The Education of Axel Heyst

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RoamingFrancis
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by RoamingFrancis »

I think Jim Merkel's Radical Simplicity is the best book to recommend for those sorts of people, since Early Retirement Extreme "buries the lead" with regards to its eco philosophy.

Amongst my hippie friends I've taken to recommending that book first, as its footprint section appeals to green (in both the eco and SD sense) and the FI section is just damn appealing to some people, depending on their work situation. I rarely recommend the ERE book anymore, unless I sense the person's in a place where they're ready to receive it.

RoamingFrancis
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by RoamingFrancis »

For what it's worth, I have a couple more thoughts on work ethic. I would like to be the sort of person that oozes quality in the activities they choose to undertake. I believe in doing things well, making whatever you're engaged with a practice, an art. But I've seen so many people live to work instead of working to live, whose hours at the desk degrade their health and well-being. That's a pattern I plan not to repeat.

So for me, it's not so much about working hard, but working well. Of course, a lot hinges on how we're defining work here, so there are lots of nuances we could go into.

The Taoist wu wei would be interesting to explore here. Doing without doing :)

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by white belt »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 5:08 pm
So, I don't know, maybe I've talked myself into a corner. I was trying to arrive at arguing for an aim of making ERE more welcoming to that kind of person... but maybe that kind of person has to go through the same kind of crucible I did before they'll touch ERE with a ten-foot stick. And I don't know if ERE has a role to play in midwifing that process or not.

I see a demographic with a huge amount of potential, and (to me) they seem so close.
So if Mr. Money Mustache was the guy that bridged/popularized some of the ERE philosophy to the conventional career Achievers/optimizer types, then who is the equivalent that can bridge to the Activist types? Maybe it will be you? I think the WL chasm is too wide for people like Greenfield or Boyle to really affect change for those masses. Podcast and video formats might have more reach than the traditional blog format these days.
Last edited by white belt on Mon Oct 18, 2021 4:30 am, edited 1 time in total.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

jacob wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 8:21 am
ERE (if going by the canonical version in the book) does require a tremendous amount of work.
Yes! But getting to fully Optimized takes significantly less work. And the RE carrot tends to attract people who aren't exactly looking for yet another effortful endeavor to huck themselves in to. Many who get to Optimized, and recover from burnout/etc a bit, will turn their attention to yields and flows and systems thinking, via a variety of unique pathways, but many remain contentedly at Optimized. The RE-carrot tends to attract people whose natural path ends at around Optimized, I think is fair to say?

I'm wondering about a carrot (hook) for those who are looking for another effortful endeavor to huck themselves in to. Or if that's a strategic dead end. I'm not sure.

Your point about our definitions of work and retirement being too narrow is well taken.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

RoamingFrancis wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 9:25 pm
I think Jim Merkel's Radical Simplicity is the best book to recommend for those sorts of people, since Early Retirement Extreme "buries the lead" with regards to its eco philosophy.
Merkel is certainly more inspiring to Greens. But he's pretty vague to my reading on the execution and strategy, and the massive section about manually calculating your own footprint feels quaint to people already familiar with carbon life cycle analysis software. From 'inside' the deep green professional world, Merkel probably seems like one of those mystic Elders from SLO (a hotbed of sustainability stuff) who disappeared into the woods. Inspiring, but not relevant or terribly actionable. The "deep green woodshed vs. bright green office campus" is a debate that's largely over in the mainstream sustainability world, and most people have decided that it's best to make a big thing a little better than a tiny thing way better. Also, there's just not that many deep green woodshed projects out there.

ERE plus Merkel is powerful for those who are ready.... it's that "being ready" part that's the trick here. I read Being the Change (Kalmus) before ERE and it stoked me out, but didn't change my life, because he didn't show me how to escape the hamster wheel I was on. I couldn't see how to get there from here. ERE continues to be the brilliant "how to write your own instruction manual" manual that nothing else can touch in terms of comprehension.
RoamingFrancis wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 9:36 pm
The Taoist wu wei would be interesting to explore here. Doing without doing :)
Yes, but beware the shortcuts. Crawl>Walk>Run>Fly. How can you do something without doing it if you've never done it before?
white belt wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 10:58 pm
Podcast and video formats....
Funny you should mention that...

