AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

[mountainFrugal]

I think the likelihood of inspiring people through honesty and authenticity is high even if their specific situation is different. Thank you for your post.

[OutOfTheBlue]

Congrats on your forum coming out, AE.

Honesty and authenticity are inspiring, like mountainFrugal said.

All the more power to you!

[shaz]

You are a valued part of this community. Thank you for taking a risk and sharing more of yourself.

[jacob]

And it's made worse by the fact that being gay is seen as a political identity instead of just something you experience, and I actually disagree with a lot of the politics by the contemporary LGBT community. For example, I've been told I can't be gay because I "support the police" (what people hear when I say I have an interest in criminal justice), etc etc, all of which is frankly ridiculous but it's harder to escape when you're in a marginalized community because people inside of the community get more defensive about perceiving they're being attacked due to past trauma.

Those sociocentric Kegan3 tribes can be quite the pain, alright. The way I've navigated it is to see myself as a hyperobject (this mental model really is quite useful). Picture a 3D cylinder (representing Kegan4+). One flatland-tribe (representing Kegan3) will see it as a square (from the side). Another (Kegan3) flatland-tribe will see it as a circle (from above).

(If you want, you can use dimensionality as an analogous metaphor for Kegan levels in terms of what facets the consciousness is aware of.)

If you're a cylinder you can never really fit in with the squares or the circles tribes. Or rather, the squares and the circles will never really grok the full you. Instead they'll each see a part of you.

In my case, the libertarians think I'm a Marxist, the kumbayas think I'm an evil capitalist, the minimalists think I own too many tools, the left thinks I'm too much into guns, the right thinks I trust government too much, and so on.

I've come to accept these limitations. Leaning towards being an individualistic introvert, I might have done the whole Kegan4+ on easy-mode.

However, the inability to truly fit into any Kegan3 tribe (which is 56% of people) also comes with the flexibility to join different tribes. Connecting over what you have in common rather than fighting over differences. Kegan3 can be approached in both ways. It's just that everybody has come to take for granted that differences means war.

The permaculture/natural principle of the edges being the most productive holds in general. The practicalities of ERE came about from combining the values of the simple living tribe (who thinks capitalism is evil) with the values of the capitalist tribe (who thinks deliberate consumption is evil). And so on.

Instead of trying desperately to align 100% with one tribe, it maybe be more useful to align 60-70% with two or more different tribes and bring them closer together. This can lend some [dynamic] purpose to your role in life?

I've found that insofar I manage to become part of any given tribe, call it A, I'm more likely to build bridges to other tribes, call it B, C, ..., because sociocentric thinking (herd feeling/monkey brain) is more about who says it than what is being said. With a foot in multiple camps---I step my foot into their dimension and appear as a circle or a square all things depending---I can communicate with tribes in a way that tribal outsiders can not. I can skew the squares towards the circle and vice versa. The only way to do this is to avoid the "black/white"-thinking, which in this metaphorical framework is better thought of as "perpendicular"-thinking.

As long as the majority of humans are still dominated by monkey-brain, this is a productive role for those who see the hyper object. Those who don't see it are kinda screwed. So ... maybe ... they can copy those who do.

[AnalyticalEngine]

@mountainFrugal, @OutOfTheBlue, @shaz - Thank you all for your kind words. I've had a number of people tell me they find my journal/posts inspiring, so I'm glad that my honesty has been useful for the community. ERE is actually a very wide framework, and so a diversity of perspectives are important is widening the conversation of what's possible. Plus I think grappling with the emotional side of it is pretty important, as I find the emotional side of ERE a lot more difficult than the practical side. After all, cooking lentils isn't that hard, but finding the emotional fortitude to forego everything society finds "normal" to cook lentils is a lot harder.

One emotional block I realize I had was not wanting to quit my job because it was my only tie to "normal." Over several months of Plotkin work, I realized my emotional tie to "normal" was being driven by internalized homophonia. I've therefore been trying to be more open about it, both to people IRL and this forum, because telling people and having it accepted has done wonders for getting over the shame of it. It's made it a lot easier to consider quitting my job now because I don't have to worry about everyone seeing me as "too weird." Now I can see my job as a time sink + source of money rather than an identity.

