The Education of Axel Heyst

[jacob]

A buy nothing year oftentimes serve as a gateway to extremely high savings rates, so maybe it'll stick.

[RoamingFrancis]

Working on fun projects in the middle of the desert sounds like the ideal place to be during a pandemic

[AxelHeyst]

Yes I've really lucked out in my circumstances, I know very few people will be in such a cushy situation to ride out the shelter-in-place. All of California went on lockdown last night, necessary travel only.

For me, my stress levels haven't been lower in a long time. Here's my thinking on why:

I do very well with constraints. So much so that I often impose arbitrary constraints on my life in order to learn something or move forward.

My idea of why this is, is that I do well with recognizing and letting go of things I can't control. Many people (it seems to me) spend a lot of time thinking/worrying about things they can't really control, and I don't know if it's because they aren't able to separate controllable vs. uncontrollable things, or something else.

One of my favorite quotes is this:

If it can be changed, there’s some action that will change it. If it can’t, it must be considered part of the landscape to be incorporated in strategy and tactics. Complaining is a sign that someone isn’t willing to risk moving on a changeable situation, or won’t consider the immutable circumstance in his or her plans.

Having a thousand controllable variables in my life is stressful to me. All those variables have to be managed, observed, considered, decided upon. It's a big cognitive burden. Uncontrollable variables cannot by definition be managed - they ought to be understood, and incorporated in to one's strategic framework, but once that's done the effort is very low.

The trivial example is clothing. If you have 100 possible outfits, then every morning you have a decision to make. You have to mix and match, if you want to wear the black trousers you also need the blue tie and the brown socks won't do, whatever. If you only have 1 outfit, perhaps several "copies" of it, you don't have to make a decision. You just wear that one outfit.

I find great relief in having my options culled to as small a number as possible, as long as the option space still leaves me able to live a life the way I want. It's not as simple as just mathematically removing options.

In one sense, living in a van/rig adds options to my life, so this seems inconsistent. But to me, I'm constrained to a certain set of decisions: I can park on BLM/Forest Service land, or I can moochdock at a friend's place, or stay on the family land. I can buy only a small amount of groceries at a time. I can only have as many clothes as fit in a box the size of a microwave. I'm cut off from decisions like: where should I sign up for a 1 year lease? Where should I 'put down roots'? I find peace in not having to make those decisions, so I feel my life is simpler for living this lifestyle.

Anyways: the shutdown order, and my decision to shelve all projects that involve buying new things (because I could still push some projects along by buying parts online), has removed a huge number of projects on my list. I'm now constrained to the projects and actions that I can reasonably perform here, in this one place, with the material objects I happen to have around me. I have no (or little) control over the virus or the shutdown - I simply follow the relatively easy best practices of social distancing, not going out, and now my option space is just this little bubble I'm in.

In the movie Apollo 13, they had to figure out how to connect a square fitting to a round hose (or something like that) so they could scrub CO2 from the cabin air, or the astronauts would die before they got back to Earth. They stuffed a bunch of NASA engineers in a conference room, dumped a box of all the stuff the astronauts had available to them, and said "figure it out". The shutdown order is sort of like that. This is your life. You have a computer, and some food, and these people, and a crappy internet connection, and all the random junk laying around the yard. Figure it out.

We'll see if I've gone nuts in three weeks, but for now, my mental baggage is lower.

[RoamingFrancis]

I agree and can relate. This is one of the reasons why living in a van/cabin in the woods is appealing, and also one thing that appeals to me about specialization (even though I generally prefer generalization) of skills. Thinking about things is just too much damn work - it's such a mental relief to have a couple of things to concentrate on.

[mooretrees]

I also am similar to you in this regard. External boundaries are very relaxing. Marriage was one of those for me. It was (and still it) so fantastic to just concentrate my energy on one man and relax into our relationship. I wouldn't have been able to express all of this as eloquently as you did, but I totally get it.

Hope to hear more about the projects you are working on, especially the water situation.

[AxelHeyst]

External boundaries are very relaxing. Marriage was one of those for me. It was (and still it) so fantastic to just concentrate my energy on one man and relax into our relationship.

