The Education of Axel Heyst

[Jin+Guice]

Yooooo,

Cool charts man. I don't want to hate on anyone else's charts (serious chart game on this motherfucker), but it's cool to see some charts that are about ERE stuff other than money.

The discussion about doing vs. being in BSOG's journal got me thinking that I probably need to chill a little bit on my post-quitting plans.

We're all nerds and nerds like to plan. Planning is cool but it is also time consuming. I consider planning/ charting like budgeting. It's helpful for insight at a certain level, but eventually I like to internalize the important stuff. Budgeting is cool, but (for me at least) it leads to inefficiencies as I spend the entire budget when I don't need to, and also end up not spending to stay within the budget when I should have splurged (applicable to any concept, not just money).


You are probably less lazy than me, but as the laziness representative for the forum, I want to remind you that it's ok to chill out and be lazy. These high functioning INTJ SOBs will slaughter you on renaissance skills every time. Sometimes it's ok to just get high and look at the moon through binoculars because it feels good. Unless you are an INTJ, in which case you have to mail your binoculars to me once you've finished categorizing every bird in the desert.

I feel like society has been systematically destroyed by turning People/Citizens in to Consumers... we all know the rant. But as much as I withdraw, I secede from the human experience. This is a core driver of my (fuzzy, vague, grasping) vision for the/my future - how to find, cultivate, participate in society in a way that is rich, meaningful, human...

One thing that's nice about this movement is it provides suggestions towards action for actual solutions. Some might even say it's what lead me to participate.... I've been privy to the discussions of so many "outsider" groups that complain about other people while mostly furthering the problems they complain about. They have different color shoes or some other signal so OBVIOUSLY THEY ARE NOT PART OF THE PROBLEM. They want everyone else to change first.

A few years ago a musician I was gigging with turned me onto the transition movement. One day when we were discussing the book we read about it he said "it's probably the sort of thing where if you want to get 5 people involved, it'll go pretty well, but if you want everyone to do it, it'll probably go pretty badly."

@RJ likes to point out that all problems are business opportunities.

If you acknowledge that you aren't going to save the world and other people will always do what they want, it's pretty easy to live "outside" of society while still participating. It mostly requires not freaking out when other people do shit that you think is harmful/ wasteful. It requires cognitive dissonance, but you're still wearing shoes so...

Tl;dr: The perfect is the enemy of the good when it comes to fringe outsider movements. Local> Global when it comes to your influence.

[classical_Liberal]

I don't want to hate on anyone else's charts (serious chart game on this motherfucker), but it's cool to see some charts that are about ERE stuff other than money.

I learned more in the creation process of this chart than I do from the final product.

[RoamingFrancis]

This chart made me chuckle. If I knew how to make charts, I'd make a chart showing my chuckles per chart.

[mooretrees]

Ha ha ha!!! Best chart out there yet. Better than each person's chart marking: retire in SE Asia, retire in lcol usa, and so on....I mostly can't look too closely at charts, my eyes get blurry, but that chart above is hilarious.

[AxelHeyst]

Hahahaha good one @cL. I can see you're adjusting to having abundant free time again well.

Sometimes it's ok to just get high and look at the moon through binoculars because it feels good.

I love that. I'm going to write it down and put it somewhere I can see it.

--/--

Chart Trigger Warning!!

DW and I were chatting about "where to be, when". We have this conversation a lot, since we both have rigs and can kinda be wherever. We have friends or family with land where we are welcome in the West and the Midwest. And it seems we can't stand to be in one spot for more than 3 months no matter what we Plan.

We got the notion to intentionally go to a different moochdock location every 3 months or so, be useful by helping with gardening, construction, whatever the enterprise is there, and then move with the seasons or approximately. We like the idea of having multiple locations where we're welcome and have significant sweat equity invested. And we have a somewhat vague notion of finding some winter hidey-hole with decent weather, and that could be the season for increasing side-hustle stuff.

My Phase 1 is right now, "be a wage slave". Phase 2 is decompress/de-stress from work, ~6 months. Phase 3 is:

[Smashter]

Loving your journal Axel Heyst, I just caught up. Something you said a few pages ago while discussing how the pain of working subsides over time really hit me:

The most worrisome aspect of this is that it's been hurting less as the years go by and I just normalize to it. I think I'm approaching a point of no return.

