The Education of Axel Heyst

[RoamingFrancis]

Definitely. My life after I fully or semi "retire" will likely look a lot like how my life looks now. I expect to gain more autonomy, control of my schedule, excuse myself from learning just to pass a test, but I think the deepest joys in life are already present.

I went "full hobo" for a while after I graduated high school, so I like to think that I can go back to that at any point and the only reason I'm going to school is for fun and intellectual stimulation (and because there are lots of attractive people in my age range ;D )

You're right; my process is building habits and frame of mind. It's hard for me to pick a point where I am on the Wheaton Scale because I think I understand at a slightly higher level than my reality reflects. I think I'd like to start using my journal for things that aren't specifically financial too - healthy habits, academic goals, etc. I am deriving a surprisingly large amount of fulfillment from documenting my life and sharing it with Internet strangers. I've always been allergic to social media, so I've never been able to use its advantages in keeping yourself publicly accountable. But a journal seems like a more in-depth, less thoughtless way to do that. It also doesn't require as much work or ego as a blog would

And I agree; you're not going to magically exist in eternal bliss once you hit your FIRE number. That's not how your mind works. The process of getting there, becoming more frugal, building healthy habits, etc will improve your overall quality of life, but ERE isn't a magic button for all your problems. It's fucking awesome, and it's the most robust roadmap for navigating the bullshit of modern capitalism that I've ever seen, but it's very possible to be rich and miserable.

[AxelHeyst]

I'd be very interested to hear more about your full hobo story, if you're willing to share. What made you decide to go full hobo? Did you ride trains / travel much? What areas of the country did you see? How are you different now vs. pre-hobo RoamingFrancis?

I'm endeavoring to assess my Wheaton level by actions, rather than notions I vigorously agree with. I agree with a lot of stuff I don't actually do in my life, so I'm trying to not kid myself on this one. e.g. I'm completely convinced that a SR of 75%+ is the way to go: until my actual SR is above 75% for substantially more than one month, I'm not going to tick that box in the Wheaton Self-Assessment Test.

I know myself well enough to know that I need to be vigilant against thinking that my life will be magically amazing post-FIRE. I build realities in my head, and the external realities rarely match up when I 'arrive' there. But my DW's adult story has been one of barely scraping by financially with generally low-stress work (but stress from low-income situation, paying for broken cars, the gas or food? debate, etc), and mine has been one of professional / high earner but high stress baked in to the job description. Both of those lifestyles have very profound negatives that ERE seems to solve, and that's very exciting for us.

An update on the food front, which relates to @c_L's advice about the scary motivation of an ENFP unleashed:
I basically accepted the idea that in order to drastically cut food expenses, we'd have to introduce more grains and such and reduce meat. This isn't ideal for me, as I'm very sensitive to even high-GI carbohydrates (I bonk often, get the shakes, have inconsistent energy levels, etc on a high or even medium carb diet), and have a lot of diabetes in my genes. In short, I think an animal-forward diet is a good fit for me health-wise. Paleo-ish. I also think that with high-quality ranching practices, an animal-forward diet can be less environmentally destructive than one that relies largely on mono-cropped agriculture. Factory farmed meat is some bullshit that shouldn't exist, I don't eat grain-fed meat, and CAFO is clearly extremely environmentally destructive.

(I just mention this for context on my food-budget decision; I'm quite uninterested in sparking a food ethics debate. Just to be clear about that, because food choices is such a potentially triggering topic these days: opposing viewpoints or thoughts are quite welcome to be posted in my journal here, but bear in mind that I am *not* going to engage in any debates or even discussion about food ethics at this time. Those arguments, to me, are a game where the only winning move is not to play.)

My DW has dove deep in to ethical meat-eating, and is obsessed with the various ethical dimensions of eating *good* meat in the way only ENFPs are. When I started talking about cutting our meat consumption, that was obviously coming up as a source of contention for her. Yesterday she was talking more about some of the potential negative health issues with a plant-only diet, and I sort of saw where the discussion was going. I offered to do some calcs on optimizing our diet for as highly animal-forward as we could, within a monthly cost that I'm comfortable with. I came up with $225/person this month, ideally getting down to $200/per the following month, on an essentially paleo diet of about 0.5lb meat/per/day.

