The Education of Axel Heyst

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Qazwer
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Qazwer »

ACT (see Stephen Hayes) makes a big deal of goals vs values - if you live your life towards goals then they can become hollow on reaching them - if you live your life trying to accomplish things according to what you value than you never reach that let down of a falsely important goal
Part of it could be the striving as you mention - part of it could also just be aiming for goals whose seeking is great but obtaining never matches the hope

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

theanimal wrote:
Mon Apr 26, 2021 4:56 pm
I've been keto for 5 years or so and eat for $150/mo.
Oh nice, thanks for the info, that's inspiring.

I don't buy meat that was grain fed (carbon footprint), or if I am suspicious that it lived its whole life in a cage it couldn't actually fit in/was basically miserable. The only stuff I've been able to find that satisfies those criteria is 100% grassfed ground beef, and I haven't put in the effort for getting meat from local rancher etc. I buy eggs from a neighbor with chickens in their backyard who get fed and petted daily by six year olds.

white belt
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by white belt »

Good to hear you are feeling better. It sounds like you had quite a few variables change (sleep, stress, sunlight, food composition), so I’d say it’s hard to pinpoint if the change is all the result of cutting out grains. Like you said, bloodwork would be the only way to know for sure but it’s good you are listening to your body and keeping track of things.

I ate Paleo for 5ish years. Now I track macronutrients because I’ve been doing some body recomposition in combination with my weightlifting/powerlifting hobby. The basic ideas are the same in that I don’t eat processed foods, get plenty of protein, lots of vegetables, but I do also eat grains and gluten (I don’t feel any different eating it as long as my protein/carbs/fat are dialed in). I also likely have genetic predisposition for high cholesterol and possibly atherosclerosis, so I don’t think eating high fat would be a smart thing for me to do.

I think Alphaville and I discussed it in one of the threads, but here are your options if you’re trying to eat high protein while still being “eco” and budget friendly:

-if you are tolerant to lactose, then milk/yogurt is extremely high protein and low carbon footprint
-eggs are also low footprint
-freshwater fish if you can get them sourced locally (ideal world is you catch them yourself)
-soybeans (controversial I know, but literature reviews show no affect on testosterone level even for athletes who are getting over half of their protein from soy).

One touted benefit of pastured eggs and grassfed beef is they are high in omega 3, but you can replicate that relatively easy with fish oil, flax seed, etc.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Yes, completely agree that I'm going off "how I think I feel" and what's actually going on might be different that what I think - I'll just point out that more sunshine and less stress began a month ago. Then I switched off of (LOTS of) grains, and my energy and "testosterone" (as measured by subjective libido) went way up within 4 days, and then sleep issues began around day 5 (but daily energy remained high).

This is the 3rd time I've done this, and my typical experience is a "spike" of energy/"testosterone" lasting a couple weeks, and then it seems to level off at a higher-than-previous level. I also cease experiencing "bonks".

Another variable is that I've not been lifting heavy or exercising intensely for several months, due to taking it easy on my hernia. I'm sure that doesn't help with sensitivity to grains/high carbs. Put another way, I can see utilizing a big post workout meal of rice once I'm cleared to do so again, and my body being fine to metabolize it. This goes to your point about having macros dialed appropriately for lifting.

Thanks for the ideas on eco/frugal protein. Interesting - I'd bought into the "soybeans are estrogenating", but I'll have to take another look.

white belt
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by white belt »

This is my starting point for considerations about plant proteins vs animal proteins: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/veget ... n-athlete/

That site is a great resource if you really want to know what the body of scientific literature says about a specific topic related to strength training or exercise nutrition. In fact, I like it so much that I wish there were similar resources that dug into the academic literature for other topics I’m interested in.

Basically what we’re hinting at is something like a pesco or lacto-ovo vegetarian diet which should be suitable even for athletes. Things get more complicated if you want to go vegan.

Interesting insight about how you think your T levels might correlate with certain things. For me, I’ve found that sex drive isn’t the best indicator of T levels, because my sex drive tends to vary depending on how many attractive females I see/interact with on a daily basis. Maybe that’s just a thing with me. Maybe I don’t see as much variation because my T levels are just higher in general since I have nutrition, training, sleep, lifestyle etc all dialed in to maximize T levels.
Last edited by white belt on Mon Apr 26, 2021 11:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

white belt
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by white belt »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Mon Apr 26, 2021 8:57 pm
Yes, completely agree that I'm going off "how I think I feel" and what's actually going on might be different that what I think - I'll just point out that more sunshine and less stress began a month ago. Then I switched off of (LOTS of) grains, and my energy and "testosterone" (as measured by subjective libido) went way up within 4 days, and then sleep issues began around day 5 (but daily energy remained high).
I’d need more information to give a guess to what is causing the sleep issues. Higher T alone shouldn’t cause you sleep problems, but being in a caloric deficit might (although you’d probably feel hungry during the day as well). If you’re very low carb you might be using up your glycogen stores over those 4 days without restoring them, but again that’s also likely to make you feel a bit lethargic and hungry.

