The Education of Axel Heyst

[Jin+Guice]

What the fuck are y'all talking about?

I find it helpful to define an entity that causes consumerism or "excess-consumerism." Call it industrialization, modernism, SD Orange, the consumer-praxis or the machine. One facet of this is that it's a way of life where the primary mechanism for getting needs/ wants met is money and the vast interdependent network that money accesses.

Just that as a statement is not the problem. We could've/ still could engineer a system that meets needs/ wants, with money, that factors in environmental costs/ limits, human alienation and gaping inequalities, but didn't/ haven't yet. I'm not holding my breath.

This is also not an opt-in system. We are born into this system and "opting-out" to any degree, takes a significant amount of effort (if most of that effort is only seeing that there are actually options to opt-out). No one person possesses the power to get rid of or meaningfully effect the continuation of this system.

Smashed into this whole predicament is that this system does in fact provide a few miraculous, life-altering, things such as some (but not all) modern medicine and abundant food.

We can't totally opt-out of this system because it dominates almost all resource consumption, including necessities. We can mostly opt-out, if we are wiley enough. The options for opting out are some combination of: reduce wants, scavenge and home produce. All of these opt-out options are only possible because under current operation, the system makes them easier than they otherwise would be.

Towards the bottom is where one gets into trouble because if you don't make your own sewing machine from scratch or dumpster dive food from a store that is in the system, then you rely on the system. Because everyone relies on the system.

I think the salient points are that the current consumer system is not a biological fact of nature, but it is a cultural fact of current human society. As society is set up now, it is nearly impossible to escape this system fully. However, there is a material difference between purchasing (and or scavenging and or home-producing) at a level that is close to what one needs for survival vs. living a life of maximizing earning/ purchasing throughout one's life.


I also don't see how ERE biases producing? The point of it is to Retire from production? In theory, with the ERE system, one is free to produce/ consume at whatever level one wants to, but in practice we greatly encourage reducing both production and consumption. Home production is seen as better than market consumption/ production as one gains more (yet not total) control over both how things are made and being able to meet their own needs. Again, in theory we are free to produce at whatever level we want, but in practice most are trying to produce at a level close to subsistance.

[Slevin]

Fully agree with your argument JnG, and think it is nicely laid out in short form. Fleshing out here for my own self / the casual reader / lurker:

We could've/ still could engineer a system that meets needs/ wants, with money, that factors in environmental costs/ limits, human alienation and gaping inequalities, but didn't/ haven't yet.

Non authoritarian systems necessarily create multipolar traps from perturbations that tend towards nash equilibrium points (see the long moloch post from SA I linked above for lots of detail / examples). These result in the systems we have, despite that these systems are ones that nobody actually wants! So while theoretically possible to create much better outcomes (literally any human with half a brain can come up with a slightly better world than we have now), we are where we are now because of time and perverse benefits for individuals to do the wrong thing. This is not necessarily just a human thing either. We see the same thing in ecosystems with multiple organisms that optimize for robustness to betrayal over global optima.

So like JnG said, fixing the machine is likely a nonstarter, but to the individual some strats feel much nicer (and robust) than others (though you still have to interface with the machine).

[AxelHeyst]

So like JnG said, fixing the machine is likely a nonstarter, but to the individual some strats feel much nicer (and robust) than others (though you still have to interface with the machine).

Adding on to this - a big part of why I thrashed pretty hard and felt a lot of frustration in my preERE life is because I was trying to figure out how to Fix the Machine and doing that "I'll be happy when ____" thing that almost everybody does. Thus, my life was a hot mess of heterotelic behavior, debt, and coping mechanisms, since I allowed myself almost no resources to put to getting my own systems running smoothly. Collapsing my scope of strategic action to my own household level, if even only temporarily as a strategic retreat, has been an absolute game changer to my mental, physical, financial, social, creative, etc health.

[Jin+Guice]

The great irony is that everyone collapsing their scope to the household level is what would actually eventually solve the problem... eventually.

The thing about the multipolar trap in this context is that we are, imo, not taking actions that are actually in our best interest. If more consumption did actually equal more happiness (utility, feel good points) we would be in an actual trap. As it stands, it seems to me, we are participating in a collective mania which creates the illusion of a trap.

