Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Where are you and where are you going?
classical_Liberal
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Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Post by classical_Liberal »

Freedom from, eliminating one of the "work details". Freedom to, adding the option of a different work detail. Call this optionality if you will, and I agree it can have significantly diminishing returns. Time agency, getting to choose when each work detail takes place and how long it lasts.

I would argue the last is the most important. The timing and duration of activities can fundamentally alter how we perceive it, the way in which we pursue it, and the outcome(s).

suomalainen
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Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Post by suomalainen »

See, I think I know what you think it means; I just don't think it means what you think it means. Examples:

1) Freedom from - Ok, so you can eliminate one of the work details. What about all the others?
2) Freedom to - Ok, this is perhaps the same as I mean by that most basic freedom of selecting which shit sandwich you're gonna eat, with a distinction to be addressed later.
3) Time agency - do you get to choose each work detail?

Taken together, my view is that, at base, you choose to do something - let's say you wake up fully FIREd, so you have nowhere to go one morning and you decide you want to drink a cup of coffee. You walk into the kitchen and open the cupboard and there's no coffee left. So now you get dressed, put on your shoes and walk (because, of course) to the store to buy your coffee and you walk back to make and drink your coffee. No big deal, right? That's why you FIREd in the first place, so you can do that, right?

But the point is that when you decided to get coffee, you obligated yourself to do other things along the way. Fulfilling those particular requirements is a very minor distinction from fulfilling the requirements of the things from which you presently wish to claw back "time agency". Even if you want to argue with me that FIRE lets you choose every single work detail that comes along...what about the work of seeing, sorting and selecting each and every detail of every activity you will ever do? You'd really choose that over accepting some bundling?

In that sense, I think "time agency" is a chimera. Think about it this way - time is like a bucket. Buckets are useful - you can put awkward or heavy or numerous things in that bucket and carry them from place to place. But it's only useful if you use it. If you don't use it, but rather you just like having it on the off-chance you might use it one day is...sort of wasteful? It's like, is your bucket merely a status symbol? That you're rich enough to carry shit around if you wanted to? If so, that's kind of a weird status symbol, no? Time is like that too. Present-you wants this "time agency" bucket so that present-you can fill it up with something that isn't present-requirements. Present-you also makes the mistake of thinking that future-you will enjoy this continuing "freedom-from". But any time you use the time-agency bucket, you're filling it not only with the thing you want, but with additional work details that you may find distasteful.

Point is - work has some distasteful things mixed in it and some people seem to look at that as if "a little bit of poop ruins the brownies", and so they want to use a different brownie mix overlooking the fact that the newly seleted brownie mix (the one chosen as a "freedom-to") ALSO has a little bit of poop in it. Why is having a little bit of poop in your brownies viewed so differently in the first instance compared to the second? I would argue it has to do with what Daniel Gilbert described as present-you is absolutely terrible at knowing what future-you will want, so it discounts the new poop more so than the old poop.

And so, after quitting their jobs and scratching their present-itch, it turns out many people bounce around a few different things and go back to work. I think this is absolutely great and encourage anyone and everyone who has the means and opportunity to do this. My point is for the rest of us who can't. You can still carve out time for Thing-X if you know that's what you really want/need right now. You don't need to buy a huge expensive Time Agency Bucket on the off-chance you might want to do something later. If you know what you want/need, just choose it now - don't buy it bundled with all the costly, never-to-be-used options. What if you die before you can exercise them? or what if it turns out your sabbatical scratched all of your itches and it turns out you didn't need infinite time? No need to wait for excessive optionality to do what you want, carpe diem.

Edit:

TLDR; frugal people like to save money by not overspending on buying something - don't buy a one year sabbatical for the price of a lifetime sabbatical.

