The Education of Axel Heyst

[mountainFrugal]

I guess I am in the later category then.

[AxelHeyst]

Probably because like with everything else EREmites are reluctantly to drop $$$ on education that can be had at the public library for 50cents in late fees...

I'd sort of thought, this being ERE and all, that "this is money earmarked for skills and access not easily or, better, *possibly* gotten at the library" would be assumed and wasn't worth typing out. If your position is that the only categories of skills and access fall into either "can be had at the library" or "entertainment", I'm skeptical but intrigued.

Let me try again, with the obvious-to-me parts actually typed out:
-I'm experimenting with earmarking a certain % of surplus income to skills and access.
-In order to for any funds to be allocated, they have to pass a go/no-go filter. Here is version 1 of my filter:

• Can this skill be learned easily enough via the library, youtube, or friends (aka existing social capital)?
• Can this access be gotten to via social capital, effort, or existing skills?
• Is there a big difference in the amount of time it'd take to learn this skill between DIY education and pay-for-education? If so, do I care?
• Does this skill/access have anything to do with my WoG? Does this skill/access have anything to do with improving the fundamental operation of my life system, vocation/purpose, or stoke-directed activities?

Some skills/access that would not pass the filter:

• -Basic Auto mechanics, woodworking, framing, electronic repair/builds, programming, software tutorials, (because library and youtube). Just about all technical skills fall under this category, I think.
• -Basic exercise physiology/training/programming/fancy gym/etc (library, youtube, rocks)
• -Most professional/industry/niche interest conferences (you get more bang for you buck by Making Really Good Stuff and Posting it on The Internet Somewhere, and/or being the one to *create* the events that other people come to).
• -Most "pay $8/mo to be a part of my internet tribe, you get early access to my blog posts and zoom access to other special people" shticks. Although there are a couple I might be willing to roll the dice on.

Some skills/access that might pass the filter:

• -A technical skill that requires tools/infrastructure/space I don't have, like a kiln (can be DIY'd, but I'd pay for access to a kiln to see if it's something I want to do before DIY'ing one), casting equipment, etc.
• -Dangerous skills that I don't know anyone willing to teach me, particularly activities that'd involve other people (e.g. certain climbing disciplines)
• -Things like BJJ, dance, learning certain kinds of yoga, etc. Social capital is the first preference, but if that fails $ might be the only real way in.

A fleshed out example that comes to mind is the Wilderness First Responder course I took. Can you read books about WFR at the library? Yep. Can you spend 40hrs running live scenarios on course-mates, imprinting into your CNS a taste of WFR-thinking-under-pressure? You cannot. And my social capital can't spin it up. Also, the WFR was a really lovely boost to my social world richness and diversity that would have been difficult to spin up.

[theanimal]

Can this skill be learned easily enough via the library, youtube, or friends (aka existing social capital)?
Can this access be gotten to via social capital, effort, or existing skills?
Is there a big difference in the amount of time it'd take to learn this skill between DIY education and pay-for-education? If so, do I care?
Does this skill/access have anything to do with my WoG? Does this skill/access have anything to do with improving the fundamental operation of my life system, vocation/purpose, or stoke-directed activities?

I think this can work as a very loose heuristic but should not be applied rigidly. This significantly underweights the value of receiving direct feedback from those more experienced, being within an environment of others learning similar skills from different starting points (who can provide further points of view what's possible and also make different mistakes), and opens oneself to serendipity. My woodworking course is a good example of taking a course that is worthwhile. It would fail your filter. However, I made friends, was exposed to more job opportunities/advancements for learning and learned quickly. The time savings alone probably made it worth it. @Jacob mentioned that we were doing things in the second week that it took him ~6 years to learn on his own. Takng the course also avoided the risk of building and ingraining bad habits from watching other videos or books from others who seemed to know what they were doing but are actually doing it wrong.

I think most technical skills are worth paying for if you are pursuing them to the level of mastery. Even something like basic exercise training (ie correct lifting technique) is worth paying for in my opinion. I've been fully classpilled by @mF and encourage the rest of you to join me. It is an easy way to level up, increase social capital, and increase opportunities for serendipity. If something fits in your WoG and is something you want to master, there's little reason not to do it.

