AE's Journal Round 4

[AnalyticalEngine]

@Hristo Botev - As for why I'm doing the SNAP challenge, it's largely to get my food spending back under control. As Jacob mentioned, there's a pretty big difference between ERE and SNAP, due to the way poverty often comes with non-financial liabilities. I'm also trying to do it to discover what types of non-financial liabilities I might have myself that are holding me back. I think with food spending, definitely lower is better. But I'm definitely very spendy with food, especially since I usually try to by organic where I can. So this will also give me a baseline.

Thanks for the book suggestion as well. I'll check that out. The "finishability" is an important aspect of these older technologies. Especially because certain things like infinite-scroll are designed to remove the natural finishing cues.

I have questioned before whether it's even a good thing to have "something on in the background." I usually listen to audiobooks, podcasts, etc during chores. But it might be better to just embrace the silence for that reason--to be more aware/alone with your own thoughts. It can definitely be easy to let endless media drown out your own thoughts, so I'm hoping this lets me be more present/mindful of the things I do.

90s Tech Challenge - 90s Tech Challenge is not going very well due to you-know-who catching you-know-what. It's hard not to be glued to social media. And on October first, I ended up having to use YouTube to learn how to repair something. Still, I'm not going to give up. I'll just have to keep trying.

[AxelHeyst]

I'm really resonating with a lot of your initiatives and thinking AE. "the way social media has ruined the internet cannot be overstated" -- indeed! I was just reading Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism (I skipped it when it came out because I thought psshh, I know this stuff, but I found it a powerful wakeup call that I needed) and he makes the point that social media != the internet. Meaning, the way social media works (precisely tuned by impossibly rich companies to engineer your attention to make more profits) was *not* the original vision for the internet, and we the people are under no obligation to just go along with it. It is not anti-tech or luddite of us to refuse to passively sacrifice our attention/minds/souls to fb/insta/The Algorithm.

I'm doing a pretty thorough pullback on digital tech, but I youtube for "fixing stuff tutorials" is definitely on the Okay list for me. If you can use it for that without getting sucked in to the auto-recommends (there's an extension to block it), it can be pretty helpful to keep you engaged with working on 90's tech.

[AnalyticalEngine]

Type II Burnout

My particular burnout was caused by having lost faith in the system I was working under. There was really no way to escape that and regain faith by taking time off or finding a hobby, etc. I found that it just got worse and worse and eventually it was hard to drive myself to think about work when I'd rather be thinking about something else. It was time to get out.

I think FI can be an obstacle to overall happiness in that regard. Golden handcuffs are no fun, especially not the self-imposed FI kind in which the argument is "just 3 more years"

Everyday, I relate to this statement more and more. 2020 has been a particularly hard year because I've utterly lost faith in the future that we are collectively building. The collective response to COVID-19 really cemented this for me. I suppose I shouldn't have expected anything else. If we, as humanity, ignore things like climate change, of course we're going to also be unable to delay any kind of gratification, no matter how small, for more immediate disruptions like COVID-19.

And it isn't that COVID-19 is the end of the world, because obviously it's not. But it's the sheer callousness that upsets me. And how very basic things like germ theory of disease are completely misunderstood by the public at large.

As an example, I have a family member who caught it from a household member who tested positive and currently has blood oxygen levels in the low 80s. I've tried to get this individual to go to the ER because blood oxygen levels that low are a medical emergency. Yet they won't go because they don't really think COVID-19 is real.

It's the analogy of the type II diabetic. It starts with pre-diabetes, which can be reversed if action is taken early. But action isn't taken, and the disease progress. Diabetes can take years to kill you because the organ damage is cumulative. Yet 1/3 Americans are prediabetic.

It's easy to blame individuals for this, but if the problem is as widespread as 1/3 of Americans being prediabetic, 1/2 being obese. Yet if the problem is that widespread, it's clearly more systemic than that. It's a feature of the world that we work to build everyday at work.

It's easy to blame things like corruption, personal weakness, the profit motive, etc. And these are all certainly factors. But when one truly understands the sheer systemic depth and scope of the problem, it becomes really hard to keep faith in one's cog-like role in this system. And it becomes hard to keep faith in humanity.

