The Education of Axel Heyst

[AxelHeyst]

Small ERE thought of the day: at a certain point/circumstance, COL isn’t as important a metric to watch as net flow. Yes, duh, but I think focusing on COL can subtly limit imagination for freedom-to.

For example I’m planning on crossing a FI threshold soon and then being “done” with earning money, but that FI status is contingent on never exceeding a certain COL threshold for very long. That threshold can put constraints on planning and ability to take advantage of serendipitous opportunities / unfolding environment.

Past FI, what matters more is net flow.

For example, I can imagine wanting to get certain kinds of jobs, or be in certain kinds of places/contexts, for the experience of it and the access to X (people, scene, vibe, etc).

Example: I might want to spend a season working at a punk coffee shop in a mountain town and be ‘in’ the scene. There isn’t a realistic way for me to live in that town in my normal COL threshold because the town is expensive and NF land is too far away. But the 20hr barista job covers rent at the hostel which is full of the people I want to be hanging out with anyway, and same same the coworkers and patrons of the coffee shop. I get access to the experience I want at a higher COL but at a sustainable net $ flow.

Again, kind of obvious, but stating it explicitly helps my brain not narrow my Overton window of freedom-to.

(…this is sort of like applying semiERE tactics to postFI status, now that I think about it. And a way to be able to hit FI at a lower number and then continue to modulate and experiment with various lifestyle dynamics.)

[Jin+Guice]

I think this is a very important revelation, particularly past WL5.

WL6 is initially more expensive for most (or maybe just me, but I think it's most) as WL5ers solve problems with money. Getting new skills often requires expanding capital which is likely to require some money for a WL5er. Likely even more true for people who make it into the ~1 JAFI territory at WL5.

Counterpoint: We are trained to use money. If one is creative enough, it's possible to do almost anything without money, even in this highly moneyed environment.

The question is whether the juice is worth the squeeze. Money is the easy way out, which is sometimes desirable. Post WL5, a tradeoff scheme between the capitals/ stocks/ flows is necessary.



It's possible to be FI in certain categories. Needs are helpful here. FI in food. FI in housing. FI in software to do fun projects. The same framework can be used for resiliency.

One can mix and match amongst the needs. We can apply @Ego's strategy of interacting with the world to avoid complacency and combine it with a strategy of total independence from the world through financial means. FI in physiological needs. Not FI in total desired lifetime helicopter rides.

[AxelHeyst]

“Not FI in terms of random yolo lifestyle experiments”

[Scott 2]

What metric do you use for ecological impact, if moving away from COL? That's the reason I assumed WL6+ people still considered it.

[Jin+Guice]

Heh ya, I think if you are earning money in a way you don't want to, i.e. very into freedom-from, or really want to do something for awhile that is unlikely to earn money, this can be an important revelation.

Maybe you eventually want to be able to afford XYZ, but you don't need to secure the money to pay for that out of investment income forever today before changing things up.

[AxelHeyst]

Scott, this isn’t so much moving away from COL as it is adding another cognitive tool to the kit. Your question is good though. For the sorts of things I’ve got in mind we’re talking about floating my COL from 0.5 to 1.0 or maybe 1.5 jafi, temporarily. If an experiment came in at >>1jafi I’d have to give it a harder think — it’d be a red flag to me for sure.

For example if the experiment were “buy a hop on hop off airplane ticket round the world”, I’d give that one a hard look. The easy/simple metric is co2e. That experiment wouldn’t pass the sniff check most likely. Back to the drawing board.

If the experiment were “my share of expenses for a 3mo pacific out and back expedition on a tall ship” or “lodging and tuition for a carpentry class” a la the animal last year, I’d be more likely to go for it.

[Scott 2]

Some thoughts. I center on money, but think this applies to all resources:


1. A successful retirement can include draw down of net worth. Temporarily, or even permanently. Especially if you are comfortable backstopping via social security or possible inheritance. It feels weird to watch that number go down, but that's OK. Expected even.

2. Big variable expenses, beyond your safe withdrawal rate, can often be successfully absorbed. Unless an unplanned spike hits at an especially bad time in your sequence of returns, it won't break the system. McClung does a good analysis of this, in Living Off Your Money.

3. When I retired, at first I was trying to take a monthly view on controlling expenses. It was stressful, because there's an annual cadence to society. Around year 2, I shifted to that. Now I'm recognizing life moves in phases and trending towards a 3-5 year time horizon. Spikes are good, signs of growth and transition.

4. Accepting the risk of a more highly variable withdrawal rate, let us say yes to some "unattainable" ideas. In practice, they cost less than imagined. And we only have so much time, so other spending fell off anyways. The energetic constraint makes it extremely unlikely every budget line item hits the High estimate.


