The Education of Axel Heyst

Where are you and where are you going?
Western Red Cedar
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by Western Red Cedar »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Tue Dec 22, 2020 12:00 am
AND - I guarantee you that I will not do that stuff if I own a car. I will take the easy, more expensive, less adventurous, less socially engaged route of driving my butt around instead.
I can definitely relate to this. I noticed a psychological/behavioral change after I finally bought a car in my late twenties. I also went without a television for many years and noticed the same thing when I finally bought one.

If I have a TV sitting in the room, I'm going to watch more of it. If I have access to a car, I'm going to use it. My wife recently got a job that requires her to drive to different clients. It limited my access to our rig, and it was a blessing in disguise. I've started riding my bike more to access trailheads and I've envisioned some longer-term travel via bicycle. One of my ERE dreams, assuming I'm back in the PNW and DW is working, is to do an extended WWOOFing trip to different farms in WA, ID, and BC via bicycle.

It's extremely valuable to know yourself and set up environments or systems that will challenge you and take you out of your comfort zone - or lead you to success, however you define it.

mooretrees
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by mooretrees »

Really interesting to hear how rural car free living seems so hard to many folks. In my limited small town living, it seems like most people who live in the 'country' are primarily diving to work.

I recently read "The Unsettlers" by Mark Sundeen. One couple he writes about extensively moved to Missouri to start a car free, electricity free permaculture experiment (The Possibility Alliance). They were really thoughtful about where they moved, choosing a small town within a certain distance of an Amtrak station and a local Amish community. Those two choices were to give themselves easier living without cars and to potentially have some neighbors to learn/share with who were experienced with living without electricity and cars.

I think your point about the pyscho-emotional motivation is really the crux of making this rural car free living a possibility. I think also, like you've kinda mentioned, not owning a car doesn't mean you can't ever use one. I've shared my car with a friend for about 9 months and I think there are ways to get creative without being a mooch.

I think you can do it and hope to join you in that car free world!

basuragomi
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by basuragomi »

Any potential in your chosen geography of living near a river/navigable stream and canoeing/kayaking/skiing into town? Surviving break-up and freeze-in would be the challenge then, but you gain an entirely new kind of flexibility relative to a car.

AxelHeyst
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by AxelHeyst »

basuragomi wrote:
Wed Dec 23, 2020 9:17 am
Potentially! Building a cedar-strip kayak is on my tick list of builds as well...

AxelHeyst
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by AxelHeyst »

JnG wrote this in @2birds1stone's journal, but I wanted to get it in here. Emphasis mine.
Jin+Guice wrote:
Fri Jan 01, 2021 3:36 pm
Something that I've noticed as I've transitioned from Wheaton 5 to 6 is a shift in mindset on spending. I think around the Wheaton 4/5 border it becomes important to begin to embrace the idea that not spending money is not a sacrifice. Around the 5/6 border, I've found it important to embrace the idea that not spending money has a lot of benefits. One way I do this is to consider the attributes of the product/ experience I'm looking for and then ask if spending money will actually enhance that experience. A lot of times I'm looking for intrigue, novelty or adventure and these things are decreased by spending money to gain access to something. Seeking these things in areas where I traditionally spent money has lead me to spend even less, even if the time/ money tradeoff is not optimized from a $$ standpoint initially.
I think that's such a concise way of putting what I was getting at with the #carfree conversation above. The further you get , the more precise and profound you get with your definition of *what it is you are seeking*.

So at a lower WL, I have an identity as "a climber" and I'm trying to figure out how to optimize my climbing per $ metric.

I also have an identity as "a builder of cool stuff", and I try to optimize my buildin'-stuff / $ metric.

Maybe at W4 or 5 I look at each of those individually, and I arrive at the conclusion that a truck is good for getting materials for buildin' stuff, and something like a Tacoma is good for getting to climbing spots. I might even be able to convince myself that I'm doing some higher WL voodoo by considering the relationship between the two, and deciding that a particular Tacoma with a custom camper shell is going to optimize [experience]/$ for both those activities.