Just to be clear, I agree that we are in a multipolar trap and that no one person has the power to get us out of the trap or be unaffected by the circumstances of this trap (or the machine or system or whatever you want to call it).

[jacob]

Using the multipolar framework, people remain trapped because they insist on one-variable solutions due to using formal-level thinking. E.g. must first form community or must first decolonize/achieve social equity or must first get rid of capitalism or must first elect strong leader or must first return to traditional values or ... This even holds for many intellectuals with each intellectual suggesting a solution within their particular theoretical framework.

However dealing with a complex "attack surface" any attempt to influence that by dialing in a single given variable remains at the level of vague and abstract suggestions. Consequentially nothing happens beyond people talking to each other about how awesome or inspiring their ideas are(*). "To solve the meta-crisis we must integrate science with the artistic and the spiritual. Whoa! That sounds so true. Say more words..."

(*) Or perhaps that is just my terminally online perspective on things.

Methinks the sticking point is actually integrating/considering multiple variables both theoretically and practically. This means doing it and not just talking about doing it in the abstract. What makes ERE unique or at least rare is that it does just that.

[7Wannabe5]

I also don't see how ERE biases producing?

Through the mechanism of investing towards outcome/goal of runaway wealth with increased production and inequality as likely first order effects, unless everybody or nearly everybody or many more did it, in which case the paradigm of Capitalism would almost certainly collapse along with Consumerism, because there would remain little further incentive for investment. At midgame entrepreneurial production and risk-tasking would increase as Capital became increasingly cheap and available, yet the availability of consumers willing to serve as markets for these ventures would decrease. In a situation less dependent on human labor, the volume of goods produced with slim profit per unit and high utilization of relatively cheap natural resources could spin out of control as 2% and then 1% slip out of sight. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important to consider whether the production in which you are currently investing is worthwhile. This is just one possible scenario I made up as I typed, please consider the range of possible outcomes for yourself and/or consult an expert.

Another potentially relevant basis from which to proceed is that for each human currently on the planet, there exists around 2 acres of arable land, around $7000 of sustainable/renewable resources to burn each year, and about $50,000 in currently available Capital. Therefore, it could also be argued that if you or any other human can't meet expenses on basis of $50,000 capital invested then the mean deficit roughly or proportionally determines the quantity of natural resources that must still be converted to create more Capital through labor/production if wealth and income distribution inequality is to be avoided as outcome.

Clearly, Caesar will be toppled from power before either of these eventualities come to pass, so tribute to local power lord will necessarily be limited to what he can get under the circumstances. Or I might be completely full of shit, but at least I'm attempting to do some independent research and think for myself, which is the best any of us can do in any circumstances

[Jean]

That's interesting to look at from a gamedesign perspective.
A well know trap of game design, is that people will optimize the fun out of a game. So you know to balance the game in a way that makes the most optimized way to pursue wathever player will pursue, actualy fun (other option is to make it addictive).
Similarly, people will optimize happyness out of their lives. I can't change what people pursue, but I can set myself big life goals that will actually make me happy to pursue even when optimized. Or more specificaly, set the metric that way.
This is the same problem as IA allignment, or incentive structure, so we might make good progress in this field in the future.
As an individual, i find it easy to do.

[Jin+Guice]

Ah, the investment portion does more bias production.

However, is the investment component of all this not just a clever way to use the tools of the machine against itself? Everyone else insists on playing the game of the system, which we are born into and is not completely escapable, so we use that to personally escape the system as much as possible a little bit faster.

ERE is not very dependent on investment returns. The thing that drives everything is a reduction in consumption, which reduces the need to produce at a job and/ or have other people produce both for your consumption and to fund your investments.

The alternative is either home producing and scavenging everything or producing at a job up until one has the money to meet their (reduced) needs. At the recommended ERE saving level of 87.5% (for a speedy 5 year retirement, assuming no return in those 5 years and a 3% SWR thereafter), one could alternatively work 12.5% of their initial hours forever. Any way we slice it, it still relies on the production of the machine and I'm not sure that one is inherently better than the ever although I think both you and I pick scavenging for sure.

You may also be targeting not me as I'm not exactly the poster child for using investment returns to retire?