Do you eat more vegetables and fruits when you go grain-free? I wonder if your boost in energy is from increased micronutrients that you weren’t getting enough of on your grain diet. My other guess would be you’re eating more protein when you cut grains out.

Stasher
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Stasher »

Cool mindset to allow yourself to experience failures/problems and see how you overcome them. As I think of the current supply chain and shipping issues globally right now I would imagine the price of used shipping containers has sky rocketed.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

“white belt” wrote: For me, I’ve found that sex drive isn’t the best indicator of T levels, because my sex drive tends to vary depending on how many attractive females I see/interact with on a daily basis. Maybe that’s just a thing with me.
Well documented effect across species, Calvin Coolidge is associated with it due to joke he made about roosters with access to many hens. Do you also experience subjective rise in T levels in situations where you are competing with other men for scarce/desirable female or in situations where you take the lead/exhibit mastery?

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

My exposure to attractive females has been a consistent zero for the past two months, so, not a factor.

If I find myself in a situation where I'm competing with other men for scarce/desirable female, I fucked up somewhere. It doesn't happen often enough to supply data. ("If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn't plan your mission properly." Colonel David Hackworth")

Oh actually wait that happened last in winter 2018/2019. Yeah it felt great. I won.

Also yes to taking the lead/mastery. It can be a chicken or the egg sort of thing. Did I enter boss mode due to high test, or did I get high test because I exhibited boss behavior? Both, probably?

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Just curious. Before I retired from the field, one of my practices was to gift a man with testosterone by allowing him to take the lead. Also, there are ways to take advantage or redirect the flow of the Coolidge effect. Male on male competition or interaction still confuses me a bit when dealing with older men. It’s kind of like when you’re too old to still play basketball, you can still get testosterone rush from coaching. The kind of behavior that might cause a bar fight between two 20 year olds is just experienced as moderately arousing with two 60 year old males. However, there is also significant variation between individuals as with most things and it may also be related to cognitive maturity.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

On a day last week that happened to be my 35th birthday, I got a call from my mentor at work. My team was on The List (again). And I'd already played my ace (dropping to 8hrs/wk so my guy could stay on full time). Not much maneuvering room left.

I called my guy this Monday from a hotel room in LA, a couple hours after my surgery, and let him know this is our last week. During our chat, while he was balancing his infant in his arms and keeping track of his two-year-old, his wife walked by and mentioned she thought she might be pregnant.

He's going to be fine, he's extremely employable and has baller experience in at least three different industries that are all hiring right now, but the concentration of shitstorm for both of us was almost funny.

My mentor and a number of principals fought to keep us, but in the end the leadership was scrounging in the couch cushions to find anyone not directly billable, and the nature of my team is very much not billable. Could I have saved us? Yeah, maybe. If I'd known how thin the ice we were skating on actually was, I would have directed us differently the last 6 months. I was operating on rules that were about 9 months out of date, and it's on me that I hadn't hit "refresh" recently. In Boydian terms, my Orientation was mismatched from reality (my map was obsolete), and because I was at 8hrs/wk, our tempo was too slow to get inside adversary's decision loop. Our "opponent" (very loosely understood here) was making decisions more rapidly, with better orientation, while maintaining a level of opacity that I was unable to penetrate, and got inside our decision cycle. Advantage opponent, and we went down.