[Scott 2]

My primary reason to engage experts, is they'll offer access to unknown unknowns. These can create a strategic shift, bypassing extended self education, maybe opening paths I couldn't conceive of.

Good strategy over great tactics. The right hour can save years.

Using money to learn is a skill itself. In general, I think those predisposed to FIRE struggle with the interdependence it requires. Especially reaching beyond the traditional degreed path.

Obviously if someone takes the ERE 1 share of GDP constraint literally, there's not much paid access on the table. High caliber people are $100/hr+. An extended transactional relationship isn't viable on that budget.

Playing at the highest levels in a field, is going to require both paid training and outsourcing. If someone wants to go there, they have to release the GDP constraint. Part of the game is peering with others at the top. Simply narrowing life isn't enough.

[AxelHeyst]

Your woodworking course certainly would pass my filter: "speed of skill acquisition" is point 3.

[jacob]

What makes this a difficult choice is that learning is not a one-variable problem. It's not just about how much the student pays but also about their learning efficacy which is a combination of interest, preparation, effort, and a bunch of other things that money doesn't substitute for.

I suspect I'm mainly playing the Devil's Advocate here. I'm primarily trying to make the point that "paying money" NEQ "uploading the skill into the brain matrix-style". The reason I'm doing that is that there's a lot of people selling "packages" promising just that. And a lot of people pay the fee leaving only with the feeling of having learned something. I think that makes for fine entertainment, but I don't think anyone learns much of anything in under 300 hours.

OTOH, exposure to what's important to learn is rather valuable. IOW, paying for a curriculum. Avoiding the unknown-knowns.

[jacob]

I should also note that there's potential value to be unlocked by figuring out a new domain by yourself. A typical way would be to apply a familiar framework to an unfamiliar domain. This is how ERE came about. It's essentially the framework of physics and complex simulations being applied to personal finance.

Had I instead taken a course in personal finance from Bogleheads or early-retirement.org, I'm sure there would have been no new insights and no ERE.

Bruce Lee had the right learning philosophy. He would challenge people to a fight in order to learn rather than to defeat them. If he lost he would try to become the student of the master who defeated him. Otherwise he wouldn't bother except perhaps accept the loser as a student. It's hard to immediately translate this strategy into areas that don't have clear winners and losers. Worse, if the metric isn't clear, knowledge is required to decide who to learn from. As such learning mistakes might be part of the tuition money or tuition time.

[AxelHeyst]

I'm primarily trying to make the point that "paying money" NEQ "uploading the skill into the brain matrix-style". The reason I'm doing that is that there's a lot of people selling "packages" promising just that. And a lot of people pay the fee leaving only with the feeling of having learned something. I think that makes for fine entertainment, but I don't think anyone learns much of anything in under 300 hours.

Amen, been there done that . Thank you for unpacking all that, I'm glad to have the devil's advocacy inline with all this.

I'm now off to go provoke @theanimal into a fight because DLJ/Bruce Lee told me to: wish me luck.

[jacob]

I'm actually not entirely sure on my position on this. It is not clear cut if there's a right approach and what it is:

However, just like ERE is a paradigm that forms a complete and self-consistent system at level7, there are other paradigms out there that play by different rules and values and which use different ways of thinking. Some of these are indeed more about "participation" than "control". I don't think this distinction can be generallized. It's rather that some paradigms favor participation and other paradigms favor control (think agency). It's just if you formed your entire world view around one of the two, it's hard to see it any other way.

WL8->WL9 is therefore not about taking it to the next level but about taking it to a different level. For me the greatest struggle has been the "patience to suffer fools gladly" while learning the new paradigm. Initially I probably went too fast. I walked into situations that I could solve in a week as opposed to the 100 weeks that the paradigm had already spent. Two orders of magnitude of a difference. (Think of it as a high school math nerd solving multiplication table exercises for a 3rd grader. I presume that might still be a thing.)

However, I likely also missed key value from other paradigms simply because I had found extremely efficient work-arounds from within my own paradigm.

I'm almost certain that this is the key challenge between WL8 and WL9. This leads to the idea (see somewhere on the forum) in which one may become "overfactored".

Just like when pursing cross-interpersonal applications and just doing it because it's easier than letting someone else, one may become overfactored in terms of paradigms because it's easier to just argue one's very well-known good solution than to make time for other paradigms to learn from their mistakes.

