Slevin's journal

Where are you and where are you going?
cjm
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by cjm »

Slevin wrote:hmm... I'm not sure if this is a place to post this or not but I have been having a very rough month. My girlfriend of 5.5 years and I spiraled downward and finally broke down due to what turned out to be a deep co-dependency from both of us. I'm currently trying to look at the pieces and figure out which bits are me and what aren't. Its really hard but I think I'm okay now and I'm getting professional help... It really hurts to see what you thought was going to be your future and your entire identity crumble into nothingness... But I understand now that is why we need boundaries and a sense of self in our relationships. You live, you learn, right :lol: ?

I'll try and get this journal back up to date when I get myself back together...
Sorry to hear that, Slevin. It's incredibly difficult but it sounds like you're doing the right things and learning from the experience. Having been through a tough break up recently myself, I've found that it can really help to talk openly about it with your closest friends/family. It can be a good time to re-connect and strengthen the other relationships in your life. Best wishes.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

I'm gonna be changing up this journal from now on... probably to be more like a journal and less of a log of my finances. I like to write down random thoughts that I think are beautiful, so this is where I'm going to stick them for a little bit.

On Strength:

There is no more beautiful part of spring than seeing new suckers sprout from dead and dying trees. All the time invested, all the effort, and the tree can let go. It doesn't look back, stops wasting energy where it nothing can be done, and starts to grow again. And this ability to begin again, the resilience of nature, it gives me strength.

Noedig
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Noedig »

Slevin, a breakup of a deep relationship will affect you for some time. It doesn't sound like you are blaming yourself or your ex: good - those who spend time trapped in hurt and hate, even when they have reasons, seem to have the most trouble learning, recovering and making a better start.

As for anxiety about losing control: I hold with the stoics who say you should be concerned only with what is immediate to you and which can affect directly. All other things are not your responsibility to change, and you should not concern yourself unduly with them

I am minded of the last words of an eastern philosopher: 'In my life I was beset by a great many problems and difficulties. I now know, many of them were not real'.

Good luck with figuring it out, figuring yourself out, and just enjoying your life. FI can wait a while.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

Noedig, you are right. The blame doesn't help anybody. And I can only understand and control what is inside of me.

I spent a lot of the past two-three weeks in really bad places psychologically. Chronic panic attacks that happened often, a lack of ability to cope, and a lack of ability to just function as a normal human have pretty much just turned my life into a long-strange-hazy event. I have only just started coming out of the haze and what I have found is both strange and disturbing.

After talking with a lot of therapists and spending 100s of hours in reflection I seemed to have destroyed a lot of my relationship in the past due to what might be classified as an extreme anxiety disorder. I took another person in and had to fit them into my rigor and rituals to make them acquiesce to my needs so I didn't feel the terrible feelings I am afraid of (anxiety, fear, embarrassment, loss of control). This made them feel trapped and hurt them and did what must have been pretty awful things. The fact that we are still on talking terms and consider that we might try again at some point in the future is something like a miracle. Oops. You live and learn, I guess. I'm not angry with myself or mad I did this, I didn't understand back then. And that wasn't all of the crumbling even, some other stuff existed too.

In other news, I thought recently that there may be something wrong with me, some sort of social inadequacy or inability to socialize well based on many of my experiences from the past couple of years. Turns out that since the breakup I have gone out with many friends and even random groups of people from meetup.com and have had only good positive experiences.

It bothers me more than anything that now I am so socially well-lubricated and happy in these situations without the person I care most about and that my life even seems to be going better in this regard... What I had before was not good, and I need to learn to make relationships better.

My therapist has suggested that I need to stop trying to control my anxiety by figuring out how to control everything... So I will probably be less and less active on these forums for a while.

FBeyer
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by FBeyer »

Slevin wrote:... Turns out that since the breakup I have gone out with many friends and even random groups of people from meetup.com and have had only good positive experiences. ...
'sounds to me like you're doing better than most.

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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by fips »

As rough as the whole story sounds, you now make a rather well-reflected impression on me (at least judging from all we know).
Good to hear you are working on this, still talk to your ex and have good experiences in re-connecting with people around you.

I second Noedig's view on applying Stoicism. Dealing with challenges and integrating into society starts from within and includes knowing what you can and what you cannot control.

Hope to hear back from you in the future, keep your head up!
And if financial independence was the main reason that drove you to the ERE-forum .. I guess you are still well ahead in terms of income, net worth and age. Don't worry about that part of the equation too much for now (even though I find that lifestyle, goals and successes in different fields often complement each other).