[AxelHeyst]

Musing:
"FIRE" - aka investing surplus income and being able to retire and live off the interest/drawdown -- is a hack [relevant to current socioeconomic context], in my opinion. It's a clever way to disentangle the majority of one's life from w*rk based on gaming the way the Machine currently works. It's not the fundamental thing that ERE is. [~"FIRE is the failure mode of ERE"-Jacob]

"ERE wouldn't work if everyone did it." What people mean when they say that is "FIRE wouldn't work if everyone did ERE." And like yeah duh! But that'd be great! If all of society was arranged according to post-consumer principles, we'd all still only have to work about 5hrs/wk or whatever, because the insight of ERE is not that you can shirk having to contribute to society but that the amount each person "has" to contribute to society to meet needs is way, way less than our current arrangement convinces us.

Everyone doesn't have to work 40hrs/wk to get all our needs met. Everyone has to work 40hrs/wk to keep The Great Behemoth of Affluence and Power growing. If everyone did ERE, then the system itself would change into something else and that something else would suck less than the current one and that'd be great.

Maybe we wouldn't be able to bust out 5 years of work and then faff off for the rest of our lives like those of us who go full-FI [have the option to]. Maybe we'd all have to have lifestyles much more like what we now call semiERE. That'd be fine.

Further reading:
Lean Logic and/or Surviving the Future by David Fleming
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/en ... seLocation
A Simpler Way by Ted Trainer

[7Wannabe5]

You may also be targeting not me as I'm not exactly the poster child for using investment returns to retire?

I'm not targeting anyone. I'm just making the claim that it may better serve purposes to be thoughtful about both consumption and production.

@Slevin:

Interesting article. I've actually come up with solutions for a few of the traps as I've encountered in life. For instance, I solved the two incomes needed for good school district problem by choosing an inexpensive rural district with overall average scores within commuting distance of academic center, because I figured that even if the district was average overall, my kids would be assortively grouped with the kids of academic commuters, and for the most part I was correct and it's not like hanging out with the farm kids was a problem beyond the occasional, "Mommy, what should I do when Becky asks me to join the prayer circle around the flag pole?" Further benefit was my daughter seemed like such a high achiever relative to the district, it was easier for her to get scholarship offers than if she was just one of the high achievers in more expensive district.

In general, I would suggest that one way out of these traps (obviously related to ERE practice) is to deconstruct your druthers differently. IOW, instead of competing for what everybody else wants, figure out how to want something different and better than what everybody else wants or how to find it where nobody else looks, or how to provide what nobody else provides. IOW, focus on creatively evolving rather than directly competing. Sometimes differentiating yourself can even be achieved by holding higher values than your competition. For example, not being racist when you are dating or buying your clothes at thrift stores or choosing an actually interesting book like "Geek Love" when it's your month to host book club, so you can get away with serving cheap homemade carnival food as the themed snack instead of socially competing on the basis of expensive wine served. Or basically not giving a fuck what anybody else is doing and setting your own standards in alignment with your own values. Don't be a sheeple. Make their outputs your inputs; their trash your treasure. While they race to the bottom to get to the top, head sideways. Fuck the market pressure; make your own market. Survival of the fittest is only meaningful in relationship to niche: if you are sacrificing your values in order to compete for survival, your true core problem is a serious lack of imagination or a lazy pessimistic take on human potential. Don't be the fall guy for any philosophy that would commodify you. If the designation of the month is "self-interested rational actor" blow their minds with your irrational hubris and uniquely subjective glee.

@Axel:

Strongly agree, but would note that the potential for loaning somebody a piglet to fatten and taking your interest in bacon would likely still exist. Also the old wine-press for wine move. Etc.

[suomalainen]

I do find purist insistence or discussions of definitions somewhat unrelatable/unproductive. Throwing the baby (investing/money) out with the bathwater (consumerism/capitalism) is rather impractical as the Moneyless Man demonstrated.
...
I often think that purists are part of the problem in refusing to do anything unless it can be done perfectly. This is a very convenient way to do nothing but complain about the status quo or "the other".