Also, one thing that I think might be going on is that people who are looking for "freedom from", "freedom to" or "time agency" is this idea that you're only "free" to do something if the consequences/costs are low. But that misses the cost-bundling point above. If you have "time agency" that you've purchased with 5 extra years of work, then having "time agency" to do X, Y or Z isn't really cost-less (to past-you) even though it appears that way (to present-you). Even if you're working, you can decide one morning "Fuck it, I'm skipping work and drinking coffee instead." It's just that people don't like the frictions/costs of choosing to do so.

@fish Happy to hear it! I also no longer feel the need for FIRE, but I do hope slowing down / reducing my obligations will help me regain some mental and physical health.
Last edited by suomalainen on Mon Mar 18, 2019 8:34 am, edited 1 time in total.

Fish
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Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Post by Fish »

Try getting to 2.5 hours of free time/day and see if you still crave FIRE. I’m there and I don’t anymore. One book that was kind of helpful was Overwhelmed by Brigid Schulte. Learning to recognize that leisure is all around us helps me appreciate it, even if it’s constrained and contaminated and surrounded on all sides by duty. It does help that my kids are also in the sweet spot where they’re out of diapers but not driving me nuts either, and I also have one fewer than you. So good luck getting to 2.5h/day.

I also wanted to express that I really enjoyed this post, there were a lot of similarities to my thought process and how I have found satisfaction in the present.

Jason

Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Post by Jason »

I was recently introduced to this philosopher:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._E._M._Anscombe

She addresses (I believe) your conundrum with regard to the future under "intention" (it is a paragraph in the wiki article). She uses the example of the shopping list and I see it this way: I do our shopping. I often (as I did today) forget an item. Obviously the list was not wrong. Nor was my desire to purchase every item on it wrong. What was wrong was my action. I forgot to buy something. But both the list and my desire remain true as the list truly expressed what I truly desired to bring home in the future. My failure to do so, although true, does not negate the truth of the list nor my desire to have bought every item on it. If I understand the allegory correctly, there will always be a disunion between intention and the desired future due to bad action, but that does not mean there is not truth to be found in the results when intention and future do not perfectly correlate.

It comes down to how you view the list. Is it a report or a desire. I think if you view it as the former you will be eternally disappointed.

classical_Liberal
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Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Post by classical_Liberal »

@Jason
Interesting, but I don't think that addressed the point directly. At least not from the perspective the Daniel Gilbert point. In that analogy, it's more like you did complete the list, get everything on it, then got home and realized it wasn't really what you wanted to begin with.

@Sou
I agree with the Daniel Gilbert point, I also agree with Paradox of Choice, and I agree with your point that expending effort towards keeping options open inherently closes other options. Which is why, IMO, Freedom to, is the weakest of the three freedoms expressed above.

Freedom from, on the other hand, can be more powerful. Because freedom from implies that we are attempting to remove something we already understand to have a negative in our life. Now there may be unconsidered second order effects of it's removal (ie your point most FIRE'ees and up back at work), but that doesn't change the fact that if someone absolutely hates a certain "work detail", the action of removal directly provides a net positive. This is something that freedom to can't do, because we are using chronesthesia, along with self knowledge to make educated guesses. Per Gilbert, most people suck at this, although I think this is partly because most people suck at self knowledge and can improve; hence increasing the power of Freedom to.

I absolutely disagree with the bucket analogy for time agency. You are making the assumption that buckets are left empty because someone has free time*. I don't think free time, or agency should be represented as empty, rather the bucket contents are just different. They are filled with whatever serves the best purpose for the self aware person at that time. It's waay easier for me to know what I want right now, than what I want tomorrow, or ten years from now. Of course the decision of usage will have consequences (ie maybe I have to go get coffee).

(*) This assumption is an underlying problem in our goal oriented culture. Just because someone isn't working towards some huge, end goal payoff does not mean that time is wasted!! True contentment comes in enjoying the process, not reaching the end goal.