My framework for education is based on Einstein's quip that "education is what remains after you've forgotten everything you learned in school". This implies that education really happens at a more fundamental level than learning various tips and tricks. Rather education is about changing how one thinks and approaches the world.

If, for example, education was approached as a product to be put in a shopping basket ("Buy my $599 value course in permaculture at 90% off this week. You get so many pdf files"), I don't think this would result in much education. This is like buying books without reading them or attending seminars without listening. All too common. Also ineffective.

Then there's the trap of seeing education as entirely self-directed. Here the student tries to understand the problem and find a solution within their existing framework. For beginners this leads to the cafeteria approach of looking for tips and tricks and hacks. There's school-learning going on but after that has been forgotten, nothing remains. Experts, on the other hand, faces a different trap as they can often find workarounds within their own paradigm. Consequently, they get no experience in operating under different paradigms and this can be a real impediment to jumping to WL9. For example, my WL8 framework is comprehensive generalization based on reasoning. As such when someone from the Green spiral suggests that "maybe I just do something unreasonable anyway because it feels right even if it is wrong", it literally does not compute. This approach is not something I can just DIY.

On the exact opposite of this is being forced into a new framework of thinking. I think this is where having a guide is helpful. It doesn't need to be a flesh and blood teacher but what it is depends on the framework that is being taught. Something like martial arts or gymnastics can not be taught from books. Team play is also hard to learn on one's one.

[7Wannabe5]

Two other common reasons for paying for an expert/coach or class would be that you wish to pay for the inclusion of discipline/structure/externalized-motivation or you find social interaction inherently motivating and/or a worthwhile side-benefit. For example, tap dancing is an activity/skill I enjoy much more in a group setting, and when I joined a hot yoga studio, I only possessed enough personal discipline to transport myself into the classroom.

Also, sexual/erotic capital might be seen as encompassed by social capital, but it might be worthwhile to consider independently since the skill acquisition motive might be more semi-conscious. For example, the fact that you keep dating guitar players might be both signal and opportunity for you to learn guitar skills. Although it's possible that this tendency is more likely in females than males and some personality types more than others. Or from the other end of the perspective, skillz constitute a form of sexual capital, but more so for men, because women generally shop for a wider, more diverse, basket of goods.

[AxelHeyst]

My framework for education is based on Einstein's quip that "education is what remains after you've forgotten everything you learned in school". This implies that education really happens at a more fundamental level than learning various tips and tricks. Rather education is about changing how one thinks and approaches the world.

If, for example, education was approached as a product to be put in a shopping basket ("Buy my $599 value course in permaculture at 90% off this week. You get so many pdf files"), I don't think this would result in much education. This is like buying books without reading them or attending seminars without listening. All too common. Also ineffective.

Short thought: to me this is the foundation for an argument that, if you're going to pay for skills/access, you need to be good at it. You need to be competent at "paying for skills/access": finding high quality teachers/courses/programs/networks is part of it, having solid study and engagement habits/practices/behaviors is part of it, and not having a "tips n tricks" mentality is part of it.

Just because it's common for people to suck at skilling up/gaining access via paid shticks is no inherent reason for me not to; rather, it's a reason for me to be sure to be good at skilling up/gaining access via paid shticks if that's what I choose to do.

(There might be other good reasons not to pay for certain kinds of skills/access, but "most people are lowWL at this" isn't.)

[AxelHeyst]

EDIT: Plans sorted, nothing to see here.

[frugaldoc]

I am intrigued by your idea of allocating a percentage of your portfolio to different investment purposes (e.g. skills, alpha strategy, etc). I am curious about your personal alpha strategy and what items you've chosen to acquire. As I move every few years, I have only been able to assemble a small collection of alpha strategy items. I have a lifetime supply of toothbrushes, dental floss, and shaving supplies. That's about it. But it fits in a reasonable sized box so can be moved every few years. Oh, I do have several lifetime's worth of aluminum foil. When I was deployed a few years ago I saw that the EOD guys had these giant rolls of aluminum foil that they used for frequent grilling in their little compound. They were about to toss them when we disaggregated the task force so I asked if I could have them. I put two of them in my deployer bag and brought it home from Saudi Arabia. Might be the one useful thing my sisters inherit when I die.

