The Education of Axel Heyst

[Jean]

it took me nearly ten years of FI to really be launched in a freedom to project.

[7Wannabe5]

However, "entertaining yourself on your own" is very much something that is not encouraged by pretty much any culture.

Hmmm...I can't speak for every culture in general, but it has been my experience that "entertaining myself on my own with small projects" has been very much encouraged by every man with whom I have ever lived.

Grouchy man: "How was your day?"

7WB5: Pretty good. I read two books, did some embroidery, and made a tuna fish casserole.

GM: affirmative mumble (already turning on TV or video game)

VS.

GM: "How was your day?"

7WB5: Great! I rode my bike through several dangerous neighborhoods into the city and bought a vacant lot at the foreclosure auction. Then I met with X and Y to brainstorm our ideas for hypatufa porch statuary business. Now I've got to hurry up and get dressed to attend the event hosted by my political action group. There's leftover tuna fish casserole in the fridge.

GM: negative mumble, mumble, mumble.

[AxelHeyst]

For me the takeaway of this thread is that, in so many ways, achieving RE (or high-agency semiERE status) is the real beginning of the journey/work. What comes before is prologue.

[AxelHeyst]

I'm listening to Tim Ferriss' interview with Martha Beck and I think there are some interesting take-aways wrt freedom-to:

The Path of Not There: They're talking about the tracker Boyd Varty, and how part of any tracking is losing the track. But the key is that you're not lost, you are in a state of knowing that where you are isn't where you want to be/what you're looking for, and you are making sensible/educated/intentional actions to move from the path of Not There to the Path of There. Martha explicitly talks about using this as a metaphor for finding what you want and dealing with not being there yet. But some kind of recognition of the state of being Not There seems important, and developing some kind of sense or vision for what the Path of There is - e.g. you'll know it when you see it. She implies that a lot of people are wandering around and don't know what they're looking for, and are maybe only subconsciously aware of being Not There. That's like saying "I'm tracking" but you don't even know what kind of animal you're looking for and you aren't looking at the ground.

A somatic exercise working through the things you want vs. the things you yearn for, and using this exercise as the 'track' that serves as what's guiding your tracking efforts.

An integrity cleanse: start a lie journal, then go X days, weeks, months telling no lies. You don't have to blurt out whatever's on your mind, but what you *do* say has to be true. (Paraphrasing, Tim: "How do you break up with people when the relationship no longer serves you?" Martha: "Only do what you want and don't lie. They'll break up with you." ) imo the value of this exercise isn't so much to be honest with other people but to learn how to be honest with yourself.

Lots of good stuff about overthinking, and how not to, and how to understand it.

[AxelHeyst]

Freedom-To: be an odd duck
I was chatting with an internet friend and they offhandedly mentioned that they assumed I wasn't neurotypical. This gave me pause because I've never considered myself neurodivergent (not adhd, dyslexic, depressive, on the autism spectrum, or remarkably above or below average intelligence). But the comment got me to spend a few cycles entertaining the idea that I am not neurotypical in some describable fashion, and that thought-space made me feel more free. Interesting!

Now I'm wondering how much the presence of so many labels and diagnoses in society has made me feel unconsciously obligated to act within certain bounds because I don't have an excuse (diagnosis of neurodivergence) to act outside the bounds of neurotypical behavior. I remember spending a fair amount of time in my early 20's on the internet attempting to DIY-diagnose myself with something that would justify how I felt (at the time, depressive) and being disappointed that nothing seemed to fit and that I might be doomed not having any decent excuse for how I felt or behaved. It never occurred to me that not having a diagnosis didn't have to mean that I was therefore not, regardless, an odd duck. (A lot of negatives in that sentence: It never occurred to me that "I'm an odd duck" and "I haven't been given a label by a mental professional" could both be true.) If I don't have an excuse, then stop being such a fucking weirdo and get on with being a normie, is an implicit imperative I now think I had.

It seems like it would have been easier to act according to my true will if I'd been able to shrug and say "whatever, I'm X" when people threw me shade for being odd. As it was, I was made to feel like I was hurting other people and so I learned how to curb my oddities and even pretend I didn't have them. The reason this is important is because when you're free, you get to make your own decisions about what you want to do. But if, like so many of us, you've had your felt sense of what you truly want to do beaten out of you by the time you'd gained young adulthood, you might not be fully capable of accessing what you truly want.

Anyways, the sensation of freedom I had while temporarily holding the idea "maybe I'm neurodivergent" is something worth working with. I don't want to adopt some label that isn't actually true (how many neuroposers are out there, people who desperately need some kind of approval to be themselves and seek it in the label of easily obtainable 'diagnoses', professional or otherwise?). I want to let go of label-obsession that doesn't actually serve me* and feel unconstrained about grokking and embodying who I am.