Overall though I agree with your end assumption. People should use these freedoms, within reason, as they become available. Many of them simply require only a single change in thought process or habits. They are not necessarily the same as accumulating some finite resource. In those cases one can open up degrees of these freedoms forever, so use them once you have them! Others though, may require accumulation over time. Be wary to spend them on the freedom which provides most utility.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

And I thought I was the mistress of rationalization...

It pretty much boils down to does your lifestyle allow you to have sex at 10 in the morning or 2 in the afternoon any day of the week or doesn't it?

Jason

Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Post by Jason »

@7 10AM Or 2PM? All of a sudden your Emily Bronte?

@CL - I couldn't find the Dan Gilbert post. My point, or well, the smart woman philosopher's point, is there has to be something beyond the list as a checklist. The list cannot satisfy as a report. There has to be something ethical, or spiritual for that matter, regulating it. Isn't it otherwise just moving the goal posts?

classical_Liberal
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Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Post by classical_Liberal »

@Jason
Not sure if there was a thread, suo just brought up his thesis in our discussion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stumbling_on_Happiness

suomalainen
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Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Post by suomalainen »

@jace yes, I was referring to the Gilbert book @cL linked to. I may have referenced it before in my journal or elsewhere.

@7w5 with the proverbial office spouse, why not?

@cL ehhhhhhh, let's push onward a bit more. Freedom to in my opinion is the only true categorical "freedom" there is - and wherever you are, there you have it. The reason is that whenever you select a "freedom to", you invariably end up with items from which you will want freedom - "freedom from"s. While I wholeheartedly agree that one should seek to remove shitty things from their life, my point is more a categorical one - there will ALWAYS be shitty things in one's life. As a result, while there can be "freedom from" particular things, there is no generalized "freedom from"; it is therefore a mind-trick only. To see my point from the flipside - if you arrange your life so that you've weeded out all of the most material "freedom froms", what's left? Why, that's your selected "freedom to" with its self-defined minor flecks of poop. You were "free to" to ignore all of the removed "freedom-froms" also. There's no objective difference between the "freedom froms" you decided to prune and the ones you left alone - they're just the ones that you subjectively felt were worth pruning.

As to the Time Agency Bucket, I probably wasn't clear (per usual). Let me try it this way: let's say a guy (let's call him Locke) is dissatisfied with something in his life and he decides that a good solution to that problem is to be financially independent so that he can do as he likes. He accomplishes this goal at the cost of so-and-so many working and saving years and now he has a Time Agency Bucket, a/k/a 16 waking hours in a day. If you take just those facts, then the assumption is that the guy NOW has to fill up that blank slate that is his Time Agency Bucket. Now take alternate facts: same dissatisfied guy (let's call him Skinner), but now the guy wants to be financially independent so that he has time to do Thing X, which is what he likes. He accomplishes his goal with ruthless efficiency and now has a Time Agency Bucket, a/k/a 16 waking hours in a day, let's call it 12 of which are already slated for Thing X.

I will venture an opinion that Locke has overpaid for his Time Agency Bucket (i.e., worked longer than he really needed to because what he really needed was not a completely empty time agency bucket - financial independence), while Skinner has hit the nail on the head. We can posit a Mr. Middleman who does the same thing, but his Thing X only requires 2 hours a day, and I would opine that he also has overpaid.

The overflow of 16 hours for Locke, 4 hours for Skinner and 12 hours for Middleman is mere "optionality", which will be used up somehow. The key question is the deliberateness of the usage. If used deliberately, maybe my "overpayment" opinions are too harsh, but if the hours of optionality are just frittered away playing video games because Locke or Middleman lack the imagination to think of something more [pick your adjective - nourishing, healthy, productive, relaxing, whatever]...well, maybe my "overpayment" opinion isn't so harsh? Let's take a more personal example - what does present-you want/need right now? Is it a completely empty Time Agency Bucket Until The End of Time so you can do what you like when you like every day until you're dead? Or do you need a two-hour daily Time Agency Bucket? Or do you need a completely empty Time Agency Bucket for a couple of months? Some combination of the latter two? I posit to you that based on the examples of all these people who go back to work, a person only needs a completely empty Time Agency Bucket Until The End of Time if they can answer yes to one of two questions: 1) do you have a burning passion the pursuit of which requires a large/majority ongoing chunk of your life? 2) can you see the future and know that all future states of future-you will cherish the empty Time Agency Bucket? If you can't answer yes to either of those questions, maybe the FIRE-version of ERE isn't worth the cost. This is just another way of saying that is something along the lines of the "did I save too much" threads.

