The Education of Axel Heyst

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AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Fri May 28, 2021 3:48 pm
...incidental yields of money or other social goods/flows can only occur in social context...
Yes! This incidental yield focus 'forces' one to engage in social context in variously rich ways, which I consider to be a benefit. Or rather, my vision for my life is deeply integrated in a rich and dynamic social context, and I see decentralizing $, shelter, food, lower-level Maslow's needs stuff, as a forcing function/accelerant for realizing that way of living.

JnG's recent description of how his life works feels relevant: his ~$0 lifestyle depends on his social context and "exploiting" attractive flow vacuums.
Ego wrote:
Fri May 28, 2021 5:16 pm
Funding life with non-incidental yields takes effort. While it may not be hard, it is not easy. To what extent is non-incidental earning a use-it-or-lose-it skill? How hard would it be to have no choice but to go back to non-incidental work after 1, 2 , 5 or 20 years of purely incidental yields? I wonder if an 80/20 incidental/non-incidental distribution may work better than pure incidental.


I suspect that for most people or definitions of "better", you are right. 100% incidental feels risky, although I wonder if that's because of socialized perspectives on money and work. Either way, I'm very curious if going 100% Incidental becomes something different in kind than a mix of incidental/non-incidental, leading to a lifestyle where the chances of "having" to go back to non-incidental yields just doesn't even make much sense. e.g. if in 5-10 years it leads to a wide positive reputation, a 200x stash, multiple shelter options amidst abundant disaster-resistant food production locations...

It basically boils down to - if I focus almost entirely on value I can bring to other people, and seek out these flow vacuum points (attractors? need to study Daylen more, it's on the top of my tongue) as high-leverage inflection points for application of my energy/efforts, will my "returns" be even much more abundant than if I actually focused on returns, even if only a little bit? Will I expose myself to getting taken advantage of, and die a pauper? Are there highly critical gateway skills that if I lack them, I'll fail at this, but if I possess/can gain them, I'll flourish wildly?

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Qazwer wrote:
Fri May 28, 2021 6:30 pm
Incidental yield also gets close to salaryman job who actually loves and excels at their field - I know plenty of tenured professors who do what they do for that reason - those who fail at it (most) get eaten up by the machine
There are also successful artists, doctors, lawyers and even bankers who work far past retirement age or need of income
Incidental yield is easier when you happen to be ridiculously successful (by definition not everyone) and you enjoy the work
Sure. That's something about this as well - it doesn't imply that one must forsake trad employment, if that's the best route to one's purpose. Something something "avoiding foolish consistencies".

jacob
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by jacob »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Fri May 28, 2021 2:41 pm
In my efforts to grok ERE over the past year and a half, I never at any point feel like I'm getting smarter or leveling up. I just feel like I'm getting less stupid. And pretty much just re-phrasing the book in my own words, realizing that the 5,000 words I wrote are captured in 500 or 50 words there, and I don't need the words I wrote anymore (but the process was probably necessary).
Smarter is adding perspectives. Wisdom is about cutting away the stupid. The stupid (barrier) has to be removed to add perspectives. The technical succinctness just happened to be my book writing style at the time---that's another skill entirely. If you were to take your posts and turn them into the college course I had in mind when I wrote it, they might end up looking similarly. Writing the book was also part of my process to get those words out of my head and down on paper.

Also 1.5 years is not a long time for grokking something "complex" (for lack of a better word). Somewhere on the forum I posted my personal evolution and how long I spent on each WL. This is a slow or rather long process. E.g. if you didn't still feel confused or like you weren't getting anywhere being 1.5 years into grad school, you were probably not doing very independent or inventive work. In particular, I don't think "smarter" happens during the learning process. I think "smarter" is about what one can do and does after having learned and internalized. The proof is in the pudding. "Smart" is the repertoire of experiential knowledge that's built on the new framework or idea. Any college educated person can bullshit their way through (re)presenting the ERE concepts---because that's how college educations work---but the key to see how much they understand is how (not how well, but how) they express it "in their own words". This expression is very much an iterative process whether you're writing it down, doing it, or just thinking about it.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

One problem is that our infrastructure is not designed to promote incidental social yields. For instance, in “A Pattern Language”, the urban/architectural design ideal would be a cluster of houses ( each house containing its own more public or intimate spaces as appropriate to constitution of household) with private gardens and workshops as well as shared communal spaces. Each adult would have “seated work” and “workshop space” and each workshop would be easily accessible to potential customers or students of the craft in conjunction with “the city as university” or “street festival.” Etc.

