AE's Journal Round 4

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classical_Liberal
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by classical_Liberal »

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jacob
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by jacob »

Once systems are in place, cooking time is reduced to about 1hr/week tops. Those systems entail cooking more than one recipe simultaneously (multi-tasking), cooking for more than one day at a time, rolling leftovers into new meals, and cleaning up as you go. It only takes "hours" if each day means following a step-by-step recipe from scratch such as one might the first time making a new type of dinner.

classical_Liberal
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by classical_Liberal »

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7Wannabe5
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I agree that an hour/week is too “systematic” to optimize aesthetics and can’t possibly include reheat/refresh time. OTOH, an hour or more to cook decent meal from scratch doesn’t make sense to me either, because even if you cooked every component of the meal from scratch, you would/should still always be rolling components forward in varied degrees of completion.

jacob
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by jacob »

I do not count the approximately 20 minutes / week spent reheating in the microwave---it's not like it requires my attention---and I don't give a flying fart about plate arrangement :mrgreen:

Anyway, this http://earlyretirementextreme.com/cooki ... han-4.html should provide a picture of what an optimized process would look like for a couple of meals I don't eat very often anymore. I approach other meals (meal types) the same way. There's practically zero wait-time as I'm juggling 2-3 things at the same time. E.g. if a pot is filling with water, I'll do something else while that's going on rather than stare at it. In contrast, DW can easily spend two hours on something elaborate as she enjoys the process. I aim to spend as little time in the kitchen at possible. It also helps that I only eat once per day. I do realize I spend far less time on food/eating than the average person.

classical_Liberal
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by classical_Liberal »

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7Wannabe5
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Yeah, if you include clean-up time, reheating time, time to do simple stuff that doesn’t really seem like cooking such as making some rice to serve with something you are reheating, then I am going to say maybe 5 hrs/week and $3/day to optimize time/aesthetics/cost unless/until you are skilled enough to get somebody else to pay for the groceries if you cook.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. This is some great insight that I think will help me take my cooking to the next level. 7WB, thanks for the book suggestion. I'll add that one to my reading list because it sounds exactly like what I need.

I agree there's a definite trade-off between life energy and aesthetic cooking, and this trade-off is even more severe when you are working FT. I've already noticed that WFH has made me way more motivated to cook because I'm not dealing with the commute. And when I first started to try and break the eating out habit, I was struggling because eating out has a higher aesthetic value than "ERE Optimal Lentil Diet." So I swapped high aesthetic restaurant food for high aesthetic home food. That worked and the eating out habit has been broken. With that habit broken, I can now take this even further.

I like the eating only once a day idea, and I'm going to give it a try. When I worked in the office, I basically already did that by eating a huge restaurant lunch then skipping dinner. You pretty much do just get used to eating whenever you feed yourself. Eating only once a day cuts eating time down from ~2 hours a day (breakfast, lunch, dinner) to maybe ~30 min a day, so there's a big improvement there.

I'll copy some of these more optimized recipes too. That should definitely help get me started.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

October Challenges - Post-mortem

1. Strategic Planning - This did not really go that well, but I've definitely realized this is one area that I need to pour a lot more focus into. The pandemic and working from home has caused me to really lose structure in my life, and getting it put in place again has been a continuous uphill battle. One thing that has helped somewhat is replacing "should" statements with "will" statements. Ie, "I should workout more" becomes "I will workout more." This has the positive effect of removing goals that I just wasn't realistically going to achieve and help me hold myself to my own commitments. Anything that's written on the todo list is something I will do, not something I should do. I still plan to read GTD as I feel that type of structure is something I really need.

2. 90s Tech Challenge - Another challenge that did not go so well, although I did learn a lot. Let's start with the good.

The good: I replaced streaming (both video and audio) with either CDs (music) or the radio (music and NPR). This was a positive thing. Having less access to music helped me become less dependent on novelty, and listening to NPR helped expose me to things I would not have been exposed to had I just listened to niche interest podcasts. Also, I used to listen to a lot of audiobooks, and I replaced that with the print version of books. I think I absorb information better from the print version of books.

The bad: I'm only 30 years old, but sometimes I feel increasingly like an anachronism, and 90s tech challenge did not help with that. I think a lot of the digital-social-media-tech is literally ruining society through context collapse on a level most people have yet to truly comprehend (this is especially obvious when you talk to teenagers today), and yet there's no stopping it. The future will be gig economy app social media hell, at least until we run out of oil (which may not happen soon enough to spare us the Qualityland fate), and to resist it is to be an anachronism. It puts you increasingly out of touch with other people. I suppose this is one area where you need to be "in the world, not of the world," but the 90s-tech-reactionary part of myself hates this.