I think often of the Late Ordovician mass extinction, where a bunch of algae grew and grew and made so much oxygen that it drove nearly half of life on the planet extinct. There would have been no way to stop it really. It's not like you can argue with algae and tell it to stop killing everything. It just does what it does. Life is, after all, just a complicated chemical reaction.

The same is essentially true of humans as a species. Humans are not uniquely good, but neither are they uniquely evil. Humans are another species on this Earth that, like many species before us, became too successful for our own good. The unique tragedy of humanity is that we can be aware of this, unlike algae. But what we're doing and how we sometimes act is nothing shocking from an ecological standpoint. There's not a species on Earth that wouldn't do the same.

It's hard to cling to traditional measures of "purpose" and "meaning" when you understand this, and it's even more difficult to care about your job writing hospital billing software.

And even though this post may sound pessimistic, I think processing this realization is important for me to escape the salaryman mindset. Traditional measures of success, the "golden handcuffs" of money or social privilege, can hold you back on your ERE journey. There's also a significant mindset shift from "I'm going to splurge on lunch" to understanding that your personal problems and also society's collective problems are actually just both ecological/systems-oriented in nature. I think it also lets you have a little more forgiveness for the flaws in yourself and others. We are, essentially, just animals.

[ertyu]

Type II Burnout

It's the analogy of the type II diabetic. It starts with pre-diabetes, which can be reversed if action is taken early. But action isn't taken, and the disease progress. Diabetes can take years to kill you because the organ damage is cumulative. Yet 1/3 Americans are prediabetic.

I see what you're saying, and maybe this is a minor quibble but your analogy is wrong. Going to the ER for low blood oxygen and wearing ppe is about not being an idiot. Getting from prediabetes to type II diabetes is about cravings and addiction (fat fuck here, trust me). It is also about socioeconomic factors like having the time and spoons to learn to cook and actually cook, as well as about things like food deserts etc - which you recognize. I am not arguing your overall point at all.

[AnalyticalEngine]

@ertyu - I actually agree with you. I sort of shifted topic without being clear that I was doing. My analogy was more about the subtle collapse of systems due to the complexity of the modern world and how that's easy to miss and less a moral statement. Diabetes/etc is really caused by the bizarre food ecosystem of the modern world. I don't mean to blame individuals, because it's not really their fault. My stat about so many Americans having metabolic diseases was trying to express that it's not really an individual problem if it's happened to everyone.

[mooretrees]

I see what you're saying, and maybe this is a minor quibble but your analogy is wrong. Going to the ER for low blood oxygen and wearing ppe is about not being an idiot. Getting from prediabetes to type II diabetes is about cravings and addiction (fat fuck here, trust me). It is also about socioeconomic factors like having the time and spoons to learn to cook and actually cook, as well as about things like food deserts etc - which you recognize. I am not arguing your overall point at all.

It's not all about socioeconomic factors. My mom is a nurse, upper middle class woman, who specialized in wound care. Perfect combination to take a pre-diabetic diagnosis seriously. And she didn't. So, while socioeconomic factors totally play a role, it's also about the uniquely human failing that AE was addressing with climate change/COVID.

I really get what you're saying, AE, about losing faith in this current American civilization. As I'm reading more and more peak oil works (couldn't finish Dark Age America, it was too much), I'm shifting my energy to learning skills and preparing to get out a career, salary man mindset. I am not gaining any hope by doing this, but it is satisfying to be learning.

[AnalyticalEngine]

@mooretrees - That is what I was trying to say. I think it really stems from how the human mind itself works. We like to think of ourselves as one cohesive consciousness, but the mind is really made of up many, sometimes contradictory, impulses. And we might not even be aware of what these impulses are. The desire to eat sugar might be one impulse. If we're aware of it, we might call it a craving. If we're not aware of it, we may end up diabetic and not even know until it's too late. My family member with covid is this way. They have had symptoms of diabetes for years but never bothered to even get tested. In this case, it was likely a result of anxiety, and yet it's also very likely to be this family member's downfall.