But a deeper level of inquiry re-examines the climbing identity, and says "hold up, you're not Adam Ondra, your calling is not to *add* anything to the world of climbing. At *best* you're going to climb 5.13, and no one will care. What is it you're really after there? Ah... it's being outdoors, adventure, a certain relationship with risk and danger, it's the bonds of comradery you get from engaging in adventurous activities with other people and relying on someone else in a no-joke epic. So "climbing/$" is the wrong metric, the right metric is something like "[adventure/novelty/comradeship/risk]/$". Well I don't need a Tacoma for THAT, in fact I can both decrease the $ and increase the [adv/novelty/etc] by ditching the car and walking, hitching, etc to the climbing area."

And a similar internal conversation can be held when examining buildin' stuff. It's not "building" that I'm after, so much as it is "creative self-expression through the design and manual manipulation of matter in a way such as to result in a new object/thing that serves some purpose, and is beautiful, and etc". Making it HARDER to get to home depot will make me thing more creatively about how to accomplish my ideas, and use what I have on hand here, or maybe I noticed my neighbor has a pile of cedar boards, maybe I can offer to fix up his woodshed in return for that cedar, which I can use as external siding for my container build.

AxelHeyst
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by AxelHeyst »

Container Update
Similarly to the above post, I had a recent epiphany with the container build. I was getting stressed trying to get it done enough to be warm by the time winter really shows up here. My mental health was deteriorating. I realized I had managed to become an overworked stressball again, with my own personal projects!

I changed my perspective from a focus on the goal of having the shipping container complete, to the goal of executing the process of building the shipping container as perfectly as I can. In other words, instead of having my mind locked in on "complete the container", I locked it in on "cut this board as well as you can. Measure this disance as well as you can. Keep your tools and workspace tidy and clean, no matter what. Move slowly, because slow is smooth and smooth is fast."

There is magic in moving your attention from the gap between what you want and where you are at (one definition of suffering), to simply doing the best where you are at. Another way of putting it is, if you put your focus on a perfect process, the product tends to take care of itself. A quick re-skim of The Practicing Mind by Thomas Sterner helped lock on to this perspective.

My mental health has been much better. The morning I spent assembling the door (see below) was one of the best mornings I've ever had.


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Floor in, internal and external housewrap on.

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Burning (shou sugi ban) the door frame boards.

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Building the board and batten door.^>

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My approach to the door was "AK47, not AR15". In other words, nice wide clearances, so it almost certainly will never bind or jam. I will use large stops and weather stripping to keep it high performance.

RoamingFrancis
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by RoamingFrancis »

Your comments on building and climbing are interesting. I can relate in two other areas; for me, it's languages and meditation.

For languages, I've built up an identity as a "language nerd/intercultural explorer/aspiring anthropologist." What I'm really after is understanding how people from vastly different cultures see the world, and learning the language seems to be the best way to get an "in" into a community. Not really sure how this translates into ERE language - mainly I guess that I need to figure out how to maximize fulfilling multicultural experiences per dollar. Maybe it just means capitalizing on whatever experiences are available, like inviting the Syrian neighbors over for dinner more often. Though recently I have been wanting to really "go deep" and become fluent in a new language, as over the last two years I've dabbled in 4 or 5, but haven't really dug deep into understanding the culture. This is a really deep interest of mine, and I'll have to integrate it better into ERE.

Meditation has just brought me so much goddamn inner peace that I don't mind throwing chunks of cash at various trainings. Maybe this deserves some more exploration as well...

Congrats on the door; keep living your badass life.

AxelHeyst
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by AxelHeyst »

Cliff Notes from my personal 2020 Annual Report:

2020 Reflections:
  • I discovered ERE and (re)committed to FIRE in January, and dropped my CoL from ~8jafi to ~1.5jafi (lifestyle... see the chart below).
  • I went to a 8hrs/wk semiERE situation in July
  • I sheltered in place with my parents, DW's parent, dirtbagged around a bit, and drove across the country twice.
  • I really realized how important stability (roots) is for our lifestyles.
  • I did a lot of healing/introspection/personal growth during the first 3 months of my semiERE.
  • I came to terms with how much I dislike car ownership, and am actively scheming to execute a nonurban carfree lifestyle.
2021 Desired Outcomes:
  • Lifestyle CoL < 1 jafi
  • Econ and investing fundamentals education completed
  • At least one comfortable shelter complete (the container)
  • Get back to FTE and re-engage accumulation phase. [Contingency: continue semiERE, focus on side hustles/entrepreneurship.]
  • Tax-Advantaged accounts game totally dialed.
  • Starting to spend time "learning by doing" with low stakes investing.
  • Strategic Approach: Apply 80/20 thinking to every dimension of my life, with a focus on high-leverage activities that will hasten my achievement of autonomy/time wealth as quickly as possible. For example, some activities have a high satisfaction ROI, but will muddle my progress towards autonomy. Consider these activities very carefully, and consider shelving them until I'll be apply to apply my full attention to them.