@Jacob

Those sociocentric Kegan3 tribes can be quite the pain, alright. The way I've navigated it is to see myself as a hyperobject (this mental model really is quite useful). Picture a 3D cylinder (representing Kegan4+). One flatland-tribe (representing Kegan3) will see it as a square (from the side). Another (Kegan3) flatland-tribe will see it as a circle (from above).

If you're a cylinder you can never really fit in with the squares or the circles tribes. Or rather, the squares and the circles will never really grok the full you. Instead they'll each see a part of you.

Thanks for this analogy; I like that visualization. That's a pretty good description of how being Kegan4 and outside of the norm feels. I might also see if I can extend this metaphor to better visualize Kegan5.

Leaning towards being an individualistic introvert, I might have done the whole Kegan4+ on easy-mode...The permaculture/natural principle of the edges being the most productive holds in general...Instead of trying desperately to align 100% with one tribe, it maybe be more useful to align 60-70% with two or more different tribes and bring them closer together. This can lend some [dynamic] purpose to your role in life?

As long as the majority of humans are still dominated by monkey-brain, this is a productive role for those who see the hyper object. Those who don't see it are kinda screwed. So ... maybe ... they can copy those who do.

This is interesting because it explains the social groups I find I have the most success in--namely, the ones I organize myself. I do pretty well organizing things and motivating people toward group norms if I can select the people involved. It's a leadership skill, but I have a lot more success when I'm the one setting the social agenda, and it is probably for that reason. People tend to gravitate toward you when you can point out facets of their experience they might be overlooking from your own experience.

Being super proactive about one's social sphere is a reasonable solution to it. You can end up bridging a gap Kegan3 people often overlook.

[AnalyticalEngine]

October Summary - Toward Systems Thinking

I wrapped up several long-term activities in October, thus allowing me time to reconsider my goals. As I try to shift my goals toward becoming a professional writer, I've found the focus is helping me clear up a lot of bad habits in my life. It's easier to think holistically when you have a reason to care.

Lessons learned on meetup
All my civics/police classes are finally over. They were interesting and enjoyable but also time consuming and not the best venue to meet people. I am slowly developing a better intuition for which activities will lead to me making friends and which will not. I've found classes generally to not be the best for meeting people. They are good for learning and getting out, but most people there just want to do the class then go home. To become friends with people, you need repeated contact with an opportunity to share increasingly personal information about yourself. To that end, I've found DnD and my sci-fi book club to be better venues for that. I'm interacting with the same people every time, there's a lot of opportunity for conversation before or after, and I meet a lot of like-minded people there. After all, most people into these hobbies are also MBTI rationalists.

Meetup tends to be a mixed bag. You often never see people you meet there again, so unless you exchange phone numbers, the one-and-done format is not the best way to build friendship. Also there's a certain personality type that goes to meetup events. Let's call this personality type "lonely with no friends and looking to traumadump their life story onto the nearest warm body." I have found this personality type transcends race, gender, sexual orientation, and age. After being the victim of five or so encounters of this variety, I was about to swear off meetup entirely because of it, but I have since reconsidered and learned a valuable lesson about friendship.

Namely, when you are at these large events, being mobile between different clusters of people is the solution. If you are initially a member of Cluster A, which consists of the people you met randomly standing in line, Cluster A does not have to be your Forever Group. Indeed, if someone is telling you about how they abused LSD in college and now see hallucinations randomly, and you personally are not into this experience, what you do is ditch Cluster A and go join Cluster B.

Now, if you are like me, you are a very specific person with very specific taste in who you want to talk to. You maybe aren't here to hear about Susie's gymnastics, people's latest sexual escapades, how to divorce your husband, where to get mushrooms, and Robert's conversation with his therapist about his social anxiety. However, if you are selective with picking people from the crowd you want to talk to, leave if it's not the conversation you want to have, and steer the conversation toward topics you want to talk about, you can have a more satisfying social experience.