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

On Fear and adaptability:

I've been spending a lot of time reading Marcus Aurelius, and have taken a lot of his advice to heart. This all comes from a lot of deep self-reflection and self-criticality.
I'm now thinking about why I am on this forum. I also read MMM's stuff when it comes out, and there are bits of each philosophy (ERE and MMM) that I find really interesting.

From Jacob's perspective: flexibility and adaptability. The people here are the ones who set themselves up to be well-tempered and well off, even in the face of failure. That's what cutting down to the bare minimum expenses does, it allows you to live in very flexible ways, and be able to get by nearly anywhere. I think that aspects of this are very important... however you have to be clear that your knife doesn't pare off other bits in the process, like generosity, a love of others, and social connection. If you run the budget too tight and aren't flexible enough, you can socially isolate yourself from those around you. Sometimes you can get around this with the magical superpower of flexibility (creative date ideas and social hangouts) but sometimes its best to cave in to the little pleasures (a beer with a friend, a tea/latte here and there).

I think that I have strayed too far from the renaissance ideal, and need to focus back in on that direction instead of the strict following of the FI direction.

From MMM I very much like the idea of community. The longest running study on long term health and well-being found that those who live the longest and the healthiest lives have deep and widespread social connections. They are the ones who always have someone to call on, and we all know it is easier to deal with difficult issues if you have a lot of support. This is what I have been fleshing out recently, building a myriad of supports and friends to call on in case things get rough again. It turns out that when you look the right way, great people are easy to find. To quote one of my favorite children's TV show characters, " If you look for the light, you can often find it. But if you look for the dark, that is all you will ever see".

I have been more and more often considering going to try living simply for a while, and seeing how I can take to it. I have always romanticized trying it, and need to try it on a small scale so I know if I can ever take that giant leap. A lot of my inspiration came from the flexibility approach of many people on this forum, and also a Jon Jandai talk. I may look into joining a more laid back WWOOF program for a little while.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

@fips and @fbeyer: I really appreciate the kind words :D . I don't know what happens next but I know whatever will happen makes me a much more whole person.

FBeyer
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by FBeyer »

Slevin wrote:...It turns out that when you look the right way, great people are easy to find....
A possibly life changing observation.

I'd rephrase it to make its general applicability more evident.
...It turns out that when you look the right way, great things in life are easy to find....

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

Quick finances update to keep this journal ehh... sorta on topic...

NW Cash:
$16100
Gold:
$5000
401k:
$15000
Vehicle:
$15000

Rough total NW:
$51,100

Easily accessible: 35kish

Something happened with my spending calculator in the past month... and I was a little preoccupied, so I haven't been able to see what this spending is :( which makes me sad because I'm sure it was awfully high and I want to know what it is.
I think this is something near the way @FBeyer is talking about above here. I don't know how to get there yet but I know it doesn't happen near home :) .
Last edited by Slevin on Wed Jan 26, 2022 12:26 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

In true spirit of everything Jacob hates... it looks like I'm going to spend some unknown number of months traveling around the world and living out of a backpack. Obviously it won't solve any of my problems, but it will teach me self-reliance and flexibility, things I haven't been exposed enough to yet in life. I'll be vagabonding around Eurasia probably for the next 6 months or so. This is probably the end of this journal for a while... If you read this journal and want to meet up/ grab a beer etc. Let me know and I'll send you a pm if I'm ever nearby.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

So, started a whole journal and some posts under "Blackjack" but found the email for this account, so I'll pick back up on this one.

NW: 230.5k.... Aghhhh, the market falling hurts. This peaked out at about 265k back in Mid December, but then my company stock took a bit of a dive with the Market, and the market went down as well. I know its just a blip and my stocks will have plenty of time to recover (since I'm not retiring in the next couple of months or anything), but owww, that hurts!

Income: $10500 cash (this should be bumped up to 11.7k cash with back pay)
Taxes: $2976
Insurance: $170 (for DGF and I)
Rent: $2130
Spending: $1042

SR: 42% (ouch that’s low)
SR minus tax: 58%
These are both underestimates due to stock comp, which is disbursed quarterly

Spending breakdown:
Groceries: $174
Alcohol: $55
Utilities: $107
Gifts: $55
Gym: $50
Restaurants: $12 (got chipotle when DGF and i were conked out from booster)
Misc: $567

The Misc spending is pretty bad. A large portion of that $(200) iis for replacement of our kitchen faucet, which was leaking, and could have been repaired (ceramic faucet cartridge) for probably like $30, but it was severely nonfunctional in the sink, couldn’t reach parts of the sink, and since we prep 99.9% of all our own food, make our own sauces, hot sauces, mayo, oatmilk, etc, that sink is our most used appliance, so I splurged on a commercial faucet. Then another $30 spent on parts to fix the other sink.

