This isn't simple, of course. Often people come to ERE and what they really need in that moment is to take it easy for a bit because they're burntout stressballs. Shallow/quick n' easy ERE hacks done quickly can afford some much needed relief, some breathing room. The mistake is to get stuck there.

So the Bad Habit I'm outlining here is refusing to do hard things because of this internalized anti-System/lieflat perspective. Sure, yes, stop doing hard things for The Man. But don't stop doing hard things altogether! Do hard things For Yourself, your loved ones, community, the species, the world, your ideals and values, that which you feel is worth fighting for, etc.