black_son_of_gray's Journal

Where are you and where are you going?
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steveo73
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Re: black_son_of_gray's Journal

Post by steveo73 »

That was another great post. I often don't read long posts but I'm reading yours word for word.
black_son_of_gray wrote:
Mon Aug 05, 2019 7:58 pm
When Harari says “the one thing they will need for sure is the ability to reinvent themselves repeatedly throughout their lives,” that sounds an awful lot to me like Kegan level 5 will have a substantial edge in the uncertain—but highly disruptive—near future.
I see ERE/FI as giving you some stability (I've chosen this work purposely) here though. So instead of having to constantly reinvent yourself via pressure from outside factors you would have some ability to be resilient and adjust more on your terms.

I have a 15 yo son (nearly 16) and I am thinking of teaching him about savings. So when he is 18 and left school he may have to pay us board and he might want to spend money on the gym for instance. Say that life costs him $8k per year. I think he should look to save up 20-30 times that amount prior to expanding his lifestyle. That gives him some stability. Sure he has to live with his parents but he can sustain that lifestyle indefinitely.

So people who save are more resilient to changes in the world that push them to repeatedly reinvent themselves.

None of this stops the reality that you have to reinvent yourself. Marriages breakdown. People die. People change. The world changes. FI though gives you some buffer against the economy changing within certain limits.

FI is a huge goal for me. I think the benefit of gaining FI shouldn't be underestimated. I also think though that some form of semi-FI with the ability to continually adjust gives you resilience as well. You are probably seeing that right now within your life.

Compare that to people who just live pay packet to pay packet.

7Wannabe5
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Re: black_son_of_gray's Journal

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

wolf wrote:Did you also read the book 7Wannabe5? If yes, how would you rate it?
Yes, I read "The Renaissance Soul" by Lobenstine. It is also on Jacob's recommended reading list and/or bibliography, which is why I found "ERE" by way of it and/or the fact that I had read "YMOYL" many years ago. Another similar title would be Barbara Sher's "Refuse to Choose!: Use All of Your Interests, Hobbies, and Passions to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams." The important thing to keep in mind is that these books are intended for audience of hopelessly sideways generalists attempting some level of focus towards mastery as opposed to rigid specialists attempting the opposite.

@BSOG: Another very interesting post. The first time I was granted free time/resources with expectation of creative work was when I was bussed to a program for gifted children at the age of 9. Too much pressure. I can't recall what most of the other children did, but I know that I pretty quickly chose to better structure my time. I spent part of the day listening to teach yourself Hebrew tapes and part of the day watching speed-reading instructional film strips.
You get better at changing your identity by getting better at changing your habits, by getting good at creating an ecosystem of carefully-chosen habits that all confirm the identity that you’ve decided to assume.
I went through a phase where I was very concerned with "practice" in the sense of becoming self-aware that everything you regularly do is your practice. As in "It is my practice to consume 4 cups of coffee in the morning before attempting any difficult task." I do not claim to have transcended this focus on practice. In fact, I think it is more likely that I have simply slumped off of it. However, this may be in part due to the fact that I was considering concept of "ideal" practice, rather than change of practice towards change of identity. So, I became rather bogged down by the reality of "not enough hours in the day" to achieve the ideal no matter what level of discipline/focus you apply.

classical_Liberal
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Re: black_son_of_gray's Journal

Post by classical_Liberal »

Agree with others, another good post.

Personally, I'm a deinstitutionalized person who has been forced to work within the constraints of various institutions. I inherently dislike rules, but recognize that they are required for consistency to reach large, overarching purposes. It's when these rules/consistencies a)tend to work against the stated purpose through second order effects, or b)are working towards a stated purpose i'm not on board with, that I get into trouble.

My main driver to ERE has been to create the ability to stay outside institutions and make my own rules/consistences to avoid "a" and "b" above. Avoid the cognitive dissonance, if you will, of feeling like my work within the institution has some good constraints to reach positive outcomes, but also some of "a" and "b".