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by jacob »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 5:08 pm
I was trying to arrive at arguing for an aim of making ERE more welcoming to that kind of person... but maybe that kind of person has to go through the same kind of crucible I did before they'll touch ERE with a ten-foot stick. And I don't know if ERE has a role to play in midwifing that process or not.
Hmm... think of ERE as a wide syncretic collection of several modules that are organized in a holistic way. ERE will fail gracefully into any one of these module. One module is FIRE. However, another is minimalism and closely related to that is zero-waste if you want to go the aesthetic way or ecological footprint calculations if you like counting beans. In some sense, the problem is already solved. With ERE being Yellow, it's a kind of conciliation of earlier ideas that often hold mutually antagonistic values.

For example, in the Green space, people almost passionately hate capitalism (and especially "the billionaires") and have almost no interest in money-solutions other than tearing the whole thing down figuring it can easily be replaced with community and care. Furthermore, the orientation is frequently so collectively oriented that individual action/change is anathema---or simply completely unseen. So Green will justify their $35,000/year lifestyle by the fact that "corporations are far worse" (because bigger number) and that the extra cost for tickets to climate conferences and experiencing what's left of nature provides a greater impact on the collective consciousness. Moneywise, they do exactly as you say. Earning and spending it is okay as long as one does "good work", but keeping it and investing it is evil---in particular the ultimate goal would be stop using money altogether and move into a "community" where everybody takes care of each other. There's already tons of literature, none-too-inexpensive workshops and seminars, meets, etc. supporting this.

The lead/carrot here is not FI or RE (which appeals strongly to the individualists) but "making a difference" and looking and feeling good about it. For this grouping I mostly lead with the "Buy Nothing" experience. It's basically an appealing change to "stick it to the corporations" (by not buying their products), "develop community" (instead of watching TV or shopping), ... and as a nice side-effect (which you don't have to mention), they'll find it hard not to accumulate money. After a year, there's a problem with "what to do with $20,000 in the bank account". THAT would be the starting point for Green to consider select application of Other colors. E.g. they can give it away, level up to homesteading, buy $20k worth of solar, ... or maybe possibly invest it.

I was trying to establish some kind of catalog of these carrots in viewtopic.php?t=12102 and also find a mechanical way to calculate them. This is a nontrivial research area for sure. Most progress is likely to be made by throwing mud on the wall or post-rationalizing something that turned out to work.

In particular, the ERE WL table is written very much as the main road of FIRE, that is, from Orange to Yellow. It may be very worthwhile to develop a similar table for Green to Yellow. (Not sure it's possible to jump further, e.g. Blue to Yellow, but consider yet other tables for Blue to Orange or Green.) Maybe I should consider this for Stoa3.

RoamingFrancis
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by RoamingFrancis »

Good points on Merkel and Kalmus. What does SLO stand for?

Maybe the ERE book needs to be rewritten explicitly as Emergent Renaissance Ecology. I find myself wanting to recommend ERE to activist friends, but financial independence doesn't function as a carrot for them, since it's aimed more at Orange than it is Green. @jacob Have you given any more thought to ERE 2.0?

I may be able to make a Green -> Yellow WL table at some point in the future, as I had a lot of Green in me when I read it. The reason it landed so squarely with me when I read it was because I was a 19-year-old desperately searching for a way to Not Interact With The System, At All, whereas I believe @AxelHeyst was already pretty far into his career.

Good point about Wu Wei too. You certainly do have to "learn the numbers to forget the numbers." Currently, I'm going through a healing process and really want to hang out in a Yin headspace and focus on Being.

oldbeyond
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by oldbeyond »

As I’ve come to understand my green friends’ thinking, the collective/system is seen as having a separate existence and will of its own, always dominating the individual or smaller-scale community. Thus the focus turns to hiding, sabotage, complaining or daydreams about revolution. Acknowledging ones participation in creating the system is seen as proof of its power oneself, rather than as an opportunity to “be the change”, and efforts to use the system for ones own ends are seen as deluded. It seems to me like selling lower personal consumption as “inspiration to others” or “civil disobedience/guerrilla warfare” is more fruitful. I’ve had success in drawing on ecology in my discussions with them, but not in referring to economics, as that merely tends to trigger.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

RoamingFrancis wrote:
Mon Oct 18, 2021 1:22 pm
@jacob Have you given any more thought to ERE 2.0?
He started a new subforum for it…

