ERE1 vs ERE2, forum culture

[ffj]

@Axelheyst

I really like you, as you are such a helpful person. I think you should know that.


Woke up early this morning and decided to read a thread topic I normally avoid but it has been very interesting. It struck me all of these conflicts are just communication problems, people assuming others would know their intentions and/or having intentions assigned.

As long as the message is conveyed that ALL types are welcome we'll be fine. Rightly or wrongly, when formats take a directional turn, people will feel excluded. They need to be reassured they are still welcome.

While I place myself in the camp of "theory without action is irrelevant", I am still intelligent enough to understand somebody has to pave new ways with bold and unconventional thinking, challenging the way normal business is done. The theory has to originate from somewhere.

[jacob]

This is great that it's working out to start. However, I will once again reiterate the argument that if ERE 1 is the sole driver for growth of ERE 2, then it will stall out very quickly if ERE 1 stops being successful. This should be an important consideration. Maybe even important enough for the thinkers of ERE 2 to consider, and advise others, that it may be best for those who have not been able to accomplish significant growth on ERE1, to focus most effort on the application of the proven theory first. IOW, Make sure they are in the valley before shouting from the mountain top.

My bold. Hopefully, I can put this one in the ground by rejecting the premise.

This is an important consideration and it was one of the first considerations. However, the answer was not to double down on showing our tribe of mostly "advanced education, high income, INTJ, IQ>120, STEM, ladder climbers", which make out 1% of the population at max, to become better at ERE---in fact ERE1 and its associated connections already do a pretty good job at that, but to explore and try to meet other tribes and figure out how to do that w/o getting our heads chopped off.

A big part of the why ERE1 has attracted the "advanced education, high income, INTJ, IQ>120, STEM, ladder climbers" is due to the values and methods that has been used to explain ERE1: "use your big brain to gain personal freedom by learning skills and saving money". These values and methods are highly attractive to some but causes allergic reactions in others. People are simply into different things.

There seems to be this unspoken assumption these days that there's only one way to ERE and that way goes through FIRE. Thinking of the Wheaton Table as the only ladder to climb is partially responsible for that. Looking around and seeing what everybody else is doing in practice (high-income engineers saving and investing money) is also part of it.

Originally, ERE(1) was a much more flexible system than that and FI/RE was just an automagic side-effect of understanding how to apply systems theory to lifestyle design. One does not have to climb the FIRE mountain in order to grok systems theory. This is why permaculturists (many of whom think that finance is evil) is adjacent to ERE1. We share how we think but not what we think about. Most ERE1 think about money. Most permaculturists think about plants. But we think the same way. Therefore permaculture is also a driver for ERE2. As is the metacrisis crowd. As is the advanced Deep Adaptation and resilience crowds. (Add: This is not as exclusive list. These are just the tribes I've traveled.)

I understand that ERE and the forum has become somewhat of a tribe for some. It's a comfortable space. "I finally found my people! And now comes this group of intrepid youngsters who talk about some scary new thing called ERE2 using new words that are not 'simple and clear'. But best guess based on my not paying much attention is that they either want to make us leave the valley surrounded by these mountains that has kept us safe or change the traditions of the great FIRE gods we have worshiped for years. This is not what I signed up for."

No, that is not what ERE2 is doing. (I do agree that we failed on explaining it because the unspoken expectation was that people would either read and follow every link all along when it came to ERE2 or ignore ERE2 altogether rather than some in between "tl;dr-have opinion anyway". In retrospect, when I put it like that, I can see how naive that was.)

What we're doing is that while we realize that our tribe has a good thing in ERE1, we also realize that we don't have all the answers (for example, what to do in retirement beyond sitting on a pile of money and part-timing our hobbies). We also realize that if we try to bring our ERE1 ideas to other valleys that are NOT inhabited by highly educated, high income, engineering-types, we're likely to get our head chopped off by the local residents who think our ways are evil and scary and will cause the downfall of their tribe because we dress weird and talk funny. We'll basically be causing the same reaction there as we've been causing here to some extent. (And which I cause whenever I talk about FIRE or ERE to the mainstream tribe.) So the mission is to figure out why that is happening... and eventually how to not only avoid losing our heads but actually spread the ERE1 ideas in order to avoid being stuck in our own valley. Because our valley is small.

[classical_Liberal]

@jacob

Super helpful response. I think there was very much a feeling of "where did this all come from?" from those who did not participate in the off forum discussions. Even reading all the major ERE 2 threads, I has no idea a wiki had been created/updated for source material on the new jargon and models being discussed, it took a lot of blind google machine use. Maybe I just missed it, because I was perusing a lot of material before posting.

I'm not completely in the dark after all that material. From my less intelligent and somewhat naive perspective, I see this as a natural extension of Interdependence based individual web of goals. Eg biological analogy, If I used interdependence in my web of goal to formulate a bunch of cells (nodes) to create a working kidney (my version of ERE), ERE 2 wants to match my kidney with someone who has created a lung and someone else who has a nervous system, etc, to form a more complete organism. Where average western Jane/Joe Blow is an ameba running around the environment randomly consuming without an organized purpose beyond survival for the day. This is a good idea and makes absolute sense. If my idea is significantly flawed feel free to enlighten me. I absolutely concede ERE as it exists is highly tilted toward the crowd that came down the FI to ERE path. This has been discussed a ton in the past. I have personally learned the most from, and appreciate the knowledge of, those who have come from different roads.