Being on the precipice of semi-ERE, I think my largest issue going forward isn't going to be creating positive internal consistencies, or the ability to modify them as situation changes. I can control my day-to-day pretty well. Rather, it's going to be finding the next overarching purpose I believe in with which to create them. I've purchased myself the freedom to choose my purpose(s), and even pick which ways to contribute to them. I'm just at a loss to where to begin. Maybe I'm just a bit weary from spending too much time within the system lately and some free time will open up opportunities, or maybe I need to seek this out with more concerted effort.

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Ego
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Re: black_son_of_gray's Journal

Post by Ego »

black_son_of_gray wrote:
Mon Aug 05, 2019 7:58 pm
Which brings us to topics addressing: “how do you change your identity?” and “how do you get better at changing your identity?”
I believe Harari is suggesting that we will be forced to become good at constantly modifying and optimizing ourselves to rapidly changing circumstances. That is somewhat different from self-authoring. The former is reactive, the later proactive. Unpredictable change will happen TO us. We will have to become good at adjusting the sails and navigating the course regardless of the direction of the wind.

Immigrants do this well in rapidly changing environments. Often better than native born people. Perhaps because they've done it once when they relocated. They became something other... no longer a Dane or a Mexican or a Pole... they are somehow both and neither at the same time. They've shed some of the anchors of tradition and cultural baggage. They are free to redefine themselves within the boundaries of their new reality.

That James Clear article on Identity-Based Habits is good. How much of success is saying to oneself, "I am the kind of person who...."? How much is saying, "I am the kind of person who does not...."? I find that eliminating the old stuff first frees up the necessary space before adding the new.

I guess the simple answer to "how do you get better at changing your identity?' is practice.

7Wannabe5
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Re: black_son_of_gray's Journal

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I don't know about the phrase "kind of person." Let me try.

Identity 1
I am the kind of person who reads for more than 30 hours/week.
I am the kind of person who does not do 500 push-ups/day.
vs.
Identity 2
I am the kind of person who reads one book/year.
I am the kind of person who does 500 push-ups/day.

I instantly feel myself experiencing a good deal of withdrawal and pain in attempt to transform from 1 to 2, and the environment which would force such change could only be a horrific dystopia.

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Bankai
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Re: black_son_of_gray's Journal

Post by Bankai »

False dichotomy. 'does not do' is for bad stuff (think smoking or dougnats).

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Bankai
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Re: black_son_of_gray's Journal

Post by Bankai »

Ego wrote:
Tue Aug 06, 2019 12:25 pm
they are somehow both and neither at the same time. They've shed some of the anchors of tradition and cultural baggage. They are free to redefine themselves within the boundaries of their new reality.
This is spot on. I certainly don't feel 100% at home in either place (emigrated at 24, 12y ago). It's both a bit annoying and very empowering at the same time. Knowing I've already started from scratch in a new country without experience, support or (deep) knowledge of the language gives this confidence that I could do it again and be just fine (most likely it would be easier than the first time).

7Wannabe5
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Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Bankai wrote:False dichotomy. 'does not do' is for bad stuff (think smoking or dougnats).
Okay, but that does not negate the fact that there is a strict limit on all the "good" stuff you can do towards the ideal. Also, I don't see the point in simply rephrasing a habit towards goal in terms of identity without actually doing some simple values clarification first. I mean, given enough external motivation, such as the classic million$$$ or point-of-gun enforced boot-camp, I would make attempt at practice that would tend to transform my identity from "soft nerd" to "hard athlete", but I think that people are often either over-shooting or displacing their own internal motivations when setting new difficult goals. For example:
In practice, people accumulate capital for all sorts of reasons: for instance, to increase future consumption (or avoid a decrease in consumption after retirement), or to amass and preserve wealth for the next generation, or again to acquire the power, security, or prestige that often come with wealth. In general, all these motivations are present at once in proportions that vary with the individual, the country, and the age. - "Capital" - Picketty
So, "I am the kind of person who sets aside 50% of earnings towards savings and investment" does not necessarily speak to mix of internal motivations.

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Bankai
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Post by Bankai »

Let me try.

I wanted to quit sugar. I had multiple motivations which in theory all worked synergistically ('unhealthy', 'costs money', 'my poor teeth', 'I'm addicted' etc.). Sugar was the exact opposite of what my web of goals was about; it was pulling me away from multiple goals of mine. Rationally, I knew it doesn't make sense to continue buying and eating sweets. I tried desperate measures like not taking any money to work so I couldn't go and buy it. It worked. For a week or a month at the time. Then I would promise myself 'just this one time' and buy just one sweet.