SLO = San Luis Obispo.
Last edited by AxelHeyst on Mon Oct 18, 2021 4:08 pm, edited 2 times in total.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

jacob wrote:
Mon Oct 18, 2021 11:05 am
Hmm... think of ERE as a wide syncretic collection of several modules that are organized in a holistic way. ERE will fail gracefully into any one of these module. One module is FIRE. However, another is minimalism and closely related to that is zero-waste if you want to go the aesthetic way or ecological footprint calculations if you like counting beans. In some sense, the problem is already solved. With ERE being Yellow, it's a kind of conciliation of earlier ideas that often hold mutually antagonistic values.
Ooh. This clicked something again. ERE is designed to fail into several possible module states... I was misunderstanding how you were using the word fail earlier. To *become*/manifest in an entity, it has to undergo a collapse into one of these states. Some thing something electrons, observation, velocity/location. Maybe. (Too much?)

Abstractly, ERE is all the things simultaneously, in the same way that it fully contains semiERE, accumulate>FI ERE, minimalistERE, dirtbagERE. This is just another way of saying that ERE isn’t one way of doing something, it’s a way of writing your own instruction manual.

[I feel like fight club: “In death, members of project mayhem get a name. His name was Robert Paulson.”]

I knew ERE contained what I was looking for, this just helped me articulate it better to myself. All I’m really talking about here is means and methods for communicating ERE more efficaciously to greens / career oriented activists / me, pre-disillusionment.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by jacob »

RoamingFrancis wrote:
Mon Oct 18, 2021 1:22 pm
Maybe the ERE book needs to be rewritten explicitly as Emergent Renaissance Ecology.
Maybe ... but it's very difficult to be all things to all people. More likely, these thoughts are better formulated as an article that sociologists can nerd out over(?)
RoamingFrancis wrote:
Mon Oct 18, 2021 1:22 pm
I find myself wanting to recommend ERE to activist friends, but financial independence doesn't function as a carrot for them, since it's aimed more at Orange than it is Green.
Someone else with more street cred and energy in that direction should write that. I believe one should write what one knows. I'm also not sure that writing is always the best method. I've learned that some people don't read books :? Personally I'm trying to revert to my "roots" in which I write only for my[younger]self---treating it more like art or intellectual catharsis. Of course to spread out from that would require developing additional selves.
RoamingFrancis wrote:
Mon Oct 18, 2021 1:22 pm
I may be able to make a Green -> Yellow WL table at some point in the future, as I had a lot of Green in me when I read it.
Maybe start a thread on it in the ERE2 subforum. I do think WLs make for a really good albeit rather specific structure for a book. One chapter for each WL. It would eliminate a lot of "subjective reviewer BS" for readers who do not resonate with a given level because it contains all levels.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by jacob »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Mon Oct 18, 2021 3:19 pm
Ooh. This clicked something again. ERE is designed to fail into several possible module states... I was misunderstanding how you were using the word fail earlier. To *become*/manifest in an entity, it has to undergo a collapse into one of these states. Some thing something electrons, observation, velocity/location. Maybe. (Too much?)
It's a system made out of subsystems (modules). When someone doesn't see the whole thing (failure-mode) it collapses into the subsystems they can see. It's like the blind men and the elephant. This is why parts can't be poison+anti-dote => superfood (see Stoa2 at this timestamp https://youtu.be/0MGQgQZHx1Q?t=3519 ).

For a physics analogy, I think it's more accurate albeit not perfect to say that water is made out of water drops are made out of water molecules, or hydrogen and oxygen molecules or ditto atoms or electrons and nuclei or electrons and two different nuclei or electrons and protons and neutrons, etc ... depending on your level of scientific development. Hold that thought and invert (always invert) applying to how you would define "life"---something we still lack the complexity of thought to define well. When defining life, biologists see reproduction(?), physicists see local minimization of entropy, postmodernists deconstruct a narrative,... but no human specialization sees the elephant that is "life".
AxelHeyst wrote:
Mon Oct 18, 2021 3:19 pm
Abstractly, ERE is all the things simultaneously, in the same way that it fully contains semiERE, accumulate>FI ERE, minimalistERE, dirtbagERE. This is just another way of saying that ERE isn’t one way of doing something, it’s a way of writing your own instruction manual.
Yes; it's a particular way of thinking, not a particular string of thoughts.
So ERE1 is the elephant. ERE2 is "where" the elephant lives.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by RoamingFrancis »

@AxelHeyst When I wrote that I meant a book project. Should have made that clear in the original message.

