The Education of Axel Heyst

[mountainFrugal]

Current top post on Hackernews:
part 1: https://constructionphysics.substack.co ... -last-1000
Part 2: https://constructionphysics.substack.co ... t-1000-a85
Part 3: https://constructionphysics.substack.co ... o-last-for

Should be a lot of interest in your project. .

[chenda]

JMGs latest is lit:
https://www.ecosophia.net/tomorrowland-has-fallen/

We can't discuss covid but it should be highlighted his historical understanding, especially of witchcraft persecution, is highly inaccurate. It was a topic I studied at length back in the day.

[AxelHeyst]

Thanks Chanda. I take all things JMG with a substantial grain of salt. I’d be interested in pointers in the direction of accurate information counter to his statements if you’re so inclined - DM is fine.

[AxelHeyst]

mF - interesting! I should note that when I say I want to build things that are relevant to the future, I don’t necessarily mean things that will last to the future, although long lasting buildings/goods are included in my sphere of interest.

Current 50yr houses are a problem because they’re full of toxic goop and made from many non renewable resources that get thrown away. One solution is longer lasting buildings (the Pantheon). Another is short-life buildings (/goods) that are made out of appropriate materials (thatch roofs, cob, Adobe, animal hides, timber if done appropriately) that will be reused or rot at end of life.

A McMansion left to ruin is a toxic waste dump. An Adobe in ruins is a pile of dirt.

[AxelHeyst]

@jacob thanks that’s very interesting, I’ll poke around.

—

… but as far as I've figured it out so far, work/labor/industriousness is a capital "G" universal and objective Good.

…You have to figure out what the good life is first (the metaphysics); then figure out the practicalities of how to get there. If you think the good life is living a life of leisure without the need for work as a certified member of the rentier class, running calculations to ensure you arrive as close as possible at $0 the second you give up the ghost, then index funds probably make a whole lot of sense. (For the record, I think this way of living is degenerate and gross and exploitive and sad.) If you think the good life is being surrounded by family (wife and kids, but also brothers and sisters, aunts/uncles, parents, grandparents, grandkids, and lots and lots of cousins), who are all no more than a short car-ride away from you, building a culture that is your own and not the monoculture of the Machine, focusing on multigenerational wealth and setting your kids up as much as possible to live a virtuous and holy life, then I say invest in family, work/skills, and productive land and other productive fixed assets.

Wanted to pull this in here because a) I’m delighted to hear from Hristo again, b) It’s somewhat relevant to this idea, and c) I basically completely agree with everything he said in that thread.

Particularly the point about starting with a small sphere ( self, family, community) and working outwards from there as you gain firm footing and as desired. I see an error I made in my 20s was attempting to “help” on a National or global scale while my own house was in shambles. I wasn’t effective and honestly maybe I was making things worse. Impossible to know. Cal Newport made this point recently as well - start local and go out from there, if you so choose, otherwise you are going to skip steps and otherwise not be on firm foundation.

A question I’m wrestling with is, is there a maximum scale boundary beyond which any group of humans simply shouldn’t meddle with? E.g. should one constrain ones sphere of influence at which you’re trying to ‘to/be good’ to one’s physically proximate community or bioregion? Simply because unintended consequence effects dominate beyond that boundary?

It seems that Jacob’s focus on emergent behavior with ere2.0 is an answer to this? Define a set of locally applied principles of behavior that have emergent positive effects at large scale - don’t attempt to enact direct effects *at* those large scales, because that’s precisely where humans get hopelessly tangled up in labyrinths of their own making.

If the relationships between local behaviors have virtuous effects at scale, rather that wicked ones, global issues take care of themselves emergently. Something like that. I see Hristos comments as pointing towards local behaviors with virtuous effects.

[jacob]

Much boils down to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_glo ... ct_locally (is there a paradigm beyond this yet?)

This means there's no maximum scale and in fact incorporating maximum scale in terms of personal [local] behavior is crucial because all scales are increasingly interconnected as the boundary conditions to the limits to growth get more influential and increasingly harder to ignore. (E.g. wildfires showing up in your backyard)

It seems that Jacob’s focus on emergent behavior with ere2.0 is an answer to this? Define a set of locally applied principles of behavior that have emergent positive effects at large scale - don’t attempt to enact direct effects *at* those large scales, because that’s precisely where humans get hopelessly tangled up in labyrinths of their own making.