Ah, this! Two-three years ago I got out of a long relationship and thought I wanted to give the poly lifestyle a go. In true INTJ/P fashion, I read a bunch of books and designed a whole system for how I was going to approach it. Then, 2 weeks in, I met DW, discovered that there was at least one person in the world who was awesome enough I only wanted to spend my 'relationship' time with her, and realized that a poly approach was not exactly in alignment with my goal of having a simple life.

[RoamingFrancis]

I can relate - I've never been a huge fan of strict monogamy, but being full poly just seems like too much damn work. I don't wanna put my entire life on a Google Calendar!

I imagine there's some sweet spot between full monogamy and full polyamory that I fit into nicely, but I haven't quite found it yet.

[AxelHeyst]

I imagine there's some sweet spot between full monogamy and full polyamory that I fit into nicely, but I haven't quite found it yet.

Enjoy the journey!

[AxelHeyst]

The whole Covid-19 situation is making me feel embarassed at how flat-footed it caught me. While I'm in a not-terrible situation, I of all people ought to have been decently prepared. I've been deep down the rabbit hole of both localized disasters and society-scale collapses. I have been expecting major and minor disruptions to business-as-usual for years. And... when the shutdowns started hitting, I had maybe a week of food.

In my defense, I've been doing the nomad vandweller thing, so it's not like I actually have a pantry. The shutdowns came a week after I arrived at my latest spot, the family land. I haven't been in any one place longer than a couple months in, literally, years. So I've just been deferring taking reasonable precautions until "I settle down and find my spot." Well, I haven't found my spot, but trouble found me.

I also didn't adequately think through and plan for a global meltdown like this. On my "about my vanlife situation" page on the internet, I actually have written "another plus of living in a rig is that if some crisis hits, I can probably just go jacks up and drive somewhere where there is food in the grocery stores". The current situation is pointing out the major flaw in that thinking.

I am taking this situation as a wake-up call to myself to get my shit together, both at small scales and at larger scales. This post is me explaining what I mean by that, and what I intend to do. How I intend to take advantage of the fire lit under my ass to get me better situated for the future.

Let's start at the small scale. This is my current list of actions, in very approximate order of importance.

• Don't get Covid-19 (right now - do everything possible to avoid getting it now).
• Don't get hurt (now + 2 weeks will be bad timing for needing to get patched up over a climbing or motorcycle injury).
• Don't spend any money you don't have to. I'm basically treating this as a buy-nothing [indefinite period of time]. I'm spending money on food, I'm relaxing my whole paleo meat-and-fresh-veggies-only thing, and that's basically it.
• Don't rush. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Panic never pays.
• Deliberately build up a food and critical supplies stash. Do NOT panic buy 100 lbs of rice, take the time to research and create a system, spread the purchasing out, and first build up to 3 months supply, cruise with that for a little bit to iron the bugs out, and then build up to a year's supply.
• Be useful at work. All employees at my firm just got anywhere between 15% and 40% pay reductions (the more you make, the higher your percentage) in an effort to avoid laying people off. I find out my percentage cut in a few days. Now might be a bad time to not have a job, since I still only have something like 4xjafi in my savings. So I'm focusing on being indispensable at work and hanging on to this income for as long as possible in case the economy completely implodes and I have to coast on savings for a bit.
• Start learning how to grow and harvest food now. (John Michael Greer says that when the grocery stores are empty is a pretty terrible time to start to learn how to compost and grow veggies. His whole concept of Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush is something I've been a paper believer in for a long time, but, see above for my vanlife excuses on that front).
• Practice yoga, meditation, exercise, etc. Peter Kalmus, in his book Being the Change, says that his mindfulness practice is a major component of his ecological lifestyle, for a variety of reasons. It helps keep him from impulse buying; it helps him focus on what's truly important; it helps him find peace and contentment without consumer goods and lifestyle; etc.

Put another way, my current aim is to progress through the Wheaton Levels as rapidly as possible. I think on the first page of this journal I stated that my goal was to get to Wheaton 8/9+. That goal hasn't changed. I'm maybe a 4 now. The only way to get there is through 5, and 6, and 7, no skipping around, no shortcuts. I don't believe in silver bullets. But I do believe in focus, discipline, and cutting out time spent on wasteful activities that don't move you towards your goal.

As Derek Sivers' music mentor told him, speaking about music school, "The standard pace is for chumps". I'm not value judging folks who take a more leisurely pace, the point is that there is a range of velocities in which one can progress through the Wheaton Levels. I am aiming for the faster edge of that range.