This goes back to a few posts ago where we were talking about how Freedom can be scary because you're ultimately responsible for your decisions and actions. Letting go of a label like neurotypical, I suddenly have no excuse for being a boring stiff.


*I hope it's clear that I'm not saying diagnoses etc aren't helpful or useful, generally, particularly to those who truly aren't neurotypical. I'm saying as someone within the bounds of what's considered neurotypical they kind of messed with my head and probably I should forget about them.

[Scott 2]

Pretending to be neurotypical is masking. The price is constant draining mental overhead. And a loss of connection - both to yourself and others. Liking the character an actor plays, doesn't mean liking the actor. It's not as simple as living authentically though. Nuerodiverse relationships face a double empathy gap. The ability to selectively mask crosses it. So there is a balance.

Devon Price provides a great discussion of the topic, in the book Unmasking Autism.

As someone who's got labels, they are not what's actionable. If you tell someone "I'm X" at best it opens a conversation. Then work happens around your expression of the traits and needs. It can be easier to start there. IE - "I'd like to write this down, to make sure I don't forget". Or - "I'm having trouble hearing in this crowded room, can we talk outside?"

The labels are useful, in that they can cluster valuable sources of trait analysis. I like the book How To ADHD as an example, especially because it does not center on neuronormative standards. Better than the YouTube channel, IMO.

The Asperkid's Secret book of social rules is another example of this trait based discussion. Though it does suffer from neuronormative centering.


Not to say you have any of the labels. Only that you may be able to pull tools from those who do. If they help, they help. I've got a pair of clear earplugs from Loop. For $30, they discretely take 10 decibels off the world. I'd recommend them to anyone.


For what it's worth - years ago you asked if I was a highly sensitive person. I read the book and parts resonated. It's now a point of contention, whether the author was simply describing autism. If you found connection to that book, you may be able to pull useful tools from autistic resources, like the aforementioned asperkids book.


Even without a label - you are deserving of support. That's the biggest shift I found in a diagnosis. I gained permission for my needs, instead of wondering how to better hide them.

[AnalyticalEngine]

@AH - Do you feel like you're masking often? Pieces of your post sound like masking to me (feeling pressure to act inside of social norms that don't feel authentic). The thing about neurodivergent labels is they sometimes let you stop masking sometimes (aka they give you an "excuse" to fail at social norms or expectations in a situation where you will otherwise be shamed for not living up to expectations, as if something is wrong with you), which is why they might sound appealing.

[7Wannabe5]

I think your IQ is likely high enough to place you in the cuckoo-bananas tribe on that alone. However, as the book on Creativity that Jacob recommended elsewhere affirms, the earliest research on the topic of creativity revealed pretty high correlation between high IQ and various flavors of cuckoo-bananas and the tendency for both to be heritable (although both traits/tendencies can also be quite sporty), so frequently reinforced in family of origin vs. normal society. Whenever I meet somebody with a high IQ who believes that they are otherwise neurotypical, I just assume they are in denial.

[AxelHeyst]

Scott, that all sounds really relevant and helpful, thank you.

AE, having learned the word ‘masking’ in this context only in the post directly above yours, I’d have to say yes. It became clear to me from a young age that “act natural” was total shit advice, but I assumed that was because I was a homeschooled kid from the mountains and my baseline needed calibration. As an adult I’ve had the equivalent of “figure out why I compulsively lie about what I want/who I am in both speech and behavior, and stop it” on my GTD list for some time. I’ve made good progress but I wouldn’t call it complete. Masking seems like a decent explanation, I’ll look in to it.

I’ve had this thing since I was a kid where I’d let other people win at certain things because I felt bad for them. I wonder if a weird kind of anti-competitiveness can be a symptom of masking.

7, yeah, I’ve had friends tell me that I need to remember who I spend time around in terms of being able to judge what average intelligence is. My brother, also my only classmate k-12, has the sort of hp to casually whip out a compsci phd, solid career in cybersec, while doing things like reading Le Mis. at the age of 12. I am kind of a dumb jock type compared to him (and neither of us fell far from the tree).

It just always seemed to me like I had odd hobbies and it was a matter of how much time I spent thinking about X compared to people with more mainstream tastes for what to spend their attention on, not any significant difference in intelligence. Aka speed won’t make up for having a huge head start.

[jacob]

@AH - I really like the title of that post.

I presume it's well-known, at least on the forum, that I'm not a fan of current trend towards pathologizing anyone who falls outside an increasingly narrow normative mainstream range, where the choice seems to be between average/norm or somehow sick.