I worry about that too. I want to try to live my best life, not become a fearful slave to inertia. I don’t want to settle for something just because it has become normalized over time.

My dad has been a lawyer for 35 years but is deeply in debt and still lives paycheck to paycheck because of awful financial decisions, a divorce and a typical consumerist lifestyle.

The other day he told me, “I am so sick of practicing law. I’d like nothing more than to stop. But it pays the bills.”

He now has a completely bonkers side business idea that he’s hellbent on trying because he’s convinced that it will make him rich and he’ll be able to retire from the law.

Even though it’s a plan that will 100% fail (just one of the hurdles is that it requires significant and unlikely changes to federal law — his plan is to pray on it), I love hearing him talk about it! He becomes full of a passion he never has when discussing his day job.

I wonder how much happier he’d be if he’d organized his life a little differently when he was younger so that he could have pursued the stuff he really cared about.

[jacob]

@Smashter - You dad sounds like a candidate for reading viewtopic.php?t=8722

[Smashter]

@Jacob good idea, thanks. That could be a way to get him thinking about actual businesses that use his real skillset.

[RoamingFrancis]

I love your graphs and charts - how do you make them?

Regarding the quote Smashter brought up, I feel I'm normalizing "normal life" too. Now I'm putting nearly all my energy towards my degree and while I'm learning, I don't want this phase of my life to last super long. I can hear the clock ticking. I'm grateful to have discovered ERE and meditation when I was young.

[AxelHeyst]

I wonder how much happier he’d be if he’d organized his life a little differently when he was younger so that he could have pursued the stuff he really cared about.

Hey @smash, thanks for stopping by. And thanks for sharing the story about your dad, stories like that (and the positive stories like the recently bumped thread by OldPro) really drive this stuff home in ways no chart can capture.

I feel fortunate that I had my dads example when I was young. He burned out on the Silicon Valley hustle in the late 90’s and we moved to a chunk of off grid desert property, partly because he realized he was totally missing his family and it wasn’t worth it etc. It was too late for him to reverse his workaholism, which he applies to everything in life, but the example he set of a) unhappy with status quo, > b) do something kinda insane helped prep me for making a change earlier in mine. For that I’m very grateful.

[AxelHeyst]

I love your graphs and charts -how do you make them?

Excel. You could use g sheets or Libra or whatever, I only use basic features that any spreadsheet tool has. I’ve just spent so many thousands of hours in my profession building engineering simulations, reports, scripts, Gantt charts, project management documents, you name it, I’ve probably built it in excel. So it’s just second nature at this point to develop my thinking using spreadsheets.

[RoamingFrancis]

Shukron

[AxelHeyst]

Update on The Plan
The main thing holding me back from quitting right now is the fact that I hired a guy in January, and if I just bail he'll be screwed. So my plan to exit ASAP and not screw him over, is to train him up to be able to take over my job when I leave. He's actually stoked on it (after he got over his shock), he's always wanted to run a team like this but figured it was 10 years or so in the future. Surprise!!

I figure I can train him up in 3-4 months. Other circumstances might push that a couple more months. So call it end of the year.

Having the conversation with him, and getting the timeframe nailed down a little more, really took a load off. First, it made it real. Second, I know what I have to do - now that I have his buy-in, it's just a matter of execution. Having been made more real, it's made my job easier to handle. I say "no" to stuff, and I say "I know you said this was due on Friday, but that's insane, so you're going to get it next week sometime". And etc.

I still feel like my life is in deferral. I don't have enough time to destress fully and recharge, but I'm also not amped on work projects, so my time feels empty.

It's entirely possible I won't have to wait that long - round one of C19 layoffs was last week, and it was a bloodbath. I (or my guy) could be out in round 2. One can hope.

Other updates
Some freelance work landed in my lap. Even though it's on top of my real work, I'm enjoying it, and it's making me feel more secure about being able to scrounge a semiERE income.

DW continues to kill it with her business selling mostly masks. As long as her income keeps up, I'm not supporting her any more. We need to sort out splitting costs for food.

