Being fulfilled, with the ERE lifestyle?

[7Wannabe5]

Another thought might be that you could engage in some select activities which are most likely to give you the feeling of being in "conformity" with others. For instance, join a choir, sports team, or river clean up group. IOW, there are many things you can do which will cause others to think/act along the lines of "Oh, that lillo, what a wierdo! But, he's one of us!"

[Mr.Moai]

Jacob & Sclass

You have dedicated a part of your life to learning, getting top academic qualifications, and honing your scientific/engineering expertise. Yet you decided to shift away from all this.

Don't you find fulfilment in pursuit of secrets of the universe anymore? Not because it would lead to money, awards, recognition, or fame, but for the fun of it with a side effect of also contributing to furthering our species like the scientific giants before you?

Is it because you think that our civilisation took a wrong turn where humanity would have been better off taking a different direction in the past several millennia that you are not interested in participating in it this way?

Or is it because pursuing the type of research you enjoy is incompatible with the level of bureaucracy, hassle, and loss of autonomy that you are willing to tolerate? Or is it a lack of access to specialist labs/kit/machinery?

Don't get me wrong, both of you had more influence on me than you likely would have by publishing scientific papers in your fields so I'm not complaining. You obviously don't owe anyone anything, let alone to the entire humanity. However, I'm just curious why you seem to have decided not to follow your scientific & engineering talents to drag us into a better future and don't see it as a fulfilling goal anymore.

[jacob]

Don't you find fulfilment in pursuit of secrets of the universe anymore? Not because it would lead to money, awards, recognition, or fame, but for the fun of it with a side effect of also contributing to furthering our species like the scientific giants before you?

Is it because you think that our civilisation took a wrong turn where humanity would have been better off taking a different direction in the past several millennia that you are not interested in participating in it this way?

Or is it because pursuing the type of research you enjoy is incompatible with the level of bureaucracy, hassle, and loss of autonomy that you are willing to tolerate? Or is it a lack of access to specialist labs/kit/machinery?

d) All of the above.

Actual research is a lot less romantic or heroic than typically portrayed by science popularizations. Read this insider view: https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0310368.pdf

For a theorist, "doing science" means writing and debugging complicated numerical programs (at 1/3 the pay of a software engineer) for months on end in order to uncover some detail about the universe that only five other people in the world care about($). Then write it up, publish it, and go to a few conferences trying to sell its importance to others. "Selling" is nearly as important as originality. Science has its own trends and fashions. Rinse and repeat that publication cycle four times per year all while begging for grant money because your research is "very interesting" and "state-of-the-art".

($) A lot of my work was about nucleosynthesis and the origin of the elements. This is the stuff that popularists like Neil deGrasse Tyson translates into slogans like "we're all made out of star dust" that unitive hippies go nuts about how "it's all connected, woooaaa!". Whereas, the day-to-day labor of inverting huge semi-sparse matrices in an expedient (remember the 3 month deadline) manner and plotting a bunch of graphs that experimental physicists can cite to justify how their work is "very-important" in their own grant requests. A typical published result would be along the lines of "The importance of the 2.32MeV resonance line in the SomeIsotope(somereaction)SomeOtherIsotope reaction for the abundance of SomeThirdIsotope". (Mind you, that's but one out of 3000+ isotopes known) This quickly dissolves any kind of romance. Star-stuff, indeed.

Insofar this research advances humanity, the advance is infinitesimally incremental indeed(*). The bigger role of research, something that I realized as a grad student, is the role universities play in a) educating students who go on to have what academics refer to as "real jobs"; and b) maintaining a readiness as a cultural carrier, because all those papers and libraries are worth zilch without a scientific culture that is able to understand them. In that way, it's kinda like how the military keeps training to maintain a state of readiness even when it's not at war. The ability to operate a submarine or simulate a supernova explosion is not something anyone can pick up in a few weeks of deep-diving into manuals.

(*) The era of "giants" is over. The hard sciences are completely institutionalized. This is partly because science now operates at a level of complexity and details that is far beyond what one person can develop. The work of a given past giant is typically only a small part of a modern project. Most notably, successful professors are not so much great researchers as they are great project managers. They don't do science as much as manage it.

I quit science to focus on ERE because I thought (and think) that ERE will have a much bigger impact on the 21st century than anything I could have done in astrophysics. These days I get to see former colleagues appearing on documentaries because they took a picture of a black hole "for the first time evaaah". Well, that's nice, but what is that useful for? In reality, there wasn't a picture as much as a group of grad students running data analysis for months on end to create a composite image. What's mainly exciting here is that they solved a hard [imaging] problem. Perhaps the methods developed will amount to something useful elsewhere, like cancer imaging or spy satellites.

I would not say that my physics education is "wasted" in any way. Rather, I think it was put to good or better use with ERE. Without my research background, my contribution would have looked a lot more like WL4-5 style FIRE. I actually think that the best creative use of any "degree" is to apply what you know in some other field rather than just being a cog in whatever machine you were trained to serve. Indeed, I think the best reason for getting a[nother] degree is to add a new perspective---really a set of sensemaking-tools---to the world.

[Sclass]

You have dedicated a part of your life to learning, getting top academic qualifications, and honing your scientific/engineering expertise. Yet you decided to shift away from all this.

Don't you find fulfilment in pursuit of secrets of the universe anymore?

No. All that stuff you mentioned (make others smarter) doesn’t do anything for me.

[white belt]

Having said that, the main problem I encountered with the ERE lifestyle is the feeling of "not" advancing in any social-economic field, and of not finding "fulfilment", a bit like that feeling you get when you are in the presence of a dear person... that society manages to give you when you reach a goal, for example graduating or getting married, and everyone compliments you and you feel part of a group and then you continue to plan your life.

I've noticed a pattern that happens to some of those who are exposed to ERE ideas very young (late teens or early 20s). Basically, at an impressionable time in your life while you're trying to navigate value systems and life purpose, you discover ERE. Hurray! A way to accomplish your dreams on your own terms. However, being young, the person tries to just superimpose their interpretation of Jacob's ERE value system on their own life. ERE is a strategy that enables you to accomplish what is in your web of goals, however you still have to do the continuous work to determine the appropriate web of goals. ERE alone cannot and does not provide fulfillment, it's merely a toolkit that can make it easier for you to find your own fulfillment while stepping away from all of the trappings of the modernist consumerism lifestyle. However, the young person may take the common tactics to include cook at home, live with roommates, ride a bicycle, etc etc as gospel because "that's what Jacob did." Those are great tools to save money, but they are also a means to an end. You still have to figure out what that end is yourself.

Similarly, if you have never achieved fulfillment through typical modernist success, then you might really feel like you're missing out on something. In that case, I'd recommend pursuing that path for some period of time and then re-evaluating. You can still use a lot of the tactics and even strategies you've learned from ERE in that lifestyle. Hell, you can mix and match things as you see fit with various semi-ERE strategies. You may find things you like about that lifestyle, but you also might find that the grass seemed greener from the other side of the fence. Keep in mind that the typical FIRE adherent comes to the movement after years of pursuing the traditional career path only to realize that it doesn't provide them fulfillment.

Source: I discovered ERE in high school and it took me many years to piece together my own lifestyle that suits me. It's still a work in progress but I do feel like I'm getting closer to the right balance of having the societal/cultural trappings I care about while also having the freedom/flexibility that I care about.

[Jin+Guice]

I found it hard to find fulfillment without ERE.