Still, I think creating a new name, and maybe a failure to acknowledge this idea of interdependence based ERE already exists, hence this is just an extension of that, did create a feeling of exclusivity which had some folks irritated. New name, even though its not really new, new jargon, all done in a in a closed off forum medium. I believe this was a mistake, and the primary source of the problems being aired out in this thread. My conversations here have been simply to flesh out whats going on for myself and others who have expressed a lot of concern to help mutual understanding

Since you and this group are fully aware damage avoidance of the preexisting small pond ecosystem should be a priority, my concerns have been alleviated. Hopefully it's also helped others who have this concern as well. I will reiterate basically what @ego stated up thread though. Spending a ton of energy on ERE 2 theory for someone who really hasn't put in the work to understand an implement ERE, could be doing some a disservice. From my perspective, if most of the brain power in this forum had not been devoted to help some of us slow learners to understand how to bridge the gaps to ERE. I would have probably never achieved what I have. IOW, even if you want to step back from this role (something you have reiterated for years), I hope ERE 2 theory and off forum discussions don't take all of the "lieutenants" you have garnered away from that type of help. Also, it does not create a barrier for participation in asking for this help, due to gaps in knowledge appearing too vast to overcome.

Again, thanks for your time and @AH for his explanations as well. Please return to theorizing

[guitarplayer]

I have spent some hours either reading stuff from this thread or thinking about it and though there is nothing I would particularly like to address, I thought I would put together a 500-word post.

I think that talking about inducing an emergent movement for cultural change is a different kettle of fish from talking about building an individually robust lifestyle that is based on individual independence. One could serve as a mental model for the other, but it would then be on a very loose basis and could result in errors, like for example Dawnism and its imperfect application to cultural phenomena which resulted in Social Darwinism.

Then there is the question of to what extent cultural change can be thought through, planned and implemented. Geoff Lawton loves to talk about being the ‘orchestrator’ of the permacultural change. I just looked up ‘culture’ at etymonline.com and it looks like it in fact originates from farming. So then okay, we have an orchestrator of a culture. What tune does the orchestra play. We have leading an interesting life in XXI century on relatively few resources. Interesting life, this connects to some physiology, there is the need for orientation that some argue is innate. But the need for orientation can be pursued in any environment, in an office/car/couch environment, farm environment, suburbs environment, cycle touring one, you name it. Relatively few resources – tricky word is ‘relative’. This is an old story, using the ERE cliché of having people with heaps of money who have no wealth of resources and poor people with wealth of resources.

So then, what the orchestra would be playing is that unseen resources become seen. Because when one sees the resources, one moves towards them. Direction follows attention. I would imagine this happens almost automatically, for the sake of orientation. What is the job of the orchestrator?

Sorry, only made it 300 words.

If I managed 500, somewhere at the end of it would be about live players.

[classical_Liberal]

If I managed 500, somewhere at the end of it would be about live players.

I think those last 200 would have been really interesting. Is ERE a dead player, with ERE 2 the live player supplanting? or is ERE or a live player pretending to be dead? Or is it just the original medium of conversation that's a dead player?

[AxelHeyst]

I think that, along with ERE2 being presented as "The Way ™," is part of it. Partly because the theorizing does not make it appear emergent at all. The MMGs were emergent, the meetups were emergent. Scheming how to change paradigms and unite everyone under a more community oriented ERE does not seem emergent.

Had to mull over this one a bit - I bolded the bit I was thinking about.

Here's the thing: as the guy who made ETE MMGs happen, it didn't feel emergent to me. Jacob had his first chat with Peter Lindberg on The Stoa and Peter made a couple posts here. It was my introduction to the Stoa and I started following them. I noticed, or Peter mentioned in his posts to me here maybe, that they do Mastermind Groups. That sounded interesting, and I thought hm could ERE MMGs be a thing?

Then I read a bunch of articles and bought and read three books about business oriented Mastermind groups (I couldn't find any other kind of MMG book). I built conceptual framework of what MMGs are in the business world, combined with a brief observation of Stoa MMGs (which I don't actually have any observational data for, just anecdotes), and then I meshed those frameworks with my conceptual framework of what ERE is, and took a first stab at designing an ERE MMG.

Is that emergence? From a far enough distance, perhaps? From the guy who noticed some ingredients laying around and combined them to make a 'new thing', it doesn't feel emergent to me. It feels like it took will, observation, design, imagination, visualization, execution, etc.

Some of the effects of the MMGs have been emergent. The darknet effect, for example, was vaguely known about but not designed for, so I'd say that effect was emergent. Emergence tends to refer to the effects of something that has been designed. The MMGs were designed, and there were emergent effects. The idea with ERE2 is that it's something that is designed, and will have interesting emergent effects.

New stuff doesn't just fall out of the sky. Somebody's gotta, like, make it happen. And if it's not a thing that exists yet, that means it's not a thing that can be simply copied yet, so then someone's gotta come up with an idea, a vision, plan, strategy, etc, for it, before it exists, which sounds an awful lot like a conceptual or theoretical framework to me. [This reflects what @ffj said up there^. Oh hey, thanks for the kind words, btw!]