Then I decided to start with identity. Whenever I thought about buying or eating sweets, I'd say to myself 'I'm the kind of person who eats healthy and doesn't eat sugar'. It took a week or two for this new identity to settle (my unconsciousness to believe in it?); I had a couple of relapses early on, but eventually, my relationship with sugar changed forever.

As for new difficult goals, I agree. Replacing goals with identity works better for me in most areas of my life. There are all sorts of problems with goals. Identity, on the other hand, is about just being who you are. So, if I'm a person who works out every day, I need no mix of internal motivations of any sort. I just do it because that's who I am.

The difference between 'this is who I am' and 'I can't/have to do this' is really that big.

suomalainen
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Re: black_son_of_gray's Journal

Post by suomalainen »

@bsog: Preach.

The way that I would say it is that as a biological being on a biological world, you can never get past the business of life, which can perhaps be expanded into a Mazlow's hierarchy of needs-type view. Every step of that hierarchy requires work, from your first day to your last. There tends to be too much focus in the FIRE world on the "I don't want to do THIS type of work" (i.e., full-time, first-world office work) without really giving enough thought to what work you DO want to do and what work you will HAVE TO do. Perhaps this is a freedom-from vs freedom-to failure, compounded with a false romanticization of a "stress free" life. In any event, I think it does argue for a mind-shift - independence from full-time work (FIRE) is NOT the goal. FIRE's a chimera. All of life is work. To not want to work is to not want to live. All FIRE accomplishes is shifting what kinds of work you're doing, but it doesn't free you from work. If you're absolutely miserable, surely a change in work could be beneficial. But if you're not miserable...why all the sturm und drang to change "happy" to "glad"?

Get busy living or get busy dying.

7Wannabe5
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Re: black_son_of_gray's Journal

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Bankai:

So, imagination trumps will-power? That makes sense. Young children try out new identities all the time. I didn't like the phrase "kind of person", because it smacks of arbitrary elitism, as in "I am not the kind of person who displays tacky ornaments on her front lawn."

The curriculum in the schools where I teach includes a good deal of time devoted to independent reading. One master teacher I observed used the technique of teaching the children the word "stamina" and then timing how long they could stand on one leg followed by how long they could concentrate on "reading" a book. Another master teacher introduced the phrase "lost in reading" to group and then had a child who was already a devoted reader demonstrate what "lost in reading" looks like before asking them to attempt the practice. The trick is getting from initial motivation to muscle memory. Muscle memory is very much tied to place and time and other environmental cues.

But whatever method works best towards achievement of practice, goals, or new identity, it still begs the question of who is setting the curriculum vitae?

CS
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Post by CS »

@7wb5
I think the most powerful schooling would be the kind that lets the kids know they can/should set the curriculum (besides the minimums needed). That would be a great lesson to get young. I wonder if the montessori program is actually successful at that.

7Wannabe5
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Re: black_son_of_gray's Journal

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@CS:

I participated in a couple such experiments in the 1970s. In middle school I was part of a project with the acronym S.H.A.R.E (students having a real education.) When I was thrown back into conventional school in the 8th grade, it seemed very confining. I am only indirectly familiar with Montessori system, but it seems to be primarily based on assuming greater independent competence at variety of tasks.

If I attempt to extend this analogy further to the topic at hand, I would suggest that an early retirement facilitator might prove helpful with problem of too much freedom.

oldbeyond
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Re: black_son_of_gray's Journal

Post by oldbeyond »

A lot of great posts here!

Regarding ERE and the recent discussion of adaptability, what struck me most in the ERE book was the focus on value creation (which also brings with it the desire to reduce waste, as waste virtually always carries some cost). I read it a bit later so I had already been exposed to savings rates etc from MMM. That part was more like reading an academic paper on something you already knew the popularized version of. MMM also talks a bout value creation of course, but there's much less of a system there.