[AxelHeyst]

Hi frugaldoc, oh man aluminum foil is great. Did you know you can clean cast iron with al foil and a little oil? (h/t The Book).

I haven't made any real choices yet, although 'floss' sounds like a nobrainer and I do already have a small stockpile of bic lighers after having read selco. I'm using 'create system for $ allocation' as a step that will hopefully induce action, when I see the bucket of "money for alpha strat" filling up. I do have a couple thoughts, or rather concerns, about it:

1) Storage costs/hassle, obvious.
2) Obsolescence. A particular form of obsolescence that EREfolk are exposed to is 'skill and/or knowledge replacement.' For example, toothbrushes sound like a slam dunk to buy a lifestyle supply of. But you know what also exists? Miswak, aka chewsticks, that iirc the ADA said is "as good as brushing your teeth", and which I personally found works better than teeth brushing. Miswak is Salvadora persica, which maybe one day I will grow. What'll I do with my lifetime supply of toothbrushes and toothpase I no longer want? And how will I know what kinds of things I will and will not outgrow? It seems to me that a likely answer here is to focus on materials and tools first - e.g., don't buy clothes, buy some fabric and sewing needles. Don't buy furniture, salvage some nice hardwood. etc.
3. Toxicity. What stuff might I put away that it turns out is laden with PFAS or future equivalent? Solution - stick to either super necessary stuff (but see 2!) or 'all natural' stuff - wood, metal, glass, ceramics, natural fabrics, etc.
4) The danger of putting *money* to alpha strat preps is that buying that stuff should be like option 3 or 4. Salvage, barter, DIY, thrift, etc should be options 1-x. Having a bucket of money "for alpha strat" might induce me to become consumer-minded about it.
5) I've just been talking about physical objects but remember that 'stuff' was level 2 of the Alpha strategy. Production (skills, education, and tools) were level 1. So, reminder to self, consumables is lower on the hierarchy.

So I've got some planning to do. I'm about to head home to QH for a couple months and top of my list is to get RID of a bunch of stuff, so I'm not really in the stockpiling headspace at the moment.

--

Also, I'm going to modify my allocation to include a % to giving of some sort. Kind of embarrassed that didn't occur to me until now.

[jacob]

Production (skills, education, and tools) were level 1. So, reminder to self, consumables is lower on the hierarchy.

Almost everything becomes a consumable at some level. For example, it's possible but quite difficult to manufacture your own plywood or your own screws. It is for all intents and purposes impossible to manufacture your own transistors although it is possible to make your own resistors (surprisingly easy) and vacuum tubes (not easy at all).

The goal should be to avoid the "for lack of a nail, the kingdom fell"-situation by storing the nail. No need to store the kingdom itself. Just the material to keep it going.

[AxelHeyst]

It was illustrative of that principle to come do projects here at Moose Haven, where there does not exist a floor-to-ceiling wall of fasteners in neatly labeled bins, three separate locations of stored wood leftovers, a shed full of leftover electrical equipment (wire, receptacles, etc) and tools for simple auto maintenance... I'd gotten used to living with a small hardware store on-site.

[Western Red Cedar]

In regards to the discussion on paying for education or skill-based learning, I think it could represent a means to transcending an efficiency/optimization framework and embrace a systems theory/actualization framework more quickly. It encourages one to look past financial elements and think more creatively about their personal system. I'm still not great at the idea of paying for courses/classes and personal investment. I see this as more of a low WL trap. Perhaps a sign of being cheap vs. being frugal. Pennywise and pound foolish.

I also recognize that it is a major pitfall for the vast majority of people. How many students pay tens of thousands of dollars to attend university and don't even complete the required reading?

Those aren't the people hanging out here though.

Life-system Tweaks
As part of integrating E into my WoG I've had to get more organized. I want to spend the majority of my early mornings, evenings, and weekend attention on/with E. That leaves weekdays for everything else I want to do. I made some adjustments to my system this past month and have been really enjoying the flow of it.

I'm really interested in reading more about this as things evolve. A lot of the WL 6+ discussions on the forum seem to focus on the individual. I'd love to see more examples of adjusting and integrating WOG with life partners. Developing a system that accounts for DWs desires and preferences while limiting consumption and maximizing opportunities is an ongoing puzzle.