Where you may get some sympathy from me is if you tell me that Locke just doesn't know what he wants and with a completely empty Time Agency Bucket he can now try everything until he finds what he wants. That sympathy is tempered by the assumption that I don't think that's how most humans work, a la Schwartz's the Paradox of Choice, but I will admit that limitless optionality is sexy to me so I tend to take the bait.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

suomalainen wrote:with the proverbial office spouse, why not?
Good point.

Anyways, I would suggest that there is no such thing as time agency. Agency is inherently physical, and it is a very modern hourly-wage/salary-man notion to tie it to a ticking clock, although it is true that terms of indentured servitude were often measured in years.

The average American spends money at a rate equal to the energy/resource requirements of a blue whale. So, if you are FIRE with a passive income of $40,000 which is also equal to your expenses, you actually own/run the equivalent of a blue whale sized assortment of humans equipped with machines. So, you have freed yourself up to engage in nothing but the most intimate of personal care tasks and the most creative of creative work tasks. IOW, you may find that you have given yourself an assignment that is simultaneously too trivial and too challenging. The day before you is a blank sheet in which all you have to do is wipe your own butt and maybe compose a symphony, because your assemblage of energy slaves can readily handle all other tasks for you. That's why I think lowering expenses is ultimately the more interesting challenge.

What most people really don't like is some other human having the right to limit their physical agency (could be boss, could be needful customer, could be creditor, could be spouse, could be bureaucrat.) That's why it's called FU money, and the extent to which any individual needs money to say FU to another human who is telling them how to use or not use their body at any given time is directly correlated to awkwardness or lack of skill outside of the context of their current servitude.

Of course, there are also situations in which we are (literally!) open to receiving direction or instruction from other humans, because our strong willfulness is mitigated by the desire to learn, shared purpose or love.

suomalainen
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Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Post by suomalainen »

I also read your post in the mini-retirement thread, and I think I largely agree with your thought processes there about barriers to agency and above. Above all, I think this is most correct:
That's why it's called FU money, and the extent to which any individual needs money to say FU to another human who is telling them how to use or not use their body at any given time is directly correlated to awkwardness or lack of skill outside of the context of their current servitude.
Or the "money is a substitute for confidence" point someone else made (or maybe it was you) and that MMM posted about. One is always free to say FU if one is prepared to deal with the fallout.

Fish
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Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Post by Fish »

That got me thinking, that FU is not really about having $ but merely an agreeable (not necessarily perfect) alternative to your current situation.

1. If your BATNA to current job is draining your bank acct at a rate of 100k/year, it will take a lot of $ (or an extremely unpleasant situation at work) to claim that FU.

2. OTOH, if your family spends 40k/year then you can make ends meet with any median job presuming employability and being ok with working. In this case you are FU with a zero NW.

3. If due to personality you are driven to do unproductive thing X for 16h/day, and on top of that you hate any form of work, you cannot claim FU without a pile of $. The lower your discount rate (on the disutility of working in the future), the higher the $ requirement becomes until it approaches FI.

I used to be in situation #1 (high income in specialist job, high expenses, no skills) while thinking that there was a better life of leisure just waiting to be claimed due to reading 4HWW (situation#3). It made me very unhappy since I did not have the requisite $. While using frugality 101 to validate the feasibility of #2 (while remaining in specialist job), I also freed myself of the liability of having to do thing X and in the process claimed an even more powerful FU.