I do think that my theory is at a more advanced stage than my actions are. By that I mean, I've read a stack and a half of books that I think are relevant to this endeavor. I've just been mucking about as a digital nomad/high earner / vanlifer, saying "yeah yeah I'll get to it." I took the classes, but I skipped the lab work. I've got a lot of remedial actions to execute, but I think I've got a reasonable idea of what the correct actions / path of actions is. At least, much better than if I hadn't read all those books.

We'll see if I look back on that paragraph in a year or two and have a good belly laugh at my naivete.

A final thought on what it is I'm trying to do: I'm seeking a way of life (thoughts, perspectives, skills, actions, habits, behaviors, ways of interacting with people and environment) that is inherently fulfilling and value-creating, that can persist in to the uncertain future without contributing to the issues that are making that future uncertain. This lifestyle, then, will be agile/adaptive, creative, clever, perhaps (dare I say it) anti-fragile, and productive. It will seek to maximize its own degrees of freedom and ability to operate independently (citation: John Boyd). A diversity of inputs is only the start: an explicit aim of this lifestyle will be to decouple as many of those diverse inputs from industrial-era systems that themselves rely on fragile systems to keep running and are vulnerable to cascading failures. As a final thought (for now), this lifestyle ought to be somewhat scalable, meaning, it passes the "but what if everyone did it?" test.

I'm intrigued by the hints Jacob has dropped about his ERE2.0 project, which I suspect is related to what I'm trying to do. One of my sub-projects is scouring the forum for the references and other hints he's dropped, in an effort to compile a more comprehensive reading list, and identify the perceptual gaps in the material I'm already familiar with. A little bit of playing with the advanced search features hasn't helped terribly much, so I might be settling in for some oh-so-exciting brute-force scrolling through all his posts. I'm sure that'll yield many hidden gems that as a newcomer to the forum I've not had a chance to discover yet.

I'm putting down a guess here that social, community, and leadership skills play a larger role in ERE2.0/Wheaton 8+ than they do in ERE1.0/Wheaton<=7. I'm dealing with some subtle, delicate, and potentially high-consequence social/leadership skills here in my little shelter-in-place community that has me thinking about it.

Okay, that's all for now. I anticipate most of my future posts being related to this endeavor. All feedback/criticism/etc is highly welcome as always. What are my blind spots?

[RoamingFrancis]

Great post, there's lots of interesting stuff to chew on. Some parts really resonated with me; I'll quote and comment on some of those.

Enjoy the journey!

I will I'm sure it'll be a long one. Shame quarantine prohibits my dating life.

Meditation has been HUGE for me. A little over a year ago, I sat a 10 day Vipassana retreat on a whim. Had the most powerful experience of my life and have been in the habit of sitting every day since. Actually spent last Saturday doing a silent retreat in my room - one of the benefits of not having much to do.

Check out Shinzen Young. He's a meditation teacher and neuroscience research consultant. I think he does a fantastic job of talking both about spirituality and science without demeaning either of them. He has a good book called "The Science of Enlightenment" too.

"The standard pace is for chumps"

This is really what I'm feeling now. Before COVID I thought, "I have 5-10 years to leisurely plan for a societal collapse." Now I'm thinking, "I have to get out of school as quickly as humanly possible, FIRE, and buy land with some friends." It's definitely added a sense of urgency to my timeline.

I do think that my theory is at a more advanced stage than my actions are.

This is especially frustrating for me living with my parents, where I tend to silently endure consumerist behaviors. My parents, my dad especially, seem to slowly growing more anti-consumerist. However, I'm the oldest of five kids, so life for them is hectic and they probably won't make any major changes for another couple years. They've talked about doing the tiny house or RV thing when the time is right, but the momentum of their lives seems to be keeping them in place for now. Maybe coronavirus will be a wake up call. Inshallah.

You mention taking classes without doing the labs. That's my literal situation right now

ERE2.0 sounds fantastic! I would immediately have my local library order it.

I agree that social/community stuff should play a larger role. In fact, I think its lack of importance in the ERE book (at least from what I remember) is a major flaw. As admirable as the Renaissance ideal is, no one can learn everything, and the best way to expand available skills and hence creative problem solving and resiliency is by working with people of varying skillsets. They say the next Buddha will be the Sangha - maybe the next true Renaissance (Wo)Man is a Renaissance Community.