@jacob I've got street cred there but not much energy at the moment. Currently focused on Being, as I mentioned before. Might start a thread at a later date.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

RoamingFrancis wrote:
Sun Sep 05, 2021 9:00 pm
I’ve begun incorporating body weight training as a more habitual practice. Any insights from your experience diving into it recently?
I've had some insights about this since you asked.

1) I was trying to do BW training every day (5-6 days/wk). Going down to 3 days/wk, with rest in between, has helped me to be more consistent and excited to do my workouts.
2) I found the material on the /bodyweighttraining sub on Reddit very helpful. I'm now doing the RR (recommended routine), and have the minimalist routine in the back of my head for when on road trips or the like. They also have excellent advice for how to do movements without equipment, like rows (knotted bedsheet over a door).
3) I remembered that when I had the best results with weight training was after a period of going *deep* on learning everything I could (movement, program design, nutrition, etc). By the time I was ready to begin training, my 'book' knowledge of what I was doing was extensive. The insight here for me is that I'm pretty uncomfortable doing new things that I don't know very much about. In other words, I don't feel 'safe' trying something new unless I've done extensive homework. Pretty sure this is a fear of looking ignorant/like a bumpkin. There's few ideas that strike terror in my heart as much as the idea of doing something wrong that all I had to do was read the instruction manual, and then being exposed as a fool.

The implication is that I'm probably going to resist sticking with a bw training program until I've hit a certain 'saturation' level of book knowledge. I currently have a pretty high uncertainty about the program I'm doing: I'm fuzzy on the various progressions, I couldn't explain well why it's okay to do a full-body routine 3x/wk with BW, and a terrible idea with weights, I know that it's easy to injure your wrists when doing handstand progression work but I don't know a good wrist pre-hab program, a lot of the vocabulary I don't know off the top of my head (Planche? front lever?), etc.

I think for me, the more I study a topic that I also intend to do, the more invested I feel in the identity of someone who ____'s. Right now I feel like a tourist, and that feeling makes my skin crawl. I'll resolve the tension by either 1) studying my face off or 2) quitting.

4) Related to a comment I made in Mathiverse's journal, I dig around a bit more to get clear on what my motivation was for doing BW training - what's the stoke source? Minimalist equipment, staying in good shape, preventative health care, etc are all good reasons, but they don't stoke me out. It's coming down to 1) aesthetics and/or 2) ability to do dope movements. Pure/general strength isn't much of a motivator, since anything less than the strength I had as a powerlifter won't impress me, and I'd have to get back closer to 200lbs to touch those weights, and just nah. Doing dope movements require a high level of specific strength, but the point will be the movement ability, not the strength behind it so much.

For a while I resisted the idea that I was motivated by aesthetics. I think I was trying to pretend I don't care what others think when my shirt is off. Pretty sure I do though, so might as well admit it and harness that motivation to achieve other incidental yields (health, movement, strength, mobility, etc).

RoamingFrancis
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by RoamingFrancis »

Yeah, I have pretended to myself that I didn't care what I look like too. I'm experimenting with allowing myself to be vain in this area. Might lead to some interesting places.
The insight here for me is that I'm pretty uncomfortable doing new things that I don't know very much about. In other words, I don't feel 'safe' trying something new unless I've done extensive homework. Pretty sure this is a fear of looking ignorant/like a bumpkin. There's few ideas that strike terror in my heart as much as the idea of doing something wrong that all I had to do was read the instruction manual, and then being exposed as a fool.
This seems to reinforce your point about orange shadow work.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Blackjack »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Tue Oct 19, 2021 7:42 pm
I know that it's easy to injure your wrists when doing handstand progression work but I don't know a good wrist pre-hab program
Hey Axel, cool diary so far. I've been enjoying catching up on it and your progress!
And oh whoa, an actual place I can offer help in this forum instead of being generally confused about what colors mean :P

This is a simplistic version of the wrist prehab that has gotten a dozen people I know to a 1 arm handstand (obviously not encapsulating the thousands of hours of incidental wrist work done through many other routines and thousands of hours of work into the handstands themselves)

1. with knees on the ground, interlock fingers, and roll the wrists around in both directions. This will feel awkward at first, its ok, it is warming up the bones and ligaments.