I admire those who are driven by the need to live a purposeful life, but from a financial perspective it is a weakness.

Add: note that FU is independent of whether one likes the current situation or not. It is about having options.

Add2: suppose one is a lawyer, does not mind it and is employable elsewhere as such. This person is FU even at a SR of 0%. However, if tired of lawyering, then FU is a function of whether any agreeable alternative income could cover expenses (possibly with savings to cover the difference).

suomalainen
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Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Post by suomalainen »

@fish - that's sort of my point. There is only one kind of freedom. You choose what you do. You can't choose what you like to do. You can't choose the consequences of your choices. You can't choose the costs of your choices. Everyone, everywhere, at all time is free to FU. The conflation is that people tend to think "freedom" or "FU" means "free" as in "low cost" (or "having options", as you put it). The highest cost, of course, is death or torture if you choose open-rebellion-FU while stuck in a Nazi death camp, and people tend to only feel their freedom when the present-cost is low. I understand that psychology, but have been trying on this tangent to draw a connection between the present-cost of FIRE for the future-low-cost of low-cost- or low-hassle-FU. TANSTAAFL. You can't get around the cost of FU, it's just time- and/or place-shifted.

The alternative to FIRE is what I think @jacob is probably really getting at, what the "renaissance ideal" or "antifragile" or "web of goals" is designed to do. It reduces the friction, the opportunity cost, the present-cost of FU, so that if you decide "hey, you know what, I want to exercise a 'freedom from' or 'i want to increase the size of my Time Agency Bucket'," then you feel more "free" to do so. Because you feel safer, you feel less fragile, because you can cash in on your social- or skill-capital. Financial capital is for lazy people like me who lack the imagination to develop the social skills and physical skills needed to thrive in life.

classical_Liberal
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Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Post by classical_Liberal »

If freedom from is really only freedom to choose freedom from, then I believe we are really just dealing with semantics. As long as the point is made that working to remove something that is a known negative in life is better than working to add something we "think" will be a potential positive in the future.

Time agency. I still think we are world apart here. You are looking at time as something you purchase in increments. Like it is something to be scheduled in a calendar. This is not agency over time, this is wealth to purchase some of your time back after you gave up agency to someone else. Here's my example:

Person A: Wants one hour a day for the next year to learn Japanese. Since that is all he needa to become conversational in the language. Person B: Has the same goal, but agency over his time

Person A Takes his lunch hour on the first day to bike to the library and see what is available for Japanese educational programs. He finds some software, checks out and heads back to work. On day 2 through day 90 works through the first several levels. He is excited to learn Japanese!

Person B is also excited about Japanese, no more so than Person A, but person B is able to dive in hard. In the first 2 weeks he spends almost 100 hours on the project and is already completed the software. The educational software suggests conversational Japanese as the next step and for only $500 has a program via skype for this purpose. This seems silly to person B, who instead looks for local meetups for the same purpose. He finds three a week, Tuesdays at 11AM, Thursdays at 9PM and Saturdays at 3PM.

Personal A, after finally catching up to person B on day 90 ,remains excited and has all the same ideas as person B. However, person A just can't get way to make the local meetups, so chooses to purchase the conversational time for $500.

Meanwhile Person B has made great conversational gains. One of his friends at the meetup suggested full immersion in the language to increase his skills. He has Family in Kyoto who would be happy to take in a traveler for a couple months over the summer. Since person "B" is free to travel on an open ended time frame, he finds rounds trip airfare for only $500. The trip was extremely satisfying, he is now conversationally fluent in Japanese, plus learned much about the culture. His desire to continue learning Japanese has diminished, but while in Japan he became fascinated with the popularity of robotics in the culture. Now he's off to the library because all he can think about is building robots.

Person A Completes the conversational package he purchased. He is doing well with conversational Japanese, but feels he probably wont show more improvements without the recommended immersion. Since he can only take two weeks off he looks for affordable airfare and hotel and really does't find anything. Hence his interest in learning the language diminishes and he moves on the the next project.