What I have learned about myself from trying to make friends
There are a few things:

1. The issue I need to be more proactive in relationships -- I'm changing my ways now, but I've historically had a problem with setting boundaries and being proactive. This lead to me getting in a lot of friendships with people who were social vampires because I wasn't seeking anyone out and social vampires come to you. Then I wouldn't ditch them when I should have and I ended up wasting a lot of my time and energy solving their problems instead of actually building a normal relationship. This is a relationship pattern I am trying to unlearn. The key is to find cool people and approach them and give my energy to them so I can build a normal friendship instead of some weird codependent unhealthy disaster.

2. I don't have a lot of the Kegan3 structures people take for granted -- Namely, childhood friends and relatives. The issue is I grew up in the army and moved 7 times as a kid. Plus most of my extended family is Extremely Mormon and we Don't Get Along. The result of this is I don't have grandparents, cousins, uncles, etc nor do I have your High School Basketball Team Friend or your College Drinking Buddy. I also dropped off Facebook ten years ago and with that, lost contact to most people in my past. I'm actually not that sad about this because I really don't want to reconnect to a lot of people, but it nevertheless remains a problem I need to solve.

Maintaining weak connections with utility friends is something I suck at, and I need to put energy into building utility bonds with people like my neighbors, coworkers, etc. These aren't really virtue friends, but they do make up a significant part of your social network.

So I've reconnected with three former friends I do want to talk to. They all live far away, so we just text each other cat pictures, but it's something.

3. Your social group is an extension of your environment -- I tend to meet unhealthy people when I hang out in unhealthy venues, ie, alcoholics at the bar, internet addicted shut-ins on reddit, etc. Historically, I've had an easier time being friends with coworkers because work filters out a lot of people. However, going forward, keeping in mind how environment is going to shape your interactions with people is critical.

4. Being FI means you have a degree of "shit togetherness" that you forget you have and other people don't often have.

5. Need to figure out how to convert acquaintances I find interesting into actual friends.

Social goals going forward
1. Continue DnD and sci-fi book club. Try to turn some of the people there into actual friends instead of book club friends.
2. Sign up for the Denver police volunteer program. Even though this involves like 40 minutes of driving one way, it's been a great way to find writing inspiration since I'm writing in the crime genre.
3. I am also currently in the Boring Suburb police volunteer program, which amounts to nothing because nothing happens here, but they do sometimes volunteer to set up events, etc, so might as well try because it's close.
4. Go to the writer's group in the town over. They often meet twice a week for an hour of writing then an hour of review. This is a good opportunity to meet the same people every time thereby making friends in my hobbies.
5. I took over a social group on meetup for my town that was going to die because it had no organizer. Going to try to revive it as an experiment in leading these things.
6. Continue my involvement in the three ERE MMGs I'm in, which have been fantastic. This forum has been a great place to meet like-minded people, even if it's just over zoom, and I'm glad I've been reaching out there.
7. Need to get involved in some kind of physical social group, be that hiking, sports, etc.

Becoming a Writer
So now that I'm not hearing how the district attorney works every night of the week, I've been trying to making writing my biggest priority. This has been a bit of a challenge because I've let my brain turn into goldfish mush over covid, and reclaiming my attention span/ability to be self-motivated on hard concentration tasks has been difficult.

What I've realized is that part of the reason I've been so mentally stuck with reducing spending/not eating out/wasting time on reddit/etc is that I had nothing better to do. My WFH job is pretty easy, so I have more time to kill than a lot of people. Because my job is so easy and so high paying, it's easy to just lay there like a slug and collect your money while shoving $50 steaks in your mouth. After all, you don't need the money, your mind isn't occupied by work tasks, and so it's easy to drift around and waste it on shiny toys because what else are you gonna do?

I was never that serious about writing because I never thought it was possible. However, after connecting to some published writers in person and listening to Brandon Sanderson's creative writing lectures, I've realized that wait, I can actually do this! Sure, maybe only 1 in 20 people setting out to be a writer will actually make it, but I think I can be one of those people who actually make it. I've already written two novels and over a million words with my previous history in the hobby, and one of those novels was so popular as to get its own TVtrops page. (I posted it online for free) I've ran social media accounts with over 1.7k followers interested in my comics. Why am I thinking this is going to be so impossible for me? I'm basically already halfway there, and I could actually get there if I just stop wasting time on YouTube videos.