And here is why I think this is actually germane to the ERE2 discussion: I don't think the notion that a bunch of nerds retreated to a monastary and thought up ERE2 out of thin air is accurate at all. It wouldn't be totally accurate, but it'd be in the neighborhood of true, I think, to say that ERE2 is an attempt to take the good things from ERE1 and the good things from ecovillages, and/or transition towns, and/or mutual aid, an/or etc etc(or all of those things), and mash them together and come up with something 'new' out the other end. It doesn't have to be much more complicated than that. All the theory stuff is working out the various ways it could go wrong, and trying to solve for those before actually having anyone try things in the real world where they could actually get screwed over.

But, on that note, I think what @unemployable said about baby steps is right on. The first practical step of ERE2 isn't going to be "Right, everyone, pack your bags, we're all moving to a ranch in Montana it's going to be great, if you don't come you're out of the club." It's... well, arguably it's already happening. Forumites meeting IRL and collaborating on things. ERE1 people having relationships with people who've never heard of ERE but nevertheless have arrived at a ERE1-ish place from whatever diverse background they have. Me spending two months with @mooretrees, helping with her bus. @mF and I swapping bikes. Small normal stuff.

Maybe this year I'll get my act together to build some more infrastructure and someone from the ERE community will come live out at Ft Dirtbag for a while and who knows what that'll lead to.

[AxelHeyst]

I appreciate the effort you've put into this conversation c_L, I think it's been really helpful.

One thing though... I'm not sure how much off forum ERE2 discussion there was? I thought it was all 98% in the ERE2 subforum. I only know of one darknet that talks about ERE2 kinda stuff, but it's honestly ERE2 adjacent rather than focused. There was no real ERE2 content genesis there. My perception of the rest of the MMGs is that it's almost totally ERE1 stuff. For example, in my MMG, on our last call, we talked about how to eat out less, how to deal with social stigmas around being ERE, and how to decide on a target FI number.

I could be wrong and maybe there's an ERE2 darknet that I'm not aware of, but otherwise, I wanted to clarify a potential misconception.

[classical_Liberal]

First of all, this is not attack on you or your work to create what you have. I would argue that what you accomplished was emergent. This is not to take away from your work or accomplishment. Just, in the sense that it would have happened soon with or without you. If the Wright brothers didn't have a successful flight, someone else would have soon after. That's not to take away from the accomplishments, mechanized flight was just an emergent feature of the world at that time.

I could be wrong and maybe there's an ERE2 darknet that I'm not aware of, but otherwise, I wanted to clarify a potential misconception.

Maybe it is? I can't possibly know what happened off forum because I wasn't there. I just know that ERE 2 vocabulary and models "seemed" to come out of nowhere for myself and many forumites. There were not discussions about the genesis of these ideas on the forums that I could find. At least not labeled as ERE 2 discussions. Simple examples, where did the new name come from? Why is a new name needed? This has been a common criticism from many forum members. eg I've been here for years and I logged on one day to read some discussions, but no longer understood what these people were talking about. This is where my personal "accusation" comes from.

All the theory stuff is working out the various ways it could go wrong, and trying to solve for those before actually having anyone try things in the real world where they could actually get screwed over.

In that sense the theory has already shown a failure point. It couldn't even predict the backlash from a core audience. I could be wrong, maybe longer term members of the ERE forum are not the core audience? I only know my experience, which was that many forum members stated publicly or privately that they had concerns about this new concept. Independently, I chose to call it out in the manner I did, because I love ERE, even if I haven't been the perfect forum member.
__________

Speaking to the room wrt ERE2. I had some time to think more about the comments about expanding ERE to those with similar mindsets. IOW, past the type of people that frequent this forum. This is also not a new idea, and has been met with mixed results in the past (ie deleted threads, highly valued forum members leaving, etc). Seems like a fine idea, finding a few like-minded organizations of people and collaborating.

The more I think about it though, the more flawed the idea seems. If the goal is to produce a sea change in which large portions of the population have similar motivations (eg the 25% @jacob spoke of), then it seems to me the collaborative efforts should focus on more mainstream goals. As opposed to with other extremely small scale pond ecospheres. 0.1% combined with four other similar groups, at best is 0.5%. Given the reaction here, it's reasonable to assume a large attrition rate (maybe that can be changed with what has been learned in application here?). That not to say, after attrition, a group of .2% with different backgrounds isn't better than ERE alone. Just that it doesn't move the needle effectively.

Is this the type of thing you are trying to figure out? Or haven't the theories gotten that far into practicality yet?

In the very least it just reinforces the concept of why this particular small pond ecosphere needs to be preserved as best as possible. I think it's still a live player, and I think smart, innovative people like @AH are proof of concept.

[Western Red Cedar]

Maybe it is? I can't possibly know what happened off forum because I wasn't there. I just know that ERE 2 vocabulary and models "seemed" to come out of nowhere for myself and many forumites. There were not discussions about the genesis of these ideas on the forums that I could find. At least not labeled as ERE 2 discussions. Simple examples, where did the new name come from? Why is a new name needed?