Not to be pedantic, but I am a purist when it comes to language. I think vague terms are generally used to sell something that doesn't actually exist as described. I think it's more accurate and meaningful and therefore less confusing to just say exactly what you mean. I'm always so disappointed by "self-reliance" videos where, sure, someone's doing something "on their own", but they never own up to the massive assistance they're utilizing but not acknowledging. Does "self-reliant" mean that you're not dependent on your parents any more? that you grow some of your own food? that you grow all of your own food? that you only eat what you can hunt and gather from the wild? with tools you made yourself from resources you yourself picked up from the ground? Ditto with shelter, clothing and water? People use "self-reliance" to mean all these things, generally when they want to inflate what they're actually doing. True "self-reliance" is a stone-age lifestyle.

As gnj so eloquently put:

We can't totally opt-out of this system because it dominates almost all resource consumption, including necessities. We can mostly opt-out, if we are wiley enough. The options for opting out are some combination of: reduce wants, scavenge and home produce. All of these opt-out options are only possible because under current operation, the system makes them easier than they otherwise would be.

Towards the bottom is where one gets into trouble because if you don't make your own sewing machine from scratch or dumpster dive food from a store that is in the system, then you rely on the system. Because everyone relies on the system.

As it relates here, rather than talking about "opting out" of our consumerist world, why not just say "I'm reducing my reliance on the consumerist world" or "I'll take advantage of everyone opportunity the consumerist world gives me, but I won't let it take advantage of me." or some such similar thing? Why insist on using language to mean what it doesn't mean on its face, unless you're deliberately trying to mislead?

[jacob]

As it relates here, rather than talking about "opting out" of our consumerist world, why not just say "I'm reducing my reliance on the consumerist world" or "I'll take advantage of everyone opportunity the consumerist world gives me, but I won't let it take advantage of me." or some such similar thing? Why insist on using language to mean what it doesn't mean on its face, unless you're deliberately trying to mislead?

Note how the more detailed/precise versions are rather much longer than the imprecise but concise version of "opting out". The same effect is observed in technical/analytic forms of philosophy. The book is 400 pages long with 390 pages being exacting definitions of words and 10 pages being the actual idea. While this is useful for technical work, it doesn't help conveying the idea. Here, the reader is much better served by a summary of the salient point.

For my part, that is why. It's not just pure laziness but also a "missing the forest for the trees". If, for example, I write a lengthy post with a dozen different detailed definitions and explanations that I ultimately tie into some overall point, I'll give you 10:1 odds that most responses will narrow in on anecdotally nitpicking the wording of a particular definition or example while ignoring the overall point I was making.

To borrow from the legal world (which I only know from TV shows), details do matter, but prioritizing details is like drowning the counterpart in one million pages of discovery most pages of which are not salient to the case being made. I'm basically trying to avoid losing the point by a "technicality". Add: More precisely, to avoid letting technicalities distract from the point. We all know "he did it".

[OutOfTheBlue]

I'd wager the above is not stemming merely from linguistic purism. I mean, come on: "True "self-reliance" is a stone-age lifestyle."

[AxelHeyst]

I'm also a purist when it comes to language (which is why I didn't budge on my insistence that consumerism and consumption aka heterotrophy are two different things). I agree that it's important to be very precise in the words we use. I am not a purist when it comes to action aka pragmatic practice.

For example: I think that when people make the point that you can't escape some amount of reliance on consumer society in the material logistics of your life, whether that be via investing or dumpster diving, they're being purists about practice but imprecise/sloppy about language, which in my opinion is a great way to chase one's own tail forever and fester in a stew of frustration. They've gotten anti- or post-consumerISM, which is an intentional attitude, perspective, worldview, belief system (something like "increasing material consumption is not the Goal, is not the best way to live a good life), conflated and muddled in their minds with the physical act of consumption (any organism or unit that converts resources/energy into work, waste heat, and 'waste' material).

There is a relationship between the two: there are certain acts of consumption that an anti-consumer won't do, like spend above their means if their means are realistically sufficient to meet their needs.

But when I say things like "I want to opt out of the consumerist system" I'm not saying that I want to, or claim that I am, no longer engaging in the activity of consumption. I'm saying I want to opt out of the values and belief system that the unchecked activity of increasing consumption is The Way to live a good life and build and operate a good society. I'm making a statement about my values, and an intent to align my actions/behavior/practice with that belief. But as has been pointed out, I live within a consumerist society, and my actions are inextricably entangled within a web of consumptive material logistics build by a consumerist system, aka a system that reflects values that consumption IS the way to a good life and a good society.