Financial:
I recently went through @c40's journal and was inspired by his chart game.
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Lifestyle CoL means everything except support for DW and capx expenses for builds. I expect to be getting below one jafi lifestyle CoL in Q1 '21.

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This includes the capx for shelter over the next several years, and assumes simple accumulation - no investment returns.

My aim is to *not need to work FT* for good no later than mid 2024. There are a few probable paths:

Traditional Accumulation > RE FIRE: Decide on a financial goal, such as 3% SWR. Hit that number around July 2024, then quit/enjoy not needing to work.

Hybrid Accumulation > SemiERE Cruise to FI: Decide on a lean financial goal, such as 5% or 20-25x. Quit at that number, in 2022 probably, then don't withdraw at all from my portfolio and instead 'semiERE' a 1-3x/yr income from part time work, side hustles, income-generating hobbies, and the like. Aim to allow the portfolio to cruise/grow to ~35x before making any withdrawals.

Committed semiERE: In this scenario, my plan to return to FT doesn't work out the way I want. I devote some portion of my attention to building income-generating side hustles and part-time work, with an aim of earning ~5x (80% SR), allowing me to hit an FI-ish number in about 8 years.

--

In other news, I'm working on an RPG-style xp-based life tracking system, to serve as immediate feedback/tracking for the purpose of encouraging high-leverage/beneficial activities and discouraging low-leverage/deleterious activities. The focus is on lead metrics as opposed to lag metrics. If it gets off the ground I'll post more about it.

classical_Liberal
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by classical_Liberal »

,,,
Last edited by classical_Liberal on Fri Feb 05, 2021 2:07 am, edited 1 time in total.

AxelHeyst
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by AxelHeyst »

Ha! Yes, it just adds salt to my father's wound that my professional career success was built upon my gamer skillz. The xp system is going well. I've built the infrastructure and played around tracking my life in January, and I think it'll basically work with a little tweaking to make data entry as efficient as possible. It *will* fail if it requires 27 entries every day, and if it isn't easy to scribble a couple notes on days when I'm away from my computer. The point of the system is a) to be inherently fun and b) to lubricate the process of improving my self. Which is fun.

A rather epic windstorm ripped up my local area Monday night. Power only came back on yesterday evening, Saturday. We ran everything off Serenity's batteries, even ran an extension cord back to the main house to get the router/internet working. We're about to get hit with a couple "big for 'round these parts" storms, which according to neighbors is 2-3ft of snow per dump. We call it "sierra cement", the really heavy wet stuff.

Speaking of my father, he got interested in my explanations of my life planning (which he calls "complex", to which I reply "Exactly!"), and read my copy of ERE (which he charmingly pronounces "EEry"). Our conversations led in to the deeper philosophical/worldview foundations for exactly why ERE resonated with me so strongly, and he asked me for a reading list. I reproduce it here:

Some of the titles that are on both lists are because they discuss both The Problem and A Solution in some depth. I don't necessarily agree with all of the books, in fact some are on the list because I disagree with (a part of) them in a way that is informative to the rest.