I think a lot of the ERE2 discussion emerged when @Jacob expanded the WL Table. I think he may have also discussed ideas about integrating community-oriented approaches to the meta crisis on the Stoa interviews and other podcasts. In fact, IIRC this may have been a major motivator for his podcast circuit last year.

viewtopic.php?p=240072#p240072

[AxelHeyst]

First of all, this is not attack on you or your work to create what you have. I would argue that what you accomplished was emergent. This is not to take away from your work or accomplishment. Just, in the sense that it would have happened soon with or without you. If the Wright brothers didn't have a successful flight, someone else would have soon after. That's not to take away from the accomplishments, mechanized flight was just an emergent feature of the world at that time.

Fair enough, and no offense taken at all. I just happened to be right place right time right person. I don't mind it being called emergent -- all I mean to say is that, in that case, "emergent" is not the same thing as "whatever happens, happens, and any amount of willful effort is 'forcing' something and therefore non-emergent and shouldn't be done."

A bunch of people called the Wright Brothers crazy. Right? Actually, I have no idea if that's true or not, but it sounds true. Somebody probably at least snickered behind their backs once or twice. Whatever. The Wright Brothers had to work really hard for a long time to get that insane thing off the ground, is what I mean. Yeah, if it wasn't them, it'd have been somebody else - but whoever was going to make heavier than air flight happen was going to have to bust their ass in pursuit of a vision they didn't know for sure they could pull off.

I can't possibly know what happened off forum because I wasn't there. I just know that ERE 2 vocabulary and models "seemed" to come out of nowhere for myself and many forumites. There were not discussions about the genesis of these ideas on the forums that I could find.

That's because the discussions were emergent. +1 what WRC said though.

In that sense the theory has already shown a failure point. It couldn't even predict the backlash from a core audience.

Totally. Yes, the people involved with this have felt pretty blindsided by this. That's not an attack, that's an admission of a big blind spot. In retrospect it seems kinda obvious that the way things happened would piss people off, but before this there just wasn't any attention going to how the ERE2 discussions would effect core OGs. (There sure is now!) It's not like the theory was consulted on the issue of whether or not core community would have a bad reaction. The question was never asked.

And this is... the normal dance of theory and practice, imo. Whelp, that didn't work, okay fix it different and lets try again see if we get any further.

[suomalainen]

Apologies in advance for the long synthesis and in particular if my synthesis is offensive to anyone.

Having read What is ERE2?, Examples of ERE2 Lifestyles (or rather, holons?) and some of this thread, it seems to me that what ERE 2 is is that certain people are finding their (sub-)tribe for the first time, in part, because these certain people are unique along multiple axes, and so their higher-dimensioned personalities were only partly seen in our ... flat(?), superficial(?) world (generally speaking but also perhaps from a Wheaton level angle here on the forum - the so-called misfitting misfits), so they had never previously really felt fully seen. It also seems to me that these certain people are excited about the possibilities of what their newfound tribeship (friendship? kinship?) could accomplish. See, e.g.,

Insofar as Jacob is trying to save the world from itself, and ERE is about how to free individuals from the cave, ERE2 is about thinking through what happens when a bunch of freed individuals develop ties with each other.

Think of ERE2 as what changes when WOGs are connected with other WOGs.

From the perspective of the more extroverted types, we as a forum are shy nerds sitting in a corner being shy with each other.

Finding that multi-dimensional connection for the first time is fucking intoxicating; it's magical. Having it aligned along philosophical, sociological, ecological, psychological, political, intellectual axes, one could be forgiven for thinking of the heady possibilities (i.e., "saving the world from itself"). Consider how the "Founding Fathers" must have felt when they debated and created the USA - it must have been thrilling to a certain type of person to embark on this both theoretical and also practical experiment - so thrilling, in fact, that many "countrymen" bought into the idea enough to die for it. But I think the reason in modern times that "mud has been thrown on this wall for [x] years without anything sticking" is that there are a couple of things that these certain people may be overlooking in their excitement, primarily that humans are gonna human. To wit:

To use the computer gaming analogy, for WL7+, IRL society presently feels like interacting with a bunch of NPC characters given how locked-in the game is. Humans are trained to act and talk in predictable patterns. Either you see it or you don't, but if you see it, it's like being stuck in the matrix playing the same game over and over.

brute has:
...
- lived his life in loops, as tight and closed as the hosts do

It's not just that humans are "trained" to act and talk in predictable patterns, it's that humans are biologically coded to act and talk in predictable patterns. This biological code keeps our species interacting and cooperating in ways that keep our codes propagating. Why this matters is that what ERE 2 seems to aim at is to see what emerges from an extraordinary group of individuals thinking about the problems caused by the way modern Western society is structured. But modern Western society not only was an emergent property itself, it was an emergent property that seems to have "won" against all the other modern societies that had themselves emerged, both large (countries) and small (isolated tribes). Westernization, you see - it's popular. And not just here.