Not quite. It's more that "culture eats strategy for breakfast" (H/T Peter Drucker) and ERE2.0 is an attempt to change the culture rather than waving placards around in front of corporate headquarters. There's a hierarchy of levels in which techniques (waving a placard around) are defeated by tactics is defeated by strategy is defeated by culture. For example, one can control a FIRE person (or a large group of them) by changing the strategy (change the interest rate for example) but not ERE2.0.

If you command a given level, the simpler layers take care of themselves. One example may be how wealthy donors control the middle class by dividing&conquering them into a red and a blue team (much like blue and green in Roman times) thus diverting the focus from the underlying (strategic) level.

So there's definite meddling but it's subtle and indirect. Like turning down the music to end a party rather than telling people to go home.

[macg]

Now my gtd system is in a 3ring binder, which whispers “do something analog” whenever I go to it for answers now. My inboxes are safely stashed in a cabinet somewhere and take an unappealing amount of energy to go fetch.

This is interesting to me. I have been doing GTD since its inception, on and off, sometimes doing great, sometimes not so great.

I never could do it well analog-style, even though I'm old enough where I didn't grow up with internet in my formative years. Maybe it's because I work in IT. I'm not sure why, but I just couldn't follow up with anything when it was strewn about in folders/files/notebooks.

Plus, mapping out projects, with different actions in different contexts, I could just never easily switch between viewing things on a project level or a context level, it was just me doing double the work all the time to keep things up to date.

So my GTD is digital. Early in my career, there was an MS Outlook add-in (that no longer exists) that tied everything together and made mt GTD system excellent. That of course fell apart once I left that job and didn't have MS Outlook anymore lol. Then I tried various ways to do it with Gmail, Evernote, Google Tasks, none worked real well for me.

Around a year ago, I found FacileThings, a web application specifically for GTD, and it has been great for me. (Note, I am not affiliated nor getting any sort of reimbursement for saying that lol). It costs ~$80 a year, but my work pays for it for me, so that made it an easy decision. So anyone out there looking into digital GTD, maybe check it out.

All that being said, to those out there looking into GTD, if you can work with it in analog, all the power to you, and congrats. And congrats to @AxelHeyst. Any time you can do less screen time is a win in my book.

[Quadalupe]

Project Analog is over. [...]

Sounds like it was a great and fulfilling project! But I have to ask, why are you stopping with the project? Did you notice some friction/downsides that made you want it to become a 'tool in your toolbelt', rather than a permanent change?

[AxelHeyst]

@macg, yes, those constraints of paper where you have to write the same thing in multiple places (because you can’t rely on digital tagging / bidirectional associativity) is the main pickle I’m figuring out with my analog system. I think if I went back to FT knowledge work, I’d have a digital GTD system and an analog everything else - analog is v difficult/impossible? to keep up with the volume and speed of knowledge work, without some major streamlining that I don’t have figured out yet.

@quadalupe the mastermind group chats, this forum, and comms with my close friends are the reasons I’m not still on Project Analog rules. If not for digital communication tools, Id have almost no social interaction as I’m way out in the boonies here at the moment.

Secondary reason is tutorials and how-tos - e.g. I figured out how to fix my parents trailers furnace due to YouTube a couple days ago. It was the sail switch that need to be cleaned, Id never have found it without the internet.

The nice thing is that, due to the changes I have kept from PA, comms and tutorials are the only things I’ve used the internet for since the end of Project Analog. My ‘digital efficiency’, value gotten from digital divided by time spend on digital, has gotten massively more favorable.

Oh, also, it’d be tough to make progress on the podcast and my side hustle visualization studio, both things I’m stoked on.

[zbigi]

Do you guys believe that detached homes are the future? In the future, resource-constrained world, how can they beat the effectiveness of apartment buildings? I know that homes are cool for a variety of emotional reasons (and also more comfortable than apartments), but I just can't see them as the resilient solution.

[Blackjack]

Do you guys believe that detached homes are the future? In the future, resource-constrained world, how can they beat the effectiveness of apartment buildings? I know that homes are cool for a variety of emotional reasons (and also more comfortable than apartments), but I just can't see them as the resilient solution.

Are you kidding? Detached homes have existed since far far before fossil fuels, basically time immemorial, so lindy says they will exist far afterwards. If we are resource constrained, then houses will just contain more people again, and shift towards using available resources (wells, fire, passive solar, cob/ other natural building techniques).

[zbigi]

Are you kidding? Detached homes have existed since far far before fossil fuels, basically time immemorial, so lindy says they will exist far afterwards. If we are resource constrained, then houses will just contain more people again, and shift towards using available resources (wells, fire, passive solar, cob/ other natural building techniques).