I know that's high for this crew. I'm still targeting ~$710/mo expenses, and am willing to forgo other stuff to make up the balance. And in the longer term, I intend to find non-fiscally-sourced inflows of high-quality meat/animal products, such as hunting, work-trading with hunters, raising livestock ourselves, etc.

Anyways, DW wrote down some financial parameters I gave her for food shopping I came up with and re-took over the kitchen, immediately figured out where all the "local's days" are at the butcher shops, and started throwing around the idea of part-timing at the butcher's shop so she could get better deals and skills.

[AxelHeyst]

I've been thinking about the Wheaton Scale, and how those more than +/- 1 level from you are difficult to understand. It seems valuable/important to record how I'm thinking and progressing in the moment, because I probably won't be able to understand my now-L3 self when I'm a L5/6/7. I won't remember what seemed revelatory to me.

In this past week I noticed some psychological changes in myself. Every time I don't act in a consumerist way, I feel powerful. The other day I went in to town to run some errands. The errands were a bust, and I was annoyed and frustrated. I had a thought: "A month ago, in this situation, I would have brainstormed something else to do/buy/spend money on town so as not to 'waste a trip'. But now that idea is repugnant." And that made me feel less dependent on the system, more self-sufficient, more in control of my own life... more powerful.

This relates to the dynamic of "high earners solve problems with money rather than time because they're stressed" in a way I wasn't expecting. The more work-related stress I experience now, the more motivated I am to not spend money. Even though I like my job and have generally positive feelings towards my company, I feel like I'm sticking it to the man every time I don't spend money. I'm buying my freedom one unnecessary expense avoided at a time.

I'm happy to report that DW and I seem to be on completely the same page with ERE in terms of motivation, getting "the vision", etc. I anticipate any further issues will be minor issues of execution, rather than major issues of incompatible vision. This is a huge relief to feel like my partner is my partner in this, that we're doing this alt thing together and are going to build an incredible, weird life together.

Some impactful recent reading:
Jacob pointed to this post: viewtopic.php?p=99322#p99322

In general, standard of living = skill of living * cost of living.

For most people (consumers), the skill of living = 1, so

standard of living = cost of living

My thinking about life in general has been very influenced by the strategic theory of John Boyd ("Science, Strategy, and War" by Frans P Osinga is, to me, the Boyd Bible). In his terms (which he borrowed from German Blitzkrieg theory), Skill of Living is the schwerpunkt, a word that literally means center of gravity, but should be thought of as main focus. It is the single most important point of focus around which to organize an entity's efforts.

(Let's say you have 100 soldiers, and you're facing off against 100 other soldiers. You can all face up in a line and have a go at it, but your energies are diffused. Take your 100 guys, and get them all to focus on breaking through one single point of the enemy lines, and you're probably going to penetrate, get behind the other guys, wreak havoc, and win the day. Battles aren't as simple as that obviously, but that example is illustrative of the concept.)

The schwerpunkt for any organization will change over time and over scale of impact. "Skill of Living" is the schwerpunkt for my ERE journey, at the moment. A sub-schwerpunkt might be groceries. In a few months, it might be "find cheap salvaged materials for building micro-shelters".

I suspect that, in relation to the sigmoid effort/results curve, it is best to focus on one dimension at a time rather than all of them. So: get food budget to $400/mo. Then, get gas to <$150/mo. Then get housing to <$50/mo (vanpeople). Then, get 'discretionary' to <$100mo. Okay. Round 2: get food budget <$300/mo. Then... etc. After 2 or three rounds, monthly expenses should be about 1 jafi.

--

I've been making lists of skills/activities I'm interested in pursuing both now, as I can, but in particular what I'm excited to fill my time with post-FIRE:
Hunting, tanning hides, sewing, bushcraft, fishing, building micro-shelters and treehouses out of salvaged material, gardening, humanure composting, motorcycle repair/maintenance/restoration/customization, slow travel, firewood harvesting, auto repair, building overlanding equipment out of salvaged materials, how to use a slide rule, metal fabrication, keeping financial records in a physical ledger, binding my own notebooks (I've made two in the past, but did a pretty shit job I'm afraid - I want to get good at it), figure drawing, landscape sketching and watercolor, writing...

--

I was poking around on JL Collins site and loved this bit in his manifesto:

This whole civilization thing has been a huge mistake and we’d all be better off as hunter/gatherers. But since we do live in this complex, technical world you had best learn about money. Money is the single most important, effective tool in navigating it.