Point being, I agree the flexiblity is there. It might even be greater than you are thinking. A hard lesson from my retirement, has been irrefutable evidence money was never my constraint. I'm not saying that doesn't happen, but I was risk adverse and used money as an excuse.

[Jin+Guice]

The constraints, dear reader, are not in our wallets, but in ourselves.

[AxelHeyst]

Project NOPE Debrief
About a year ago I was feeling frustrated about how many projects I had going on that felt like obligations - they were other people's projects that I'd said 'yes' to. I had a 9hrs/wk handyman/laborer gig for a neighbor and then two offgrid solar PV design/builds (one for a neighbor, one for my parents). And some other stuff.

As those projects were wrapping up I came up with the idea to do Project NOPE (No Other People's Endeavors), where my default answer to anyone asking me to do something would be "no", no thinking required on my part. I didn't want to NOPE forever, I just felt like I needed to do it for a while to learn how to say no. I said I'd do it for a year, but like 3 months in I decided I'd learned enough and ended it (see a trend here? )

jng just asked me "What did you learn from project NOPE in terms of what you wanted to do?" I thought I'd put my response here:

That I need to be able to trust myself to know if it's something I actually want to do, or if it's something that I feel like I ought to do to trick people into thinking I'm a Good Selfless person, like I was programmed to from birth.

The Project itself demonstrated to me that I can tell people "No" and 99/100 they'll just say "Oh, okay." And the 1/100 who are a dick about it, well, fuck them.

Fiffing off of Existential Kink, I learned to first get off on the feelings of frustration and disempowerment/humiliation I received when I'd say yes to things I didn't actually want to do and hate myself for being a pushover about, and then I learned to get off on exerting my own power by telling people no.

I think I also learned a bit about why most people don't do what they want to do. It's harder and not as fun as it seems. Everyone's all "freedom yay, I do what I want mfer" but when they're faced with ACTUAL FREEDOM, which involves actual responsibility for your own actions and having no one else to point the finger at when shit goes sideways or you're asked to account for yourself, well that's a different story. The burden of freedom is real and few people talk about it or even know about it until they get into it.

Sometimes it's nice to just relax into the mediocrity of going along with someone else's plan/vision for a bit, but nobody really acknowledges this. I think in order to really embrace freedom more people need to realize and explicitly grapple with the hard things about freedom.

[7Wannabe5]

Sometimes it's nice to just relax into the mediocrity of going along with someone else's plan/vision for a bit, but nobody really acknowledges this.

I totally acknowledge it. Exactly what I do almost every time I go on a date. However, I would note that "strong" practice of submission or "relaxing in feminine energy" would entail more "respect" than your note of "mediocrity" would suggest. IOW, benefit of doubt towards assuming other's vision/plan to be "great" or at least "interesting" or "likely of some value*" would be best practice.

Anyways, I believe that you are implying that the pain involved in decision-making creates the boundary of personal freedom, and I strongly agree.


*Of course, this is easier within context where your own alternate plan for the time period under consideration might be "Watch another episode of "Glee" while eating a grilled jelly sandwich."

[AxelHeyst]

...However, I would note that "strong" practice of submission or "relaxing in feminine energy" would entail more "respect" than your note of "mediocrity" would suggest.

Ah, yeah, I agree. I think it's mediocre/a cop-out when one is using relaxing into someone else's vision as a mechanism for avoiding the discomfort of facing their own vision. I don't at all think that following someone else's vision is inherently a copout.

In the same way, forcing one's own vision upon themselves/the world could be a cop-out/avoidance mechanism from the pain/discomfort of submitting to someone else's vision, when that is (for a variety of intrinsic or extrinsic reasons) the Right Choice.

For me, last year's growth opportunity was to stop copping out and own my own vision and respect it/myself. For others, it'd be the inverse.

[AnalyticalEngine]

Everyone's all "freedom yay, I do what I want mfer" but when they're faced with ACTUAL FREEDOM, which involves actual responsibility for your own actions and having no one else to point the finger at when shit goes sideways or you're asked to account for yourself, well that's a different story. The burden of freedom is real and few people talk about it or even know about it until they get into it.

Sometimes it's nice to just relax into the mediocrity of going along with someone else's plan/vision for a bit, but nobody really acknowledges this. I think in order to really embrace freedom more people need to realize and explicitly grapple with the hard things about freedom.

This is an underrated point I've been thinking a lot about lately myself. The fact is, freedom, once you really have it, can actually suck because now you're responsible for EVERYTHING. No one else is there to make decisions for you, and it can be honestly exhausting. I think this is a big reason why a lot of people just settle for Default Lifestyle as they get older—the alternative is both terrifying, lonely, full of potential failure, and a massive amount of work compared to Default Lifestyle.