(reference: https://breakingmuscle.com/fitness/get- ... wrist-prep at timestamp 0:35)

2. with knees on the ground, stick arms onto ground roughly shoulder-width apart. Straighten elbows, and weight the upper body (eventually move knees back to more of a plank position as strength allows). Shift your weight around to put the weight on all of your hands. Shift back and forth and do silly patterns. This is warming up your wrists and elbows.

(reference: https://breakingmuscle.com/fitness/get- ... wrist-prep at timestamp 2:15)

For the other two, start with 3 sets of 10, work your way up to 5 sets of 10, then work your way up the progression ladder (up to from a plank position):

3. back of hand pushups: erm, kinda what it sounds like. Start with 3 x 10

(reference: https://breakingmuscle.com/fitness/get- ... wrist-prep at timestamp 4:45)

4. wrist flexion raise: This is the number one technique for building wrist strength in the handstand. The videos will do a better job than I explaining, but knees on ground. Place hands on ground, pointer finger facing forwards. Elbows straight. Now lift your upper body by pressing up your hands to the first knuckle. Start with 3x10, progress to 5x10.

(reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0cw5jY ... MTMontreal ). Wow, last time I hung out with Didier in 2019 he had hair past his shoulders.

The idea here is to warm up the joints and tendons and muscles in the wrist, then move into strength work on the area you need strength for in the handstand (wrist flexion raise) as well as building strength in the opposing movement (back of hand pushups) to prevent imbalance in between the two movements of the wrist.

PS: the handstand itself is a very needy skill that requires a lot of attention. For the average person it will take 1-3 years of training 1ish hours per day 5x per week (once you have built up the ability to train the skill at that rate) with some kind of daily to weekly form coaching on their current level of activity. Some lucky people will get it in 9 months at 5x per week, but I've only seen a couple people ever get one training at a rate less than 5 days per week, and those people usually came from a dance or gymnastics background or had a handstand as a kid in life. Lmk if you have any questions about the bodyweight stuff and I will help where I can.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by mountainFrugal »

I finally made it through your journal. Great work! Thank you for sharing.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

@mF: Whoa. You are welcome, also, :shock:

@Blackjack, thanks again!
RoamingFrancis wrote:
Tue Oct 19, 2021 9:10 pm
This seems to reinforce your point about orange shadow work.
Oh yes. It's interesting - an earlier version of myself tried to reject these feelings (probably as I was deep in Green, but ??). But I don't think that'd be a good thing. The idea is to integrate. There's nothing wrong with valuing competence. The sensation of impending annihilation clutching at the fragile veil of my sanity at the thought of fucking something simple up, well, I could probably do without that. I'm assuming competence was some key to surviving childhood. The common annoying experience of cleaning less competent people's messes up for little thanks doesn't fully explain my revulsion to incompetence.

--
jacob wrote:
Mon Oct 18, 2021 5:06 pm
It's a system made out of subsystems (modules). When someone doesn't see the whole thing (failure-mode) it collapses into the subsystems they can see. It's like the blind men and the elephant.
I've had a strange few days with this. With this whole discussion in my head, I went back to the book to take (new) notes and get a good look at the whole elephant. My desired outcome was to be able to explain ERE concisely to friends for whom early retirement isn't an enticing carrot vector.

It took less than an hour for me to become convinced that I have no idea what the hell ERE actually is, and I've been "wrong" this entire time. What I think was happening was that my previous idea of what ERE "is" was my particular collapsed subsystem. When I went back to it, all of a sudden I could see how my previous idea didn't actually fit as the whole thing. In other words, I thought the elephant was a leg. And then I came back to the elephant, but I was seeing a big floppy ear. In my peripheral vision I could see a bit of leg, which was comforting, but this whole ear business was really confounding.

I wound up drafting the following, again with the intended audience being people for whom RE isn't an immediately enticing carrot. Basically, thinking through how to present ERE in way that might appeal to my friends without triggering common "yeah, but..." responses to how I've been communicating it to date. I'm interested in any feedback, in particular if I've misrepresented anything... because at the moment my feeling of grokking ere is at an all time low. :roll:

--
ERE is a skill-based philosophy of nonconsumer lifestyle design. There is no one identifiable ERE ‘lifestyle’; ERE is the set of principles by which one can design their own unique nonconsumer lifestyle, with an emphasis on maximizing autonomy and resilience.