So when the ecology of our world changes (food deserts, added sugar, chronic stress), it's easy for these impulses to get highjacked. It was very hard to get diabetes in the ancestral environment, even with these impulses, because addictive, sugary foods were not abundant. But the modern world is bizarre and complex beyond our understanding. And so we, collectively, do things that bring about our downfall because of the environment we find ourselves in. I'm not sure if it could have been any other way. We're not that unique of a species in this regard.

This is why, I think, Greek tragedies are an important genre. They're all about the protagonist's own character flaw being their fundamental downfall, and nothing could have changed it or happened otherwise. The point of a Greek tragedy is to not cast judgement on the character or even to learn a lesson. Rather, it is to simply witness that this is just how life is sometimes. This is how I feel about our predicament.

There's a reason, I think, that Greek tragedies are no longer a popular genre. It's a lesson that our culture somehow forgot as industrialization and science promised to solve all our problems. But the way forward has to involve embracing the truth of Greek tragedy--that sometimes we create our own downfall and it could have been no other way. This is the nature of our society and world now.

Shifting energy to learning skills and such is what I'm trying to do too. It's not that I have any hope of fixing any of these massive problems, but traditional measures of success become hollow and meaningless when you realize this. It also furthers the point that "splurging" or "cheating" to become "FIRE" isn't really the point. The lifestyle and skills have to be ends in themselves.

[classical_Liberal]

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[Jin+Guice]

I dunno, once you accept that our society kind of sucks and is self destructive and that nothing you can do can change the iminent ecological collapse, you can kind of do whatever the fuck you want. Once you realize that the current way our world functions is neither natural nor the inevitable march of glorious human progress, it's a lot easier to give it the finger.

This might sound like an advertisement for unchecked nihilism or hedonism, but it's not. Neither of those things alone make most people very happy for any long period of time. It's much more interesting to try and take care of yourself and those you care about in a way that leads to an intriguing and interesting life, only occasionally indulging in unchecked hedonism and nihilism.

I only work at my paid job 1-2 days a week. I spend most of the rest of my time working in some other capacity. Working for pay at anything looking like a real job sucks. It's very close to a human rights infringement. Jobs are lame. I view jobs as my tax for participating in modern society. There's no choice in the matter, but modern society has some cool stuff. Chocolate. Airplanes. Modern medicine. Internet forums. I use them when I really want/ need to. I still keep my AC on 80, because it helps me sleep better at night.

If you can find a job you like doing that's great. It's always nice to succeed in a well recognized way. Otherwise the job just pays your modern society tax and influences your social standing. It's fine to not pretend it's more than that and enjoy the rest of your life. Our job loving society crumbles eventually either way.

[7Wannabe5]

In the same post, Jacob also said:

Yet some consider having a mere two years of savings enough to completely rediscover their spirit and change course. In reality, it probably is.

I have recently found, much to my surprise, that attempting to extend my planning further into the future actually impedes my performance/happiness. The environment, inclusive of all size scales from global to personal/internal, changes so fast that planning for "future me" in "future world" works better on a tighter time scale. My thinking is a bit fuzzy, but maybe it has to do with greater ability to examine/update relevant factors. For instance, you can plug along chanting "4% rule, 4% rule" for 10 years or you can examine/research your actual returns within larger context more frequently and alter your path in accordance. I offer this financial example, but I think this is even more relevant in other realms. Maybe what I am attempting to convey in more generalized terms would be something like "It's most important to learn how to make and update your own predictions."

[classical_Liberal]

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[AnalyticalEngine]

Interesting responses, everyone. Thanks for sharing them. It's given me some food for thought.

I think the reality is that realizing Progress As Myth actually changes the nature of our condition less than one might think. True, we may all die horribly, but you can also die horribly in normal circumstances. True, your "legacy" is no longer as relevant, but that was also already true--no one really remembers you anyway after your children/grandchildren die. And maybe you will lose all the money you worked to hoard, but one hyperinflation event could have done that.

So it's really more the death of an idea. The idea of Secular Progress is almost religious, and to realize that we're not getting a Star Trek future, your job is kinda bullshit, and politics is just corruption is more about the loss of the Myth we are all socialized under than anything that's changed about reality.

It is still hard though. Humans want to feel like their lives have some meaning in order to making the suffering all worth it, and that's just not really true. "Collapse" just sucks because it means all our fancy attempts at escaping the true nature of our condition are moot in the end.