My feelings about the whole thing are complicated.
  • I feel like I let my guy down. If I'd played our cards differently, he'd still have a job.
  • This team wasn't just some team, it was *my* team. I mean, we weren't doing something that any other team anywhere does. The whole premise of what we were doing was a combinatorial idea I came up with, sold to leadership, and executed. The roots of this idea I can find in my journals back in 2010. This team was my expression of meaning-making, and how I was trying to impact the world. It wasn't just a job, not by a long shot.
  • The plot thickens. The seeds of the idea for this team, this work, were sown in a mind that thought differently about the world than I do now. Axel 2010 through 2015 wasn't as clear on *what* he was trying to save as 2021 Axel is. Between when I came up with this idea and now, I've gone through the whole Kubler-Ross cycle with respect to the metacrisis. At the beginning, I was trying to do my part to transform civilization -- decarbonize the built environment, end the commodification and mass production of ugly toxic schlock we pass off as buildings these days, and help avert the worst of climate catastrophe. Now... well, now it's not so simple. I'm not a doomer in the shallow sense of the world - I'm fucking not defeatist, I do believe in fighting the good fight even if the odds look impossible -- but I am very leery of getting tricked into fighting to save the very things that are the root cause of the destruction in the first place. I've found it more and more difficult to justify the projects we do. In short, I don't believe in the work anymore.
  • This lack of belief explains how I let Adversary get inside my observation-orientation-decision-action loop. I no longer cared. In Boydian terms, I collapsed at the Grand Strategic level - my unifying vision ceased to make meaning, my noble philosophy ceased to cohere. There's an argument that I wanted to be defeated, so that I could be freed to do the next thing. I hope that's not 100% true, because it implies a level of cowardice I'm not entirely comfortable with. I had 12 years of inertia to keep on the same approximate trajectory, and the addition of a dependent (a team), and I didn't see an honorable way out.
  • So, through all of that thick soup and mourning for, basically, the entire output of my life from 23-35, I *do* feel a remarkable lightness of being and freedom. Specifically, I feel free to explore how to achieve alignment between my actions and my views, something I haven't felt free to do in quite some time.
I have 6.2 years of FU cash, not counting the stuff I'm planning on selling in the next couple months (truck, topper, mtb, and some other stuff, which should add a year or two). Dividing my total NW by CoL, I have 25 years of runway. I'm assuming that's a gross overstatement of course, so it doesn't factor into my thinking explicitly, but it shall suffice to say I'm not in a rush. I'm getting a little severance (it's based on an 8hr week), and I'm not planning on claiming unemployment.

I'm not planning on getting another "job", ever. My loose idea is to see friends, think, read, write, and moto around for the summer. Come fall I'll execute on whatever specific plans I came up with between now and then, which I expect will look like freelance (efficient income generation based on my specialty), plus a couple of hustles aimed at generating diversified passive income. On my mind is the C^6 model and operating at levels 6 and 7, and the notion of employing best strategy. I have a lot going through my head on this topic, I'm sure I'll be thoughtdumping a lot here over the next few months.

Anyways, long story short, I'm about to discover if the difference between 20% and 0% is indeed greater than the difference between 100% and 20%.

Western Red Cedar
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Western Red Cedar »

I think you should look at this as a gift. You have been moving in this direction for some time anyway, and now your employer made the decision for you. It is unfortunate about your team, but a solid recommendation and marketable skills go a long way in this economy.

I hope you heal up quickly and wish you the best on your new adventures!

RoamingFrancis
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by RoamingFrancis »

Agreed on viewing this as a gift. You're about to reap the fruit of a lot of work and reflection. Excited to see where this takes you; you're at a very interesting transition point.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Gift - the perfect word which had eluded me until you said it, thanks WRC and RF.

Jin+Guice
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Jin+Guice »

The sales pitch on FIRE for me was freedom from doing work that I didn't find meaningful.

The reason I joined this forum was that I saw an opportunity to use the freedom from a monetized and commercialized existence to exercise the freedom to do something, anything, meaningful.

I think that it's lazy not to try and save humanity from itself and arrogant to think you'll actually succeed.

What ERE has meant to me is a framework to make my best effort to live in accordance with my values and a means to do so. That framework incorporates personal growth, allows for change of what is meaningful and allows me to pursue interests outside of things that directly try to "save the world." It allows me to lead a full life, which includes a lot of celebrating and enjoyment as well a context for mourning the full loss that comes from the dying world we were all born into.

ERE doesn't offer a full solution to the social and environmental problems we face. But, for me, it illuminates the full depth and scale of the problem. It offers a few steps that each of us can take to at least reduce our own personal harm while increasing our enjoyment of life and the joy of those close to us.

RoamingFrancis
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by RoamingFrancis »

Jin+Guice wrote:
Sat May 08, 2021 6:36 pm
I think that it's lazy not to try and save humanity from itself and arrogant to think you'll actually succeed.
This quote is gold! Thank you for sharing.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by mountainFrugal »

I also had a recent forced sabbatical/ER test run recently. I had been on the path long enough to have enough FU money buffer that I could treat it like a gift. I hope that you find a new equilibrium without your job. There is always work and now you can be more choosy. Perhaps you will come to the conclusion like I did that finding (or making) a job with all the aspects you like about working is a possibility. I had a few specific learning goals that were helpful to structure my day so I did not just "waste" it online. You might find that helpful as well.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Jin+Guice wrote:
Sat May 08, 2021 6:36 pm
Goodness. This post needs to be on a billboard somewhere, or maybe wheat-pasted all over every major downtown area in north america.

Small update: Friday was my last day of formal employment. On Monday, I got hooked up with a freelance project doing exactly the sort of thing I want to be doing with my life. A small thing, but it felt like a nice message from the universe saying "Everything's going to be juuuuuust fine".

RoamingFrancis
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by RoamingFrancis »

Congrats and good job. Luck favors the bold and persistent, and you've shown both qualities in your ERE journey so far.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by mountainFrugal »

Nice! Enjoy the freedom and setting your own hours.

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