"Self-reliance" is a tricky word that I try not to use unless I define exactly how I mean it every time I use it, because it clearly makes people's minds melt. I have nothing to say in defense of youtubers who use the term. I don't know what they have to do with any of us.

Anyways, my point is that I feel like I do use language that means very much exactly what I am trying to say, generally. This whole discussion has opened my eyes a bit to the difficulties and miscommunications that can arise when not everyone has the same understanding of that language. I'm willing to accept that sometimes I make assumptions about what other people understand when I use certain words, but not that I'm being misleading. It's like the difference between an implication and an inference. If I imply that I'm materially decoupled from industrial-consumer-society, shame on me. If someone infers that I have claimed to be materially decoupled from it because they don't understand the precise words I'm using, that's on them.

[philipreal]

I would say I'm not a purist when it comes to language or really practice, although I agree it's generally important to be precise in the words we use.

To get pedantic, I'm not sure how Suo is defining "self-reliance." There's a disconnect in my mind between Suo's comments about purism and self-reliance and his example of a stone-age lifestyle, and it seems OotB has also picked up on it. As I understand it, he's roughly defining self-reliance as "being able to meet one's own needs without the assistance of other humans, whether direct or indirect to some degree" (we see this in "with tools you made yourself from resources you yourself picked up from the ground"). However, I have a couple issues with this.
First, I think going far enough on the indirect assistance angle (which I agree must be included), precludes Mr. Stone Age as well. Without assistance from others, none of us would have been born, and we rely on knowledge learned from others to survive and to understand the world. This holds true even for someone living a stone-age lifestyle. The only way to resolve this in my mind is to create a time boundary and say "No direct/indirect assistance from other humans in the present," but this comes with its own issues. Am I self-reliant for 30 minutes if I go stand outside naked for a half hour? Is someone self reliant if they inherited $100m from papa and paid people to build a luxurious farm, hiring tutors who taught him how to maintain it all? Even if so, no matter where we go in the present we're still tangled within a complex web of legal systems that affect us, although to determine how they "assist" us demands a further investigation of that definition, and so on we can go.
Second, I don't see why we're only considering assistance from humans. A truly, purely self-reliant person shouldn't need assistance from any other animals either, or even plants, bacteria, rocks, etc. If Suo or someone else can sufficiently clarify to resolve these things I'd be interested, but until then I don't really think a "pure purism" works.

This is not to say that we can't agree on definitions or determine some to be better than others. I generally aim for defining things based on convenience/utility/etc which goes into what Jacob was saying. I really like what Axel was saying in his last paragraph. It can be a very tricky thing, since a message depends both on the author creating the message and the reader interpreting the message. For my part, I'm trying a lot harder to understand people lately, both so I can better interpret their messages and to make better messages that will be interpreted in the way I want. A Very nice part about this forum is that I feel I can generally assume that no one is being deliberately misleading, which is a big help.

[Jin+Guice]

I'm not targeting anyone. I'm just making the claim that it may better serve purposes to be thoughtful about both consumption and production.

I agree with this is theory, although again depending on context, it helps to concentrate on consuming first, just to get on your feet financially. I think post-FI or post WL5 focusing on production is more important than consumption.

It's not necessarily necessary to do it in that order, but that is sort of the order of ERE. How one approaches this would also depend on if they share the equity and environmental goals implicit, but not explicit in ERE.

Also, your response to @Slevin is pretty much how I do it. It took until my late 20s to realize that other people were not just going to do this if I revealed to them what I was doing.




I'm not sure what the rest of the argument is? Did anyone say we were totally self-reliant or totally decoupling from the consumer system? Some degree of consumer decoupling and self-reliance are, in my mind, the main goals of ERE. Do they need to be re-explained?

[Jean]

Self reliant only means that it's more self reliant than what you think the people you are talking to are used to.
It's like tall or fat. I am tall and fat in east asia. None of them in the netherland, tall in sicilly and just fat in a dutch climbing gym.