What's the Problem?
  • Overshoot. William Catton.
  • The Long Descent. JMG.
  • Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush. John Michael Greer (JMG)
  • Muddling toward frugality. Warren Johnson.
  • Civilized to death. Chris Ryan.
  • The Wizard and the Prophet. Charles C. Mann.
  • Limits to Growth. Donnela Meadows et al.
  • The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter.
  • Ishmael. Daniel Quinn.
  • What we think about when we try not to think about climate change. Per Espen stoknes.
  • Green Illusions. Ozzie Zehner.
  • Dark Age America. JMG.
  • Feral. George Monbiot.
  • Capitalism: A Ghost story. Arundhati Roy.
  • The End of the Long Summer. Dianne Dumanoski.
What To Do About It / Some thoughts on how then to live.
  • Being the Change. Peter Kalmus.
  • Early Retirement Extreme. Jacob Lund Fisker.
  • Muddling toward frugality. Warren Johnson.
  • Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush, JMG.
  • Green Wizardry. JMG.
  • The Ecotechnic Future. JMG.
  • Voluntary Simplicity. Duane Elgin.
  • Radical Homemakers. Shannon Hayes.
  • Ecovillages. Karen T. Liftin.
  • Entropia. Samuel Alexander.
  • The Retro Future. JMG.
  • Tending the Wild. M. Kat Anderson
  • The Five Stages of Collapse, by Orlov.
  • We're Doomed. Now What? Roy Scranton.
--//--
It's time for me to fill in that huge gap in my knowledge. An education in finance, economics, and investing. I'm so illiterate in these areas its embarrassing. I was planning on doing my next ultralearning project on [a form of digital art I'm interested in], but I'm already decent in that discipline. The renaissance ideal demands that I fill in the gaps that are likely costing me real life value.

If anyone is interested, I'll post my more detailed plan, but it essentially looks like this:

Preamble, by end of January:
Read Financial Intelligence by Karen Berman and Joe Knight to get myself oriented. I highly recommend this book to anyone starting at ground zero.
Information Intake, by End of June: Read Economics (McConnel), Investing (Bodie), and Financial Reporting and Statement Analysis (Stickney, Brown), as well as a smattering of online resources I'm picking up.
Active Practice: Mock investing and analysis of financial statements. I'll begin as soon as I know enough to find my own arsehole with both hands and a flashlight, which at the moment would be a big lift.

I'm assuming I don't know enough to know how to design "the best" curriculum for myself, so I anticipate tweaking the plan throughout as I learn more.

A reasonable amount of time to take all this in is probably around 300hrs, so I'm aiming to utilize Scott Young magic and get 150hrs (1.5hrs/day, 5days/week, Feb-June). If that's not enough, I'll keep going.

My practices will emphasize active recall and direct practice, such as creating a question book (sort of like flashcards, but more suited to understanding concepts rather than facts) and doing mock investing.

--//--

I'm reading Steinbeck's East of Eden for the first time, and this paragraph leapt off the page:
John Steinbeck wrote:"In human affairs of danger and delicacy successful conclusion is sharply limited by hurry. So often men trip by being in a rush. If one were properly to perform a difficult and subtle act, he should first inspect the end to be achieved and then, once he had accepted the end as desirable, he should forget it completely and concentrate solely on the means. By this method he would not be moved to false action by anxiety or hurry or fear."
This captures completely the theme of my personal growth over the past several months, and more broadly the essence of the lesson I'm beginning to suspect I was born to learn (by being constituted exactly the opposite). I think I mentioned The Practicing Mind by Thomas Sterner earlier, which is a whole book on this topic that I return to every couple of years.

From a young age, when there was some goal I wanted to accomplish, I would tense every single muscle in my body and strain to my maximum capacity to make it happen, giving no thought to technique or forethought. I am the caricature of the gardener getting down on hands and knees and getting face to face with the brave little delicate shoots and screaming "GROW, DAMMIT!!" My yoga instructors had much fun with me.

Recently, I've invited what are for me normal levels of stress in to my life by putting too much focus on getting the container build to a certain point by a certain date. I convinced myself it was important to invoke a sense of urgency due to the immanence of winter. Of course, the result is that I'm a grouchy stress-ball and tend to screw up whatever it is I'm working on and have to go back and redo it because I was rushing, taking longer to accomplish my goals than if I just relaxed and focused only on doing a good job, winter be damned.

For example, the container isn't level, not even close. I figured it was more important to get it insulated and framed before leveling it, even though I knew that ideally you start your build with a level base. Well, I came to some work on the door, and the non-levelness of the container was going to make success unlikely. So for the past three days I've been lifting one end of this 11,000lb+ box a fraction of an inch at a time, and it needs to come up about a foot.

I'm only about halfway there, and already the door won't close because the frame is getting tweaked. I'm going to have to take the door and the frame off and re-hang the frame, re-hang the door, and *then* get back to whatever it was I was doing.

