What's the Point?
All of us around here ostensibly are on the same page that ~ERE is neat and all, but when you drill down and start getting in to specifics, we're all a bunch of individuals with our own drives, worldviews, and values, so of course ERE "means" something at least a little different to each of us.
Over the past year or so, I've come across various forumites asking the question "I'm not sure why I'd even want to go from WL 5 to 6, or 6 to 7, or whatever?" or in the Wheaton thread, JnG asking what the actual point of the table is.
The questions at first befuddled me, because "duh", but then I realized I didn't have a better articulation of why one would want to progress up the WLs than "duh", which is a sign I've got some unpacking to do and the questions are very valid.
I didn't have a well thought out argument on hand if someone were to accuse me of being a mindless ladder-climber, just replacing corporate/consumer ambition with "ERE ambition", whatever that means. In other words, if my instinctual perception that WL7 is more desirable than WL6 only boils down to a socially-programmed success and ambition drive and an ability to calculate that 7>6, then I've got a problem.
This post is my first real attempt to unpack my motivations and reasons for wanting to level up my ERE game beyond securing the basics of financial security, broad skills, and time autonomy. It's not necessarily an attempt to convince anyone else of anything, but rather an attempt to convince myself that my thought process and motivations are solid - they don't have some flaw, incorrect thinking, or unhealthy emotional baggage that's corrupting my drive.
"If it is not at first manifestly difficult, then there is no hope for it."
-I've lost the accreditation to this quote
I have an instinctual feeling that if something is easy to understand, it has little power to impact my life. Potential energy is a good metaphor here. If the delta_E between me and some other state is very low, well, energetically, we're basically at the same state. It seems to me that when it comes to matters of understanding, how much cognitive work it will take me to "get" it is an indication of the delta_E between my current state and my potential future state once I've internalized the matter of understanding. I use "how easy is this to understand?" as a proxy for delta_E.
For example, a long time ago, the idea that the sort of people I wanted to date would react favorably if I shared my feelings with them was easy to grasp. Simple, thanks internet! But it didn't change my life very much (turns out there's more to healthy relationships than just emotion-vomiting on cue). It was a tiny move in position from where I already was - delta_E was very low. On the other hand, fully internalizing the concept of sexual polarity (without making the common mistake of falling into misogyny/patronism) was a big cognitive lift for me, it took (/is taking) years. But my relationships are immeasurably better now because of this work. Big delta_E.
So I tend to be unimpressed when people claim their ideas, methods, or systems won't take much work to grok, or if I perceive that whatever they're talking about is something I basically already get. "Well then what good is it?" I think. I assume that it will at best move the needle of my life only a little bit.
I think this explains my relationship to MMM - I found his site years ago, but my reaction was essentially "don't spend much, index invest, okay that seems pretty easy, whatever." It's to my own detriment that I didn't take his advice/methods more seriously, but the way he made his ideas seem simple and easy was in a way a turnoff to me, because I unconsciously assumed there wasn't much depth there, not enough meat to be worth my time. The energetic end state of MMM wasn't very far away from my current energetic state, or so I felt. (To his credit, the delta_E between Axel_2015 and Axel_MMM would have been significant, but the way he presented it made me assume it wasn't - that I was basically doing all right by just not having a car or whatever.)
Contrast that with the ERE book, which has derivatives in the section about skill acquisition. That got my attention. Clearly there's some meat here. The potential delta_E was obviously huge. The Wheaton table was just more proof. I'm at best a WL3 (when I got here), and it goes to 8 and beyond? I'm struggling to wrap my head around L5? Alright awesome, this shit is going to take me places. I can't articulate what that place is going to look like, because it's so far away from where I'm at now, but I'm going to trust the process.
It's sort of like the idea of going for a bike ride around your neighborhood versus bikepacking to another hemisphere. If you're basically cool with where you're at, maybe you just want to "stay fit", going through the misery of biking to Patagonia is insane. But if your goal is to *become a different person* (and not out of a sense of self-hate but out of a sense of exploration, curiosity, self-love, etc), then a spin around the block just isn't going to cut it. You understand that transformation at that scale requires big effort, commitment, risk, and work.
This article from Scott Young is relevant.
Okay, but why ERE specifically?
That all hopefully explains my basic attraction to the obvious depth of ERE. But lots of things require effort to learn, what specifically about ERE captured my imagination? This is where I'm getting into more speculation, trying to figure out and articulate my own motivations as accurately as possible.