[suomalainen]

To get pedantic, I'm not sure how Suo is defining "self-reliance." There's a disconnect in my mind between Suo's comments about purism and self-reliance and his example of a stone-age lifestyle, and it seems OotB has also picked up on it. As I understand it, he's roughly defining self-reliance as "being able to meet one's own needs without the assistance of other humans, whether direct or indirect to some degree" (we see this in "with tools you made yourself from resources you yourself picked up from the ground").

I wasn't trying to define, or start, anything. I was just using it as an example. I'm not an originator, or seller, of ideas. I'm a consumer. Sometimes I consume the "general idea" of "opting out" or "self-reliance", and I read and watch a bunch of stuff about it. I get frustrated, as a consumer, when a title was misleading (cuz convenience) when the substance is disconnected from the title. Sure, I can own my frustration at "the many books on the topic written by many authors aren't accurately indexed so that it's easy for a reader to zero in on the right stuff."

So here I am. Owning, and expressing, that frustration.

ETA: I think @axel's attitude sort of threads that needle. The last few days started because he said a "concise if imprecise" thing. I reacted to it. He wrote a long post explaining it. I asked additional questions about it. It was clear he (and Jacob) were thinking about one thing (in one plane) while I was thinking about a different thing (in a different plane). "Clarifying the definition" was therefore helpful. The topic moved on and others jumped in. Jacob made a point about the definitional thing which I thought was a bit too dismissive of definitions (he and I approach this with different viewpoints and tolerances), so I reacted and others reacted and here we are. To the extent the exchange was helpful/clarifying at all to @axel's ability to express his ideas more clearly and concisely, great. The exchanges have been helpful to me in organizing my ideas too, great. If it was helpful to others, great. If people are just wound up by a lawyer being overly technical, great, tell your favorite lawyer joke. Here's mine: What do you call 1,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?

A good start.

[jacob]

Anyways, my point is that I feel like I do use language that means very much exactly what I am trying to say. This whole discussion has opened my eyes a bit to the difficulties and miscommunications that can arise when not everyone has the same understanding of that language. I'm willing to accept that sometimes I make assumptions about what other people understand when I use certain words, but not that I'm being misleading. It's like the difference between an implication and an inference. If I imply that I'm materially decoupled from industrial-consumer-society, shame on me. If someone infers that I have claimed to be materially decoupled from it because they don't understand the precise words I'm using, that's on them.

When communicating I predominately struggle with figuring out what to leave out and not say in order to avoid what could easily turn into an hours long monologue of a lecture. It's not just that not everyone having the same understanding of language but worse: not everyone has the same level of comprehensive understanding, period.

In my (unusual!) experience, the audience's lack of knowledge is almost always a bigger problem than the audience simply having a different definition of the words I use. It's not that the audience has a different opinion or a different definition. It's that the audience doesn't have the required knowledge at all.

(This is a big reason why skipping WLs is not functionally possible.)

A simple way to look at the construct (<- do we all agree what construct means?) is in terms of Hegelian dialectic (do we all know what that is?). There's a thesis (we know what that is, right?) and an antithesis (ditto). These are for our intents and purposes "the details". They can be organized at a higher (more abstract) level of thinking with a "synthesis". This synthesis can itself have an antithesis which is resolved by yet another synthesis. If you draw this out, it would look like a decision tree (does everybody know what that is) except in this case it's more of a "conclusion tree". (Did I functionally manage to communicate my thought despite using a metaphor?)

(In asking if everybody knows for every parenthesis, I'm not trying to be condescending. Rather, these are the questions I ask myself when trying to communicate a point to someone or a group of people. I know full well that insofar someone does NOT know a term or concept, they're unlikely to stop and figure it out---perhaps going all the way down the rabbit hole---but rather skip it and have an incomplete understanding. For each person who claims to understand all the terms and concepts, I can show 5-10 others from a "general audience" who don't.)

So, I have the "conclusion tree" in my mind. When I communicate a point, I'm trying to transfer this conclusion tree to the mind of others. In other words, I'm trying to do a mapping (<- technical term again). However, I know that I'm dealing with limited attention span or limited ability to hog the bandwidth ... so my challenge is to first translate this giant conclusion tree into "short form".