The ugly: I think too much Internet use has fried my attention span. I'm rereading The Shallows by Nicholas Carr now, and I may reread Deep Work/Digital Minimalism. I definitely notice that reading a book or watching a movie feels a lot more painful than it used to be.

3. SNAP Challenge - As stated previously, this is one area of progress. I've started to make some of the recipes from the ERE cookbook, and while less aesthetically-pleasing than what I was eating before, they are amazing less expensive in both overhead, time, and money. I now eat the lentil stew recipe almost everyday. In much the same way the Internet can fry your attention span, too much high-aesthetic food can fry your taste buds. I now try to save the aesthetic food experiences when I'm eating out socially.

4. Fitness - Having a dog has helped force me to go for at least an hour walk everyday. Not an amazing amount of exercise, but I'm getting there. I kind of hate working out to be honest. It's insanely boring.

5. Decluttering - Also a good area of progress. It's still unbelievable how behind I got on cleaning/decluttering. Definitely one area where ERE principles are super helpful. Organizing and using stuff systemically saves so much time and overhead.

November Challenges
In the name of only committing to what I will actually do, I have just two things for Nov.

1. Read and implement GTD - As previously stated, I desperately need structure right now. I'm going to read this book and implement it's suggestions.

2. Unfrying my attention span - I'm reading The Shallows/Deep Work/Digital Minimalism and implementing some of the suggestions in these books.

7Wannabe5
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I am curious why you chose the 90s decade for your retro tech challenge. Since I am 55, I can remember working in a cool record store in a cool college town when CDs were first taking over (1988.) My father was born in 1932, and raised in an upper-middle class urban setting, and he insisted that nothing had really improved since his childhood. My kids are around your age and I was appalled when my DD29 went through a phase of thinking the 80s were cool (They were terrible. Only cool to the extent that they were still like the 70s or becoming the 90s.)

I’ve attempted GTD several times, and I have integrated some of the recommended practices/philosophies. However, it has been my experience that the benefits of structured brain-dumping of tasks and ideas does not work so well for an ENTP, because we are constantly coming up with new ideas that we like. My Tickle File of “wannas” was going to fill an entire cabinet after 1year on GTD. It works much better for people who keep fretting over conflict between routine and exigencies. For instance, A friend of mine who couldn’t even relax enough to have sex because laundry list of “shoulds” was constantly running through her brain.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

@7W5 - There's definitely an argument to be made that the 90s cut off is arbitrary. After all, technological innovation is more of a continuous thing and less a discrete event. There is also a large amount of nostalgia blindness that's easy to suffer from. However, I picked the 90s, in part because I remember them, but also because I feel like technology today has fried my attention span and lead to context collapse. 90s tech was less severe in this respect, and so simply refusing to upgrade is one way to avoid Amazonland.

Unfortunately, everything else becomes Amazonland, and then you're left as an anachronism. Or, as the hip kids call me, "a millennial boomer."

ertyu
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by ertyu »

for me, pre/post internet, more so than pre/post mobile phones, is the divider when it comes to the quality of one's attention span.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

That's interesting, @ertyu. I don't remember the pre-internet world too well due to my age. Any trick you've found to unfry your attention span nowadays?

7Wannabe5
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Gotcha. Obvious (to me) solution is to choose to go back to era not remembered by your peers. I recommend either 1770s, 1940s, or 1970s. I can help you get started with 1970s. First suggestion would be cut off a well-worn tight pair of Levi’s into shorts, and go for a bike ride wearing only the shorts and some very basic sneakers. No shirt, no helmet, no underwear.

jacob
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by jacob »

The pre-internet for me was pre-1995. (I went online for the first time back in 1989 calling BBSs---I even ran my own 24h/7 between 1991 and 1994---and interacting on fidonet.) Back then things were mostly asynchronous. One was not constantly online. Being online was quite costly (charged by the minute), so if one went online it was with a specific purpose to be finished ASAP. Newsgroups/mailing lists updated in batches maybe twice per day. There was typically a client program that handled this and one downloaded the most recent posts; responded locally; and then uploaded those as the next batch was downloaded. Push notifications were not a thing and news feeds were most definitely not a thing. Email worked the same way. Even files/data could be set to download in a prearranged way.