In his lectures, Sanderson talks about how you should focus on becoming the type of person who can write a great novel instead of focusing on how good the novel itself is. This means setting aside consistent time to write, focusing on the technical aspects of the craft, analyzing what's popular and why in the genre, and, most importantly, clearing your mind from digital goldfish mode so you can actually brainstorm your novel.

What I love about this is that it solves so many problems I've otherwise struggle to find motivation to solve, mainly:
1. Reducing spending -- probably not going to make millions as an author, so now I have a reason to get my lifestyle footprint down.
2. Killing my internet addiction -- I have a bad habit of reading crap I disagree with on social media (don't we all?) then fuming about it while doing mindless tasks. Or filling all the empty space in my day with background YouTube, reddit, etc. However, because writing is an intellectual task that requires you think about what you are going to write before you write it, I can toss all that into where it belongs--in the trash can--and spend empty space thinking about my novel instead. Also, a lot of casual texting/Discord/reddit posts/etc consume the same task-type energy that fiction writing does, so this gives me a reason to cut those things out too.
3. Managing my day -- Writing has the danger of becoming all consuming of your life because you need to think about it so much. This has happened to me before, and I struggle with the balance of working on it consistently vs managing the rest of my life. This gives me an incentive to actually implement all my time management systems because I have actual things to do now.
4. Align my social goals with the rest of my life so I don't have to spend a lot of time driving to things I don't want to go to, wasting time, etc. When I was first trying to get involved, I said yes to basically everything because I needed to force myself out. Now that I'm more active, this gives me a metric to be more selective with: "Will this activity support my goal of being a writer?"

All of this is a lightbulb moment of "wow, I can see how my entire lifestyle was sabotaging my goals before because of the externalities. Now that I have a reason to actually care, I can work on making all parts of my life more harmonious toward this goal."

Which is a big part of WL6.

(Disclaimer: These posts often sound more judgemental than I actually am because I try to write them to be funny, which includes giving exaggerated and specific examples. I don't actually care what most people do and do have sympathy for all the people struggling out there. It's just this reads better if I inject more personality into it, which might come across the wrong way if read as a literal account of my personality)

[ertyu]

A very interesting post and maybe I'll come respond to it in more detail, but an immediate thought I had was, when it comes to this

getting in a lot of friendships with people who were social vampires because I wasn't seeking anyone out and social vampires come to you. Then I wouldn't ditch them when I should have and I ended up wasting a lot of my time and energy solving their problems instead of actually building a normal relationship. This is a relationship pattern I am trying to unlearn. The key is to find cool people and approach them and give my energy to them so I can build a normal friendship instead of some weird codependent unhealthy disaster.

Maybe a worhtwhile practice would be to deliberately ask others to come through for you in small ways even if you don't necessarily need them to. How do they respond to a request to accomodate you and your preferences? How do they respond to a request for a small favor? How do they respond when you want to talk about your life and interests? In other words, intentionally and deliberately take up space not just to practice being in touch with yourself and your needs and preferences and desires, but also to give yourself the consistent message that those deserve interpersonal space.This will have the important side effect of allowing you to see others' reactions and weed out people who would be all take and no give.

[grundomatic]

@ertyu
Brilliant suggestion.

[AnalyticalEngine]

@ertyu - That's a good idea, and I'll start giving that a shot. Not only does that weed out vampires, it also helps me realize I can ask other people to accommodate me or meet my needs, which is something I still struggle with. I definitely internalized a lot from my childhood about never being allowed to ask for anything or needing to be completely independent all of the time, and that's something I've also been trying to unlearn. That kind of attitude makes it hard to want to be around people because you think it's impossible for other people to ever want to meet your needs.

[NewBlood]

I was never that serious about writing because I never thought it was possible. However, after connecting to some published writers in person and listening to Brandon Sanderson's creative writing lectures, I've realized that wait, I can actually do this! Sure, maybe only 1 in 20 people setting out to be a writer will actually make it, but I think I can be one of those people who actually make it.

Very cool post and holistic plan of action!