I don't really have much answer here except to +1 your observation. Real, actual freedom is daunting in a way very rarely talked about, which is probably why psychological barriers to doing what one wants are always higher than anticipated.

[AxelHeyst]

I wonder if a contributing factor to people "failing out" of freedom is just this - that it's not discussed and maybe not fully recognized? The stress of freedom is this vague sense of existential nausea that most people can't figure out, or attribute to other things, and eventually go back to the devil they know.

...maybe full-on explicit acknowledgement that it's going to be uncomfortable and it's because X and Y, expect it, and here's some strategies to deal with it, butt-smack go get 'em champ kinda pep talk would actually help a lot? I bet a lot of people feel like, I don't know, the one loser in the world who is struggling with freedom and you can't TALK about that to anyone so they kind of slink around with it, and that vague unknowing closeted freedom-shame sensation is what actually breaks the deal.

ETA: I also wonder if the volume of expectations that most people deal with in FTE sets the bar of the volume of 'stuff' they expect themselves to be responsible for when it's just them. But that isn't realistic either, because most people are told what to do by a whole institution designed and funded to load people up with 40hr/wk of expectations. Hell, the expectation just to generate that list of FTE-equivalent expectations, much less actually execute any of it, gives me nausea just thinking about it.

[ertyu]

Sometimes it's nice to just relax into the mediocrity of going along with someone else's plan/vision for a bit, but nobody really acknowledges this. I think in order to really embrace freedom more people need to realize and explicitly grapple with the hard things about freedom.

What does relaxing in your own ACTUAL FREEDOM look like? There seems to be an underlying assumption in this discussion about the "stress of freedom" vs. the "relaxation of followership/the default," but must it always be this way?

[AxelHeyst]

It would call it the main thesis of this discussion, not the underlying assumption, to be honest. But - no, I don't think freedom is always stressful/burdensome. I think *most* people assume freedom is always awesome, all the time, and that's what I'm poking at.

Just two recent examples of decision-making under conditions of freedom:
- A week ago a client asked if I could do something last minute (and pay me well for it). I said no. Pre ~2022 Axel would have said yes, even if there wasn't extra money involved. It felt awesome. It felt like I wasn't this client's bitch and I'd just proved it.
- I'm in the middle of a series of decisions about how to spend my time this year, and something has come out of the blue. This thing has nothing to do with my purpose in life, the metacrisis, w*rk, money, or anything I've ever written in one of my documents. But I'm going to put a fair amount of time and effort working this thing into my wog because it sounds fun and yolo. Saying to myself "Yes, okay, I'm going to move a bunch of other stuff around and make room for this thing because I can and I want to and that's all there is to it" - man, that feels great.

I suspect the burden of freedom is actually just a phase people either work through or turn around before they get to the far side. It's harder for some people than others. I'm mostly on the far side, and because of some of my experiences this phase wasn't a huge slog like it might be for others.

[jacob]

"Freedom" has been turned into a slogan.

"What do we want?" "Freedom"
"When do we want it?" "Now"
"What is it?" "Deeeerp..."

The natural slave part of https://earlyretirementextreme.com/99-p ... laves.html might be useful if a bit lacking in nuance. Perhaps it would lend nuance to also talk about "cultural slave"-mentality (nurture vs nature) as in something that is instilled by others either via hierarchical orders or by trying to fit in.

What's we're really talking about here are the difficulties with the freedom-to that the lack of freedom-from solves by simply removing it slowly from consideration. Children normally grow up having their freedom-tos incrementally taken away from them by getting ever more loaded up with homework and obligations and expectations. Ultimately as adults, this transition is complete.

In my "lived experience" it was almost the opposite. Each step from elementary school to middle school to high school to university made me feel more liberated because I could do more. This is likely because what I sought was the intellectual version of freedom-to. Not having to ask for help and being increasingly capable and maybe importantly not being under expectations to make lots of money or become a surgeon (that's the SD:Green meme) left me free-to pursue my happiness.

I do think that freedom-to requires some creativity even if it's with a small c. See viewtopic.php?p=288344#p288344 for definitions. Otherwise, adults are left with very few commercially available freedom-to offers. Travel, watching TV, and gym/sports clubs. This is where ERE City could make a difference.

It is also an open question whether children slowly loses creativity through the educational system or if it just become apparent that one never had much in the first place. https://earlyretirementextreme.com/a-me ... ement.html

It may be that creativity is a skill like anything else, so CCCCCC again. The easiest is to Copy someone else's creative activity. Doing that, one can Compare different activities experientially. Do I like doing this or that. Eventually, they might lead to higher Cs and even the highest one of creating creativity with a big C. This, I think, is where the forum/internet can be helpful to others when people who have hit their number talk about what they actually do with their freedom-to instead of disappearing.