In regards to your current priorities, what does your current skillset look like? You say you're planning to learn to grow food as soon as possible, and I'm curious as to where your other strengths are. It seems you have some DIY stuff under your belt from your Serenity build. Not sure what else I can add, as you're a couple Wheatons above me.

[mooretrees]

I'm really interested in what you figure out on this path. My main question is, what kept you from getting prepared before corona? If you were the guy reading the books, living the van life, where was the disconnect with acting on your theoretical knowledge? I think that would be interesting to suss out, as it could provide a long term energy towards being truly prepared. I am like you, I'm eager to progress to the next Wheaton level, and unlike you, I wasn't expecting corona or anyway prepared for it. However, at some point I really cared about climate change and it's really hard to tell from my life that I am trying to do anything to prevent/mitigate climate change. I'm clumsily trying to say I get it, but why did you and I both ignore/not act on something that we believed we should? This corona event will pass, and I'd worry that some of the urgency to be better prepared will also pass. So, it might be worth it to understand why your previous self didn't act and break down whatever barrier there existed previously.

Switching gears, I've wondered how to prep while living in a tiny house. It depends on your location, I suppose. I've planned on living in or near town initially and that would allow a storage unit with a freezer possibly. I've appreciated my house during this virus outbreak as it's been so easy to find places to put our extra food. I think you're out with family/friends on their land? What else would you have done/brought with you to be better prepared? I'll definitely be canning more this year and hopefully from my garden.

[AxelHeyst]

In fact, I think its lack of importance in the ERE book (at least from what I remember) is a major flaw. As admirable as the Renaissance ideal is, no one can learn everything, and the best way to expand available skills and hence creative problem solving and resiliency is by working with people of varying skillsets. They say the next Buddha will be the Sangha - maybe the next true Renaissance (Wo)Man is a Renaissance Community.

A little bit of devil's advocate here, as someone who has done some digging and has some experience with community living, is that execution on community living is incredibly difficult in the "West", because we're all so individualistic. Jamming our selves in to community and making it work, even amongst people who *want* to make it work, has proven to be exceptionally difficult. Intentional communities have something like a 90% failure rate at best. And so, if Jacob had written community as a central focus of his (first) book, I imagine it would suffer from inaccessibility. I've read a lot of books on community, and been stymied at execution by the challenges I mentioned.

Another problem is that a lot of people show up for a community being, frankly, broken and useless people, because that's what our society produces under the bell curve. They don't know how to do anything (because they're completely specialized), and they have emotional/pschological/spiritual baggage that they drag the whole community down in to.

So I'd view the lack of community not as a missing flaw of ERE1.0. I'd view ERE1.0 as perhaps a primer, the required material you must progress through, before you make yourself a useful enough person to be able to show up to [community] in a productive way. ERE1.0 was Wheaton up to 7, which is the ground work to make you a self-sufficient person. Only self-sufficient people need apply to the higher-level community actions.

Of course, maybe I'm wrong, and Jacob's idea of Wheaton 8+ is also individualistic. Which is fine, it's his acronym, and I'm still down here at Wheaton ~4, so I don't even know what I'm talking about. I'm going to not make a habit of using the term ERE2.0 from here on out, as it's pure speculation based on two off-hand comments of his and I don't want to accidentally build up totally incorrect notions of what it is.

All that said, *I* happen to think community is really important, and it's part of my overall vision. I'll write more about it (and my small experience with it) later.

I appreciate the rest of your comments as well RF, thank you. I'm going to follow some of the leads you dropped. As for skill sets I currently have, here goes:

• Basic construction (I helped dad build our house from ages 13-20, so I know how to do standard concrete work, framing, sheathing, drywall, basic plumbing and wiring, etc. I'd run off to college by the time we got to more detailed interior work). I don't have any metalworking skills.
• Design and installation of off-grid solar PV systems.
• How to dig holes in the ground (water lines, gas lines, leach fields, data/etc).
• Basic modern backpacking, simple orienteering and overland travel.
• Very basic automechanics: how to change a tire, fluids, etc.
• How to look stuff up on the internet (I wouldn't have put this down, but it continually shocks me how deficient other people seem to be at looking up basic information and instructions on the most incredible learning resource humans have ever invented, so I guess that's a strength).
• Basic violence-avoidance skills (de-escalation, posture, situational awareness, etc)
• Basic leadership skills (emotional intelligence, NVC, how to lead a meeting, how to give and take, how to compromise, how to make people feel heard, seen, and valued, how to get over my own shit in order to move a social/community situation forward towards a common goal, how to delegate, how to give critical feedback without making people cry, ...)
• Basic bicycle maintenance
• How to tow (how to drive, back up, how to assess a vehicle/trailer system in terms of capacity, stability and weight distribution, etc)
• How to 4x4/vehicle recovery (basic)
• How to design and install low-voltage DC systems
• How to build and use a composting toilet system
• How to shoot a gun
• How to start a fire with a knife and flint
• How to not immediately die of dehydration/heatstroke in an extreme desert environment (I grew up playing in the Mojave desert). Some basics on where to look for/find water in a desert.
• How to not die of hypothermia at night even if you don't have a $600 sleeping bag system
• How to exercise, stay in shape, and eat basically healthy
• How to meditate (at a basic level), how to do yoga (at a basic level)
• Some basics of Earthship construction (I did an internship with them ages ago) and theory regarding other natural building techniques.

Part of my new initiative is to shore up the hand-wavey skills on that list, draft a wish list of skills, and start getting after it.

[jacob]

Being the change is a great book or rather a great example of someone who has translated theoretical knowledge into "moral knowledge", that is, how to act in one's own life given that knowledge(*) Failing to do that is the biggest sticking point I see when it comes to climate change concerns for example, and many, particularly on the activist side get downright angry if it's pointed out to them. "Theoretical knowledge" or "theoretical concern" seems to compartmentalized into something that always affects "other people", "far away".

(*) I consider it somewhere between "I wish I had written that" and "Since someone has already written that, why do I need to write another one like it."

In LTG, there's a great diagram showing people's concern sphere from the local to the global in time and space. Most are only considered with the local, that is, their friends and family and don't give much thought to anyone else. (Entire political parties are build on this "me&my friends first" principle. But there are also other people (and parties) who "get off" on being concerned mainly about those who are entirely out of their sphere. E.g. poor people on the other side of the world ... and phrase the problem as e.g. "solving the social injustice of climate change" while NOT drawing the connection to their own local behavior. A behavior that may involve a $1.5M community farm that requires a $300k buy-in but has daily yoga meditation routines where "people come together to act out their climate grief in song and movement". (Yes, that's really a thing!)

What keeps one from acting is that one can not imagine whatever thing happening to oneself personally. "Sure, people who drink a lot of cola will become diabetics, but it won't happen it me. (I'm the exception.)" or "Sure, the world will see an increasing number of epidemic diseases, but that's a third world problem (and I don't live there, so I'm excepted.). Therefore my interaction will be support and raising awareness about it, but there's no need to change my personal lifestyle or behavior in any way."

In Kegan terms, we see issues as something we HAVE, not something we ARE. We're blind to our own role in the problem.

Fundamentally, it's therefore a failure to draw the line ALL the way back from the fundamental problem to one's behavior. Like when people are coordinating their protests about their low wages and crushing student loans on latest model iPhones after stopping in for a refill at SBUX. Climate change activism is where I've noticed some of the strongest behavior. Everybody wants to the buck end with someone else than themselves. "Any change needs to be top down, so there's no reason for individuals to even try before ..". "N corporations are responsible for X% of emissions", so we need to target those (as opposed to the people who buy from them?).

It's essentially the complex systems fallacy similar to what we saw during the credit crisis. viewtopic.php?p=209607#p209607 Most take the opportunity to blame the cofactor, that is furthest away from themselves as possible. For example, for each parent who now go "Maybe we should have had less children or none at all, given how..." (if any even exist), I can find tens of thousands (literally) who think that "China should just clean up their meat markets". That is the challenge with moral knowledge.

The reason I've been struggling with ERE2.0 is that which ERE1.0 I could present a carrot (FIRE) for adopting all this crazy behavior. Yet, I found most readers were willing to settle for a smaller carrot (slow and easy or high income). With ERE2.0 I have no obvious carrot to offer. Look at the sales numbers (amazon rank #500000+) of "Being the change" and tell me what possible difference it would make to have yet another book along those lines.