I don't know if you follow John Michael Greer. I find his writing has taken quite a turn in the last couple of years and you may have to sift through quite a bit of ranting (ymmv), but he started a series of posts about the publishing industry that may have some interesting tidbits for you:
https://www.ecosophia.net/writing-as-mi ... nd-perish/
https://www.ecosophia.net/writing-as-mi ... will-open/

[AnalyticalEngine]

Thanks for the recommendation, @NewBlood! I'll check that out.

[AnalyticalEngine]

2022 Year in Review: The Year of Engagement

My theme for 2022 was engagement. In 2021, I had come to realize I had lost my own sense of agency and participation in my own life. I was unable to recognize my own needs and wants, nor act on them, and this was causing me to drift around in unhappy jobs and relationships while distracting myself with mindless internet use.

I wanted to regain my sense of personal agency and ability to act, and as such, 2022 became the Year of Engagement. The goal was to simply be engaged in everything I did so that I could start to see my life was indeed comprised of choices I was actively making. And I am happy to say that this was a success. Here are the wins:

1. I picked up regular exercise in 2022, going from a total couch potato to being able to run a 10k and beginning to learn to ski.
2. Improved my art skills thanks to dedicated practice and the great MMG Proko Yo!
3. Attended 36 events on Meetup, completed two citizen's academy police courses, completed a weightlifting class, completed one town civics course, attended a DnD campaign all year, joined one writing group in-person, regularly attended the sci-fi book club in-person, made many great friends on the ERE forum from participating in three MMG, and started started the writing MMG.
4. Resumed a regular writing habit and made good progress on improving my writing skills/writing a real novel.
5. Found a WFH job that is finally a good fit for me.

But perhaps the most important change was regaining my sense of agency and learning to accept who I am. I had a lot of internalized shame about being "too different," and this was preventing me from trying to make friends while also keeping me trapped in job situations I hated. Now I am able to see work as an active choice I am making, not my only identity and social worth, and this has been critical in freeing my mind to see possibilities for life outside of work.

On the Loser Mindset, Agency, and Web of Goals
The Loser Mindset is a very easy trap to fall into for multiple reasons. Mental illness and trauma can rob you of your sense of agency, but these are not the only factors. American socialization can also encourage the Loser mindset because complacency makes the system run. If you don't ask questions and do your job, you're not causing problems for anyone, and most corporations run on lowest common denominator management. The default path in school and work is to shut up and do your job, and internalizing this mindset will make you continually work on things you actually hate.

In ERE terms, it was impossible for me to design a Web of Goals/WL6 until I had actually learned to have my own goals in the first place. Becoming self-directed again was massively important to overcoming the Loser mindset. You're not going to be able to think in terms of yields/flows if you've learned to simply look to your boss or other people to give you orders and define your self-worth. This is an extremely common problem!

However, the real goal here is not to be a rebel without a cause. Rejecting the system is a lot easier than building a meaningful replacement. That was another trap I had fallen into. Having gone from "consumerism bad!!" to burnout, I was simply solving my problems with money because I had entered the pit of apathy. I am now trying to re-cultivate the "consumerism bad!!" mindset while actively finding better solutions to the problems consumerism solves.

2023: The Year of Connection
My theme for 2023 will be connection. While this includes connection to other people, is also critically includes systems/material objects/environments/ideas outside of just people.

This will include several subgoals:
1. Replace physical and digital consumption with things I made myself or received from others without monetary transaction. Going back to both Marx and DeBord: "The more you consume, the less you live." The real issue with consumerism is that it alienates you from yourself and others. Capitalism and media spectacle are a set of social relationships with other people mediated through objects or images. This causes alienation because money is mediating how you interact with others. It robs you from participation in your own life by injecting an artificial mediator. Therefore, solving more of your life problems with personal skill or social capital increases participation in your own life, making it more meaningful and connected.