"Create value" seems like a much more potent and resilient perspective than "independence", perhaps especially from an emotional standpoint. These are merely abstractions of course, but at least for me it seems to nudge me towards industry, collaboration and contentment. "Independence" has led me more towards excessive risk-aversion, rent seeking and passivity. But these things are obviously very personal.

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Re: black_son_of_gray's Journal

Post by jacob »

oldbeyond wrote:
Sun Aug 11, 2019 9:06 am
"Create value" seems like a much more potent and resilient perspective than "independence", perhaps especially from an emotional standpoint. These are merely abstractions of course, but at least for me it seems to nudge me towards industry, collaboration and contentment. "Independence" has led me more towards excessive risk-aversion, rent seeking and passivity. But these things are obviously very personal.
I've written a 4000+ word guest post for GRS about what I've been doing for the past 10 years from a perspective of exactly that. Not sure what JD's timeline is ... might take a few months to come out.

The other thing that "independence" (cf value adding) often leads to is filling time with consumptive behavior that's just an expansion (Parkinson's law) of what one was already doing (travel, eating out, concerts, movies). For most people, this is ultimately not meaningful enough. I think this is why semi-retirement in the form of sticking around/going back part time consulting in one's old career is a typical outcome.

horsewoman
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Re: black_son_of_gray's Journal

Post by horsewoman »

CS wrote:
Wed Aug 07, 2019 9:10 am
@7wb5
I think the most powerful schooling would be the kind that lets the kids know they can/should set the curriculum (besides the minimums needed). That would be a great lesson to get young. I wonder if the montessori program is actually successful at that.
Our Montessori school does have a curriculum that is loosely based on the state school curriculum, because in Germany it is mandatory that children go to a state approved school. The Montessori kids sit the same final examinations as the kids in the "regular" schools, so they need to be taught what will be asked in the tests at some point. But the way to this point could not be more different. My daughter pities her friends who go to regular schools and I see what not being graded does to her self esteem. It's beautiful to watch! It's a shame that only very few kids have the privilege to learn this way. The motto is "Help me to do it myself". Very empowering!

Regarding the discussion about being self-directed ect. I think this is one of the points where I have gotten off easy due to the traditional system of being a married women with a child. I quit FT work when I had my baby (in Germany you can take up to 3 years maternity leave, and in rural areas most women do this due to lacking child care). The first year I was fully occupied with surviving a new born, but afterwards I've had lots of time to reflect on what I wanted from life. I pretty soon realized that I would never go back to FT work, so I started to monetize my hobbies. The whole process felt very natural, probably because it is "normal" to stay home the first 3 years hereabouts. Not so much for my husband! I persuaded him to go part-time - this was surprisingly hard, and we had many discussions like this one. DH gets teased/insulted all the time by other guys for not working full time, which is a problem I do not have. The first few years where hard for him even though we had lots of work on the farm. I felt he worked 3x as hard on the farm because he felt like a slacker for not working FT. 8 years later I have to force him to stay with his employer because of health insurance - he bitches about 10 hours/week as if it was SUCH an imposition on his time :)

In the end I think this is something you simply have to DO, no matter how much thought you give it beforehand. If it sucks, just get a PT job. And if this job sucks, quit and look for another if you are so inclined. Maybe this comes easy to me because I'm a generalist, not a specialist, IDK.

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Re: black_son_of_gray's Journal

Post by black_son_of_gray »

ERE and Golden Eggs

A couple of years ago, when it made sense to have an Amazon Prime membership, I stumbled upon the original television series Twin Peaks (1990-91) and streamed it. Over the last few weeks, I've watched the new season on DVD from the library (2017; it's a "25 years later" type thing), and I've been working through my thoughts on it.

It's a polarizing show. People tend to think it's either: 1) refreshingly original (nay, brilliant!); or 2) absolutely terrible. Example: My SO watched the first season with me, then refused to continue. It's got a lot of over-the-top melodrama, a huge tangle of narrative threads (many of which don't go anywhere), and loooong stretches of dialogue-less surrealism (think 2001:A Space Odyssey's "Star Child" sequence, if that rings a bell for you). The central narrative line—the thing that starts us down the rabbit hole, so to speak—is the investigation into the murder of a local high school girl named Laura Palmer.