[AxelHeyst]

My main question is, what kept you from getting prepared before corona? If you were the guy reading the books, living the van life, where was the disconnect with acting on your theoretical knowledge? I think that would be interesting to suss out, as it could provide a long term energy towards being truly prepared.

Well, my excuse for not prepping food (for example) before now was that I barely had enough storage space for my socks, let alone a 50lb bag of lentils. But that's a cop-out and I think not your real question, because it's very related to your point about being very concerned about climate change, but not really having a life that reflects that level of concern. That 100% resonates with me.

But to muse about the prepping in a tiny house question for a moment, there's a "tips and tricks" level approach (clever storage solutions, roof rack with buckets of beans, scatter your stash in friend's basements, etc) and there's an approach based on thinking about stocks vs flows. If your flows are able to, um, flow, even in an Event, then you don't need a big stock. People have to store a bunch of food because their only flow of food comes from grocery stores. No grocery stores, no flow of food. If your flow of food comes from grocery stores, your garden, the forest (foraged wild vegetables), the forest (bunny rabbits and fish and squirrels and quail and deer), your friend's gardens, and the dumpsters behind TJs, then you don't really need that big stock of buckets of rice, yeah? But that's all high-Wheaton stuff, and in the meantime I need to figure out how to build up a stock as a buffer between my survival and Events that disrupt the flows I'm currently dependent on.

Back to why I didn't act enough on my theoretical knowledge.

I read a book called "What we think about when we try not to think about climate change" by Per Espen Stoknes. This book really nuanced my understanding of climate change denial (I ranted about these topics in my first few posts in this journal) among sustainability professionals, and the role of cognitive dissonance and other psychological factors in not acting on our beliefs. I recommend it. To summarize, I think my inaction was a combination of the following influences/factors/dynamics:

• It's difficult to take an action that no one else is taking. None of my friends were living in the bush, gardening and prepping. They were mountain biking and brewing beer. So that's what I did too. Humans tend to need to see a critical mass of other people doing something before they'll risk being *that guy* and do it too. Herd mentality.
• It's difficult to spend time doing what you want when you have a full-time highly stressful job. I fell in to the high-earner trap of solving time problems with money, and merely recreating in my off-time.
• Cognitive dissonance. With the climate change stuff, even though I live a pretty low-carbon lifestyle compared to other westerners, my vanlife style relies on gasoline for example. Yeah, I'd like to get a diesel truck and brew my own biodiesel from waste grease, but see the issue above about time. I'm not there yet. So, while I think that climate change is a big deal and we should all stop using fossil fuels, in my life that would mean abandoning the vanlife thing. And, I don't want to abandon it. Where would I stay? I don't want to pay rent or live in a city. So, to solve the cognitive dissonance, I just don't move on my beliefs, and stuff them down, and say things like "well I'm a sustainability professional, I'm having a positive impact, so it's fine that I do these things because they're offset by my work", which is total BS by the way. I'm not articulating this very well.
• As someone else called me out on earlier (J+G?), I blame stuff on my girlfriends. "Well, *I'd* like to live in a hovel and only eat kitchari, but my GF here, she isn't in to it, she needs some comforts, so what can I do eh?" This is also total BS. I've made great strides over the past 10 years in owning my own life story and inviting others in to it... and I still have work to do.
• I hadn't yet found any good practical how-tos. I knew "Step 1: Stop burning fossil fuels, Step 2, completely re-make society", but what to actually f#^$ing do tomorrow, Tuesday, at 10am, that I hadn't figured out. The closest I came was Peter Kalmus' Being the Change [oh hey, look at that, Jacob already mentioned it while I was drafting this], but (I realize now) it was a tips and tricks book where the tips and tricks applied mostly to people who lived in houses. There were several things in my life that were show-stoppers that it didn't address (high-earner stress, vanlife). This is why ERE/Jacob/this forum excited(excites) me so much, it was the lightbulb epiphany, the map, the instructions, that made sense to me. The foundation is, stop spending so much money. Everything flows from there. Not rocket science, but for some reason how Jacob laid it out is what got me straightened out.