In a single phrase, I think it comes down to value alignment. ERE hit so many chords in myself, so perfectly, so simultaneously, that it didn't take much (any?) conscious work to conclude that this was something worth investing effort in to. And that obvious and instantaneous value alignment was such an intuitive thing, it explains why it can be difficult for me to articulate it, and why it's a little baffling to me when people question WHY they'd want to level up the Wheaton table. It *feels* self-evident to me, and I think that's because the explicit AND implicit values of ERE are in a creepy-aligned harmony with the values I already had when I read it. I didn't have to expend any effort to conform my worldview to get on board, I was able to jump straight in to execution and logistics.
In other words, when it came down to the philosophy and "why" of ERE, I was not sitting there going "oh, huh, I'd never thought of it like that before, I'm going to have to go on a long walk and think it over", I was going 'OH MY GOD THIS DUDE GETS IT and is articulating it in a way more precise and thorough way than I ever could, but This is clearly It right here."
If I just make a list of the values:
- Autonomy/Agency
- Competence/Usefulness
- Security/Firm stance
- Adaptability/Resilience
...It isn't very revelatory. Single words rarely are. It's the connection between them.
I desire autonomy/agency because who doesn't love freedom, but also because I'm an Explorer (in the Bartle player taxonomy). But take that and combine it with the value of competence/usefulness, and we have the idea that I require the Agency as a prerequisite to explore what areas I can most impactfuly apply my Competence at, and be a useful human being in service to others. This is both a form of creative self-expression, and an outward focus on helping other people (thanks to JnG for beating the "social skills" drum, as well as @RoamingFrancis' concept of The Renaissance Bodhisattva). The Competence/Usefulness value is deeply rooted in my understanding of the metacrises of climate change, peak resources, economic and political inequality, and ecological destruction, and wanting to do something about it or at minimum stop contributing to them. More on that in a second.
The values of security/firm stance give me a locus of power from which I can execute my usefulness - if I'm always wrapped up in worry about where I'm going to get money, food, shelter, resources, my ability to apply Usefulness in the world will be limited. Adaptability/Resilience is sort of taking the concept of Security/Firm Stance and integrating it over time - it is the ability to dynamically hold a firm stance through unfolding circumstances and changing environment. Very Boydian.
That discussion of values does an okay job of explaining the resonance of ERE, but it's only a couple layers deep. It doesn't get into the mud of my psyche, it doesn't totally explain why I've been putting a grad-school level of effort into ERE for the past 16 months. We need to go back to what I think my Competence is *for*, the metacrises, and my history with it, because that's where we get at my sense of meaning-making.
My Hobby: Staring into the Abyss
This is a good point to quote 7 from the Wheaton table thread:
7Wannabe5 wrote: ↑Wed Apr 14, 2021 6:09 am
@Ego: Good insight. I think what had me confused is that although it makes eminent sense to view 1Jacob as a measure or rough descriptor on the ERE Wheaton Scale, it may also serve as a target in a game some of us are playing in order to distract ourselves from our relatively recently acquired knowledge of the high grim likelihood that the planet is going to burn in spite of our futile efforts.
This relates to something I once learned from a wise old female INFP, which is that INFPs and INTJs and bordering types (artists and scientists on the enneagram) gain energy towards their purpose through the process of “staring into the abyss”, but ENTPs lose energy through this process.
I think the world is pretty messed up. I'm not sure if I'm a particularly sensitive person, or what, but going back to even my teenage years I perceived society as being corrupt, unfair, wretched, dysfunctional. Dysfunctional is actually probably the best word for it. I rarely assign blame to people for the messed-up-edness of the world, I don't think there are evil cabals of people scheming how to mess things up for everyone else, I just see systems that aren't serving their end goals well, and no one fixing them well enough. I perceive misaligned incentives, inequitable reward and punishment dynamics, "blind spots" (e.g. economic externalities), functions that solve one problem at the expense of another, and systems that simply accrete so much complexity that the maintenance cost exceeds the value they provide. Dysfunction drives me nuts. Dysfunction that benefits some and screws over others pisses me off. It's very difficult for me to shrug and go on with my life. I have to DO something about it (which, yes, is a potentially disastrous impulse in the naively righteous, which is something I'm very aware of, and why I have such a focus on true Competence and accurate perception, because a shotgun blast of altruistic feelings is likely to make things worse).