To put it in analogies bandied about here, it seems to me that ERE 2 individuals are really excited to see what emerges from their fun game of keepie-uppie, without really realizing that what will eventually emerge from their fun game is ... a game that's already been invented. Many times. Today, it's called soccer. The Aztecs had a higher-stakes version called ullamaliztli. It keeps getting reinvented for two reasons: 1) inventing shit is fun, and 2) ball games are fun. Because of (1) and (2), different groups of people will continue reinventing soccer. Think of it like convergent evolution. @AH sort of discusses this idea as well in a post too long to quote at length and to dense to quote summarily:

There's nothing wrong with convergent evolution, and indeed it is a feature, not a bug, of evolutionary processes. To me, it's just that ERE 2, as a way of solving societal level problems, isn't really all that interesting. Yes, it's important for society to think of ways to organize and cooperate and (gasp) govern our species, and everyone has an opinion on how things should be structured. See e.g.,

So there might be some elements of community/group coordination and organization within monastic traditions that is useful to take a look at, while other elements are clearly not ERE2.0 (funding source, non-scalability/lack of broad appeal, etc).

What would give me pause, personally, is that the traditional organization of such communities seems to, in the course of human history, almost inevitably produce communities that are ultimately oppressive of their members. So in addition to all that can be learned, I imagine there will be a lot of examples of pitfalls to avoid.

Etc. But it's just not a game that I think is fun. This is not the first time a (small) group of people thought they had A Better Way(TM), and perhaps this time really will be different. Whether it is or not I don't think is the point. As @BRUTE says, nothing lasts, but nothing is lost. These folks should go for it and enjoy the ride; they'll be better for the it. In other words:

Another focus is figuring out the post-FIRE life script, which frankly doesn't exist. Many don't know what to do with themselves after retiring. There seems to be three general options: tinkering, traveling, or going back to work. Again this reflects the fact that the density of EREmites is so low that everything has to be done as an individual. What could be done if there was a "we" and not just the current situation of spread out "mes".

What we're doing is that while we realize that our tribe has a good thing in ERE1, we also realize that we don't have all the answers (for example, what to do in retirement beyond sitting on a pile of money and part-timing our hobbies).

But this again then brings the focus off of the ERE 2 "societal level" and re-focuses it on "what's an individual to do with their time?" ERE 1 seems to provide a process to be able to eventually generically answer with "whatever I want", but post-freedom, ERE 1 doesn't have an answer to that question. Religious people tend to have a higher-order answer (variations on "do what god tells you to do"). People with identities intensely associated with doing things (work or hobbies) tend to have an answer (do the thing that engages you in "flow"). In other words, it comes from your individual values. It seems to me that the ERE 2-ers are just looking for their answer to this question, and it's hard for them precisely because of their renaissance multi-dimensionality. THEY'RE EXTRAORDINARILY CAPABLE. AND BORED. AND LONELY.

So, follow your interests, work on a problem you find interesting, that you find to be bigger than yourself, and do it with people you enjoy being with. In short ... do what you are biologically coded to do. Find out what that is and then go do it. You'll never be happier.

[candide]

I'll only speak for myself -- again cards on the table: 1) relatively new to the forum, and while I tried to catch up by doing a lot of reading on the old threads, there were real gaps in my understanding of what I was walking into and 2) I am a kinda prickly/pessimistic/mildly misanthropic. So read anything I write in here those contexts, but I think Axel and Daylen have acquitted themselves quite well through all this. I now understand where each is coming from much better. I don't think anyone should deny the repeated good-faith attempts to either make things better, or connect -- or both -- since the darknetting thread started. If you both have convinced me, I hope it would follow that you can convince anyone.

This is what I've worked out so far:
1) The use of jargon and frameworks that would overtake practical and ERE1 threads sucked. It came off as elitist and exclusionary. That's totally legit. I think we all get that now and have already improved that, keeping heavy jargon and framework stuff to dedicated ERE2 threads.
2) The perception that people who are not 'full ERE1' aka WL7 were trying to tell people who were/are WL7+ what they ought to do rubbed people the wrong way.

I think this is substantially correct. But I want to build from this a bit. From that famous Geeks, MOPs and Sociopaths piece
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

The sociopaths quickly become best friends with selected creators. They dress just like the creators—only better. They talk just like the creators—only smoother. They may even do some creating—competently, if not creatively. Geeks may not be completely fooled, but they also are clueless about what the sociopaths are up to.

ERE2 came off to my ear, and apparently to a lot of OGs like ERE -- only better, like the ways that would fool MOPs and push out the Fanatics and only serve Sociopaths trying to extract the value. Not a perfect analogy because ERE2 went into meta-theoretical and meta-social territory rather than in the real creation of ERE-lite for the masses, but that's partly due to quirks of Jacob; to sound like Jacob--only better would require going down these paths.

Still, please stay with me for this conclusion: it is not only important to not be a sociopath trying to strip mine a community,which I now don't feel anyone is doing, it also important to not sound like one because there is a large concentration of not only smart people here, but ones experienced with the world. Toward the beginning of the same piece:

One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death. Eventually—around 2000—everyone understood this, and gave up hoping some subculture could somehow escape this dynamic.

Obviously, "everyone" is bit of hyperbole, but it was everyone who could read the social currents, or at least reflect upon and apply experience.

OG ERE1 people have seen sub-cultures die in other contexts. They, or someone they know, have also seen new managers or consultants come in with their rapid language changes that don't help the workflow, but might paste over mining out labor... I work what should be a stupidly simple job, but do you know how many different frameworks and changes of terminology I've had to live through, often just some new administrator can make his mark, or worse, have something to fight about with the experienced teachers?

