@zbigi: I hear you. I used to want to spend all of my time doing music and any time away from that was viewed as a loss. The number one activity I still do is work on music. I am not well paid for this, and while it does occasionally produce a show or an album, it's not something I need to live my day-to-day life.
I used to deal with life's necessities by largely eliminating them. I had no house to clean. My clothes were old and had mostly been given to me or acquired at the salvation army. My only shoes were my running shoes. Food, the only thing I couldn't figure out how to escape, was outsourced by eating only meals I didn't cook. And my god, I am so so lazy.
It wasn't until recently that I started wanting to do laundry by hand and grow my own food. It does take some time away from music. If my goal were to actually become completely self-reliant asap, it would consume all my time. As it is now, it takes very little time. A few hours a day at most. Actively engaging with home production does make me feel more a part of life and the world. There's something nice about making a home-cooked meal or fixing something on your bike that I just don't get from another hour in the spine mines.
I'm not sure I would've explored this path if I was able to find a career I enjoyed for 30 years or thought that our society was run extremely well and had an acceptable degree of equity. If I didn't think we were murdering the environment that made us. I think it takes a degree of unhappiness to want to change.
There are also a lot of false efficiency gains in the comparative advantage lens. Once you see the multi-dimensionality of the problem it's also more complex. Eating out is highly time inefficient. I do laundry by hand in a sink everyday it's sunny out. This is time inefficient compared to a machine, but it's actually more enjoyable to me than doing laundry all at once. Folding 4 clothes is kind of fun. Folding even a minimalist 20 gets boring. I also don't own a washer or dryer, and now I don't need to worry about getting one or dealing with them when they break. Anyway, there are a million little examples of how supposed efficiency gains are either inefficient or factorize work into large boring chunks, rather than allowing the fun of inefficiency.
I'm not going to tell you not to do the things you love in order to hand-knit a scarf. I will tell you that home-producing stuff is more fun than it initially sounds, especially with friends, there are a lot of ways to tie it to your current hobbies/ interests and that I have become interested in things I never thought I would be. I see some possibility already. A lot of my time "producing" stuff is spent researching, aka reading and talking to people about fun topics they are interested in that I am trying to learn about.
@2b1s: Thanks for clarifying. For me, 1-2 years is a worthwhile amount of time to do something not that hard to achieve financial freedom using the tried and true FIRE path. Not that everyone needs to do what I do, but if I were personally in this position I would do it (the work would have to be easy and/or fun and not all-consuming though). I also think that working a job while you figure out what to do next can be a great idea. The potential to slide back into old habits is there, but more dollars do usually equal more freedom, you keep the resume a bit fresher and you hopefully get some inspiration for the next phase of your life.
2Birds1Stone wrote: ↑Sat Jul 31, 2021 10:48 am
the whole premise is that life is short, our health and longevity are not guaranteed, and most people delay doing the things they really want to do in life until their "golden years" which either never come, or by the time they do these people don't have the desire, health, etc to do the things they dreamed of over their lifetime.
Ok, this is sort of my whole point with semi-ERE. Something ERE has done for me is allow me to come at things sideways to extract the human message from the industrial capital message.
Quick example: I used to be a really angry teenager, and at 12 I thought blasting Rage Against the Machine in my white-washed suburb was really doing something. Then I realized that those records were made by a multi-national corporation, made in air-conditioned studios using millions of dollars, printed on unsustainable plastic and that consuming music from a living room in the United States wasn't going to solve global poverty. Later I realized that what I really wanted was someone to explain to me a way of life that was heavily marketed to me as the only moral way of life but was clearly only promoting depression, anxiety, loneliness, and disillusionment in my life ("they say save and you say "how much?", you're brain dead, you got a fucking lentil in your head").
Anyway, I think that dude's book sounds like I'd agree with it, but I'm sure he's spending 10x as much as I am to do basically the same shit he insists you need money to do. I think it's important to do things in the cycle of life where they are most fun/ accessible and not wait for some future day to do the things you want to. Money would truly be no object if you didn't use it at all.