[7Wannabe5]

However, much as 99% prefer to be natural slaves and much as 1% prefer to be natural masters, that is no excuse for abuse. Surely, the latter should be somehow compensated monetarily or otherwise for the burden of responsibility of “taking care” of the slaves by creating jobs, taking risks, etc.

I've been reading a series of novels based on the adventures of a early 20th century family of con artists. Con artists who prey on the affluent are successful when they target the vice of greed. For example, inventing a plausible scenario for 20% return on investment. So, there is obviously a level beyond which one should not necessarily hope to be compensated for taking on risk. This, obviously, also holds true for taking on responsibility for others beyond your level of authority.

I was reminiscing with one of my semi-exes recently about the time when he (although quite well-off middle-aged high-income professional) was living-for-free post-divorce in a room in the very modest home of his multi-millionaire best friend, and I was living for free in that room with him. He didn't understand why I found it so amusing, because he didn't/couldn't comprehend that it was a bit of a harmless con I was running based on relative levels of frugality.

My point here being that there is always going to be some structure against which your desire for freedom is going to bang its head. For example, you will never be a member of the last generation of 20th century Polish aristocracy who held the right to ride their horses anywhere across all the lands. You will risk fines and imprisonment if you attempt to live in a camper on a vacant lot in the city. So, you can only ever find freedom in the interstitial spaces of the current power structure, because to the extent that you join the power structure, you are also locked in place.

[AnalyticalEngine]

"Cultural slave" may be an apt metaphor especially considering the void of 40hr/wk institutional obligations. Consider, for example, one could be a cultural slave even without a FTE job, such as being a feudal serf. In this example, even if you manage to become a free serf, it's still unlikely you're becoming a Lord, and even as a Lord, you now have obligations to your estate.

In our modern era, it may very well be that Kegan3 becomes a limiting factor with "freedom-to," as the institutional life pack includes things like social recognition, connection, etc that are difficult to replicate in freedom-to. Either one has the aptitude for solitude or finds a way to replace these (often invisible) yields elsewhere.

[7Wannabe5]

and even as a Lord, you now have obligations to your estate.

But not as a passive investor. You can be like the plantation owner who lives in Richmond and leaves slave management up to hired overseer, who can blame his behavior on all the primary and tertiary consumers who want cheap cotton. "How can they have cheap cotton if I don't beat the slaves as much as they beat the slaves on the other plantations?!?!","How can I survive as an industrialist if I have to take on the expense of fire-proofing my factory and my competitors don't?", "Those young people demanding AI generated UBI are punks! Make them work in the salt mines of IT like I had to for 15 years before becoming FI!"

the institutional life pack includes things like social recognition, connection, etc that are difficult to replicate in freedom-to.

This seems increasingly dated. I recently watched a 2009 episode of "Glee" in which one of the main young-in-2009 characters said (I paraphrase), "Money is dead. Fame is the new money." Level Orange is Money. Level Green is Happiness. Level Yellow is Interestingness (or a particular definition of creativity.) So, Fame is a certain kind of high level Green/Yellow. So, there is a level on which saying "You can't bank creativity" is like saying "You can't eat money."

[jacob]

In our modern era, it may very well be that Kegan3 becomes a limiting factor with "freedom-to," as the institutional life pack includes things like social recognition, connection, etc that are difficult to replicate in freedom-to. Either one has the aptitude for solitude or finds a way to replace these (often invisible) yields elsewhere.

WRT ERE/FIRE freedom-to used to require nearly 100% independent thought as you were the only one who swam against the stream. I think forums like this one has provided a lot of social validation for people who aren't willing to act exclusively on math/reason (this is one reason why the ERE book contains a lot of math---it used to be that this was the only way to convince people.

Moving beyond the social validation of the ego, that is Kegan3, I think the more fundamental freedom-to issue in terms of availability of activity post-FTE can be described by a matrix such as

individual ERE doing small projects: hobbies, craft, baking, running, ...
individual ERE doing large projects: necessarily must be done within the current institutional framework which is limited: travel, weekly sports club meetings, watching TV
collective ERE doing small projects: the ERE forum, EREfest, meetups, small collaborations
collective ERE doing large projects: N/A, ERE City

It's clear that the menu options are not equally abundant between the four groups. The difference is particular large insofar you want to do large projects or neeed to collaborate with others to get anything done. Wanting both is a double strike. Conversely, those who are capable of entertaining themselves on their own should have no problem. However, "entertaining yourself on your own" is very much something that is not encouraged by pretty much any culture.