Ultimately, it can be freeing though. It stops you from dedicating your life to something that isn't real. You can make better decisions and ultimately be more grounded.

I'm actually rereading "Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals" right now. It's pretty much related to this exact topic--how we elevate humanity above other animals when really that's the source of a lot of our cognitive dissonance. Here are some good passages:

The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, 'Western civilisation' or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.

Action preserves a sense of self-identity that reflection dispels. When we are at work in the world we have a seeming solidity. Action gives us consolation for our inexistence. It is not the idle dreamer who escapes from reality. It is practical men and women, who turn to a life of action as a refuge from insignificance.

Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?

Future orientation
This is a great point. Definitely one can be too future-oriented. I know I've changed a lot even in the past five years, and past-me wouldn't want the same things that now-me wants. Any attempt to optimize the future therefore could fall into the trap of overfitting. Perhaps it is best to only ensure future-me has good health and isn't broke. The rest of future-me's needs and wants are not now-me's problem.

I do struggle because I tend to be past-oriented above anything else. Future-oriented is probably my second disposition, with present-orientation being the last. This formula does not always lead to happiness. Sometimes I look at my dog, who is content to chew on a pinecone and not ask questions about if there will be pinecones tomorrow to chew on. There is some wisdom in that.

[7Wannabe5]

As I noted above, my thinking is still a bit fuzzy, but I didn't mean to directly promote present-orientation over future-orientation. I meant to suggest that near-future-orientation might be better than far-future-orientation. And a good part of the reason why I am making this suggestion is in order to counter-balance the heavy forum focus on health/wealth orientation. For instance, an individual could do a values clarification exercise and determine (or make first determination) that top 6 Values Today are Health, Wealth, Ecology, Creativity, Pleasure, and Family. This individual could also do an Ideal Day Essay or Ideal Life Collage exercise, but instead of planning how to achieve this Ideal Day/Life in alignment with Top Values in 10 years, the focus could be on doing whatever is possible today to best alter immediate environment (taking Action as Today You in your Today Domain) to achieve this as best as possible for Tomorrow You. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. (Inclusive of Values Clarification Exercises.)

Recently, I have been in a funk, dwelling on how/why my life was closer to ideal a few years ago than it is now. I went "on the lam" last week, broke myself out of my rut, and realized that my previous state of Every Morning a Fresh Start Optimism actually relied on honoring the reality of that cycle, rather than focusing on linear or exponential growth which kind of dooms you to be part of the problem. Something like that.

[AnalyticalEngine]

@7W5 - Thanks for the clarification. That does make sense. It is essentially then the risk of overfitting the far-future, which I do think is a common problem in the FIRE community. I do know it can be easy to get focused in the "far-future" to the point that I'm missing stuff that's a little more achievable.

[AnalyticalEngine]

On The Nature of Self

This post is going to be a bit existential, but I've been thinking a lot on the nature of self lately. What got me thinking about this was my last post on how we're actually just a bunch of competing desires.

In the West, we have this Homunculus Theory of Self. The Homunculus Theory is that there's a single, unified "you" that basically drives your body around and makes Important Decisions with Free Will and Agency. It's an extension of the mind/body split.

But the problem with this theory is that is just isn't true. If you study neuroscience, you discover that we're made up of different, sometimes competing and contradicting desires. Our brain has many parts and structures that work together. We're less a Homunculus and more a hive of bees.

And this also explains the very human tendency to want one thing but then self-sabotage. Like wanting to lose weight but eating sugar or wanting to quit smoking but buying cigarettes anyway. Failure in these cases isn't caused by weakness or personal flaws. It's not that there's a Homunculus who's failed a test of will and is a personal failure. There isn't a singular "you." There's only a storm of competing desires in your brain that have bubbled up through a very complex mix of genetics, environment, habit, and sheer chance.

This is where mindfulness meditation and the like can be useful. It highlights the fleeting nature of desires and emotions, and by doing so, shows how sometimes our very sense of Self can be fleeting as well. It makes you more aware of the different forces that are driving you.