[Jin+Guice]

Hey Axel:

I'm enjoying your journal. I read it after being transported over from the Ishmael thread by @c_L.

Something that's interesting to me is you seem to have experienced Wheaton 6-7 level skills in college, but now you've lost them?

For example, we got back from a hike yesterday and she had 10 minutes before she had to go back out for a meeting with potential business partners. We didn’t really have anything in the fridge ready to go. She asked if buying crackers and cheese at the store was okay. Now obviously crackers and cheese are kinda expensive, so the simple answer is no. But... it’s also the wrong question, isn’t it? Crackers and cheese costs maybe $6. Im aiming at $5/person-day for food at the moment. But if for a couple days we cut our food cost to $2/per-day, then it evens out. But... we’ll go mad if we think about everything at that level.

I think I'm a Wheaton 5 going on 6 (I started as a 4 going on 5). I don't even see expensive snacks anymore. They just aren't part of my world so the decision is already made for me. I also stopped tracking expenses and don't budget. It's interesting for me to get inside your mind a little and see where the differences lie.

It also seems like if you're able to get out of your expensive apartment you'd be able to have very low expenses very quickly? I know your food is expensive, but you said that paying for this food is ethically important to you. However, high food costs alone won't get your expense high. Are you having trouble not buying other things? Where else are you spending money?


I'm new to the anti-civ stuff and I plan on continuing the discussion over in the Ishmael thread if you're interested.

[AxelHeyst]

Hey Axel:.

Hey +J+G, @c_L put me on your journal and I’ve been enjoying it as well, so that’s a nice symmetry.

Well, I wasn’t making an income in college. I was living off of student loans. That’s one thing. But The next ten years of making an income, and having non-frugal gfs, and not really thinking about it, was a process of the frog slowly boiling to death. I kind of knew it was happening, but didn’t know how to fix it.

I suspect I’ll move quickly from L3 to L5 at least, though, due to my experiences. Might be like re-learning to ride a bike after years away from it.

Also, it would be a lot easier for me if I were single. I feel a sense of duty to not make DWs life overly uncomfortable. In college I didn’t have skills, I just had an abnormally high ability to endure and get off on suffering. So now I have to learn how to spend less but have a rich fulfilling life.

Yes, once we’re out of this apt expenses should drop radically. We’re actually talking about renegotiating the end date to cut a couple months off it. I think I insta-cured my other spending habits when I started making “time to FI” graphs and realized I could do 2-4 years if I stopped being a lazy bonehead.

Thanks for the heads up on the Ishmael thread, I’ll join in the fun.

[Jin+Guice]

What are you buying that is difficult to stop buying? This is honestly something that at this point confuses me about people who struggle to get to 1 JAFI or less. It's totally a Wheaton level thing, I just can't remember the mindset of not only buying ~ "the necessities." (Sorry, I don't mean this as an attack).

Also, it seems like you're placing a lot of the blame on your current/ previous girlfriends. Have you ever examined why this is or why that might be? I'm not sure how it helps your current situation (again because of Wheaton levels), but I never feel deprived and being frugal makes me feel LESS poor because I have everything I want AND am unlikely to ever run out of money.

[steveo73]

I never feel deprived and being frugal makes me feel LESS poor because I have everything I want AND am unlikely to ever run out of money.

I don't care about meeting someone else's arbitrary level (Wheaton levels or Jacob levels of spending) however this resonates with me. Spending money can make me feel poor but being frugal makes me feel rich.

Axel - interesting journal. I can spend money. I don't mind buying something expensive if I'll get good usage out of it. I'm also not really a spender or maybe better put I don't just throw money away on all sorts of stuff. It doesn't disappear from my pockets. I have friends who just spend money like it's meaningless. I think what happens is you just get into the habit. I think the key is to just spend consciously but there are limits especially when you are in a relationship.

[AxelHeyst]

Well, at the moment, I’m not buying anything, so this might be a solved problem. I need a month or two of consistency to call it though. I currently have no issue not spending money on stuff besides food, rent, and gas. If I stopped paying rent and supporting my gf, I’d be at 1 jafi tomorrow.