DW and I are living here in far from optimal conditions, which is part of my sense of urgency. But also I want it to be *nice*, because I want my lady to have a nice space to live in. So I've added this extra source of stress, which is that I'm a bad DH because my lady and I are living in a tiny metal shoebox in the cold mud and the only way out of it is to get this build done as quickly and nicely as possible. So I try to go fast. But every time I go fast, I screw something up, at which point I have to decide am I going to rip it apart and re-do it so it's nice, which will take longer, or just sort of duct-tape it and keep going and hope it doesn't fall apart and force me to redo it, which will make it not nice? Either way I lose. And I really, really dislike losing.

[It occurs to me that this way of acting about things has been imprinted on my brain from my career, where due to razor-thin margins it's always "go as fast as possible, get it done and out the door and then it's someone else's problem. It just needs to be good enough that they're not going to sue us in to redoing it on our own dime." This is one reason why I'm so attracted to the idea of RE -- I'll be able to begin the long process of deprogramming this dysfunctional approach to work.]

The secret, of course, is to do whatever I have to do to make myself forget the deadline, the schedule, the rush and the hurry, and to bring my focus only on to how to do the best, most appropriate job on whatever it is I'm doing today. And in so far as I can pull that off, the result will be the nicest, fastest container build you ever saw, even though that's not what I had in my head at any given time. AND - my stress levels will be much lower, I'll enjoy the process more, and I'll be prouder of the end result.

But I have to trick myself to pull this off. My temperament and my career conditioning won't let me turn on a dime and just "focus on the process" all of a sudden. What I *can* do is a short experiment. I can make myself do anything if it's an experiment.

Beginning a couple days ago, my experiment is this: "Forget how long things take. In everything, focus only on doing it as thoughtfully and deliberately as possible, with as little attention given to speed as possible. At the end of the experiment, think back and reflect on how well things got built, how much progress was made, and your psychological well-being."

AxelHeyst
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by AxelHeyst »

GTD Update
I'm switching from Evernote to Standard Notes for my GTD system. Evernote no longer functions adequately off-line, and the app has become bloated and extremely slow to even create a new note (possibly related to not functioning well offline/on poor internet). It's also expensive. There was a sale on Standard Notes which works out to 1.67$/mo for five years, at which point I'll probably be ready to go paper-only for my GTD system.

I've also started to use contexts, which is something I've never really done before even though it's the officially-endorsed way to think about GTD. I like it.

I keep running across criticisms of GTD that I think belie a shallow understanding of it, or an unfair simplification. In some instances, e.g. Cal Newport, I've observed people criticizing some aspect of GTD and then going on to introduce their "own" system... which is nothing more than a re-packaging of a more sophisticated understanding of GTD. It's like they'd absorbed the concepts, but not realized where it came from after the fact, and then thought they'd come up with an original thought. Cal for example created his own "life admin" system, which is nothing more than applying GTD principles to one's personal life as well as one's professional life. This is the classic error of thinking that GTD is only for one's professional life, which is a complete misreading of it. Must be frustrating.

horsewoman
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by horsewoman »

I've laughed out loud at the sentence with the yoga trainer. These guys are so utterly relaxed, I can't even imagine how that feels.
A few years ago I visited an osteopath (who is also a yoga teacher, AFAIR).
osteopath: please relax.
me: I am totally relaxed.
osteopath: there is a vein twitching over your left eye!
me: well, that's as good as it gets!

:lol:

Please keep us updated how you go along, I'm very interested. my latest self-improvement project is to increase conscientiousness,
I make too many avoidable mistakes due to rushing throughmy tasks.

AxelHeyst
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by AxelHeyst »

Ha! I get it. When the doctor taps my knee with his little hammer or runs his pen down the sole of my foot, I force myself to prove how relaxed I am by inhibiting my reflexes by sheer effort. I *might* be missing the point of that exercise...

Thomas Sterner, the author of The Practicing Mind, relates a story about slowing down. He was having a stressful day as a piano tuner. He had to do two or three pianos in a day, all high-stress jobs for large, Really Big Deal performances. And piano tuning is, I'm sure you know better than I even, a task that requires delicacy.

