Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Believing in a task that is greater than the ego or personally fun fulfillment. They have a purpose greater than themselves. Gotcha. So, for example, creating a model of a frugal lifestyle that other humans might actually copy because it seems like it might actually be fun could be towards fulfilli...

No, for most creative people, it really is money. This is why artists, scientists, or anyone whose contributions can't easily be commercialized tend to end up "serving fries with that" or spend much of their lifetime trying to source it from rich people asking for grants, etc. Sorry. I wa...

Maybe 7wb5 can make a table for sex? Not kidding. I think that the recurring sex/poly-debates could benefit from a table of their own! I think the fact that I actually just did a spot of research to determine whether standard deviations beyond the norm represented by 28 lifetime partners by age 59 ...

To go from a low cost of living to a very low cost of living, ~10k, you have to think about money a lot less than normies do. Yes, this is because thinking about and developing any other form of capital will more than likely lead to decreased expenses or osmotic cash flow as secondary effect. HOWEV...

In particular, even fewer do it in an informed way seeking good consequences. I'm thinking of the stereotypical spiritual bypassers who figure they're going to reinvent themself on a farm in Nepal and thus cash out their 401k only to crash and burn. Next year, they're off to art school, except they...

@jacob: Gotcha. That makes sense. Being a fully functional conventional (or unconventional) homemaker requires mostly a mix of objective and inter-subjective skills. So homemakers often suffer from either a lack of subjective (care for self as opposed to others) functioning or a lack of inter-object...

I ended up here through a link from some stock broker's blog, I think. Newly free from a spendy ex, and bringing in salaryman money for the first time ever, I knew I had to invest to get ahead. Interesting. Very much like IllinDave (INFJ)s path. You were likely very much in your masculine energy in...

At this point, the focus changes more from the "outer work" of understanding how the world works---that's the key challenge of WL6 and WL7 to the "inner work" and understanding how _you_ work. What makes you happy/content/satisfied? What is a meaningful existence for you. What i...

Well, in my first marriage which lasted 20 years (or from conception of first child to maturity of second child), I was in charge of the finances, the plans, the kids, the house, medical, projects, travel, food/cooking, etc. etc. My ex was in charge of handing me his paycheck every two weeks and con...

@ducknald_don: Yes, I agree that it very much depends on how you layer the spreadsheets. I also didn't mean to lob the term "naive" directly at you. We've all had these same muddled thoughts. Here's what occurs to me when Level Green notion that "Money is Evil" is dismissed as na...

@ducknald_don: Yes, but this is taking the naive conservative perspective that established businesses are efficient solid producers of needful goods (as opposed to bloated monopolistic whales) while new businesses are likely to be only bringing shiny gin-crackery to market. The majority of businesse...

someone has to do the 2dollars worth of impact at some point, to make the money to buy the product. Yes, but eventually it comes down to the material reality that humans have to eat and keep themselves warm. For example, extremely poor subsistence farmers and hunters are also capable of doing extre...

Another model in which investment in the stock market can be regarded as neutral would be based on Donella Meadows' system description of a corporation. The overt mission statement of a corporation is pretty much just bull-shit, because a corporation can't survive (for very long) without profits. Ho...

There are a number of scholarly articles on the topic of Green Libertarianism. The notion that all humans should have equal CO2 dumping rights, for example, is debated within this political framework. Obviously, the de facto status quo is that your consumption and dumping rights are pretty much equi...

I don't know if allergies is a good analogy. I have allergies, asthma, and may go into anaphylactic shock if stung by a wasp or a bee, but I love nature and gardening, so I pack my drugs and just attempt to make limited use of them. OTOH, I hate calesthenics, running, sports, and gym class, so I hav...

I think Keynes' essay may also hint at why some would choose "work 15 hours/week" semi-ERE over FI-ERE. In an individualist model, some (points finger to Teletubby-esque self- the episode entitled "Laa-Laa has Muddy Feet from the Muddy Puddle" perhaps most representative of an ab...

dishonesty is a deal-breaker for me

That's because you've never been in a relationship with somebody who claimed to practice "radical" or "total" honesty.

Keynes prediction complete to highest Wheaton levels. He wrote the piece in 1930 (depression era) looking forward 100 years (about now!) I think it's rather remarkable how he spells out many of the problems encountered on this forum. The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along wi...

Even if you run your own tiny business, like I used to with my book business, in order to support your very frugal lifestyle, you will still have to face the reality of turning a profit in order to survive and the ethical issues associated with this. Since my business partner was a primary Fi, stron...

"welfare should not be exclusively thought of as a tax-funded government-provided service." Yes, I agree, but this constitutes a default to Level Blue unless/until welfare issues are integrated into systems design at Level Yellow/Turquoise. IOW, if welfare is not a tax-funded government p...