Your point about keeping up with the momentum even after the covid urgency passes is well taken. I don't know the answer right now to my satisfaction. Part of my idea is to quit my job before I hit FI levels of savings, so I have a fire under my butt to hustle as well as more time available. Kind of a burn the boats strategy. I'll be dwelling on this question more here.

[jacob]

A little bit of devil's advocate here, as someone who has done some digging and has some experience with community living, is that execution on community living is incredibly difficult in the "West", because we're all so individualistic. Jamming our selves in to community and making it work, even amongst people who *want* to make it work, has proven to be exceptionally difficult. Intentional communities have something like a 90% failure rate at best. And so, if Jacob had written community as a central focus of his (first) book, I imagine it would suffer from inaccessibility. I've read a lot of books on community, and been stymied at execution by the challenges I mentioned.

Totally agree. With ERE (peak oil blog in disguise) it was clear that any viable solution would have to rely on what an individual could/can do inside the present system. There are lots of people talking about what their ideal society would look like, but in my opinion, the only way to solve the "here to there"-challenge is to start with individuals which can then become components of larger systems making any change emergent. That was ERE1.0.

ERE1.0 has in many ways been a failure. It was subsumed by the FIRE movement which although better than nothing has turned into a "young high income engineer learns enough adulting skills to live a median class lifestyle and retires in 15 years to start traveling around the world instead of buying larger toys"-movement. I mean, it's good that very many people got their financial shit together, but it has fallen short of the goal, I was hoping for.

I think ERE2.0 will fall even shorter---and I'll end up being rather disappointed and bitter about the outcome like so many who have already tried doing the same thing. See what happened to Lovelock, Randers, Meadows, Vogt, or Leopold---how their writing/attitude has changed over the years from mildly optimistic to resigned, frustrated, or bitter. I don't want to go to there. In that case I'd rather make clocks out of wood. This is part of why it's on the backburner.

Another problem is that a lot of people show up for a community being, frankly, broken and useless people, because that's what our society produces under the bell curve. They don't know how to do anything (because they're completely specialized), and they have emotional/pschological/spiritual baggage that they drag the whole community down in to.

This has been my observation as well. This is also why community (in the commune sense) is not a driving factor in what I think of as Wheaton8+.

I've been [mostly] lurking in a few other places and the common sentiment is that "community will solve all my problems (so I don't have to learn anything)". In terms of dealing with COVID, the most popular answer was---I shit you not---"Strengthen the bonds our communities". Not anything about staying-the-fuck-at-home or "turning germ theory into moral knowledge". Gently informing people that the communities they seek already exist but they're by "invite only" for those exact reasons was not appreciated. I realize that I am framing my perspective based on strong individualistic INTJ tendencies. I think many of those who congregate in such groups are similarly blinded. Of course a "community organizer" thinks the solution to everything is "organizing the community" just like an INTJ thinks the solution to everything is "being sufficiently competent to not depend on other humans". Or academics thinking that more education/information will create the breakthrough.

[AxelHeyst]

The reason I've been struggling with ERE2.0 is that which ERE1.0 I could present a carrot (FIRE) for adopting all this crazy behavior. Yet, I found most readers were willing to settle for a smaller carrot (slow and easy or high income). With ERE2.0 I have no obvious carrot to offer. Look at the sales numbers (amazon rank #500000+) of "Being the change" and tell me what possible difference it would make to have yet another book along those lines.

[Paraphrase of a quote I have no idea where I found it]: In a crisis, you don't have time to invent anything. You work with the ideas you have already lying around. (Similar to "in a crisis you don't rise to the occasion, you revert to your level of training.")

At a simple level, people change their behavior due to pain avoidance (god my job sucks, oh hey, FIRE promises an end to that pain, I'll do that) or pleasure seeking (I want to spend my time farting around with my hobby/traveling/whatever, FIRE promises more of that, I'll do that).

Wheaton 4-5 solves those problems adequately. Wheaton 6-7 solves problems most people don't have, so why bother. The only people who get to Wheaton 6/7, I suspect, are people whose problem is not "god my job sucks" , but is rather something along the lines of "omg omg omg I just ran the numbers, guys, the oil is going to run OUT, and also sea level rise and all this other stuff and ITS BECAUSE OF WHAT WERE DOING RIGHT NOW, omg, cancel my flights, sell my car, I'm going literally insane and I can't get this out of my head, every time I start my car I feel a stabbing pang of moral guilt". People who can shut this off don't have a W6/7 problem. Those who can't, do. That's a small number of people at the moment.