Fans have become obsessed with theories of how the Twin Peaks world works, and in particular, what really happened to Laura Palmer. But co-creator of the show David Lynch had this to say about the show's own central—and most coherent—plot line:
“What killed ‘Twin Peaks’ originally — who killed Laura Palmer? — was a question that we did not ever really want to answer,” Lynch said. “That Laura Palmer mystery was the goose that laid these little golden eggs. And then at a certain point, we were told we needed to wrap that up and after that, [the show] never really picked up.”
The Laura Palmer murder got the whole thing going, but the Twin Peaks world, once set in motion, kept spitting out more new and different and bizarre and incomplete and provocative other stories. It was self-seeding from then on out. An infinite story. At its peak, when the show was nearly unwatchable from a narrative standpoint, but still magnetic to a small, cult-ish fanbase from a "world building" standpoint (with a well-defined, much beloved tone, sense of place, and internal logic), you might even be forgiven for calling it a systems-level show. The show in total was more than the just resolution of its plot. It wasn't even about the goose. It was about the golden eggs. But alas, most interest in the show dropped off after the first season—precisely when the side narratives and surrealism took off and the narrative about solving the murder moved to the back burner. Water cooler buzz, which had led the show to enormous popularity after the first episodes, died off because no one could even explain what the show was about anymore, even if they still liked it.

Which brings us to ERE. I've started thinking of ERE as the goose, and about the opportunities/fringe benefits/emergent properties/quirks that result from ERE as the golden eggs.

It's not even about saving a ton of money.
It's not even about creating a low-expense lifestyle.
It's not even about multiple income sources.
It's not even about financial resilience in a changing world.
At least, not for me.
Those are goose things. Those are "central plots lines." They are important things, and I've been incredibly fortunate in stumbling across these ideas and this community so early in life. They need to be there to get the whole thing going. But in moving forward with my life, I'm much more interested in all the golden eggs the goose has been laying. Those are the things that make the show more than just a well-executed sit-com.

Over in the Yields and Flows thread, I emphasized a particular viewpoint I've been mulling around recently—a progressive widening of focus when making choices:
black_son_of_gray wrote:
Wed Sep 25, 2019 7:41 pm
[…]now it's all just mashed up together with "living your life". At this level, you're looking at the cost and value not simply of a single thing/behavior over the course of your interaction/participation with it, but across your whole lifestyle and all the other things you own and/or interact with. Does this one thing "lift up" or support numerous other goals/systems/routines that you have in your life? How do the other goals/systems/routines that you have in your life in turn impact this one thing that you are considering? Because the cost and value are spread across so many other aspects of the lifestyle, calculating it for any particularly element becomes perhaps ironically, extremely difficult. This is also why money itself starts to become almost irrelevant once a robust system is up and running smoothly.
But when vision is broadened, defocused—to the point where individual elements start to merge into the background...how do you know which direction to go?

On that point @7Wannabe5 said something to music-producer @Jin+Guice about managing this challenge that really resonated (sorry, had to) with me:
7Wannabe5 wrote:
Sun Oct 06, 2019 5:07 pm
Do it like you adjust all the different levels in the recording studio until you optimize "good."
What's interesting to me about this idea of following your own ear towards what sounds "good", is that it implies that each journey into the highest ERE Wheaton Levels is idiosyncratic and has to be done alone. While these levels can be described at some cold, sterile, 10000-foot level in abstract, structural/hierarchical terms, they can't define what "good" is—you have to do that for yourself. They can't tell you which or how many golden eggs you're going to want to have around you. ERE just provides you with a biological description of the goose—which is helpful—but not all there is to know about being a farmer. For better or worse, I myself am having a hard time understanding what ERE even means for me anymore. What I am doing is making some small measure of progress in figuring out what I think is the "good life." (Is that progress?)

This haze is distinctly different from the lower ERE Wheaton Levels which have no obvious philosophical tuning aspect to them. At the higher levels, the mathematical precision that defines the lower levels starts to dissolve into a gut-level balancing of a much more individualized "goodness" (e.g. Is something "worth it" from a YMOYL standpoint?). From the outside, or from lower levels, this can look ridiculous, bizarre, or incoherent. But those lower rungs are staring at the goose and blind to the eggs.