The same goal, achieved in two different ways, with equal money, one had agency over his time, the other had purchased some free time back. The entire experience is different in kind.

classical_Liberal
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Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Post by classical_Liberal »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Tue Mar 19, 2019 4:59 am
Anyways, I would suggest that there is no such thing as time agency. Agency is inherently physical, and it is a very modern hourly-wage/salary-man notion to tie it to a ticking clock, although it is true that terms of indentured servitude were often measured in years.
It is not inherently physical. Even if I "owe" someone 7 Years, 40 hours a week of my physical labor, If I get to chose when I provide that labor, then I still have agency of time.

EDIT: As shown above this can completely alter the the task at hand. One hour a day doing physical labor may be really good for me. Now what initially sounds like a prison sentence becomes a healthy daily exercise routine for 40 years.

If I need 5-10K year of money to survive throughout a lifetime, that does not mean I lose agency of my time. As long as I can choose when to do the activities needed for survival. Modern society has granted us additional freedoms. We now have the opportunity to choose how, and related, how much, time I need to surrender for survival activities.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I think that differences in life experiences, current situation, inherent temperament and druthers are leading to different perspectives and even definitions here.

@Fish:

I know this likely isn't speaking directly to what you wrote, but not all options are created equal. For instance, even if the only tool I have is a microwave oven, and the only cooking skill I have is knowing how to punch numbers into it, then if I have $5 in my pocket, I can still walk into any supermarket and choose from hundreds of frozen dinners. But if I also have the skills necessary to forage my next meal and make a fire on which to cook it, even if all I can acquire that day is carp and blackberries, it is not the case that my options equal 100 frozen meal possibilities + 1 foraged meal possibility = 101 options.

IOW, I think what I am trying to convey is that because money is the universal lubricant, it is also the universal eraser of dependency trail.



@classical_Liberal:

Oh my gawd. You really are an ENTJ bulldozer type :lol: . I need to take a nap just reading your post. As somebody who has allowed herself a great deal of time agency or freedom to make her own schedule throughout the course of her life, I have almost never chosen to use that agency in order to power through tasks or towards goals in the manner you suggested. I use it so that I can do a little bit of this or that and take the side path if I like.

classical_Liberal wrote:It is not inherently physical. Even if I "owe" someone 7 Years, 40 hours a week of my physical labor, If I get to chose when I provide that labor, then I still have agency of time.
True, but this is exactly why it is quite difficult to get a loan without having to pay interest. If you provide the labor later rather than sooner, future you loses even more agency.
If I need 5-10K year of money to survive throughout a lifetime, that does not mean I lose agency of my time. As long as I can choose when to do the activities needed for survival. Modern society has granted us additional freedoms. We now have the opportunity to choose how, and related, how much, time I need to surrender for survival activities.
Most activities needed for survival (maintenance of physiological integrity) actually do require cyclical cognition with environment. For instance, you can't save up your need to breath for more than a few minutes, and you can't save up your need to eat for more than maybe 30 days. In modern context, first thing to notice is that most people who have a lot of money don't really have a lot of money. What they really have is a collection of more or less easily converted to money assets, often abstracted and located at some distance from their person. It is less time consuming to order a delivery pizza on your credit card than it is to make one from near scratch with garden ingredients, but you still have to make use of all sorts of complex pathways every day in order to feed yourself. It's just that much more of the complexity is hidden from you when you make use of more money in the process.

suomalainen
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Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Post by suomalainen »

classical_Liberal wrote:
Tue Mar 19, 2019 4:06 pm
Time agency. I still think we are world apart here.
Ummm. I agree with your example 100000%. Worlds apart?!??