I go back and forth in my head whether or not it's insane to quit a good paying job in these troubled economic times. Perhaps I should stick it out another 3-4 years and trad FIRE? But I always talk myself back in to semiERE with the following logic: if semiERE doesn't work, it's because the economy is so effed, trad FIRE probably wouldn't keep me safe either. Better in either case to quit asap and "liberate a significant amount of free time to reskill yourself" (JLF, blog post about collapse). If it's Mad Max out there, I'll be somewhat better suited with a few years of upskilling under my belt. If the economy does a V or a U, all good, I can do freelance and follow the semiERE script while continuing my project of becoming the most interesting and broadly competent human I know.

Depending on when I quit/get quitted, I'll have ~5-10 years FU saved up.

I'm reading Survival+. Whoa. Connected a lot of dots for me I hadn't made the connection before. Excellent motivation to GTFO out of this insane asylum of a society.

My truck broke the other day. I was stoked at the opportunity to diagnose and fix the problem myself, as I've always paid a shop to deal with it. I bought an OBD scanner to help with diagnosing. Nope. Problem was battery terminal corrosion causing the computer to fritz and refuse to allow idle. #facepalm

[horsewoman]

As a long-time "Semi-early-retiree" I highly recommend going that route. It is hard to imagine, when one works full-time, how less money one needs if one can substitute enough time to throw on problems and general lifestyle design. The only thing that is problematic in the US is health care, do you have this covered? You probably wrote about that up-thread, but I cannot recall.

[classical_Liberal]

Don't let your employer dictate when or how you jump off into semi-ERE. This is the deep seeded salaryman controlling you. When you're ready, go!

I realize you've been there awhile and feel some sense of duty, but they will drop you like a bad habit anytime it suits them. They do not care about you. You are in no way obligated to make sure the transition goes well for them. If you are the only person on staff that can possibly do your job, then you have the power to dictate the terms of your continued employment(so do that), until they find a suitable replacement. If you are not, then you shouldn't feel obligated to wrap things up into a nice box for them, that's the next persons job. It's not personal, only business, which is what they said to all the people they laid off recently who needed the job to feed their families.

[RoamingFrancis]

Go for the Semi ERE! You got this!

[AxelHeyst]

Thanks for the comments!

Two clarifications: I have fully made the decision to go semiERE. This is just my post-decision second-guessing and mulling it over / justification / rationalization. But I appreciate the encouragement.

Second: I feel no obligation to the company. I’ve given way more value than I’ve received. I feel an obligation to my new guy. It was entirely my decision to hire him, and I hired him away from a company - he wasn’t looking at the time. If I quit now, he’d almost certainly be laid off too. And no one is hiring people with his skill set right now. And he’s got another kid coming.

Long story short, I told him five months ago that I had a five year plan, there was security, etc. And I changed my story. My sense of integrity demands that the way I quit doesn’t fuck his life up.

I understand I could take a “it’s just business” approach to his situation, but to me that would be clearly unethical at a human to human level. If my actions caused him hardship, I’d regret that shit the rest of my life. My path to freedom cannot involve stepping on other people to get there, even if it takes longer.

[classical_Liberal]

My sense of integrity demands that the way I quit doesn’t fuck his life up.

I grok this. You're a good man.

[AxelHeyst]

As a long-time "Semi-early-retiree" I highly recommend going that route. It is hard to imagine, when one works full-time, how less money one needs if one can substitute enough time to throw on problems and general lifestyle design. The only thing that is problematic in the US is health care, do you have this covered? You probably wrote about that up-thread, but I cannot recall.

I don’t have it figured out, but I plan on investing a significant amount of time in to health coverage as well as health care strategies. My current notion is “bare bones catastrophic coverage + tourism for specialist preventative care stuff (Mexico) + far above average DIY preventative health care / heal thy y lifestyle”, but that’s with a tiny bit of knowledge and time invested to date. I’m just banking on the fact that others have figured it out, so I will be able to as well. I am not planning on going without health insurance.

[classical_Liberal]

I don’t have it figured out, but I plan on investing a significant amount of time in to health coverage as well as health care strategies.

If you want help here, I've done a bunch of research on this plus personal achedotal stuff, feel free to PM me.