But for reference, before ERE In previous months I bought:

A motorcycle and gear
A big canvas tent
A stove for the tent
Gas for driving in circles around the Southwest at 12mpg
Parts and labor for my gfs van
Parts and labor for my truck (when things break, not ‘truck bling’)
Parts for when my mtb breaks (I was in to DH mtb... that might not be the case any more, it’s expensive as hell).
Ski passes
Ski boots
Etc

I do have a bachelor party coming up for one of my best friends, and the buy in for the weekend is $500. This dude and I have literally counted on each other for our lives, so I’m just going to do it, but it’ll probably be my largest single expense this year.

And - yeah, that’s fair to call me out for blaming my gf’s. There’s two things there:

1) If I’d taken more time to flesh it out, I would have stated “I have used gf’s as an excuse to spend a lot of money even though I didn’t want to, because I was weak willed and didn’t set firm boundaries around my spending habits.” In other words, I take the responsibility for the money I spent, and it was a result of my dysfunctional emotional reality (codependency, Nice Guy syndrome, etc) that led me to those behaviors. I would spend money on them as a way to try to convince them I cared about them, in the hopes that they would reciprocate. Fucked up, yeah? I’ve done a lot of work rooting that shit out and figuring out what I want, and not letting my romantic partners distract me from it. Still a work in progress, but I’m miles ahead of where I was.

2) It might not be fair of me to assume it’d be easier if I were single. I get a lot of fulfillment out of life due to my DW; without her, it might be more difficult to avoid spending money to try to fill that ‘loneliness’ hole. I think I misrepresented how I feel about my situation with that comment, anyways... might be a vestige of some old behaviors. I’ll dwell on it.

I appreciate the insightful questions, thanks for taking the time to read and criticize! It’s very valuable for me to get comments from higher-Wheaton folks.

[AxelHeyst]

Stevo- exactly, some people spend like its meaningless. That’s the trap I fell in to, without a real reason or framework for why not to.

Hypothetically, let’s say someone takes home $6k/mo. They got a deal on housing, so they spend 1,400 for rent. A grand on groceries. A grand on car/gas. And they save ten percent. That person has $2k/mo to burn, That they won’t feel bad about spending, That they won’t even notice. And without a natural propensity for frugality, that money *will* get spent.

That’s $64/day on “whatever”. In this situation, you just don’t even notice $100 here, $300 there. Money becomes casually meaningless.

The numbers aren’t exact, but that’s the approximate headspace I’ve been in for the past few years. Whatever. It’s just money. You can’t take it with you. Etc.

But!

Now that I can see a mechanism for turning that money in to freedom, literally paying for the rest of my life, the mental switch was rapid. I want my life back and I don’t give one single shit about all the stupid stuff I used to buy that I can’t even remember.

[classical_Liberal]

That’s $64/day on “whatever”. In this situation, you just don’t even notice $100 here, $300 there. Money becomes casually meaningless.

I asked my GF today what she thinks she does differently today vs two years ago. Her exact words were. "When I'm bored I do something that matters instead of going shopping". I asked if there was anything else and she couldn't think of anything. Maybe I tend to overthink some of this stuff . Although I think reaching the next levels (6-7) does take another shift, but it's probably much simpler than I make it out to be.

[AxelHeyst]

I woke up at 0445 this morning thinking about ERE graphs. I was mulling over why @J+G had a hard time understanding "being uncomfortable with frugality", because @J+G felt better when not spending. I knew it had to do with the skills, specifically Jacob's equation Quality of Living = Skill of Living * Cost of Living.

If your skill of living is low, and you just slam your CoL down super low, there's going to be a period where your Quality of Living is low. That's what I mean when I say "uncomfortable" - it's not that living frugal is inherently uncomfortable, it's that radically changing your habits to frugality is going to be uncomfortable for that transitional phase.

So I tried to model this dynamic over time. I had to come up with a way of modeling skill acquisition, so I assumed that acquiring skill was a function of the difference between your Desired Quality of Life and your Actual Quality of Life. If the delta is big, your motivation (modeled as dSkill/dt) is high. If the delta is small, your motivation is smaller. I applied a factor to it, Skill Acquisition Factor, which I think of as one's ability to pick up skills. So the equations are these:

Quality of Life Actual(t) = Skill at Living(t) * Cost of Living(t)

Skill at Living(t) = dskill/dt * Skill at Living(t-1)

dskill/dt = Skill Adoption Factor * (Quality of Life Desired - Quality of Life Actual)

So this is a run assuming an immediate, rip-off-the-bandaid approach of dumping one's CoL to 1.1 jafi, and a desired quality of life of 6. I also assumed a starting Skill at Life of 1.2, so that the curves aren't on top of each other and the graph is easier to read.