The real point it is important for terminology not only to not be bullshit. It needs to not sound like bullshit. This also has a credibility/credential component. I am hearing that a lot of "how I live" is really boring to some of you guys. I'd say just make sure you have "about me" somewhere handy that would show in a shell where you are in ERE. Ethos matters.

And, again, I think strides are being made on all fronts here. I am left with a lot more trust of ... well, pretty much everyone.

I wrote this just seeing if this might help to explain some of the intensity of the reaction.

[classical_Liberal]

Suo kicks ass in written language, as always. Triple points for finding old BRUTE quotes, he's the reason I became a part of this community. There were other people too though, Bigato. now on his Brazilian ranch, many more successes all left. I think I've missed my Cue.

I had a snarky and intelligent reply post all thought out. It spoke of how I had started a discord group two years ago and was specifically asked to stop it by our dear leader jacob (props to BRUTE). It ended up the pinned travel thread instead. Nowhere near as cool as the off forum universe AxelHeyst has created, but certainly proof that it was an emergence.

Anyway, Suo is absolutely correct. If a bunch of people want to create the wheel 2.0, if it makes them happy and inclusive, why should I or anyone else object.

Good luck!

[Ego]

Yes, if this mess shows anything it shows how extraordinarily difficult it is to create a resilient, evolving, post-fire reason to get out of bed in the morning. A solution may work for a few years. Eventually the passion fades or the world changes. Without ten others vying for attention it is easy for the person to fade as the passion fades.

It is fragile to be dependent and have no choice but to do what others demand.
It is equally fragile to be independent and have to do nothing.

Back in the early 2000s we decided our solution. Never be fully dependent. Never be fully independent. Never retire. Always have something that we have to do. Always have ten things we want to do.

In other words, make sure my life is full of real things competing for my time and attention rather than pastimes.

[jacob]

I think a lot of the ERE2 discussion emerged when @Jacob expanded the WL Table. I think he may have also discussed ideas about integrating community-oriented approaches to the meta crisis on the Stoa interviews and other podcasts. In fact, IIRC this may have been a major motivator for his podcast circuit last year.

viewtopic.php?p=240072#p240072

I'll lead off of this, but this is an answer to everybody who wants a more complete history of how this "ERE2" stuff came about. This would roughly describe my perspective for the period of early-2021 to 2022-now. I hope it doesn't get lost in the stream.

It's important to realize that for my part several things are happening in several difference places often at the same time. I connect with people working on similar things outside of ERE/forum as well. The ERE forum does not exist in a vacuum. These ideas did not originate solely from the ERE forum or myself or a secret cabal.

Much of my motivation for venturing outside the ERE forums starting early 2021 was due to the account deletion debacle and the ongoing trickle of political rage-quitting. I thought I was building a community and a repository of knowledge on the forum and spent a lot of life energy reconciling angry arguments, connecting threads, answering questions... only to realize that many just treated the forum as a "free Q&A"-session, a place to hang out and vent, and a place to get support to become FIRE to be followed by "thank you, I'm off to sail into the sunset and if you could please delete my journal". Basically, that put me in a bad place and I decided to spend less energy on the forum. Moderation became more hamfisted (delete and lock w/o explanation) and my patience was reduced to a minimum.

Prior to that I had frequented the Deep Adaptation boards a bit and I became more active over there. Unlike the very individualistic "personal prepper" types we mostly have here (orange NTs), DA is very very community oriented (green NFs). This was interesting but also a strange culture shift. Whereas ERE folks presume that the best and often the only way to solve any problem is to learn the skill and do it yourself, emphasis on "yourself". DA often thinks the only solution to anything is to first form a community. Indeed, doing things yourself is considered selfish if not downright impossible without "the wisdom of the tribe". After all, before moving ahead on anything, it's important to consult everyone and listen to their feelings. Good point, but a common side-effect is that the green tribe often gets stuck in ever inclusive endless listening.

How very strange that humans can operate with such different values. Certainly I don't believe that "all humans are basically the same". I believe culture and temperament can make humans behave very differently. I thought I knew it all at least for practical purposes with MBTI, but MBTI is just temperament. There was clearly something more going in. For example, there were also green NTs. Of course at the time, I didn't know what green was. I just presumed my values and methods were universal because they were "reasonable". Is there any other metric? Oh yes! It turned out.

Around the same time I had been invited onto The Stoa to present a talk about ERE (like in the book). There were all these people talking about various colors and shadowplay and ego development and so on. I went to a few of their sessions but it was like visiting an alien world. I was a fish out of water. They kinda understood me, but I didn't understand them, not even theoretically. I joined a few times but then went back to lurking. However, I started reading up on the stuff. Spring/summer is probably when you'll notice me moving beyond MBTI and Kegan to Spiral, Wilber, and Cook-Greuter.

I was invited back to The Stoa in fall 2021. This time I talked about ERE1 and FIRE as a movement within the context of personal and cultural development. With this perspective, ERE1 can be seen as the "galaxy brain" intellectual (the nerds of https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths or as I like to see it: the grad school of lifestyle design) with other and more relatable people, like MMM or JD Roth, popularizing it (the college and highschool of lifestyle design respectively).

