Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Status and Esteem Part 2

I think that the status/ esteem feedback loop is being sent into overdrive, causing a lot of the crisis of modernity. However, we still need some status to meet our needs.

Pursuing status has a negative connotation. In "Status and Esteem Part 1" I argue that status and ...

@Stasher: I think social media amplifies the problem (as I think all media does). It exposes us to vastly more people (though I think this issue predates media and modernity) and is engineered against us.

On the other hand, every escalation has a corresponding positive aspect, which is often almost ...

Status and Esteem Part 1

Status is a position in a social hierarchy. People want status within their in-groups, particularly with high-status individuals inside their in-groups.
I think esteem comes largely from iterative feedback loops with status*. We learn to value ourselves as we perceive ...

@AH: Options are difficult to choose from because we don't actually need to do anything. I think the modern value meme imposes a complicated structure on basic needs (needs of modernity) and imposes a complicated structure on our emotional/ fear systems. From that view, ERE just points out that ...

@Stasher:

Heh, this tendency is actually what lead me to go down this line of thinking. I noticed that I always want to upgrade my gear or, failing that, at least know about the latest gear, well beyond what I need for my particular skill level and goals (a strategy for not upgrading gear ...

Mimetic Desire and Identity

Mimetic desire is an idea put forth by historian Rene Girard. It posits that, aside from physiological desires, human desires are not spontaneous but mimetic or learned from others. Desire is a social process. Girard uses this theory to build a theory of social ...

This discussion is basically the contents of my next two posts which are titled "Mimetic Desire and Identity" and "Status and Esteem."

It's tempting to comment on this discussion from the idea I've developed, but I don't want to do that before I've laid it out.

Y'all are having the discussion and ...

@Lemur: That's a great summary about what I've been trying to say up until this point. By creating the conditions to meet our physiological needs easily we've created a world where things don't quite make sense for us. Continually trying to find food and avoid death with the community you were de ...

Toward a Theory of Status and Esteem Needs

Needs beyond the physiological present interesting challenges. If these needs are not strictly necessary for biological survival, where do they come from?

For the purpose of this series I'm using the word "need" to mean anything that drives human ...

A fair nitpick would be that the first headline is 2x the money of the second headline.


Ah I was rounding using a 90% savings rate, forgetting how much a few percentage points in savings rate effects things at high savings rates...

If we're using a 33x savings goal the equivalent is "internet ...

I thought of a new way to characterize what I see as the difference between pursuing ERE without focusing on achieving FI first (what I call semiERE) and pursuing ERE with a focus on achieving FI first.

The headline I hear for semiERE:

"Internet person figures out how to get 10 years of living ...

I somewhat disagree on the basis that both old people and adolescents often "don't care what people think"


I don't think that anyone truly does not care what anyone else thinks. My explanation of this is the subject of the next several posts.

@Ego: It still seems like you're arguing that the ...

@AH:

I view myself as the defender of all non-linear paths to FI. As such I want to point out that the path you pursued was... highly non-linear. From my perspective you opted to semi-retire by going down to 1 day a week at your j*b. Eventually you were laid off. This freed you to pursue a purely ...

I found ERE due to sex workers. My then gf found ERE and MMM from posts on the stripperweb forum.

Yes, I agree. We spend the majority of our time working and buying signals that we are not impoverished, irresponsible, boring or uncool.

Why are we doing this?

Is this what we want to spend our lives doing?

@7: I found that shame thing about modernity quite interesting as well.


How well does this jive with the fact during the sustained Nazi bombings of UK cities known as the Blitz, asylum admissions went down significantly and many long-term patients actually improved?


Bombing is a direct threat ...

I read the essays and I think this is an excellent summary.


@AH - It's popped up here and there before, but Aristotle identified "the good, the true, and the beautiful". Within medieval Christianity, which relied/stole heavily from the Greeks, these are also known as the transcendentals. I was ...

Modernism, Safety Needs and Fear

I am using a modified (by me) version of Maslow's (extended) Hierarchy of Needs. The modification I'm using removes "safety" as an individual need level that follows physiological. Instead I assign "safety" to three different systems: physiological (somatic ...

Denying aesthetics is denying life. The sharp line between the intellectual and the aesthetic is made up.


Some of the old guard weren't interested unless sharp blades were involved because they realized that eliminating danger changed both the fighting, the fight, and the fighters completely ...

@jacob: There are years of people on the forum using semiERE to mean what you described as "slowmodeERE." There are also years of people using it as you've described.

I agree that this is confusing due to how semi-retirement is defined in Clyatt's book. I agree that if we are following naming ...