When such multi-scaled branching infrastructure is lacking, “hustle” becomes more necessary to maintain incidental or semi-incidental flows outside of the most conventional, well-regulated and large channels. J&G and I (and Tom Sawyer) have close to the same MBTI/Enneagram type which is sometimes referred to as The Con Artist :( But part of what we verbal, somewhat more extroverted, rational Explorers do is try to figure out new ways to make contract, thereby increasing resilience of the overall system. For instance, ENTP is type most likely to open a gallery promoting the work of secretive garret dwelling artists.

My point here being is that I half agree with Ego, because it definitely is possible to lose your hustle or positive internal initiative (juvenile masculine energy.) When that happens, you have to summon up either 20% more grit or 20% more balls out bravery. IME, the difficulty can be recognizing which is more appropriate to the situation. For instance, obvious dilemma for members of this forum being summoning up grit to continue doing work not in alignment with “stoke” until FU money is acquired vs facing the unknown with what some might view as reckless FU attitude.

chenda
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by chenda »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Sat May 29, 2021 7:43 am
One problem is that our infrastructure is not designed to promote incidental social yields. For instance, in “A Pattern Language”, the urban/architectural design ideal would be a cluster of houses ( each house containing its own more public or intimate spaces as appropriate to constitution of household) with private gardens and workshops as well as shared communal spaces. Each adult would have “seated work” and “workshop space” and each workshop would be easily accessible to potential customers or students of the craft in conjunction with “the city as university” or “street festival.” Etc.
The souqs of North Africa are an ideal example for this; private courtyard dwellings behind blank featureless walls (no conspicuous consumption!) linked by a network of dense alleyways to narrow street fronting businesses and workshops. Different types of businesses naturally congregate in their own part of town. I think there are also great psychology benefits in living in such an intimate vibrant environment, which provides both privacy and doorstep sociality.

zbigi
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by zbigi »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Sun May 23, 2021 4:11 pm
It is also possible to try to overtly construct a local zombie apocalypse survival circle beyond natural interdependence with close family and friends.
I assume that entails "Gerthood"? I am very sceptical of this. For some reason, the vast majority of people living this way all over the world were/are desperate to escape to cities and join the larger economy. Sure, a lot of them didn't have enough land to sustain themselves, but it can't be the full story. The self-sufficient life is just tough and often brutal IMO. Somehow it's pictured in idyllic terms by the permaculture movement, but even Paul Wheaton suggests sustaining yourself as a part of the global economy (by selling courses, trainings etc.) and not strictly off the land.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@chenda:

I think those dwellings were mentioned in “A Pattern Language.”It attempts to morph architecture/design with psychology/anthropology through description of basic human patterns. It even touches on spirituality in description of some patterns such as the one related to trees.

@zbigi:

Actually, I almost meant the opposite of Gerthood. I’m sure Paul Wheaton didn’t mean to amuse me by rendering poor assumed to be middle-aged lone permaculturist Gert de facto celibate, but I did chuckle to myself and wonder who might be driving his truck to her acreage if she only feels the need to use her truck maybe once a month.

What I was thinking about was my overt lifestyle design which attempted to balance my non-profitable hobby of permaculture or plant “rescue”and my not-very-profitable vocations of rare book “rescue” and poor immigrant student “rescue” with polyamorous contracts with relatively more financially affluent and muscular men. IOW, my design was based on the sort of rescue movie scene Axel Heyst described above, but with a more weblike structure and my role being more intermediary or more stereotypically feminine. For example, being the human who is calming and counting heads of kindergarten class as the helicopters fly overhead rather than jumping out of helicopter. IOW, it is possible to make plans for zombie apocalypse survival more “overt” within friends/family general social circle. The sad, funny thing is that I am the one who ended up “rescuing “ my extremely wealthy friend who could have easily afforded a battalion of helicopters when he had the great misfortune of dying from cancer in the height of Covid.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by jacob »