They did exist before fossil fuels, but life during that time was mostly pure misery (see for example this documentary for a humorous take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jgu7EJ9A8A). We shouldn't use those times as any sort of benchmark.

In any case, in a resource constrained world, if one area has everyone in houses, and another comparable area has most people in apartment buildings, the standard of living in the second place will be much higher. And yet, sustainable people are mostly focusing on houses. I think it may be because it's their personal goal/dream to f off into some rural area and live a quiet and independent ("independent") life - but they want to make it about something more than themselves - hence they try to dress up their goal/dream with environmentalism/sustainability. Sorry for the cheap psychology here, but that's the simplest explanation I could find that explains this phenomenon.

[AxelHeyst]

Apt buildings win in the early 21st century on efficiency, not so sure about resilience. The design principles for one are different than for the other. Future apt buildings might be able to be made resilient though, with sacrifices to efficiency.

But I don’t spend much time thinking about how to win in the early 21st century: I’m much more interested in the late 21st and early 22nd. In those times, it’s my suspicion that the construction industry is going to look very different than it does now. It might be prohibitively expensive to build apt buildings due to resource and energy availability in 2189, or the infrastructure to provide dense housing with electricity, heating, and sewerage might not be practicable.

At any rate, I’m not anti-apt buildings. I actually worked on the design of a couple, back in the day. Part of my lifestyle strategy is to follow my stoke and do what I know. I’m not stoked to live in cities, and I know rural/low pop density spaces. So what I spend my time on is mostly going to revolve around that. At no time in human history is everyone going to live in apt buildings, so humans are always going to have a need for ways to live that don’t involve apt buildings. It’s not that I think detached houses are *the* future, but I’m quite certain they’ll be in it in some capacity. Good enough for me.

[AxelHeyst]

And yet, sustainable people are mostly focusing on houses.

As someone who worked in the sustainable built environment profession for twelve years, I can assure you this is not the case, at least not for sustainability design professionals.

I think that most people who have dreams about their own future home dream about detached homes, not apartments, for obvious reasons. Apartments are like cubicles for living in. There’s a subset of ‘most people’ who are also into sustainability; they also dream of detached homes, but they combine that dream with their interest in sustainability.

[chenda]

Are you kidding? Detached homes have existed since far far before fossil fuels, basically time immemorial, so lindy says they will exist far afterwards.

Yes although far less common in urban areas, even amongst the wealthy. Even pre industrial rural villages often have a dense core of attached dwellings (look at an Italian hilltop village as an example) Low density suburbs of detached dwellings on big plots are only possible due to cheap abundant energy and car culture.

[AxelHeyst]

Yeah, as with most things, context matters. Apt buildings / very dense housing makes sense in some places, and low density makes sense in others. And suburbia is one style of detached housing; there are other styles of detached housing that aren’t part of a fossil fuel dependent strategy.

Long story short: I grew up in a mountain pass in the Sierra Nevada mountains. I’ll become a mountain man (trapping and trading furs with local shops for supplies - yes, we actually have those kind of folks around here) before I move into an apt building again. That’s a personal choice, I certainly don't think it’s a universalizable lifestyle…

…but then again I’m strongly against the idea of universalizable lifestyles in the first place. I want to live in a world that has nomadic mountain folk, dense urban dwellers, and people recolonizing the ruins of 20th century suburbia, and everything in between.

[chenda]

@axelheyst - In Spain or California? Either way sounds interesting do tell us more about it if your minded.

[Scott 2]

very dense housing makes sense in some places, and low density makes sense in others

I did not appreciate the vast amounts of open land in the US, until I took a train across the country. Low density housing is a practical requirement in those areas.

[mountainFrugal]

I’ll become a mountain man (trapping and trading furs with local shops for supplies - yes, we actually have those kind of folks around here) before I move into an apt building again.

See ya out there Pilgrim.

My sibling's old neighbor (in the Midwest) hunts and traps squirrels, opossums, and raccoons in their older suburban neighborhood (mature trees). When my sibling asked him what he was going to have for dinner he looked up into the trees and said "Whatever the neighborhood provides".

[shaz]

@zbigi how do you see food production working without farms? Or will all the farmers commute to the farms? There are robot harvesters now so maybe with the addition of more farmbots the need for humans on-site would be minimal. But even cattle on open range do best with some husbandry.

Your posts seem to assume that rural existence is of low value to the rest of society. I think you would find otherwise if all the farmers packed up, moved to high density locations, and stopped farming tomorrow.