One thing tho:
classical_Liberal wrote:
Tue Mar 19, 2019 4:06 pm
The same goal, achieved in two different ways, with equal money, one had agency over his time, the other had purchased some free time back. The entire experience is different in kind.
There wasn’t equal money in your example. Assume Person A and Person B have the japanese learning idea on the same day, same job, and same starting net worth of zero. How does Person B get to what is your starting line for him of jumping in 50 hours a week? He has no time for a job and no assets. How does he live?

classical_Liberal
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Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Post by classical_Liberal »

1000000%?! OK then, we are thought brothers again!
suomalainen wrote:
Tue Mar 19, 2019 7:06 pm
There wasn’t equal money in your example.
You are operating under the wrong assumption. It's entirely possible for person "B" to live life that way (at ERE consumption levels) without Salaryman employment. It could easily be accomplished from any of the other three quadrants while maintaining virtual complete agency over time.

classical_Liberal
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Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

Post by classical_Liberal »

@7WB5
Right about the interest, so pay as you go! I agree that not everything can be saved, as part of that assumption money can't buy everything.

I completely grok (first time I have ever used that word, does that mean I'm officially part of the group :?: ) what you are saying about the complexity. Still, as long as the system is in place, and it reduces total effort required to provide for oneself in a wealthy industrialized country, it seems rather foolish to not take advantage of the system. I'd rather learn to adapt to work within any system that actually exists vs trying to operate much less efficiently in a system I "wish" or" believe someday may" exist. Work with what you've got.

suomalainen
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Re: Reading Recommendations

Post by suomalainen »

TheProcess wrote:
Fri Mar 08, 2019 8:09 pm
Would you consider posting some reading recommendations? I could use a little of that nirvana.
Relevant books from my reading list as I've grappled with psychological issues / unhappiness / whatever since 2012, with some sort of descriptor from my reading journal (some are more helpful than others), presented in the order in which I read them.

1) Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert - You're terrible at knowing what you want and even more terrible at knowing what you'll want years from now. Good luck and don't worry about it.

2) The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, Oliver Burkeman - I've read this at least three times. A bit of a survey of other ways of thinking, as opposed to the "positive thinking" self-help group.

3) Siddhartha, Herman Hesse - One of my favorite books of all time. Story of a man seeking enlightenment and his path through life - a German's interpretation of Buddhism.

4) White Fang, Jack London - Classic Alaskan wilderness book. "This was living, though he did not know it. He was realizing his own meaning in the world he was doing that for which he was made ... for life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do." "Life is always happy when it is expressing itself." "Life is movement". I think about this whenever I get out of the habit of getting outside amongst the trees. I am ALWAYS happiest when I'm consistently outside and moving.

5) Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand - Don't laugh, but I read this for the first time not as an angsty teenager, but as an angsty 30-something. The one real takeaway for me, given my upbringing was the idea of "the sanction of the victim" - that a person cannot shame you unless you accept their moral code/judgment. It helped me reject an oppressive external moral code that did not align with my values, the juxtaposition of which had caused me many years of grief as I struggled with being "wrong". I went from judging myself "wrong" to judging myself "ok" in the relative blink of an eye. One of the major bricks in my road away from organized religion.

6) East of Eden, John Steinbeck - Possibly my favorite book of all time. I guess the thing I'd highlight here is the idea considered across the book about responsibility and blame for one's choices. Part of being an adult is to have the courage to make difficult choices without full information and to be willing to accept the responsibility and blame for the consequences of those choices.

7) The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts - Perhaps a good quote to summarize the direction of the book would be: "Because consciousness must involve both pleasure and pain, to strive for pleasure to the exclusion of pain is, in effect, to strive for the loss of consciousness. Because such a loss is in principle the same as death, this means that the more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love." Also "[life] all exists for this moment. It is a dance, and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting somewhere."

8) The Big Picture, Sean Carroll - Part of my Buddhistic journey has been a grappling with theism vs atheism or meaning vs nihilism or however you want to frame it. My reading journal notes were previously printed here (scroll to bottom): viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5671&p=179384&hilit ... sm#p179384 the most relevant bit being: "The mistake we make in putting emphasis on happiness is to forget that life is a process, defined by activity and motion, and to search instead for the one perfect state of being. There can be no such state, since change is the essence of life."

9) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Mark Haddon - Delightful book about an (autistic?) kid who goes about trying to solve a dog’s murder and finds out (spoiler alert) about his mother’s infidelity, etc. The most impactful part of the book for me was the idea of this autistic kid needing to find his own space and block out all stimuli to calm himself down. It somehow really made the concept of needing that kind of thing really accessible.

10) Breaking the Spell, Dan Dennett - again along the lines of helping me "get free from the oppression of organized religion." The idea of religion being a meme that itself survives via natural selection. The ideas best adapted to humans are the ones that stick around the longest.

11) The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, Mark Manson - a really, really accessible book, possibly the one I would recommend the most as a first read. The main point of which is basically "don't hope for a life without problems. There's no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems." In other words, pick which shit sandwich you will enjoy eating the most.

12) Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl - I don’t agree with everything, but I do agree with the idea that of all things, man is free to decide what he thinks and how he orients himself to his situation.

13) Beyond Hope, Derrick Jensen - an article on Orion Magazine that is an environmentalism-related article, but this paragraph was something I found to be of more general application: "A WONDERFUL THING happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn’t kill you. It didn’t even make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems — you ceased hoping your problems would somehow get solved through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself — and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself." To me, it correlates with this Buddhist / psychological idea of not living in past memories or future fantasies, but to do what is needed right now.

14) Stranger in the Woods, Michael Finkel - a story about a hermit who lived in the woods in Maine for many years and survived by breaking into lakeside cabins and stealing food. The guy lived totally alone with basically nothing and survived the Maine winters. Stories like this just helped put my social anxieties or my need for introversion into an "ok" space. It helped remove judgment similar to my experience reading Atlas Shrugged and Curious Incident.

15) Why Buddhism is True, Robert Wright - A full review here: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5671&p=179384&hilit ... ue#p179384 but as I recall the gist is "why meditation is good for you" and it has an extensive bibliography if you want to follow up on any particulars. This would probably be the second or third book I would recommend, after reading Subtle Art.

16) Mindfulness - An Eight-week plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World, Mark Williams and Danny Penman - This ... is a very dense and excellent book. It was written by a couple of psychologists and they have a therapy based around mindfulness meditation. There are 8 meditations and each chapter goes into some depth about why that particular meditation would be good. There is just way too much to synthesize. Definitely recommend reading this one. Maybe I'll just post my unabridged reading notes. [edit:posted]

17) 10% Happier, Dan Harris - I'm still reading this one, but it's a story of Dan's journey from panic attack on TV to ... I guess being 10% happier. I'm about half-way through, but this is like a selective autobiography rather than a book about meditation, so it's a pretty quick and easy read with a few good insights so far. Maybe this would be a good book to read after Subtle Art and before Why Buddhism is True.

Update: paragraph on 10% Happier from my reading journal: The big takeaway from this book is this idea that meditation or mindfulness doesn’t make you into a permanently happy lump simply passively watching life pass you by. You can be annoyed; you can see problems. What mindfulness allows you to do is to pause between seeing the problem and responding to the problem so that you don’t simply react to the problem. Once you decide how you want to respond to the problem, planning for it is totally fine, but there comes a point when you must ask yourself “is this [continuing to plan] useful?” Once planning no longer is useful, return to the present moment, rather than continuing to uselessly worry about the future result of this plan you have made. Another way to think about it is that you can be attached to the things that you control - your effort in your plan, but it is useless to be attached to the result that you want, since much of the result is out of your control. The attachment to this future thing outside of your control contributes nothing to you but suffering.

edits: typos and stuff. And can I just say -- deciding to start a reading journal is possibly one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life. Sad, but true.
edit 3: added update paragraph
Last edited by suomalainen on Wed Apr 03, 2019 9:47 pm, edited 4 times in total.

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