As a teen and early 20's, I didn't have the theory to describe how I felt in those terms. I was mostly just angry. I'd go on loosely themed internet dives and learn about fucked up government programs (mkultra, project plowshare, bikini atoll fallout, the war on black peo^H^H^H^H^H^drugs, native american sterilization and reeducation programs, the use of international fiscal policy to exert dominance over small foreign states, the origins of industrial education (e.g. purpose to create controllable factory workers), propaganda and its relationship to marketing and advertising, the list goes on. (oh right, I consumed a lot of critiques of capitalism as well, all the way from Marx to John Bellamy Foster and Murray Bookchin.) And all that was before diving in to climate change and peak oil a few years later, at 21-22. As I left high school (04), a lot of my friends were enlisting and going over to Iraq/Afghanistan (coming back a few years later with PTSD and/or alcoholism). As I left college (09), the economic prospects for a lot of peers was pretty shit.
So, that's all to say that I had a predisposition I suppose to learning about the dysfunctions of society, and then holding all of those things in my head. To the extent that I "let go" of any of those things, I think mostly just internalized a deep sense that the way the world is organized is insanely wrong. That might be the engineer mindset, to seek out problems to solve. Unlike a lot of friends, who weren't that interested in any of these topics and wanted to spend their attention on happy and/or distracting things, I felt a drive to dive in and soak it all up. Per @7's friend's insight about INTJ's drawing meaning/purpose from "staring in to the abyss", this proclivity might be a prime source of power for me.
One more relevant dynamic I is how I was raised. I was homeschooled k-12 up in a mountain pass with no one around. A big reason my parents chose to do that is because they simply figured they could do a better job at educating us than the public schools could. The arguments that schools have some structural dysfunctions, such as teaching to the lowest common denominator and over-exposure to peer-group social dynamics, convinced them to do their own thing. The result (on top of our perception as Born Again Christians that we were a religious minority in a sea of sin) was a suspicion of any large/public institution. The story I was raised with was "keep your eyes out any authority/institution that claims to have your interests at heart - it's probably kinda effed." So I did keep my eyes out for that, and I did see dysfunctional, untrustworthy institutions everywhere.
To summarize, by the time I was in my early 20's, I had
- a built-in general distrust of society's systems,
- I'd spent an ungodly amount of time learning about the messy back-room dysfunctions and atrocities of most of the institutions I had any relationship to, and
- I was pretty sure that due to climate change, peak oil/everything, and ecological destruction, the whole clattering mess was in the process of hurling itself off a cliff.
That left a pretty big question mark of how *I* out to behave. I've written my story out before - I got a career in sustainability, but I was pretty primed to question "wait, what is mainstream sustainability *for*? Because if the whole point of this sustainability business is to preserve our current arrangement of institutions, I'm not down with that."
I got to a point where I'd exhausted all of the options that mainstream society put on the menu for "how to respond to a world in crisis".
As JMG says,
jmg wrote:Social elites that are secure in their power make a point of providing their members with a range of venues for ineffective dissidence. It’s a way to let them blow off steam and feel better about their status as cogs in the machinery of power.
(That essay is gold and relevant to most ERE's, by the way)
I found myself frustrated, having beat my head against the wall for over a decade trying to figure out my place in the world, trying to figure out what to do with this drive to help, or at least to not hurt, others, that was being diffused or questioned at every turn.
Point is, I was pretty primed for the allegory of the Cave to make intuitive sense to me. I knew the shadows were shadows, and I knew the shadowmasters were a bunch of assholes I wanted nothing to do with, for a long time. I just didn't really know how to crawl out of the cave myself.
I keep thinking of that picture that Jacob's DW painted:
I feel like I spent a solid decade plus being that figure on hands and knees in the dark tunnel, bumping around the stalactites and stepping in bat poop, sometimes getting turned around and getting a bit closer to the fire and the shadows before going "NOPE, fuck that shit, I'd rather wander these dark caverns forever than go back to that".
And then there's ERE, like a guide with a headlamp coming up on me going "um, you know the way out's that way, right? It's like, right over there. Two lefts, go straight through the three-way, and you're out."
Even just writing this out is emotionally powerful for me. Wandering in the dark alone for a decade will do that to you.
---
After all those words, I'm not sure if I've convinced myself that my relationship to ERE is 100%
healthy. But it feels
hopeful. It feels like something that is moving me off of the plateau that I was stuck at.