Another large chunk ($70) was spent on my first haircut in over a year. Large upfront cost there, but it only happens once or twice a year. Also chose a style that I should be able to upkeep myself, which should mean minimal upkeep.

Repairs: Kitchen Sink (replacement), Toilet (logged in repairs log), bathroom sink (replaced ceramic cartridge, I tried looking into fixing it without replacing the cartridge, but i couldn’t find a solution that actually “worked” and made the sink not leak anymore), caulked up about a dozen air leaks from the windows throughout the house.

Books Read: Gardens of the moon, Spirituality and Healing in the Life of Treya Killam Wilber, (finally finished ) A Brief History of Everything, Ministry of the Future, All we Can Save

Books Started: Deadhouse Gates, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by jacob »

Slevin wrote:
Wed Jan 26, 2022 1:30 am
Books Read: Gardens of the moon, Spirituality and Healing in the Life of Treya Killam Wilber, (finally finished ) A Brief History of Everything, Ministry of the Future, All we Can Save

Books Started: Deadhouse Gates, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
May I suggest: https://www.amazon.com/Integral-Ecology ... 590304667/

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

jacob wrote:
Wed Jan 26, 2022 11:46 am
May I suggest: https://www.amazon.com/Integral-Ecology ... 590304667/
Reserved it from the library. I'm psyched to get my hands on this and maybe be able to form some some interesting AQAL perspectives (is that the right way of saying it? talking about the subjective + intersubjective + objective + interobjective map of views on a subject) on human / ecology relationships and be able to try and sort out what I think is are some good / useful models for human/ecology interfacing. It is one of those places I can see myself spending a whole life on, trying to balance the relationships between the noosphere and the biosphere.

I'm still somewhat annoyed that I don't have a good way of interfacing with the integral theory people since it looks like the (in person local) green aspect of the community shut down about 6 months before COVID (due to the gathering place where they had free/ cheap rent being shut down), and nobody has tried to start it up again. There are a couple somewhat alive websites, but from what I can see no chill message boards like here. Ahhh well, at least I have this board and the textbooks to keep me company!

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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by jacob »

Slevin wrote:
Wed Jan 26, 2022 9:36 pm
Reserved it from the library. I'm psyched to get my hands on this and maybe be able to form some some interesting AQAL perspectives (is that the right way of saying it? talking about the subjective + intersubjective + objective + interobjective map of views on a subject) on human / ecology relationships and be able to try and sort out what I think is are some good / useful models for human/ecology interfacing. It is one of those places I can see myself spending a whole life on, trying to balance the relationships between the noosphere and the biosphere.
They call it a tetra-mesh. There's a distinction between nature (all 4 quadrants but none including the noosphere), Nature (capital N) (the two exterior quadrants only but developed to the point of the noosphere) and NATURE (all 4 quadrants to the point of the noosphere. nature is how nature is normally seen, Nature is how science and systems science see it, and NATURE is the integral (tetra-mesh) perspective.

The book re-convinced me that the real problem of the "world" is humans. The noosphere is where the frontier is.
Slevin wrote:
Wed Jan 26, 2022 9:36 pm
I'm still somewhat annoyed that I don't have a good way of interfacing with the integral theory people since it looks like the (in person local) green aspect of the community shut down about 6 months before COVID (due to the gathering place where they had free/ cheap rent being shut down), and nobody has tried to start it up again. There are a couple somewhat alive websites, but from what I can see no chill message boards like here. Ahhh well, at least I have this board and the textbooks to keep me company!
Perhaps we can get a couple of people together here for an MMG focused on AQAL, ERE2.0, and general meta-crisis stuff? Would you be interested in joining such?

RoamingFrancis
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by RoamingFrancis »

@jacob - YES PLEASE TO THE MASTERMIND GROUP!!!!!!!!