And then I did a run assuming a gradual reduction of one's expenses to 1.1 jafi.


I made the first graph so I could point at t=4 and say "that's what you might be forgetting, @J+G, since you're already at t=60, but t=4 is uncomfortable if you reduce expenses fast". I'm not arguing for not reducing expenses fast, just trying to explain/explore the mind and experiences of an ERE noob such as myself.

But comparing the first and second graphs is very interesting! Assuming my governing equations are anywhere close to correct (pause here to sniff and push my glasses up the bridge of my nose), it actually makes an argument for fast expenses reductions *if* you can handle momentary low Quality of Life.

Minimum Quality of Life in fastERE mode is 1.1. Minimum Quality of Life in slowERE mode is 3.

BUT! fastERE gets you back up to higher QoL faster than slowERE (quality is 4 by t=11, vs. 4 by t=22). It also (obviously) gets more money in your savings than slowERE.

There are also non-modelable effects here not shown, such as: will slowERE show so little progress you get frustrated and quit? Will fastERE make you think it's all about ascetecism and revert? Also that "quality of life cycling" in slowERE might be frustrating - one step forward, two steps back.

[jacob]

Neat!

In my case, I started with skill=1 but my desired lifestyle at the starting point (Oct/2000) was also rather low (1 jacob) since I was de facto still living like a student in a dorm room. The only difference between me and a regular student was that my grad student stipend was 3x what I had been living on the 5 years prior. Ripping off the band aid just meant giving up my consumer electronics addication.

There was some skill in finding replacement meaning/entertainment beyond shopping. However, the above two graphs implies a kind of back-against-the-wall/strategic retreat whereas in my case, I just upgraded my lifestyle as my skills increased. Graphing it, the orange line would stay flat. Skill of living would increase like a sigmoid and quality would follow. It would look like the first graph but starting at time index = 5. (Alternatively, the initial drop wouldn't be very steep.)

Once I reached "passable middle-class", I lost interest. This is very likely because this is what I grew up with. My only experience with $100k/year+ spending is from visiting the homes of friends, etc. and what I see (marginal differences in bling) doesn't seem to be worth the effort of further skill increase in that direction. IOW, my s-curve is maxed out in terms of getting more---I find it more interesting to try to get the same for less. This is hard to understand for those who are used to thinking in terms of earning and buying, but I don't do it to save money.

[AxelHeyst]

In my case,...

So your graph, and one more appropriate for younger ERE'ers / students / etc might be something like this:


Although I'm not sure the implication that quality of life decreases during the "doing more with less" phase is right. It seems like the mechanism at that point was a bit different - you were able to become interested in doing more with less, and build the skill, which caused the Cost of Living to go down, with no dip in Quality of Living. Which implies that at that phase of ERE/Wheaton Level, ds/dt = Factor(Q_desired - Q_actual) is not accurate.

For me, I'm assuming that a drop in cost of living is going to trigger drop in quality of living, which will drive motivation to develop skill - that's the mechanism I'm counting on at this early phase of my ERE journey. But at a certain level, that relationship reverses, so you have some other source of motivation to develop skill, which increases quality of living, which drops the Cost of Living.

Maybe I'll tune the model to reflect that at some point for fun, but I've probably gotten what value there is to get out of the exercise for now. This is all a pretty gross simplification of a sophisticated system, so I don't want to spend too much head time in an overly simple model. I just like the exercise of modeling the gist of the mechanisms at work to inform intuition, get it shoved in the right direction, before dropping in to the nuances.

[mooretrees]

Fun graphs! Only think that might be hard to include is when you're not happy with your life and want a change. So quality of life in one way is low, which is not how you put it. When we were spending way too much, I was unhappy and that affected my 'quality' of life. But, I get it, it's just an exercise in quantifying the change in skill over time + discomfort during that time frame.

[Jin+Guice]

Interesting model and graphs. I actually don't think spending a bunch of money makes most people's lives better though. Spending money is actually kind of a lot of work. And all the excess stuff! It's amazing how much stuff I have, I can't keep it away from me. Most people I know who spend a lot of money spend it buying shit they'll literally never use, isolating themselves from the people they care about and paying people to take care of their children/ lives for them.