[philipreal]

As sort of a follow up to mf's comment,

I think that the skills training and resiliency builds as part of the "investment portfolio of the self" is a very underutilized allocation. I think this is underutilized/under-discussed even within ERE.

I've been considering the money->skills issue and it's gotten me thinking about the ERE Wheaton table as I see it.

To be a bit reductionist, the table generally treats money use as decreasing as you increase in WL, eventually becoming irrelevant. It says on the wiki description for 7 that spending money indicates poor systems design, and becomes more and more irrelevant in 8. While the table saying that of course doesn't require someone to behave this way to "be" WL7/8+ (map is not territory map is not territory), I think it does set the tone in a way that unduly disadvantages the use of financial capital once someone has reached this level. To put it another way, the table does a great job of showing how to sufficiently differentiate from using money to solve problems, but I don't think it satisfyingly integrates it once more, at least from how the descriptions are written.* Financial capital should be as valid a capital to draw from as any other once you are able to make your system and draw on them all (which I'm not saying anyone here disagrees with).

Of course, the table is built from the experiences that have been collected on this forum, which is a reason why I'm interested in seeing the results of AH's experience. And I'd say it's a reason plenty of other people seem to be excited about it as well.

*Of course, this doesn't mean the table needs to be changed. The consistent decrease of dependency on $$$ may likely be better when using the table as a communication tool, which is supposed to be the main purpose. Just something to keep in mind as we (even unconsciously) use it as a guide to some extent.

[AxelHeyst]

Interesting point. A couple thoughts...

Column three is titled "Desired household spending", not "$ use". (I may be putting too much emphasis on the wording.).

Note also that at WL9, the entry is "not much, most $$ flow divesting elsewhere". And under column 5 it lists "avoiding foolish consistencies". These details open interesting room for interpretation if one is so inclined.

Also note Jacob's comment in the WL8>9 thread that he sees it as a meta-paradigmatic leap. Insofar as WL8 is "the end" of the post-consumer paradigm, WL9 represents the opportunity/challenge to the individual to [re]invent new games and ways of organizing their systems and relationships to other systems.

As Jacob notes in that post, and as I think you're talking about here, there is a danger in 'overfactoring' - in becoming so good at operating within the paradigm of post-consumerism that it makes it extra difficult to operate in/with other paradigms. Such as ones that involve spending money on things like advanced skill acquisition and access to tools and networks.

So while the WL table does trend down in use of household $ as you go up in levels, there's room for an inflection point at WL9 depending on how you run your post-ERE/post-conventional lifesystem.

I mean, sure, the table doesn't actually point towards re-integrating money as a form of capital for use even later, it just makes space for it, but honestly I think that's appropriate. If it did point towards $ re-integration, it'd be implicitly saying "$ re-integration is the thing to do after WL8", which is not actually correct and would probably encourage people to 'skip ahead' to the fun part of the WL9 when you start making it rain without going through the bit where you actually master and internalize post-consumer praxis.

Financial capital should be as valid a capital to draw from as any other once you are able to make your system and draw on them all (which I'm not saying anyone here disagrees with).

"Valid", sure, but depending on one's worldview/stance, there are unique considerations to the use of the different forms of capital. The deployment of financial capital beyond a certain threshold brings up the issue of funding resource consumption (there is a value judgement to be made regarding the activity of sloshing cash around), and the risk of re-adopting a consumerist mentality. The capitals are not fungible between types. There is a world-system-impact difference between deploying social capital vs. financial capital to gain access to participate in a valuable training program, for example.

[AxelHeyst]

I’m going to do that intj thing where i overexplain myself. It’s my fault: I started talking about something other than what was being talked about without making it clear that I was talking about something else. As a result my comments appeared to reflect some very basic (as in dumb) ideas that I don’t actually hold.

Anyway, I’m not writing this to defend myself so much as to take the opportunity to unpack my perspective on what I was actually talking about… because that’s what I find interesting and worth doing. Also because I’m killing a four hour layover.

There is no out. Even Dick Proenecke (sp?) had regular supply deliveries via float plane. And there is no point. But why should that stop anyone from doing what they want to do today?

Right, that’s the beauty of ERE. You don’t have to give one single rats ass about the planet, climate change, peak oil, global economic injustice, the metacrisis, etc for ERE to be worth it. You get a better life no matter what your worldview and that’s the genius beauty of the carrot of ERE. This is well trodden ground.