Also, some folks dream about independence from the system they see as so destructive, and some people have such a strong vision of it, but aren't able to connect the dots, they have a pleasure-seeking motivation to change. I mean, most people have a combination of both pain-avoidance and pleasure-seeking motivations to drive change.

As TS starts to, with increasing velocity and volume, HTF, I think more and more people are going to be having problems that W6+ solves. More people are going to be unable to turn off the moral connection between their actions and Events, and more people are going to be dealing with day-to-day issues that higher wheaton levels solve (like the consumer economy imploding, resource scarcity, etc. Depression-era people were clever Renaissance folks, partly because they had to be). I wonder how many 4-5jafi FIRE people are right now going "wait, what was the name of that one crazy guy? Jacob Fish something? Maybe I'll go check out his blog again..."

So, this is my attempt to take your last sentence seriously. The difference the ERE2.0 book will make is that as the percentage of people with Wheaton6, 7, 8 problems starts to increase, they'll be able to find the book (it's an idea that's already lying around) and apply it to their lives. Right now there's like 14 people who will read it maybe. But by the end of the year I bet 23 folks'll be interested. And so on.

In that case I'd rather make clocks out of wood. This is part of why it's on the backburner.

Well I completely respect that. I also think ERE1.0 + this forum + your hints is (/should be) enough direction for the dedicated. If you need more handholding than that... you're not ready.

[jacob]

Until a few weeks ago, you could buy https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006SH5OBE/ used for less than a dollar and the sales rank was in the millions. Same with https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393346617/ ... Both are great but should have been read and acted upon when they were published.

I see your point with solving problems that are not on most people's radar screens yet. These are the books that get rediscovered 10, 20, 50 years later though. However, it's also clear that most radars are rather short-range in nature. For example, despite having 24/7 evidence broadcast right in their face, it seems that almost all governments and people will take this right up to the point where they'll be operating in crisis-mode for the next many months.

More generally, there's a predilection for overshoot followed by a managed crisis rather than avoiding the crisis altogether. Predictions therefore mainly serve as an "I told you so" than anything else. The Cassandra syndrome is strong with this one. I submit that the number of people who are ahead of the curve will always be [too] small.

[AxelHeyst]

I submit that the number of people who are ahead of the curve will always be [too] small.

Agreed.

[RoamingFrancis]

Interesting points raised. I admit my focus on community could be due to my ENFP personality. Community building, leadership skills, etc come fairly naturally to me and so I have a natural focus on those things. That said, I do think some form of mutual aid will be important in the coming years.

@jacob I've heard of Lovelock, but not Randers, Meadows, Vogt, or Leopold. Could you provide some context or a link?

Interesting point about intentional communities and Westerners too. This is something I've been wanting to look into more - from what I've read they tend to have a high failure rate, but the ones that succeeded in the 60s are still running and just sort of quietly faded into the background.

I've experienced a couple situations similar to communal living - I spent a couple nights in a squat in the Netherlands, where a bunch of artists started squatting in an abandoned factory. It was a fascinating place, but one of the problems they suffered from was the lack of any real enforcement apparatus for the decisions the community made. People would move in as a last-ditch effort to escape homelessness, addiction, etc, then not care about any of the rules the community set for itself. So AxelHeyst's point about people seeing "community" as a quick solution for all their problems is definitely a realistic one.

The other place I've experienced that is when I volunteered at a meditation center for a month last year. This place ran much more smoothly, and definitely felt like a functional commune. To volunteer there you had to have attended a 10 day silent meditation course, which was very emotionally and psychologically challenging, so there was a sort of vetting process built in to avoid the problems above. Additionally, we had 3 hours of meditation scheduled per day, which I felt was important for maintaining social harmony.

I read that utopian communities that had an explicitly religious focus (e.g. the Shakers) tended to outlast secular ones. Although the center was not explicitly religious, perhaps a sense of shared spirituality is useful in stabilizing things.

[jacob]

@RF - Try this one https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813586518/ ... it's not really about what it says in the description but more about the intentional communities that worked (survivor bias?). IMHO, not worth the $100+ price tag but if you can get it at the lib... For the others, just google or wiki them.