[AxelHeyst]

I actually don't think spending a bunch of money makes most people's lives better though.

Indeed! Inspired my mooretrees and my DW I just spent the past hour trying to add to the model "Consumption", "Life Satisfaction", and "Ennui", modeling dynamics such as ecological guilt and the friction/stress involved in a high-consumption lifestyle. Those relationships get complicated pretty quick, most of my models went unstable after t=15 or so. I'm going to call it on the graphing psychological behavior exercise for now, I'm not sure what value it would provide.

[RoamingFrancis]

Cool graphs. Contemplating how to work that into my current student life.

[AxelHeyst]

Im in the middle of reading through @J+G’s full journal (which is awesome), and his original questioned me (how can you spend so much money?) makes more sense to me. It seems he was raised frugal and has never been a high earner.

It got me thinking. I think there’s a misconception about high earner’s relationship with money. I think some people think a high earner will pull out a $100, and think “haha! I make so much money this $100 is meaningless to me! You see? I spend this $100 and I don’t care!”

Now I’m sure there are some damaged people out there who have a thing for ostentatious displays of spending, but I and most moderate high earners aren’t like that I think. Before ERE, this was my relationship: “Oh, that thing is really cool/worth having? Sounds good. How much is it? $100? mkay.” End of story, already forgotten. Thats what I mean by ‘casually meaningless’.

I feel compelled to record this now because I can already tell I’m forgetting what that attitude is like, and I’d like Axel+5years to have some compassion for Axel-a month ago.

—

In other news I’ve been wading through the fatFIRE leanFIRE semi-ERE discussions. At this point, I think it would be healthy for me to set a ‘ceiling’ to my savings - meaning, if I hit that number and I’m still working FT, quit. My greatest danger is probably dragging my feet and building more capital than I need, and then not feeling any heat to build skills once I FIRE. My current stab at that number is $250,000.

I feel like that’s lean enough to motivate me to do interesting things with my life that I can get paid for, and fat enough I won’t be scared in to getting a ‘job’ again. And depending on how things go over the next couple years, I might go leaner.

I’m aiming at <1 jafi standard living expenses, with doing side hustles to fund further side hustles and adventures without dipping in to principal. I’ve a long list of side hustles I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but not had the life energy required to engage in.

My leanFIRE/semi-ERE date is q1 2022. My ‘maxFIRE’ date is q3 2023.

[classical_Liberal]

Before ERE, this was my relationship: “Oh, that thing is really cool/worth having? Sounds good. How much is it? $100? mkay.” End of story, already forgotten. Thats what I mean by ‘casually meaningless’.

Yeah, I think this is part of the problem for some people, my GF was probably one of those. I grew up in solid middle class suburban life and stayed that way until my late 20's, through my first career. There is also some very strong social positioning spending (even in the realm of life energy/non financial capital) in these ranks. It's part of the culture and something you may not have experienced given your different background. Interestingly, I was talking to my South Korean neighbor/coworker about this yesterday. She stated that this type of influence is much, much stronger in her native country than in the Midwest USA. So it's not just a USA problem. As a matter of fact, she named the decreased social spending pressure here as the number one reason she is immigrating to the US. I think we are seeing the next generation of this on social media. Now it's not just your coworkers, family, and neighbors to try to keep up with, but everyone on social media as well. This shouldn't be too surprising considering humans are social animals. I just wish we could find better ways to compete for social positioning. It would help solve a lot of problems.

I think your plan of having a financial line in the sand is a good one. It'll likely still move if you get too addicted to saving money. This is a real problem not discussed around here very much due to the conservative financial nature of the forum. IMO you have a solid base vs the average FIRE person coming over here trying to understand ERE (ie me). You already think outside the box and have a purpose other than just retiring. Again, it's great to have you here! People like you, J+G, 7WB5, theanimal, etc are really inspirations for people like me to try and look at the world differently.

Edit: quoted the wrong part

[jacob]

I think we are seeing the next generation of this on social media. Now it's not just your coworkers, family, and neighbors to try to keep up with, but everyone on social media as well. This shouldn't be too surprising considering humans are social animals. I just wish we could find better ways to compete for social positioning. It would help solve a lot of problems.

I send this [antidote] to muggles who demonstrate potential: https://nomoreharvarddebt.com/2014/01/2 ... year-olds/