Due to my activity in DA, I also saw that ERE to a large part attracted egocentric ("me and my family"-focused) people, whereas DA to a large part attracted sociocentric ("our community"-focused) people. The contrast was pretty strong.

Two observations. 1) DA, which is much smaller than FIRE and even smaller than ERE back then needed a different type of movement. 2) The two types of extreme foci (individual vs community) could learn a lot from each other.

A graph like this was included in the Stoa2 talk. I started the ERE2 subforum here:

I created a new subforum for those who are interested in ERE beyond the[ir own] personal benefits. To describe it visually, this is for subjects that fall in the yellow zone.



Previous discussions on this are currently scattered in multiple places, but I'd like to gather them here.

Looking at that graph, ERE1 is the orange blob. DA is the green blob. ERE2 is the yellow blob. This color choice is not accidental

One thing I had noticed was that AH's MasterMind Group had been running really well. While I had noticed that some members had fallen off the radar, the group seemed to be speed-running through the ERE curriculum much faster than the traditional forum ways of loooooong threads that required a lot of repetitive input from me. AH's MMG seemed to figure it out without needing me which was a very welcome observation since I've been feeling stretched thin for years. The slight reduction in forum activity due to the MMG seemed well worth it in terms of building more understanding of ERE principles. So around that time, I also asked if I could join one of their sessions and try to understand how it worked. My takeaway was that synchronous conversation would solve some snags (misunderstanding theory, for example) faster than long forum threads that where participants might miss 1/3 of the posts or get stuck in rhetoric or defensive postures. When people met face to face, there would be more trust and accountability too.

Around the same time, someone who was part of the core group of DA happened to see the Stoa2 talk and asked if I was interested in joining a DA group working on a new digital space to replace their current space which aside from an active facebook group and regular zoom meetings was functionally dead(*). Hell yes! This was an opportunity to take everything I had experienced and learned over the past ~14 years from the start of the FIRE movement to its current size of ~0.5% of the population of the western world. I was basically 12 years ahead of these guys in terms of working with online groups at different scales.

(*) Note, there will be some upcoming irony here

However, as I mentioned, DA is very much "green NF" and didn't exactly operate in the way I was familiar with from research labs or corporate or anything at all really. I was not just a fish out of water, but a fish on the frying pan now. The group worked much like a therapy circle complete with a virtual talking stick and emotive check ins and check outs to ensure that everybody could share their perspectives and feels and that nobody got more time or words than others so as to avoid anyone with expertise dominating or oppressing people given how expertise and experience was seen as simply yet another opinion from one person in the circle. There was a strong belief in the innate wisdom of a community of humans and that work was best done together in a "co-creative" way. There were strong objections to anyone doing anything on their own. Over a period of about a month, I learned that this group (in various forms) had been at it for over a year---that is, trying to solve a problem that should only take 1-2 days to solve---and that innate ageless human wisdom somehow doesn't include any knowledge about website management, social media, or mass movements. After about a month of that I had reached my frustration tolerance of being told various forms of "I don't work with ideas or platforms. I work with persons" and my explanations and objections being met with shrug emojis. I bowed out.

However, I still felt that I owed the guy who initially invited me a proof that I actually had some good ideas in case they actually wanted a solution before funding was withdrawn.

So in December 2021, I wrote a 20 page white paper basically proposing an expanded version of the "movement system" I had discussed in my Stoa2 talk that would integrate the skill-oriented individualists (orange above) with the community-oriented people (green above) using a combination of public forums, small zoom groups like AH's MMG style but also DA's circle style, which eventually would get comfortable enough from existing in the same space that they would start to interact more---green circles meeting orange MMGs w/o losing their minds---and move into the yellow zone.

Add: This was NOT intended to be a merger between DA or ERE in any way. Rather it would be a way to increase understanding between all the different groups that work on 21st century type problems. They often have similar general aims using similar methods and perhaps because of that there's also much animosity and "not invented here" behavior due to people squabbling over what is mostly due to differences in "ego-style". IOW, the framework I created was rather generalized. E.g. usable for finding a way for e.g. hippies and survivalists coming together over what they had in common avoid the all too common outcome of squabbling over their differences instead.

My DA connection thought it sounded good and "why don't we try it out?" Since I had more or less burned my bridge with the DA circle, I figured we could try it out on the existing space of ERE and create more MMGs on ERE and get the resident individualists more comfortable meeting others face to face, at least virtually. So the new subforum for MMGs started in Jan 2022. AH had written a "how to start an MMG post" which IIRC, I moved over from another subforum, but after that it pretty quickly took off with different people starting their own. I do remember pushing a bit for people to take initiative. There were lots of people interested in joining, but people didn't know how to start one or thought it was too complicated, so they had to be nudged. After a while that was no longer necessary and MMG kinda took on a life of their own. In terms of emergence, the seeds were already there (probably part due to the success of AH's MMG and part due to all the zooming people had been doing under covid), so it was only a matter of preparing the soil and adding a bit of water and people started sprouting on their own. I started a repair MMG. I also invited a few people from ERE and my contact invited a few people from DA and we started a DA+ERE MMG group to discuss cross-cultural pollination: "How to be a fish in other waters". Very meta.