At the scale of an individual life, it does not matter if it is consumerist, anti consumerist, postconsumerisr, etc. It’s just: is it a good life? Is it being lived on one’s own terms? To the individual lived experience the labels mean nothing and labels are much more of a hindrance to the good life than an aid. It’s very easy to get sucked into anxiety over whether one’s life is ‘anticonsumer enough’ and for most people this is a recipe for a moderate rolling internal disaster. Ask me how I know.

When @7 made the comment that an anticonsumerist lifestyle is an oxymoron, however, that’s the point at which I was no longer talking about a single individuals life scale.

When I say “there is an out” (to consumerism) I’m talking about the multigenerational project of cultivating the successor cultures to the current arrangement that will emerge over the next several centuries.

Today, these successor cultures are like weeds growing in the cracks of the pavement. They get their nutrients from the runoff of the asphalt empire: nothing exists ‘out’side of consumer logic in any meaningful sense.

In two or four hundred years, however, the fossil fueled consumer l society will no longer exist *as such* and what were once weeds will be the flourishing and culturally dominant social organizations of 2300 or whenever. The things people do now have some relation to the form these future societies will take, regardless of whether people know or care about that future form. Our actions ripple down through time.

I don’t know what those future organizations will look like, but I have some ideas of ways I’d like them to and not to work, based mostly on my understanding of thermodynamics, ecology, history, and my lived and observed experience of life under the current arrangement.

One of my desires/visions for these future societies is that they will not be based on the logic of consumerism, because I think consumerism is a bad deal for most forms of life.

The Out I’m referring to are these non or post-consumer future societies that I will never see nor likely get within a century of.

The ‘Point of all this’ I refer to is the relationship between my actions now and the successor societies I’ll never see but am part of the long transition towards. Insofar as whether or not my ‘anticonsumer lifestyle design’ has any kind of Point to it, it is in the quality of construction of these future societies which I will never see, and in the shape and flow of the transition from here/now to there/then of which I’ll experience a small part.

Note: nobody has to care about any of this! It’s entirely fine and appropriate for people to just want to live good lives and not think about this stuff and generate meaning in their lives however they want. I happen to generate some of the ‘meaning’/direction/purpose/creativity/curiosity/joy in my life via situating myself in the context I’m describing. I understand that some people find thinking about the future anxiogenic or ruminative. That is not my experience. My inner relationship with the future is a rich source of meaning and engagement. I’m not *worried* about the future. It is a slow-unfolding blossom of infinite interestingness and I am in awe of my sense of place within it.

So this is why I strongly disagree with the statement “lifestyle design is inherently consumerist.” It’s because I’m intentionally designing my life *as a transition towards* these future anti, non, post-consumer societies. I myself am certainly never going to fully decouple the material logistics of my personal life from the supply chains of industrial consumerism even if I put all my effort into such a project, which I am not. (Neither was Proenneke, to my understanding: he was just living a dope life on his own terms.) I think we’re at a point where it’s neat to have examples of people who make such an attempt for educational and inspirational purposes, to push everyone else’s Overton window of what’s currently possible, but not necessary or critical to actual pull off full individual life decoupling.

One reason that it’s basically impossible to fully decouple one’s lifestyle from consumerism is that you need the full support of societal infrastructure, and that doesn’t exist right now. That’s why I give a shit about the future successor cultures that will possess such an infrastructure! And this infrastructure won’t just fall out of the sky into the middle of an abandoned strip mall. It is being cobbled and pieced together bit by bit and it’s eventual emergence will be a long oozing surprising so-slow-nobody-notices churn of human social and material organization.

The next phase of the center of gravity of the fledgling successor societies is not “fully decoupled”, it’s something like “demonstration of a good life at 90% energy/resource reduction from western baseline.” Arguably this is accomplished already but only in very small numbers. Perhaps we’ll gain strength in the next recession.

After that it’s something like “living off solar income and 95% of materials from industrial salvage”. I’m just throwing out numbers here as a hand wave in the general direction I think is a good idea, to give my sense of the shape of the transition. There’s a lot more to it than just energy and materials of course, and I’m just this dumb guy who is probably wrong about what it’ll look like anyway.