@Slevin have you checked out integrallife.com? There's some great stuff on there; I've been really enjoying the Witt and Wisdom podcasts recently.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

jacob wrote:
Thu Jan 27, 2022 10:03 am
They call it a tetra-mesh. There's a distinction between nature (all 4 quadrants but none including the noosphere), Nature (capital N) (the two exterior quadrants only but developed to the point of the noosphere) and NATURE (all 4 quadrants to the point of the noosphere. nature is how nature is normally seen, Nature is how science and systems science see it, and NATURE is the integral (tetra-mesh) perspective.

The book re-convinced me that the real problem of the "world" is humans. The noosphere is where the frontier is.

Perhaps we can get a couple of people together here for an MMG focused on AQAL, ERE2.0, and general meta-crisis stuff? Would you be interested in joining such?
Yeah I'm very interested in getting a group together to talk about ERE, AQAL, and meta-crisis stuff. I'm also interested in the repair mmg too (as a professional maintainer / debugger / infrastructure builder in the software front, but my best practices for maintainance / repair leak into EVERYTHING I TOUCH), just haven't sat down to actually write out an application message yet.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

How to 8x your buying power of prepared foods by insourcing prep:

This is a blog style entry for beginners on how there are places where you can drop your spending on an item by something like 90%, in this specific case, I’m gonna be singling out one of the kings of healthy prepared food that most buy at the grocery store: hummus.

Meta view: (This site) has earlier defined the premise that Lifestyle = Spending * Skill, where skill is a variable, and there should be a number of places where the skill number of the equation can become an exceptionally high value with very little effort. This focus should be on high factor costs first (housing) , then you can drop down to playing with slightly smaller factor costs. Food (for many people) is one of the higher monthly costs. So factor this in as a helpful tip when you get to that section of cost evaluation.

I’ve been making my own hummus for a number of years now, and noticed the astronomical price when I was walking by the hummus in the grocery store this week. A small 10oz (1.2 - 1.3 cups) container of hummus (wrapped in a giant plastic container) from sabra (medium quality) now costs $3.09! I thought this number seemed too high (and who only wants to eat 1.2 cups of hummus??) , so I went back home and crunched the numbers when making my own hummus.

This is the amount of ingredients needed to make about 6 cups of hummus.

½ lb garbanzo beans / chickpeas : $0.84
¼ cup olive oil: $0.25
3 cloves garlic: $0.10 (overestimation)
¼ cup lemon juice: $0.38
¼ preserved lemon: $0.13
1 tbsp tahini: $0.15
Salt + pepper to taste: $0.0 (trivial)

Total Cost: $ 1.85

Cost basis per 1.2 cups: $0.37. 8x LESS than what you would spend at the store. Not to mention that is MUCH more delicious than the store bought kind.

So what are the downsides? A little bit of hands on work (i would estimate about 20 minutes hands on), and some hands off time as beans cook. It also requires a bit of equipment to make it effortless (from a quick search on craigslist, pressure cookers or instapots are available from $10 here, and modern food processors from $30). Mine were gained for free from social capital (people I know getting rid of perfectly good stuff).

Steps:

* Soak (if not pressure cooking), then Cook ½ lb of garbanzo beans (1 ¼ cups). With a pressure cooker, this takes about 1 hour altogether. On a stovetop, 2+ hours.

* peel garlic, then throw into processor to chop

* add tahini, lemon juice, garbanzos, preserved lemon if using to the food processor, process. Stop and wipe down sides as needed depending on the strength of the food processor.

* slowly pour in oil while processing

* throw in 2-3 cubes ice or 4ish+ tbsp very cold water to improve texture (as needed)

* salt + pepper + adjust for taste

* eat and enjoy!


Some amazing uses for hummus: Hummus and grain bowl, hummus and veggies, hummus and chips, hummus sandwich, hummus toast, baked hummus and tomato pasta, hummus into a dressing for salads.
Last edited by Slevin on Mon Jan 31, 2022 3:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by mountainFrugal »

Slevin wrote:
Mon Jan 31, 2022 1:23 pm

Steps:
...
* eat and enjoy!
Will try your recipe this week! Also, it is hard to make an overly garlic hummus IMO. :)

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

mountainFrugal wrote:
Mon Jan 31, 2022 1:49 pm
Will try your recipe this week! Also, it is hard to make an overly garlic hummus IMO. :)
I think it would end up being hummus flavored garlic paste at about 5 chunky garlic cloves per 1x of this recipe ;) . Obvs you can keep adding garlic during the tasting phase if you need to bump up the garlicy-ness of the flavor profile, but you probably need to dice it by hand at this point (depending on food processor strength)

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