2. Develop a Web of Goals and continually tune it. Having regained the ability to set goals, this one is obvious.

3. Seek out a variety of relationships with others. Aristotle has three types of friends: pleasure friends, business friends, and virtue friends. I have historically made the mistake of mixing up pleasure friends and virtue friends and ignoring business friends all together. Instead of trying to find a single group of people to be my "friend soulmate" or tribe, I'm going to start intentional categorizing people into one of these three friends and cultivate all three types. Business friends are important for trading favors, but that doesn't mean you have to agree with their opinion on politics. Pleasure friends are great to play board games with, but they may have some personal flaws that would make them poor virtue friends. Virtue friends are hard to find, but when you do find them, make sure you invest a lot of energy into the relationship because virtue friends are so important.

And people who are dead weight/social parasites need to be dumped/avoided/limited ASAP because they will sap your ability to contribute to meaningful relationships via opportunity cost.

On a more practical level, this is going to translate into the following strategies/tactics on a monthly basis:
1. Physical health: diet, exercise, avoiding sources of plague (very tired of constantly catching colds).
2. Mental health: meditation, journaling and reflection, proper relaxation and stress management, awareness of emotions and acting on them in a healthy way, avoiding unneeded sources of stress (aka internet/news bullshit), managing clutter/cleanliness/aesthetic of personal environment.
3. Social: actively cultivating healthy relationships through networking, organizing events, and finding quality people. Actively try to give to other people. Learn to let small things go, no one is perfect, while recognizing red flags.
4. Creative work aka "Deep Work": Art, writing, and programming projects. Unfortunately, work is currently included in this from a web of goals perspective because it takes up creative work energy.
5. Personal development: Always seek new experiences. Read quality books. Learn healthy new habits and attitudes. Push your limits and horizons.
6. Money: Track and reduce expenses again. Tighten investing game. View spending money as a failure to solve a problem a more efficient way.

[candide]

Fantastic piece. Here's to the year of connection!

This one struck me:

1. Replace physical and digital consumption with things I made myself or received from others without monetary transaction. Going back to both Marx and DeBord: "The more you consume, the less you live." The real issue with consumerism is that it alienates you from yourself and others. Capitalism and media spectacle are a set of social relationships with other people mediated through objects or images. This causes alienation because money is mediating how you interact with others. It robs you from participation in your own life by injecting an artificial mediator. Therefore, solving more of your life problems with personal skill or social capital increases participation in your own life, making it more meaningful and connected.

This made me reflect on all the podcasts I listen to. Even though I'm not paying, there is the interruption for ad copy, or the up-sale to the patron content, where as the podcast starts getting along, you feel you are just experiencing a cost-loser to get in the door.

Ergo, more friend time, less podcasts.

[grundomatic]

Congratulations on all your progress, and thanks for writing about it. I can relate to a newfound sense of agency. It's like I've spent my entire adult life searching for the best group (for me) to fit into, then agonizing/lamenting that it's not a perfect fit. Where's the best place to live? What are the best companies to work for? Who is the best manager to learn from? What's the best lifestyle? What's the best investing plan? Then some weeks ago I realized, "OH SHIT! I really am in charge of EVERYTHING about my life, and can really do whatever I want." More recently I came to realize that if I'm unhappy about my life, there is nobody to blame but myself. It may sound trite and obvious to some, but for me it was simultaneously liberating and terrifying.

[AnalyticalEngine]

@candide - That's a great point about podcasts. I'm someone who consumes a lot of podcast/nonfiction YouTube too, but lately, I've been thinking I should cut back on that and replace the learning with books. Not only are podcasts/etc a cost-loser, they also suffer from being written to be entertaining first and foremost, as well as extremely prone to the creator's personal bias. I've noticed this is especially prominent for subjects that are extremely subjective, like philosophy, history, or politics.

I've noticed that they create a sort of autodidact-bias with the content you're getting. Take fitness, for example. Because fitness tends to go in trends, consuming fitness podcasts only gives you random bits of advice that could be very biased in favor of whatever trend is hottest. Whereas if you started with a sports medicine textbook, you're getting a more comprehensive curriculum and not falling victim as much to the "unknown knowns" of the field.

Because I listen to these in the background so much, I'm wondering if they are actually sapping my cognitive energy when I try to pay attention and learn from them, thus making me feel more burned out than I need to feel.

So I'm going to do an experiment where I cut out podcasts, set aside time for dedicated book study on the topic instead, and replace the background noise with simple music.