zbigi wrote:
Mon May 31, 2021 4:08 am
The self-sufficient life is just tough and often brutal IMO. Somehow it's pictured in idyllic terms by the permaculture movement, but even Paul Wheaton suggests sustaining yourself as a part of the global economy (by selling courses, trainings etc.) and not strictly off the land.
Maybe not brutal, but definitely tough. Carla Emery has a few pages on the economics of self-sufficiency as well. The hard part is covering the last 20% of expenses consistently (head tax, etc.). Failure to do so is what gets banks involved, which is what eventually ends the dream.

I'm not a fan of the model in which one sells or needs to sell "farming manuals" in order to make a living farming. It's like selling people down the river insofar they too need to sell courses on what is not an inherently economically sustainable model w/o those sales. Proposed Gerthood strategies should come with the stipulation that the market for yet more internet courses is a highly competitive rockstar business. Adding extra income from e.g. "farm tours" or petting zoos would be different because those scale a lot better.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Today's autopost, from 2008, pairs nicely with Deep Survival, from 2017. The book treats in some depth a real-world instance of Jacob's vignette about the top-man ice climber causing a catastrophic failure of the roped-up team (~half a dozen deaths on an "easy" mountain), among many others. It's a solid layperson's intro to normal accident theory as it relates to outdoor survival. I think anyone spending time outdoors should read the book. I intend to read further into it (Perrow's stuff) but haven't yet.

It appears that Perrow coined the linear><complex, tightly><loosely coupled quadrant (a goal of ERE is loosely coupled complex system).

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Mon May 31, 2021 8:13 am
IOW, my design was based on the sort of rescue movie scene Axel Heyst described above, but with a more weblike structure and my role being more intermediary or more stereotypically feminine.
For what it's worth, the scene I described was intended as a sort of metaphor. At the moment I'm nowhere near going to be one of the people jumping out of a helicopter, although I have some friends in SAR and could see pursuing it at some point (partly as a way to justify/make use of climbing and backcountry skills). When it comes to disasters and catastrophes, there are all sorts of scales to consider; time, distance, skill, strength/weakness, prevention vs. treatment, etc. When it comes to my "purpose", I'm interested in helping be a part of the movement to build "things" (buildings, structures, social dynamic systems, energy generating/obviating devices, relationships to industrial society, etc) that make it such that when certain kinds of 'disasters' occur, those people who avail themselves of the systems I'm involved with don't notice or are fine.

Simple examples: If you modify your relationship with electricity so that you only consume 500wH/day, and rig up a DIY vertical axis wind turbine connected to a small battery array, you might not notice if a cold snap knocks out the power grid. Particularly if your house is superinsulated, maintains a tolerable indoor temperature due to good passive solar design (if that works in your area), and you run a rocket mass heater when needed. *Extra* particularly if you're engaged in your neighborhood consensus community group, so resources and such can be shared and are shared on a normal basis, not just when disasters hit.

Relating to my last post - metaphorically speaking I'm more interested in helping to ensure that no one climbs with a roped top-man who will rip the whole party off the mountain if he falls, rather than being an expert at fishing mangled bodies out of the crevasse at the bottom after the fact.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

The conversation and issues around "self-sufficiency" make talking about these sorts of things difficult. I am holding some of my ideas for how to arrange my life close to the chest at the moment, partly because I feel a need to weave a bulletproof network of caveats and qualifiers to communicate what I'm *really* talking about. A lot of the threads I'm attempting to weave together are hype buzzwords that many people will make assumptions about. In a similar way that it can be difficult to plant a garden or mention a book you read about permaculture without someone assuming you're entertaining fantasies of self-sufficiency or naïve back-to-the-land-ism, which zbigi is right to be skeptical of. Too many people have fallen into the trap of thinking that if they can just build an earthship, they'll be set for life. I (think that I) have already been through the process of falling into, and climbing out of, those magical-thinking traps, and feel the need when I talk about my ideas to clarify it all.