For me, the biggest distraction, though, has been the introduction of tabbed browsing. I probably have 50+ tabs open right now. This makes it easy to flip through the deck hitting reload to look for updates. This is a nasty habit.

Culturally, the other big difference was that the 1990s was mostly comprised of nerds. It required some level of intelligence to get online and the culture online reflected that. You went online to talk to people who were smarter and more well-behaved than what was generally available IRL. This is obviously no longer the case and in many ways/most places online culture is far worse than IRL culture.

7Wannabe5
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Yeah, that is true. I actually started crying the first time I accessed poets reading their own poetry on the Internet.

AxelHeyst
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by AxelHeyst »

In addition to reading those books, I've been finding a lot of value from Cal Newport's podcast "Deep Questions". Fills in a lot of blanks and clarifies things he only touched on or didn't include in his books. I recommend you start from the beginning, don't just start listening to the latest episodes.

My own recent journey to unfry my attention span has been enormously rewarding, I'm sure yours will be as well!

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Thanks for the podcast recommendation, I'll check it out!

On Health Insurance
Now that I have reached the decrepit old age of 30, my health insurance provider has graciously informed me that I somehow no longer qualify for the wonderful Bronze-tier plan I was paying $250/mo for and never used literally once. As a contractor, I'm responsible for providing my own health insurance, but I'm getting increasingly frustrated by the fact I need to pay $250/mo, have an $8k deductible, and pay $200 in "facility fees" for a general health exam. Like what's even the point of this?

Do any of you have any alternatives here? I make too much for medicaid or for any kind of subsidy. I think my options are to either continue to pay $250/mo for nothing, go uninsuranced, or find a new job.

Hristo Botev
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by Hristo Botev »

AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Tue Nov 17, 2020 2:18 pm
the decrepit old age of 30,
Well now you're just being cruel man. :lol:
AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Tue Nov 17, 2020 2:18 pm
Do any of you have any alternatives here?
Marry someone who works for a large healthcare conglomerate? I'm kidding, of course, but there's something wrong with a healthcare system that requires that you either be employed by a very large corporate employer to get healthcare insurance that is both affordable and useful, or else be married to someone who is.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Updates

A lot has happened over the past three months! I took some time away from this site and some others, and made some pretty significant changes.

New job
I took a position at another company that included a significant pay raise and a promotion. My yearly salary is now $138k, which I still find insane. My old job was getting insanely boring, so I think this will be a new challenge. Leveraging my salaryman skill set and professional connections landed me this role. It's really taught me the importance of networking and all that other stuff I wrote off as "corporate bullshit" before. As much as I hate "corporate bullshit," I'm starting to see the utility of it from a Kegan-perspective. I suppose this is what happens when you get more mature, you realize why things are the way they are and you stop trying so hard to make everything about yourself.

Moving to Austin
The new job is located in Austin, but it's currently WFH until corona ends. So who knows when I'll actually be moving, but someday I will. I think it will be a good opportunity for me to move to a larger city and "start from scratch." It's going to force me to build a lot of the skills that I need to build and it will be a lot easier to meet like-minded people in the city and not the suburbs.

Hobbies
I've gotten into fiction writing again, and this now consumes most of my free time. It's a fun hobby, cheap, and hopefully I'll be able to use it to network in the near future when corona goes away.

Screen time
Unfortunately, I've been spending way more time sucked into the Internet and screens than I would like. This has been a hard one to avoid due to corona-isolation, but hopefully I can get this back on track when I go back to the office.

How this relates to ERE
My NW is $500k, so I could probably quit/"retire" if I wanted to and cut my expenses. But I've found that I just don't want to yet. Sure, corporate sucks, but living alone/being "non-normie" also has a different set of challenges. Right now, I'd rather deal with the challenges of corporate than the challenges of being a weird hermit. I really turned into a weird hermit over the corona isolation, and that experience taught me that there are worse fates than work. Maybe I will feel burned out eventually and then want to quit, but for now, I think I'm on the right path.

The biggest risk here is getting sucked into lifestyle lock in with that high of a salary, so I'm going to need to remain mindful about ERE principles. Again, ERE is not about "retirement" but about systems lifestyle design, and so I need to keep focusing on that. Making so much money does make it hard to care about tiny $10 expenses, which is a risk I have to accept with this choice.

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