Fish wrote: ↑Fri Mar 26, 2021 8:10 pm
When looking at the table I notice two paradigms: personal finance (1-5) and lifestyle design (6-10). The objective of PF is to accumulate FU capital to unlock the LD game.
This entire table presumes efficiency as the goal. It is especially evident in 6-10 where the financial aspects are geared towards economic independence and transcending the financial system. Although I have yet to reach the LD stages, I imagine that actualization is the true goal and that finance need not be a part of it.
That's entirely not how I intended/see the roadmap. As described in the 10+ posts around this one
viewtopic.php?p=239947#p239947 ... the table is more of a description of a commonly traveled route. Efficiency is just one perspective (stage) along the way.
In the framework of transcending (good framework!) it goes from starting with being controlled by money because it is the scarcest resource for almost everybody. As one starts leaving Plato's Cave, one becomes better at manipulating/handling the solely-known money resource (1-5) and eventually discovers "other resources" (The "Deliberate Consumer" as described in The Stoa Talk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPvftqB-WXk ). These resources rise in relative importance and the importance and focus on money fades. This happens around (5-6). [This is also where the "behold my enormous comparative advantage"-tech bros get stuck. "Why should I pick up a screw driver when my giant hammer can easily drive this screw in by sheer force?"]
At 7-8 the stocks and flows of all these resources are put into and consolidated in systems. For someone spending $15k the total market value of these stocks and flow systems might tally $60k, but the actual monetary part of these flows is 4x lower. This is why the ERE HQ looks like our very middle class (60k median house hold income) neighbors on "THE SURFACE".
Now, I'd grant that someone operating under the same stock/flow/system paradigm could tally $100k in annual spending but this would imply they're running an operation with an equivalent "level 1-3" spend of $400k in consumer-world ... and I just don't know what that looks like because I've never seen it. In short, I've never met/seen someone spending over 30k in dollars who also had an integrated understanding of household systems and beyond-money resources. (I mean in the "truly knows" (kennen) sense, not just "knows about" (wissen) sense).
Moving onwards from WL7 to the new WS8, money is now "on tap" which means it fades into the background. It's there when you need it. You realize that your limits for self-actualizing in terms of "access, control, and optionality" are not what you can afford but what you bring to the table. Without those, you're stuck with "touristy"-entertainment like traveling, buying vehicles, "seeing" stuff, and paying for "experience-days".
However WS8 or the new WL8 is somewhat navel-gazing. You're just using your WL7 systems to "entertain" yourself. Basically, who you would be if money was not a problem. Someone who wins the lottery gets an instant chance at this. However, because they usually have zero skills, they'll be back at their old job soon enough. Having a very high-income (100k+) also affords such a lottery ticket resulting in the same story. After a couple of years of realizing the limits of personal skills---insofar the idea does not occur to develop them---it's back to the ole' career. OTOH, if you arrived at WL8 on the long way rather than the short cut, you might find yourself stuck "puttering around in your systems" after a while. There may (or may not) be a need to expand them which becomes possible once the other capital levels are high enough to gain access, control, and optionality to enter other spheres
beyond the consistence of your beautiful systems. This sends you to WL9.
In some sense, this WL9 is the career equivalent of someone "who has made it" and who can largely write their own ticket. Except here they have options on all shelves of "being human" and not just within their career ("being a career specialist"). IOW, they can become anyone they want w/o being limited by money or personal skills. This is the "live player", who is no longer self-restrained by the need to be consistent with the systems they've designed. WL9 recreation also seeks to go beyond the self-indulgence that was the recreation of WL1-8---this is basically just opening up an entire new dimension to "play".
I'd say, I'm presently somewhere between 8 and 9, probably closer to 8 but definitely inspired by 9.
As always the last stage 10 is meant as a catch-all for everything beyond. So it's more like 10+. The hippie-talk descriptions are legit enough but represents more of a (my) guess at what a reality-based focus/orientation would be like. Many human development models venture into solving the dualism (body vs soul) problem here, but I see dualism of more of a special-interest (spiritual) problem than the general goal of transcendence... IOW it's a side-road dead-end. I might be wrong. I prefer to keep the descriptions directional (likely accurate) but vague (imprecise).
Scott 2 wrote: ↑Fri Mar 26, 2021 8:35 pm
Given the FIRE audience tends to be successful white collar professionals, have you considered directly addressing the high earner trap?
No. Also being as that trap happens a few levels behind me, I can feel its existence is beginning to irritate me
The "curse of knowledge" is having an effect as well. I am for the most part getting increasingly ready to leave all this FIRE movement stuff behind for others to deal with. As far as I can tell, in the past few years it's been taken over by WL3 fatFIRE bros and WL4 baristaFIRE types. These are not "my kind of people"---the communications gap is too large. Specifically, I suspect it's easier to teach finance/consumerism to people who are interested in post-finance/post-consumerism than teach post-finance/post-consumerism to people who are interested in finance/consumerism. (Kinda like how Wall Street realized it was easier to teach options-theory to physicists than it was to teach advanced math and programming to MBAs.)
Add: I didn't mean to be haughty. My point is that it's perfectly normal to be "stuck" or perhaps more accurately not see or realize the point of further development for long periods of time or even for the rest of one's life. For example, I sat around 7.5-8 for the better part of a decade and only recently grokked the possibility of breaking out. Certainly someone can reach WL5-6 and not feel any need or drive to break out---living out the rest of their natural life that way. In terms of the "2020 FIRE movement", I don't think I'm your huckleberry. For the most part, "FIRE" has just become the latest "cool" providing all the terminology but practically none of the spirit of the OG FIRE once it was discovered by the traditional high-income wannabe (multi-)millionaire consumer demographic that describes WL3. Also see
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths I don't think it can be "rescued" or "fixed". It just is. Live and let live.
I do agree that the savings rate column can be misleading. It IS technically anchored in the income/spending column. However, I also realized that the median household is now 70k which is much higher than the 48k it was when the first table was made. I started updating the numbers but then I realized that the reference points (GRS, MMM, YMOYL, ERE) are still targeting/living their old non-inflated spending numbers.
What to do ... the problem is if I remove both sets of numbers, the reality-based quantitative grounding falls away and the Forer effect becomes much stronger. I'm undecided.
As it is, the identifier would be the last three columns. Since the recreation column was generalized, it's become more useful in that regard. The numbers columns would then be used for verification.