The creators of Twin Peaks followed their aesthetic for "good" and ended up with a highly esoteric show that even most fans can't really understand or explain (at least, not fully). In this respect, I'll be very interested in seeing what ERE Wheaton Level 7+ looks like as it populates (how many are already there??). Will it just be a bunch of people that maybe-kinda-sorta get each other, and understand each other in a certain abstract way, but ultimately are as varied as individual preferences for "goodness"?

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Re: black_son_of_gray's Journal

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Twin Peaks was initially aired while I was attending high school in a fairly affluent rural location, not unlike that portrayed in the show. There were 6 sets of identical twins in my graduating class.

I am kind of surprised that the studio analogy I threw out is resonating. It's too bad we can't construct an instantaneous fix for lifestyle like that. I did try an experiment to correlate my daily subjective happiness rating with current activities and it was a bit helpful. General rule of thumb is that you have to start thinking in terms of qualities more than quantities as system design becomes more complex. From the rut where I am currently spinning my wheels, my thought is that it doesn't matter how skilled you are at adjusting the levels if the bass player sucks rocks. Something like that. Another round of "return to fundamentals?"

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Re: black_son_of_gray's Journal

Post by Jin+Guice »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Tue Oct 15, 2019 6:27 am
It's too bad we can't construct an instantaneous fix for lifestyle like that
I once asked a famous music producer/ mix engineer I was assisting how he knew he was done with a mix. He responded "no one who is being honest ever thinks their mixes are good. This problem only gets worse as you get higher level projects. Just fake it until you make it, I promise everyone else is." So the analogy still holds for life.
7Wannabe5 wrote:
Tue Oct 15, 2019 6:27 am
From the rut where I am currently spinning my wheels, my thought is that it doesn't matter how skilled you are at adjusting the levels if the bass player sucks rocks.
The official jargon is "you can't polish a turd." I've never seen that knowledge stop anyone from trying.





@bsog: I'm convinced the higher levels actually have nothing to do with frugality and don't require it. I have a few people I know who I suspect of being Wheaton 6 or 7. They are people who usually aren't very financially minded so they don't have much financial capital. They do however treat money like a flow. All of them have jobs they don't plan on retiring early from. I don't think any of them are intentionally employing systems thinking to run their lives, they just sort of did it naturally.

Everyone I'm describing (and pretty much everyone I know) is middle class. I don't think any of these people are following an independent framework like ERE. At higher levels ERE as an idea and a movement is most helpful because it replaces the standard middle class framework for success. I worry that some of these people will start chasing more traditional goals as they age.

If ERE is more about freedom to... than freedom from..., moving to the higher levels is about figuring out how to fill in the "to..." with the same principles that allowed you to achieve freedom.

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Re: black_son_of_gray's Journal

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Jin + Guice wrote:He responded "no one who is being honest ever thinks their mixes are good. This problem only gets worse as you get higher level projects. Just fake it until you make it, I promise everyone else is." So the analogy still holds for life.
Gotcha. Likely I am suffering from Icarus syndrome. I thought I had my mix at 85% , but it all fell apart while I was shooting for 95%.
The official jargon is "you can't polish a turd." I've never seen that knowledge stop anyone from trying.
True, but in the realm of permaculture you should at least be able to render it harmless and compostable in your dry outhouse surrounded by willows. I am not sure how to extend this analogy to either internal or external crappy bass player. I guess "Don't feed that which sickens you." would serve as general rule of thumb.
I'm convinced the higher levels actually have nothing to do with frugality and don't require it.
I get where you are going with this, but I still disagree. If you read Paul Wheaton's recent book, he makes it very clear that luxuriant living for lazy people is high level functioning. His hero is Sepp Holzer who he always quotes as saying "If you don't want to let the hogs eat the brambles, then I guess you will have to do the hog's work yourself (shrug.)" Frugality does not equal scarcity mindset and/or Calvinist work ethic. It's more like the pleasure inherent in solving the puzzle of how to get all the best things in life without spending very much money (having to draw a cloud of ignorance at the end of a path rather than a loop in your system.) That said, I very much agree that Jacob's particular solution or Paul Wheaton's particular solution must not be the only solutions. In fact, they would fail as Level 8 Influencers if particular solutions were what they were promoting.

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