However, this did not go down exactly the way as described in the white paper. Instead it began to generate some of the very problems described in the white paper.. And now comes the irony. The white paper did identify the problem of the mostly defunct DA forums due to being siloed up in tiny circles each with their own slack or discord channels. I refer to this as the "German problem", because I once heard someone mention that "whenever 2 Germans get together, they start 4 clubs". What DA had (and likely still have) were almost as many separately isolated groups as they had "active creators" by the 90-9-1 rule.

What subsequently happened as an emergent effect of promoting the idea of MMGs on the ERE forum was that rather than each person joining one MMG each and maintaining connections with the public forum (to help newcomers and people outside the groups) as I expected, many started joining multiple MMGs, and slowed down or stopped participating on the public forum because they were too busy typing out things in the respective slack or discord silos that almost every MMG created. Just goes to show that emergence works in unexpected ways and just how hard it is to deal with complex environments. Since the effect came slowly, I didn't realize it at first but the more popular the MMGs became, the more the public forum was getting darknetted and ironically converging on the same heat death as the DA eco system. While not obvious to the individual "active creator" who was as busy as ever, it was very clear to lurkers and those who were only on the forum and didn't join the MMG fest.

And this basically brings us up to the point of a few weeks ago when this was publicly recognized and discussed in the darknetting thread.

Incidentally, since that thread made people aware of the problem forum activity has roughly increased by 150%. This is wild!!!

Turns out that I was somewhat wrong about too many forumites only caring about their own problems ... and that many in fact do care about the ERE community.

What we've actually experienced here and are experiencing is/was a clash between two cultures, the previous one and the new one. Lets call them the OG-culture and the MMG-culture, respectively. Now that the air is in the process of getting cleared, I very much hope that making the effort to make them understand each other and the water they swim in will result in the formation of a joint culture of sorts or at least some cultural understanding.

With the *strong disclaimer* that I think this point is better made in overly honest or cynical terms and includes some stereotyping, I think the OG culture has or had the expectation of the forum being a free resource for themselves; a place where they can go and hang out; a place where they could vent and argue and expect jacob to clear things up when the discussion got too heated; a place with smart people that would freely answer questions that would otherwise cost $150 in consulting fees; and that one would not necessarily have to pay it forward by helping other people; sometimes even deleting journals or swisscheesing debate threads.

And that is basically how it used to be. It was nice but it was also bad in some ways since the cost was born asymmetrically.

And the MMG culture has or had the expectation that the forum would keep going even if they stopped participating after joining an MMG; after all, "if I only write 1-2 posts per week, it shouldn't matter if I stop", except of course it does matter if 20 other people think the same way. Taking for granted the mutual trust that exists due to public forum participation in order to keep joining new MMGs to enjoy not only "free answers" albeit from a smaller group of smart people but "also privacy"(*). Only, it eventually regressed to a point where the social capital was used up and for the first time someone wanting to join an MMG was told: "Sorry, we don't know you. You have not posted on the forum enough."

(*) This in turn caused the OG culture to complain that all the smart people were disappearing along with their free answers. And yes, indeed they did. Because why bother spending time on detailed answers on the forum if the value is in someway not paid forward or worse the thread later is rendered unreadable because some deleted all their entries. At least that's how I increasingly felt.

Either way, in both cases, there was an inability (a dispreference) too see the second order consequences of personal behavior while seeing the current system or ecology as a static situation that is independent of personal behavior. This is the biggest lesson that I hope people would learn from this. There's no magic emergence. Emergence is a pattern that originates in human action. People doing nothing or waiting for someone else do not generate emergence. This is also why there's a lot more emergent patterns in a tiny group of active entrepreneurial people, especially if they come from different backgrounds ... than there is in a large group of people where most passively wait for someone else to take initiative or just copy the behavior of each other.

[IlliniDave]

Yes, if this mess shows anything it shows how extraordinarily difficult it is to create a resilient, evolving, post-fire reason to get out of bed in the morning. A solution may work for a few years. Eventually the passion fades or the world changes. Without ten others vying for attention it is easy for the person to fade as the passion fades.
...

So, you're telling me I'm doing it all wrong?

I'm still pretty new to the post-fire phase, < 1.5 years, so maybe things will change, but that notion is very foreign to me. The sunrise itself is more than enough reason for me to get out of bed in the morning. I don't want to derail the thread, but now you have me worried!

[jacob]

Incidentally ...

Here's an old blog post on naming conventions: https://earlyretirementextreme.com/the- ... -made.html

The Emergent Renaissance Ecology name goes back to at least 2012 and possibly earlier, so others recognized the potential a long time ago. It just wasn't deliberate pursued until the past couple of years.

[vexed87]

Well this thread definitely caught me up. Sorry I missed all the fun. I was busy mixing with NF types and raising a kid.

[classical_Liberal]

Thanks for the explanation.

tl;dr you decided that human differences matter, Interdependence is an important factor of change, and learning about those may improve your chances at being the next Nietzsche. I think you missed those points from your own forum years ago.... Whatever, lets watch some tiktok.

[daylen]

Can we all just agree that we don't know what we are really doing here on a rock in space? Confidence is the ultimate illusion. Uncertainty is the norm. That's our common ground.. so now what?