I'm also not a fan of the simplistic postmodern approach that "modernist categorization is evil" and that "ignorance or 'lived experience' is but an equally valid opinion"---regressing to basically amateurs working out any difference and bonding through conversation.

While categories can be used to oppress, they're also useful for illumination. Getting rid of types or categories altogether is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Modelling human differences should be as simple as possible but no simpler than that. Categories are useful as long as they don't become a straight jacket. Lacking categories is operating in the blind. Thus an optimal number of categories is neither zero nor infinite but likely more than the default two of "in or out", "normal or not", "sick or healthy", ...

Most people are terribly naive when it comes to theory-of-mind, that is, understanding what goes on in other people's brain. They automatically presume that everybody else is like themselves or that becoming normie is just a matter of studying for the class (Kegan3). (Un)fortunately, that presumption works out more often than not because brains follow a Gaussian distribution and so this assumption is correct within a standard deviation 2/3 of the time. This feature is also a bug in the sense that anyone who falls outside the sd range of the median is easily dismissed.

(The majority are also naive in terms of understanding what goes on in their own mind (fact) often confusing themselves with the average of the five people around them (fact and popularized fact, statistical Kegan3 only though). This is part of why many have problems assigning themselves to a category---because who they are depends on who they've recently talked to. Typological models would likely hugely benefit from adding a category called "normie human being". In MBTI terms, this is called "X". Many humans are XXXX or EXXX or XFXX or XXSX ... or EFXX ... Most people have 1-3 X's and so get confused when testing reveals different answers from time to time. Test results would benefit from adding a category of "pretty normal" or undetermined.)

I figured out that I was a strong outlier in terms of how I think about the world when I was 19-20 something. What a friggin' revelation that was! To finally have labels or categories after growing up in a world of no labels where everybody was presumed to be the same/within range of each other and otherwise just expected to adhere/figure it out. (My SD:Green/Orange experience is different from your SD:Blue/Orange experience) Before realizing that most people ran on different software than I do, I figured that their software was simply broken or bugged ... because it clearly didn't work very well. (One thing that bugs me in particular about the pathological model is the idea of "high-functioning"-pathology. As opposed to what? "low-functioning"-normality?!).

Mass-society is by construction centered around catering to the norm or the middle of the bell curve. It is actually remarkable how inclusive it is in terms of allowed optionality though INSOFAR one is individually capable of figuring out how it works and devising a personal solution. Like, it's not legally unlawfull to be FI or pursue lifestyles that haven't been turned into some kind of wedge-issue. It's just culturally dubious because it falls outside 2 or 3 standard deviations of normal behavior. When it comes to "other people", it will require a certain amount of "passing", insofar you want to smooth out you social relations and explain your different choices. In that way, the sociocentric orientation of humanity still leaves a lot to be desired.

This is something that deserves a thorough treatment. The closest I know is Harry Browne's "How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World". However, this basically boils down to putting oneself (the individual) into a position freedom-to not care ... which is rather difficult to disentangle from freedom-from caring. Even Browne later changes his mind on that one.

[ertyu]

feeling pressure to act inside of social norms that don't feel authentic

wait

uh, doesn't everyone have this

asking for a friend

An interesting twist to this happens when a non-nt person changes cultures. E.g. long ago, I had to move from my country of origin to study and then work in "western" settings. I had to then derive from zero 1. that the norms of social behavior around me were different from what I grew up with, and 2., I had to then figure out what the new norms were and how to conform to them. This was very difficult for me, but that's not the part that's relevant to this discussion -- the part that's relevant is that even withing the same country, those norms are not the same within race, social class, rural vs urban location, white collar/blue collar work, south/north-west/mid-west, and so forth. I imagine some form of the "how I grew up formed how I feel 'authentic,' but now im in a completely different environment and must fly by the seat of my pants, shit" experience is common to everyone. A non-nt person, to the extent they have a harder time reading social cues, would have a more stressful time navigating this experience.

Another thing that lets you "fail" at social norms in addition to non-nt labels is queerness. A person that describes themselves w some combination of the lgbtqa+ alphabet soup is necessarily not going to conform to traditional, allo-cis-heteronormative relationship and lifestyle milestones

[loutfard]

I imagine some form of the "how I grew up formed how I feel 'authentic,' but now im in a completely different environment and must fly by the seat of my pants, shit" experience is common to everyone. A non-nt person, to the extent they have a harder time reading social cues, would have a more stressful time navigating this experience.

Please allow me to contribute a tiny bit of my personal experience on this.