Similar to how when people learn that I think some form of societal collapse is inevitable, they assume I think it's going to be Fast, Soon, and Utter, and am stockpiling ammunition and MREs out in the desert, and launch into a sermon about how wrong-headed I am and I ought to consider community resilience and Lone-Wolfism is a fantasy, I'm being unethical to be so Defeatist, etc. It's exhausting and so I prefer not even to bring it up, because inevitably it takes a few hours of me talking to get us both on the same page, and rarely has the other person gotten to that level of thinking it through and they actually have neither relevant criticism (which I am always open to) nor positive additional ideas, because they're still a half-step or more behind in their Kubler-Ross journey.

[eta: ^^^was a rant about experiences in meatspace, not necessarily this forum.]

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

General Updates
I'm all healed up from the surgery, and have started working out again to recover my overall fitness from "taking it easy" since January. I did 15 pushups the other day and was sore for three days. :cry:

I am assembling a prehab/mobility/strength routine that requires no equipment besides a backpack, since I'm going to be roaming for the next couple months. Becoming a Supple Leopard and Overcoming Gravity are my primary sources - bodyweight training is new to me.

The two weeks after I got laid off, I did a fun freelance animation project. Ironically, I worked more in the two weeks after I lost my job than I did in the few months previous (since I was at 8hrs/wk).

Tax season was kind to me, since I dropped to 8hrs halfway through the year so withholdings were excessive. Also I got my stimmie checks. Depending on how you figure it, I have 5-8 years of FU$, with an additional 10-15 years of FU$ in retirement accounts.

Spending is right around 1 jafi, again depending on how you figure it. My burn rate isn't "mature" yet - I feel like with another six months or so of tightening my systems, it's feasible I can run a version of my life at 0.6 jafi. Another version of my life looks like even less for a couple years.

DGF and I finally built real rear doors for my camper shell. I was still healing from surgery, so I designed and supervised and she did all the actual work. It was fun. More on that build here if anyone's interested.
Image
Speaking of which, I've decided not to sell my truck until right before our trip to Europe in February. DGF needs a vehicle, and has been using my truck since this February. If I sold it, she'd have to buy one and then sell it again before we left. Too much hassle, and our vague plans for the rest of this year "require" a vehicle.

I got my second vaccine shot last friday, and then walked up this thing the next day. Had a headache, but that might be because I skipped coffee that day. The day after that I helped my buddy install new upper control arms, spacers, and leaf springs on his project pre-runner truck. It was the first weekend the world felt kinda normal again.

I'm about to hit the road. I'll meet back up with DGF, see some friends and old colleagues in the Bay, then spend the rest of June/July hiking, backpacking, and seeing friends (and forumites :) ) up and down the west coast. I won't have my computer with me (which I negotiated keeping as part of my severance, by the way). August I'm housesitting the family land, and am debating between focusing on a woodworking project or building a walipini.

By September the smoke will probably be bad, so we'll head east, possibly NM/CO or even MI. My notion is to find folks running homesteads or tiny farm situations who will be happy to put us up in exchange for work (like @7wb5). Free or discount shelter, some food, hanging out with fun new weird people, and time spent learning skills that I've always been interested in in beautiful parts of the country. DGF already found a friend of a friend running a permaculture farm in southern Spain who we might do the same thing with next year on our trip.

By mid to late Fall I want to return to the shipping container and focus on climbing for a bit and sort of finish that build off. I'm honestly not real sure what my intentions are for that thing anymore - I don't know how much time I'm going to wind up spending there ultimately. I'm not worrying about it, basically letting it go for the moment.

In the meantime, my intent is to say "no" to any activity that would have "make money" as the zeroth-order goal, and that furthermore doesn't have 0th and 1st order goals that are strongly in alignment with my unfolding vision for the rest of my life. More on that later.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by mountainFrugal »

+1 on Becoming a supple leopard. That book is so good for recovery and prevention. I like the doors on the rig!

Western Red Cedar
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Western Red Cedar »

Glad to hear you are healing up. I dig the air filter animation - it reminds me of something I would have seen while living in Seoul.