@grundomatic - Definitely relate to searching for the best X then being sad it's not perfect. It is indeed a lesson that seems obvious, but may be impossible to really grok until you have life experience. What I'm trying to do now is take full responsibility for my entire life, assume that I have 100% agency, but then also accept that acting in the real world means that my results are never going to be as perfect in reality as they are in my head. It's a fine balance sometimes between settling for things you don't need to settle for and accepting life's imperfections. I think that's the key to making solid progress on your goals and retaining your capacity to act.

[mountainFrugal]

Because I listen to these in the background so much, I'm wondering if they are actually sapping my cognitive energy when I try to pay attention and learn from them, thus making me feel more burned out than I need to feel.

I started only listening to content when I was doing chores or coloring comic pages/illustrations. It has also helped to limit this to afternoons when I more brain dead anyway. It makes it a treat to listen to, instead of constant background. It also helps to prioritize what you are listening to if it is only during these other activities. Do you know how many hours you are listening per week?

[AnalyticalEngine]

@mF - It's probably about 15 hours a week when you include audiobooks. Half of that time is podcasts, the other half are audiobooks. I usually listen to them when I am working out, coloring comics, or doing embroidery.

I reflected on this a bit, and I think the sense of burnout is actually coming from a lack of an actual mental break from my goals. I've been spending 95% of my time thinking either about ERE or writing. And because I had reached FI but not ERE before, I've been pretty behind in a number of non-monetary areas (relationships, fitness, diet, managing stuff, etc). This means I am never getting a mental break from cognitive demands because everything I am doing is either: 1) new to me or 2) something I'm trying to analyze to fit into a web of goals.

This leaked over into podcasts because I used to listen to them for purely recreation, but now I'm either listening to stuff like Huberman Labs or fiction audiobooks (because I am analyzing genres), neither of which are an actual break. And when I do try to listen to old podcasts I like, like philosophy, they are too cognitively demanding with the amount of new activities I am trying to master. That is, it's hard to absorb a lecture on Kantian ethics when you spent all day writing, programming, learning new recipes, trying to network at events, and learning to ski.

This problem might just be growing pains and might self-correct when everything I'm doing stops becoming a conscious learning effort. But I think I might also benefit from trying to cultivate more actual rest time that involves doing something that's an actual mental break.

[ertyu]

This problem might just be growing pains and might self-correct when everything I'm doing stops becoming a conscious learning effort. But I think I might also benefit from trying to cultivate more actual rest time that involves doing something that's an actual mental break.

for me, one-on-one in-depth conversations with others provide this. i can engage intellectually with a topic and i get connectedness while being free from the demand for a solution or results because any issues or wonderings others might have are not my problems to solve. conversations are interesting and thought-provoking, but it's not me that's on the hook unless I deliberately decide to bring over some of that into my life.

[grundomatic]

I can relate to thinking about ERE almost non-stop and wearing myself out trying to do all the things I think I should be doing, and stressing out viewing every monetary outflow as failure. Another struggle is figuring out how relaxing fits into an ERE lifestyle system. The solution I've come up with most recently looks suspiciously like standard salaryman compartmentalization, leading me to believe I've still got all this wrong.

[AnalyticalEngine]

@ertyu - Good point on 1:1 conversations. Those can be great for a mental break from work because they are so absorbing. I might try to find a way to include more of those in my life. Most of my socialization lately has been networking because I'm trying to find a group of people I truly like vs just tolerate, and networking is the opposite of fun. I'll see if I can convert more socialization into genuine downtime.

@grundomatic - I feel you there. Sometimes I try to start optimizing my breaks for ERE, which paradoxically turns them into the opposite of a break because now I'm worried about "resting the right way." And yet, it is a struggle because the entire point of ERE/WL6 is that it is supposed to be all-encompassing, and that's the power of the strategy.

I watched some talks from the author who wrote Rest who mentioned many successful creative people have "psychic distance" hobbies like mountaineering that are "high quality leisure/play" but still a great break from work. And yet, one of the principles of ERE is trying to dissolve the boundary between work and play, so this may be an area I need to put more thought into.