I learn and accumulate social cue reading skills, slowly, but surely. I like to contrast that to the neurotypical pattern of mostly oscillating around a predetermined level.

Still, I had a wonderful time temporarily moving from western Europe to Rīga, Latvia. Little to no stress. Quite to the contrary, liberation.

I self-exported as a white, comparatively affluent male foreigner living with locals. I quickly understood how I could get away with many non-conforming things locals couldn't even dream of. Freedom. Like being affluent and still choosing to cycle in the capital. Like making a joke about the Latvian flag, and learning why that is not a good idea without getting shunned.

Immersion in a completely new social environment massively grew my understanding of social cues almost immediately. A second and substantially different social environment to observe and compare was exactly what I needed.

If I'd have to invent a name for this "condition" of mine, it would be agoraphilia: running into a wide open new place and loving it.

[delay]

It never occurred to me that not having a diagnosis didn't have to mean that I was therefore not, regardless, an odd duck.

If you aspire to be something you can often fall into it. I remember a student who was jealous of people who lived on social insurance for people who could not work. Five years later, she was diagnosed with a neurological disease, and was living on benefits. She lives in a nice house and spends the day tending to the garden, exactly as she envisoned.

I once sprained my ankle and visited a physician to check if it was okay. He examined my ankle and started to enthusiastically prescribe a variety of medicines and surgeries and treatment. It didn't take long before I felt as if there was really something wrong with my ankle! And perhaps if I had submitted to ankle surgery, then afterwards I really would have had an ankle problem.

So if you aspire to be a regular duck, imagine yourself as a regular duck. The results may surprise you!

[Ego]

There is self-knowledge and there is diagnosis. Diagnosis is done by someone else. An expert.

When a person is diagnosed, they carry that diagnosis around with them. The diagnosis itself changes them.

This paper (PDF) is about those on the margins of being diagnosed/undiagnosed with a mental illness. Some saw doctors who tended to over-diagnose while other saw doctors who under-diagnosed.

While this is about mental illness, would the results hold true for other characteristics that are at the edges of what is considered "normal"?

In the developed world, the diagnosis of mental illness is widespread among young adults. This paper estimates the long-term causal effects of being diagnosed during young adulthood for those at the margin of diagnosis. We follow all Swedish men born between 1971 and 1983 matched to administrative panel data on health, labor market, and family outcomes to estimate the impact of a mental illness diagnosis on subsequent outcomes. Exploiting the random assignment of 18-year-old men to doctors, we find that, for people at the margin, a mental illness diagnosis increases the future likelihood of internal death, hospital admittance, being sick from work, and unemployment while also lowering expected income and the propensity to be married or have children. We find that diagnosis increases the use of psychiatric medication in the 36 months right after diagnosis. A possible interpretation of our results is that the amount and type of treatment used for marginal diagnosis may be inadequate, or inappropriate.

[7Wannabe5]

Even Browne later changes his mind on that one.

Yeah, in the handicapped version of finally engaging adult feminine (caring) energy where he takes on the enormous social task of caring for an attractive, fully competent younger wife* who is supportive of his purpose to the extent that she is helping him write his memoirs. Don't get me wrong, I think Browne's clear-eyed take on how to maximize juvenile masculine energy (feeling/experience of freedom) by creating clear boundaries with adult masculine "killer" energy is quite valuable, but it really only speaks to 1/4 or maybe 1/3 of human functionality, so could be mis-applied. Opposite example would be somebody who doubles-down on "helping/caring" after reading about the concept of making deposits in other's Love Banks.

*I have been this younger "wife" in more than one relationship with a mellowing old successful "killer" or "bad boy", so easily recognizable for me. (Yawn)

[jacob]

Simplistic calculation of how many X's are out there.

Assuming that 68% fall within one standard deviation and calling that X.
(This holds for all dimensions except N/S which is 30/70 rather than 50/50 like the other three.)

4X: C(4,4)*0.68^4*0.32^0 = 1*0.21*1 = 21% (non-typed, average human, everybody is uniquely [the same])
3X: C(4,3)*0.68^3*0.32^1 = 4*0.31*0.32 = 40% (one type, e.g. E or I, pop-books on being introverted)
2X: C(4,2)*0.68^2*0.32^2 = 6*0.46*0.10 = 27% (doubly typed, e.g. ESXX or IXXJ, business management and marketing describing 4 types)
1X: C(4,1)*0.68^1*0.32^3 = 4*0.68*0.03 = 8% (triply typed, I fall in this category as an INTX)
0X: C(4,0)0.68^0*0.32^4 = 1*1*0.01 = 1% (strongly typed... the proverbial stereotype)

So just going by math, it becomes clear why 21% will insist that typing is not a thing as they don't see it in themselves and thus fail to recognize it in others, but 40% is willing to entertain one-dimensional differences such as introvert/extrovert. That's 61% of the population right there.