Normally, he would hurry, dump all his tools out, and Get After It. But he knew that there was no hope of him getting through the day if he did that. So he did the opposite. He laid out every single tool, one at a time, on a cloth, aligned perfectly. He did every single task with his breath, focusing only on that task, focusing on getting it perfect. Every time he switched tools, he put the old one on its place on the cloth and then picked up the new one. When he finished the first piano, instead of tossing all his tools in his toolbox and rushing off, he placed each one, one at a time, in its place, packed up, went to the next piano, and unpacked all his tools with meticulous care again.

He finished early, and all the pianos were perfect, and he wasn't a nervous wreck.

This story has helped me often through the years. I think the discipline (practice? sect?) of karma yoga is relevant here - I intend to dig more in to that. Perhaps @RF can comment. :)

jacob
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by jacob »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Sun Jan 24, 2021 3:33 pm
Ha! I get it. When the doctor taps my knee with his little hammer or runs his pen down the sole of my foot, I force myself to prove how relaxed I am by inhibiting my reflexes by sheer effort. I *might* be missing the point of that exercise...
Reminded me of https://xkcd.com/883/

AxelHeyst
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by AxelHeyst »

Ha! A nurse once asked me how I'd rate my pain for [something I forget], and I said "two", and he said I was the most honest person in the hospital.

RoamingFrancis
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by RoamingFrancis »

Don't know anything about karma yoga, sorry. :)

AxelHeyst
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by AxelHeyst »

I would like to propose a new term for the consideration of the board.

We know the acronym HNWI, or high net worth individual. But ‘round here, NW is just one metric. We go by Wheaton Levels, more or less. So a high WL person is a HWLI, which we can colloquialize to “howlie”.

Nominally it refers to WL 7 and up (“black belt”), but depending on context it might mean “higher WL than me”.

It also creates the potential to meaningfully use the sentence “ugh, that jerk is acting all howlier-than-thou”.

RoamingFrancis
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by RoamingFrancis »

I love it!

It also serves as a useful word to distinguish people like Rob Greenfield, who are HWLI but not HWNI.

AxelHeyst
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by AxelHeyst »

I'm now leaning much more towards not returning to FT work this year or anytime. This is the path I'm contemplating:

.Stay at 8 hours on the w2 job, pulling ~22k.
.Begin a consistent routine of investing time in passive income generation. Something like 8 hrs/wk while I've got a major build going on, perhaps more when I don't.
.Get and keep my CoL below 1jafi. I've been leveling off at something like 1.5 - 2.5, depending on how I fudge the numbers. I want that number truly below 1 jafi, no fooling. With my circumstances, it should be very doable. This month (February) I'm committing to spending <=$600.

Why am I considering not going back to FT and doing a quick 2-3 year accumulation burn?
1. It sounds just awful. I've become accustomed to my autonomy. The thought of w*rking anything close to 40hr/wk is nauseating.
2. I'm more confident in my ability to build "things" that passively generate money, rather than a more traditional wealth management approach. (I'm still committed to my econ/finance/investing learning project, and in taking an educated approach to my personal wealth management - I'm just not getting warm and fuzzies about either my prospects of success for "earn a pile of cash, then manage it to grow some and try not to lose it all", or my level of enjoyment of such an activity). This could certainly change.
3. There's a lot I want to do, and FT w*rk would seriously harsh my flow. I think I can build a life I like and build up to some FI NW number over a longer period of time, while enjoying every single minute - rather than gritting my teeth and "getting through" 2-3 years. I already "got through" 10 years, took my lumps, and I have no desire to get back in the ring.

sumac
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Re: Axel Heyst's Journal

Post by sumac »

Thanks for the comment on my journal. Funny how people with our background (starting out in climate doom) feel a common need to fill a DEEP gap in finance/economic knowledge once they begin enacting ERE. I had just written a post about that before coming here.

I also liked what you said about, essentially, abstracting what you're getting from climbing and making by one level. (I literally broke my back climbing, which oddly didn't make me rethink climbing, but did make me rethink my mechanisms for deciding to trust people and situations.)

Some more background on the car: I only owned and drove a car for one year of my life total, and my relationship with driving during that time was always characterized by anxiety rather than freedom. I'm probably the odd one out in that I can count the number of times I used my car recreationally on one hand.

That said, I do have a similar relationship with biking: even though it's how I get to my rural-ish job, I only bike recreationally when it's also a social event.

I think we have a similar perspective on FT work, and I wish you well on whatever path you decide to take!

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