I could barely get off the couch after my 2nd Covid shot. Pretty impressed you were out bagging summits the next day. Feel free to PM me if you're in the PNW in the next couple months and want to drag my ass up Mt. Adams, Rainier, Hood, or elsewhere. I'd be happy to show you some ideal boondocking spots away from the masses if you are in my neck of the woods.

RoamingFrancis
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by RoamingFrancis »

Hope to run into you soon :)

Jin+Guice
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Jin+Guice »

We are in very similar places. For me it's very difficult to figure out what I actually like to do at all times. So many times halfway through a thing I want to just stop. For me, it's always a balancing act between being lazy/ flakey and also my propensity to just power through things that are terrible. This also brings up questions of who "you" are and why "you" "like" to do some things and not others.

I also really like working 8-16 hours a week doing just about anything that involves other people where I am not in total control of/ my ego is not (very) tied to the outcome. Ideally this is mentally/ physically/ socially stimulating and just plain fun in someway, but that is really secondary to just doing something. The easiest way I've found to do this is in some sort of formal job, although well structured volunteering could also work.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

[quote="Western Red Cedar" post_id=244312 time=1622682864 user_id=7327
[/quote]

I will definitely hit you up if/when we get to your neck of the woods, I’d love that.



DGF and I are reunited again, after being mostly in different locations since March. We’re in this awkward space of being rootless and ungrounded, and not liking it very much, but also not seeing any obvious less bad options for where and how to settle down for a little bit. Serenity isn’t big enough for the both of us.

She’s from the midwest, I’m from California. Most of both of our friends are on the West Coast. California is on fire and full of smoke half the year, and prices for everything is insane. Michigan is cold and depressing half the year. Staying at our respective parent’s places isn’t ideal, although it continues to be tempting because there is acreage at both locations. Our friends are starting to slowly scatter, because none of them are super wealthy and so if you wanna buy a house and start doing adult shit, you have to go somewhere else. Because Covid, the boondocking spots are starting to fill up, crowd out, and many are getting shut down. A lot of my van life and dirtbag friends are coming in off the road because it’s getting to be a bit much out there and the trend is “worse”.

We’re trying to think about where to find a place (or two) to settle down considering the following variables:
.Location to friends and family (mostly west coast, some MI).
.Fire and smoke proximity
.Able to have a garden/grow things
.Not horribly depressing in the winter
.Not heinously expensive (including property taxes)
.Ideally doesn’t lock us in to owning a car
.Not a city
.Climate catastrophe impacts (e.g. extreme drought, also climate induced mass migrations / likelihood of disaster contributed civil violence)
.Cool stuff to do nearby
.Local culture
.Not an “undiscovered gem”, which would lead the place to get blown out shortly after our arrival like many of the other places we’ve lived. Also, I don’t want to be “one of those people” who is part of the visible demographic shift that “ruins” places. Although, my ancestors were okies, so maybe it’s just destiny/inevitable?

It feels like every time we feed these variables into our search, the result is “zero search results, try broadening results parameters”.

The only thing that seems like it will work is the “do work trade/internships/etc at permaculture homesteads until you find one you vibe with and decide to stay” option. Which is what we intend to do starting in ~September, and then continue that theme as we travel overseas next year. We’ve been thinking that we need to get our own house/land, but maybe we just need to find someone else’s land that we like and are welcome. We can’t really get started on that for a couple months because of some obligations I have.

A dynamic here is also DGFs HSP (highly sensitive person) ENFP personality means that its incredibly difficult for her to anticipate whether any given option is going to be a good fit, and if it *isn’t* a good fit, she gets real sad and overwhelmed. She has to go actually do it and see if she likes it or not. I accept that, but it’s also fatiguing, and makes me feel like all of my efforts at strategery and planning and logistics are useless. It *feels* like everything I’ve proposed for us has been a failure, and so I’m jaded about putting a ton of effort into further planning because it’s just going to get shot down anyways. But she’s incapable of doing any actual planning for us, so if we’re going to do anything it’s up to me to figure something out to try. The resulting dynamic feels like “Axel comes up with plans, and DGF tries them and doesn’t like/can’t handle them and so we abandon those plans and find something temporary and then the cycle repeats”.

