Early Retirement Extreme Forums

@icefish - Thanks a bunch for sharing all of that! That was very helpful. I have some follow up questions. 1. Have you considered traditional publishing at all or do you intend to stick with indie? Why or why not? 2. Is there room for stuff in the indie market that straddles the line between literat...

@AH - Your thoughts here are pretty close to what I was thinking myself. :lol: The van thing does sound great and I'd like to try it out someday, but I don't think it's a good fit for the pets/WFH/writing due to the logistical difficulty. However, I'd love to try it someday. Visiting all the nationa...

@grundomatic - That's a good idea, I'll look into that. What site did you use, if you don't mind me asking? I'm going to run the numbers and see what the most cost effective way (while minimizing the amount of pain I have to deal with) to handle this might be. I may be able to get a friend or relati...

Thanks @mF, that was well put. I suppose one reason I find Plotkin/subpersonality approach so helpful is that it forces me to orient myself on things outside of myself. I'm prone to getting stuck inside of my own head, so focusing on connection/purposes or thinking about how I can fit into some natu...

Would it stand to reason/argument that this is not just fiction but actually how the mind gets constructed. Parents, friends, society, culture, ... tells the developing ego what to do, what to think, and what to say. When the developing ego hits the operational stage, which for most humans happen a...

Plotkin is an extension of Jung at his core and his cardinal directions/subpersonalities are basically just Jungian archetypes laid out in another way. Jungian analysis is very NF-heavy, as is Plotkin, so it's understandably off putting in some contexts or if one has had bad experiences with "s...

My apologies because I am sure this has been posted before, but what order do you guys recommend reading Plotkin's books in?

Nice find on the desk! I got a desk like that for drawing a few years ago and it's great. Really makes drawing a lot easier.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. All of that is good to know. I think I'll start with some US cities first since those will be very easy then give Europe a shot afterward. Also @theanimal, thanks for that feedback. I've only ever been to Santa Fe, but I loved it there. The natural desert was stunn...

@grundomatic - The law enforcement (and civics) classes did attract a much wider range of people than what I usually get in the "nerd" hobbies, which was good. I think exposure to other people who are different than you is important for personal growth. One thing I learned from that is you...

While this article is written from a "become the greatest corporate executive ever" perspective, I've found the paradigm here useful for dealing with burnout: https://hbr.org/2001/01/the-making-of-a-corporate-athlete The basics of it are that you need to balance stress (work in the article...

I am struggling with the fact the "You are a product of your environment" and "Wherever you go, there you are" are both true. It's more like you're the product of the sum of your environments with your early childhood experiences weighting much heavier than recent adult experien...

@avalok - This is a good point. An issue I've been trying to work through is a generalized sense of misanthropy that I've built up over the years that is making those types of connections rarer. I want to get to the point where I can enjoy weak ties for what they are while still always keeping an ey...

I really love it when those connections occur. In my mind they are invaluable and one of the things that cannot be bought at any price. To encourage them, I try to optimize for serendipity. I adopt a position closer to that of an enthusiastic student than to that of Confucius. I know the Epicureans...

ERE offers an interesting side door to being able to do long term work on some idea without having to be affiliated with an institution. Publishing the ideas is another story. :). I met someone last week who was a psychology postdoc. Because the subfield he was in wasn't very hot, he was responsibl...

@jacob - That's an interesting way to look at it. I'll ponder that some more. It sort of reminds me of the strategies on how to lose weight. Increasing levels of this might look like: 1. Pantry is full of cookies and you "try not to snack" (very low odds of success) 2. You don't buy any sn...

This analysis has been true in my experience too. An additional complication is that "normies" tend to all be normal in the same way, but people who differ from the norm are all different in different ways. So while society tends to break up into culture and counterculture, you may still e...

@zbigi - That's a good point. Your comment makes me realize my issue is that I may be attempting to find some social circle devoid of any context. That is, it's very textbook salaryman socialization to go join some club or social event to meet people, but this format is going to necessarily confine ...

Does anyone here have any additional good book recommendations on Epicureanism? I've been meaning to study more about that philosophy because it seems more applicable to our bizarre time period than Stoicism. I personally don't believe free will exists, but paradoxically, the more agency I imagine I...

That is a good point on the I/E split. I tend to lean toward introvert, which makes socializing more difficult when I'm burned out. An observation I've had while trying to socialize more is that what I'm seeking are social connections that can mirror my subjective experience because there is cathars...