Best selling business or other interhuman understanding books, etc. allow 4 types (e.g. MBTI has NT/NF/SJ/SP) which is interesting to 27% of the population. However, going full bore and semi-full bore only really makes sense to 1% or 1%+8% of the population.

As such, if MBTI was actually taught en-masse in the public school system, about 9% would "finally get it" whereas the other 91% would be complaining about "why we have to learn this crap theory that clearly doesn't apply to myself or anyone I know". As it is, the idea that "everybody is more or less the same with perhaps one introvert/extrovert quirk" is the solution that fits the majority of humans.

Damnit!

[Ego]

As such, if MBTI was actually taught en-masse in the public school system, about 9% would "finally get it" whereas the other 91% would be complaining about "why we have to learn this crap theory that clearly doesn't apply to myself or anyone I know".

Results of an MBTI test are presented in a form of a diagnosis.... but MBTI takes it one step further than a psychological diagnosis. Psychological issues can be treated. Cognitive behavioral therapy can change the underlying issue. Most followers of MBTI, on the other hand, believe the results are more or less fixed.

What percentage would be able to grasp the idea that diagnosing people with particular MBTI types might be more harmful than good?

[7Wannabe5]

In the Enneagram Model, the XXXX is the highest functioning, not the normal. I believe this represents a pre/trans issue. As Kegan suggests in his description of intimate relationships at higher levels of functioning, once a human becomes self-aware of their innate tendencies, they comprehend that their direction(s) of growth are towards greater fluidity within any dimension. Therefore, they to some extent crave relationship(s) with those who will push their buttons towards this growth in fluidity. OTOH, achievement will always be maximized in alignment with initial inherent tendencies. So, generally, it might only be after finding success as a self-aware oddball type that one would start to crave development in less comfortable dimensions/directions. Axel's take on Existential Kink is clearly related to this.

[jacob]

+1 on the pre/trans issue. At Kegan5 people start accepting and incorporating all 8 cognitive functions into their being. However, Kegan5 only comprises 1% of humans which leaves the other 99% floundering in the "cultural or societal water they swim in". So to answer @Ego's question, diagnosing would be helpful if you're strongly typed in one or more dimensions... otherwise diagnosing would just be confusing ["overkill"]. (Like the Kegan3 folks who can't tell themselves from whichever group the most recently hung out with.)

A crude metaphor would be how tall one is. The average male US height is 5'10" or thereabouts. If you're 6'2", you're taller than average, but your height is not your defining characteristic. OTOH, if you're 7'5", your height is the first thing people see and talk about. "I bet you play basketball!" "Could you get this down from the top shelf? "Oh, you bumped your head on the door frame, ha ha". "I'm sorry, the bed is too short for you but it's the only one I have." "I don't understand why this ergonomic office chair isn't working for you (it's because the shoulder support is bumping into my lower back and the table is like 5" too low).

In this case, being type-tall WILL BE your defining characteristic. You're playing on hard-mode. Similarly "tall" cognitive functions is the same way except unlike height the difference is not immediately apparent. It's not like you can't figure it out, eventually. It's just that you're playing on hard-mode whereas everybody else is on easy-mode because the world was designed for them. And without the "diagnosis" strongly-typed people have to figure it out on their own. Whereas non-typed people never even realize it's an issue.

@daylen has a post somewhere that Kegan levels correspond to how many cognitive functions one has developed within oneself, e.g. Kegan2=2, Kegan3=4, Kegan4=6, and Kegan5=8. I suspect this is a good rule of thumb but not a complete diagnosis.

[AnalyticalEngine]

In this case, being type-tall WILL BE your defining characteristic. You're playing on hard-mode. Similarly "tall" cognitive functions is the same way except unlike height the difference is not immediately apparent. It's not like you can't figure it out, eventually. It's just that you're playing on hard-mode whereas everybody else is on easy-mode because the world was designed for them. And without the "diagnosis" strongly-typed people have to figure it out on their own. Whereas non-typed people never even realize it's an issue.

This is a pretty good definition of why masking can be exhausting. Masking is something almost everyone does at some point to smooth over social interactions, but being ND/queer/outside the norm/etc means you often have a choice between masking constantly in order to function or give up masking and face social consequences. It's the fact you can't afford to drop the mask that becomes the major problem, as the world wasn't designed for you but you have to function anyway. It's why all these stigmatizing labels/diagnosises can easily become a source of shame and frustration for people who have them.