There's a couple of important implications from this. For one, it's just not helpful to feel bad about yourself when you don't meet your goals or if you can't enjoy FT work/are non-normie in some other way. You might think, "what is it about all my coworkers that they can engage with this job when I can't?" But if "you" isn't a singular Homunculus and instead a contradictory mix of impulses, it explains it. Maybe you just lack an impulse they have, and there's no reason for shame there. There isn't a "you" that's failed.

That's not to say we shouldn't try to better ourselves or reach our goals, but focusing on our environment and mindfulness is going to be a much more effective strategy than beating yourself up that your non-existing Homunculus has "failed" in someway. Instead, work on becoming more aware of the contradictions and impulses in your head, and consider what might be triggering them in your environment.

[jacob]

It is essentially then the risk of overfitting the far-future, which I do think is a common problem in the FIRE community. I do know it can be easy to get focused in the "far-future" to the point that I'm missing stuff that's a little more achievable.

This is part of the reason that I've put the "ERE2.0" project on indefinite hold "while I rethink it". It became increasingly clear that 1) it was more of a sales job and that the hard way experience of COVID did much more to shift most people's framework (even on this future/theory-oriented forum) than any book would do; and 2) exact prediction becomes increasingly harder the further out you go. Contrast e.g. peak oil with "pandemic originating in Huwei". Both have "been waiting" for years.

On the other hand, the lack of predicting or a solid future orientation can also lead to traps in situations/strategies that take longer to build than one's current time-horizon. Strategies beyond one's time-horizon tend to be excluded from one's optionality. The reason most people suck at saving is because their operational time horizon is somewhere between "tomorrow" and "next year". This is the same reason why FIRE (and ERE) are full of INTJs who demonstrate an average planning horizon of [IIRC] 33 years!

[daylen]

If you consider the following spectrum: (singular you - uncountable you)

..then I think most of the you's who can agree would agree that it is somewhere in the countable range but larger than one. Otherwise, you either have no unconscious or else meditation wouldn't really help at all(*). We are built from a practically uncountable number of cells but the vast majority of these cells are operating within a herd at any given time. At times the approximation of you as a single entity suffices without further meditation. Quite extraordinary really.

So how many you's are there in general? Well perhaps having several models with different degrees of freedom is the way to go, because then whatever you is meditating can conjure up enough agency to choose how complex is the focal point(s). This series of models may even follow a scaling pattern (1 -> 2 -> 4 -> 8 -> 16), (2 -> 4 -> 16), (3 -> 6 -> 12 -> 24), and so forth. All of which may be built upon a series of bifurcations or implications emanating from whatever you deem fundamental to all of you. In contrast, maybe you wish to remain diffuse during these meditative retreats and avoid external impositions or organizational tactics.

So who are you? ..and how will the battle of agency present in you? ..will you veer towards hierarchy or heterarchy?

(*) That is unless there is a Pareto distribution on the uncountable set of you's that have most of the control at any given time. In which case the rest can be truncated.

[7Wannabe5]

On the other hand, the lack of predicting or a solid future orientation can also lead to traps in situations/strategies that take longer to build than one's current time-horizon. Strategies beyond one's time-horizon tend to be excluded from one's optionality.

True, but given only so many hours in day, time devoted to strategies related to things that might go wrong in distant future may limit time available for strategies related to things that might go right tomorrow. Of course, my perspective is currently somewhat tarnished due to witnessing the death of my friend XNTJ who was very narrowly focused on being successful at saving money and taking care of his health/fitness. I'm sure most members of this forum do not do this to the extent that there is 20 years of dust on their living room draperies and their primary "romantic" relationship is with a drug-addicted ex-prostitute who screams at him in his hospital room. At the visitation after his death, I learned from one of his friends, that it was his plan in his 20s to never marry so that he could become a millionaire by 40. I think the longest range strategy for success might include somebody who really loves you by your side when you die.

[classical_Liberal]

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[daylen]

This disagreement stems, I think, from what a strategy entails. A strategy can be general enough to account for any amount of variation in principle so long as different routes are specified to cover all contingencies. Strategies can be defined such that they equalize utility across their operation.

Hence, there can exist a strategy which would require a minimal operational period before reaching maximum efficacy independent of any utility concerns.