Maybe we’re just going through a long period of learning and experimentation, but honestly it isn’t terribly fun. The unsettledness consumes a fair amount of our attention. We’re not actually necessarily *trying* to be nomads at this point, we just can’t find a place that’s agreeable to stick to. I suspect that if we can adjust our attitudes towards our lives we could make it fun, but for whatever reason we’re finding that state elusive. A big part of that is DGW doesn’t handle being ungrounded well, and trying to figure out how to resolve the situation consumes a lot of my INTJ mind. And the feeling that I’m just spinning my wheels when I could be making progress in my life is frustrating.

/rant

I’ve been hanging out with friends and acquaintances a fair amount this past week. I had a realization last night, walking home with a couple slices of pizza wrapped in tin foil in my hand, the leftovers from a meal out that we were treated to by somewhat wealthy older friends. “yields from social capital” is sort of like “dumpster diving your friends”. Some of my friends are entirely comfortable living in such a way that throws off a fair amount of “waste”. They value their time so much that they can’t be arsed to cook, keep leftovers, or otherwise employ their attention in order to run their lives efficiently. The inefficiency of their lives throws off a certain amount of “waste”, which in some instances looks like the two slices of pizza I’m about to eat for breakfast.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Jin+Guice »

I think what you're experiencing with your gf is the difference between someone who interacts with the world primarily through emotion and feeling and someone who interacts with the world primarily through logic and thinking. I have similar struggles with my girlfriends as well.

Actually this is sort of similar to a discussion you and I had about why I don't like sexual dichotomy theory. The cycle you described is why it seems unbalanced/ like the "masculine energy" gets the short end of the stick in sexual dichotomy theory. My solution after reading about sexual dichotomy theory was to decide that sometimes I am the manic pixie dream girl. Instead of leaning into your logical side to balance out someone else's emotional side, lean into your emotional side to draw out the logical side of the other person. If you've chosen an emotional person who would not be consistently described as a "hot mess," this should work. This should also benefit you as you'll be able to gain insight into yourself. Maybe you've been putting up with places that don't feel quite that good in the name of some concrete goal, but is that what you actually want? The emotional person is probably also frustrated by your constant logic and will enjoy the empathy to their way of being.

Jacob also said something like "No control without responsibility and no responsibility without control," which is harder to implement than it sounds, but I have found very useful in dealing with scenarios where I am the "responsible"/ thinking one and I feel the resentment of my plans falling apart starting to build.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by mountainFrugal »

Have you tried weighting/ranking your list of ideal characteristics of a place to live? Expanding on @Jin+Guice... you could also weight how a place feels when you visit. If that is important for how DGF is going to experience a place, then it should be weighted/prioritized more. If I understand correctly you are more or less mobile with serenity so you could prototype places that you have not visited to expand your list. Spending time in a place gives you way more information than an abstract list. Also, spending time in different parts of the year is important if that is possible. This is exactly the same exercise that my partner and I did and found there is no place that is perfect given our criteria, but once ranked it became easier. We also found that every place has it's own nuanced version of what an "ideal" might be. Once you have a general list of somewhat "ideal" places that are ballparked with what you both want, then go in from the bottom of your list. What bad part(s) can we live with?

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

JnG, when you first mentioned “be the manic pixie dream girl” I thought you were on one, but I’m starting to understand the wisdom in it now. Your post made a lot of sense to me.

In a sense I’ve started to do that - I recently told her “I’m not doing any plans this summer, because you just destroy them and I need a break” (I said it nicely though). But I could stand to channel more MPDG rather than burnt out bitter guy. It does consistent maintenence - my role for so long has been Mr Strategy and Logistics, it’s difficult for her to remember I’m not planning anything, and takes effort on my end to relax into no-plan.

mF, we’ve done the decision matrix before to a certain extent and all your practices are sound. The wrinkle is that there are multiple dimensions to it, with each dimension having a large set of variables. The “where to live” dimension sits below the “how to live” dimension, which includes variables like homestead ourselves, in someone else’s project, nomad more, etc. Each how to live variable sits on top of its own where to live matrix.

For now, I think our best course of action is to continue to wander with a focus on low cost experiments that generate more information. “Settling” in a place for a month at a time during this process will provide enough temporary stability to keep us sane and happy, I think.

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