The core practical insight of ERE is that the amount of money you need depends on your skills. The more skills you have, the less money you need:

Image
(Old graph that makes no sense:)
Image
[graph inspiration credit: @Ego]

If you don’t have the skill to change your oil, you need to spend more money to get it changed. If you don’t have the skill of buying a used car, you need to spend more money on a new car. If you don’t have the skill to design your life to your satisfaction without needing a car, you need to buy a car.

If you don’t have the skill to cook your own food, you need to pay someone else to cook it for you. If you don’t have the skill to cook food with inexpensive ingredients, you need to pay a lot for fancy ingredients. If you don’t have the skill to grow a lot of your own food, you need to pay someone else to grow/raise it for you. If you don’t have the skill to build up healthy soil, you need to buy soil enhancements at the store.

Some people think “frugality” simply means “doing without”. Generally speaking, in ERE, “frugality” means “replacing money with skill”, although deciding/realizing you don't need certain things can be considered one of the ERE skills.

Why would you want to become an ERE-style nonconsumer? There are several possible motivations:
  • Freedom/Autonomy. Consumers depend on jobs for money, and they depend on money for almost everything. Consumers are essentially not free to not work. They can do anything they want, as long as they want to work 40hrs a week. Nonconsumers have a variety of methods for solving problems because they have broad skills, so they are much more free to do what they like with their time.
  • Smaller ecological footprint. Nonconsumers tend to have a significantly smaller impact in terms of carbon emissions, pollution, resource use, etc.
  • More equitable use of global resources. Related to the above, nonconsumers tend to use an amount of resources much closer to the globally equitable amount. If the world is a pizza that has to be shared among all of us, nonconsumers are happy with a thinner slice, so others can have a slice as well.
  • Ability to pursue meaningful activities. This is just an extension of the first point. If you don't *have* to spend 40 hours a week just to meet your basic needs, you're much more free to find engagement that is meaningful to you since "generates $x0,000/yr" isn't a requirement for your actions.
  • Resilience. Other words for this include agility and adaptability. If money is your only means of solving problems, you will be up a creek if you run out at any point. If you can solve problems with not only money but a broad variety of skills, then you will be able to continue to solving problems even if your money supply is constrained for any reason.
Whatever your set of motivations may be, you’ll likely start your ERE journey as an adult with a source of income. As your skills increase, your spending decreases. The amount of surplus money you have will grow, since you’re not spending all of it. If you keep working long enough (5-10 years), eventually you’ll have as much money as you need for the rest of your life. You’ll technically be “financially independent.” If you then quit, you’ll be “retired”, even though you might be 32.

You also might decide to stop working full time before you become technically “financially independent”. You’ll still need to earn some money, but since you spend very little, you don’t need to work very much at all. A couple months a year might suffice.

It’s also quite common that, in the course of doing whatever it is you like to do with your autonomy, you’ll find an activity you want to do that other people will pay you to do. In this case, money becomes an “incidental yield”, and there is little observable difference between your life and the life of someone who is technically FI. You’ll likely become FI eventually as well, but you might not even notice it when it happens.

ERE, then, despite the name, isn't about early retirement. Early retirement isn't the point, it is merely a common side effect of pursuing this particular form of nonconsumerism. A tiny ecological footprint, equitable resource use, improved health, and ability to pursue meaningful activities are also potential side effects of ERE. ERE, in a sentence, is about increasing autonomy through skills, thereby becoming a nonconsumer.

As such, there are an infinite number of ways one might pursue an ERE lifestyle. Some ERE folk retired to live mostly in SEA. Some live in vans or slowtravel the world. Most live in normal looking houses they rent or own and do whatever they like. Many continue to work their full time jobs, because they find the work fulfilling and meaningful.
Last edited by AxelHeyst on Sat Oct 23, 2021 10:37 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by shaz »

I have really enjoyed your journal. Thank you for putting so much effort into thought-provoking posts.

If you want to learn more about the theoretical underpinnings for strength training, as well as a lot of practical info, I highly recommend NSCA's Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Thanks for the kind words shaz, and the recommendation. Added!

I just realized my graph needs some massaging. The ‘minimum skill’ end of all three curves should converge, at 0.1, probably. Max skill end is probably fine.

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