I can do this by simplifying it. That is, I provide a reduced version of the full story. This gives an idea of where I'm coming from and where I'm going, but it does not explain the journey. Alternatively, I can do it by narrowing it down to the exact synthesis I'm focusing on without including all the cascading supporting information. Here I'm providing the full version of a reduced story. If the audience already knows the rest of the story, I'm good. If they don't, I'm screwed as they proceed to fill in their own blanks.

Either way, someone will complain.

Usually we're in a situation where the audience doesn't know but they think they know. (This is really an attitude towards knowledge and it's a bad attitude.) For example, in the endless climate debates we have had on the forum, it was pretty clear that most questions and objections wouldn't have been raised if those raising them even had even a basic understanding of the relevant physics (concepts like energy conservation, quantum energy resonance, radiation transport, ...)

Here the problem is---to paraphrase Dostoevsky---that you can explain even the most complicated thing to the dumbest man (I somewhat disagree with this... most people don't have the patience for this) but you can't explain even the simplest thing to an intelligent man who is convinced he knows otherwise.

Sometimes one does get lucky though. The communication is successfully transferred. It happens when something is said in the just the right way to the right person at just the right time. There are so many instances of people missing the point the first time they hear something but then their life changes and they experience some more ... and then a few years or decades later, they hear the same words again and now the words make perfect sense.

In that sense communication is not really a matter of providing "formal details for the record" but rather an organic process in a complex adaptive system of knowledge (culture). Case in point, if ERE had just been the book, it would not have communicated ERE to very many despite being read or at least bought by some 60,000 people. Rather, it has taken the sustained effort of this forum to get to the point where we are now.

[7Wannabe5]

It's not necessarily necessary to do it in that order, but that is sort of the order of ERE. How one approaches this would also depend on if they share the equity and environmental goals implicit, but not explicit in ERE.

Yes, when I was a young adult, I used to meet my frugal father (6W5) for coffee, conversation, and thrift store shopping many Saturday mornings. One nugget of fatherly wisdom he attempted to impart to me was that the often the order in which you do things or the order in which things happen to you in life makes a large difference in outcome. I would add that it can also result in a fairly large difference in perspective. For example, one thing that makes me a demographic oddball is that I married and had kids at a younger age than the majority of my nerdy female Level Orange/Green/Yellow most-educated-city-in-U.S. peer group. So, my first "career" as an adult was Post-Modern DoesTraditional Homemaker. So, the more likely Modern to Post-Modern to Post-Post-Modern ERE path does not seem as much like a clear-cut caterpillar to cocoon to butterfly process to me, because the first production I did as an adult-with-post-modern-perspective (choice-negotiated with male partner who was early-adopter-hipster enough to occasionally wear a skirt- rather than role) was frugal home production. So, even though I also read YMOYL when it first came out in the early 90s when my kids were toddlers, the necessity to FIRE in order to engage in full-time or near full-time home production doesn't register with me, because all you really have to do is team up with somebody else (or group of others) who would rather do some work for some money than engage in frugal home production. However, I do recognize that the Lentil Baby option is likely less accessible for men who have not yet dabbled in the post-modern lark of skirt-wearing or similar. Most men and many women in our culture will feel like they need to "graduate" or justify moving on from the Modern in some manner. Why we have so many threads on topic of how to deal with "What do you do?"

Also, your response to @Slevin is pretty much how I do it. It took until my late 20s to realize that other people were not just going to do this if I revealed to them what I was doing.

I had an extremely interesting conversation yesterday with a newly released LLM on the topic of how multi-polar traps relate to lifestyle design. As an extreme bibliophile eNTP, it is kind of scary how much my brain functioning resembles that of an LLM chatbot set to "more fuzzy creative." I'm not sure whether it was the recent upgrade to the LLM or my use of more collaboration promoting prompts, but the conversation really lent some "confirmational clarity" to my fuzzy speculations. It was oddly a bit like conversing with my iNTP son. For example, at one juncture the LLM informed me that it felt the need to "coin a concept" to continue our discussion. The concept the LLM coined was "Tragedy of the Personal Commons."

Just as shared resources can be overexploited, individuals can overexploit their own internal resources

When I asked it if it agreed that "life-system" might be a more appropriate term than "life-style" when considering the multi-polar traps and meta-crisis of the 21st century, it strongly agreed, explained why it agreed, and then went on to suggest that even "life-system" wasn't fully adequate to capture the complexity and urgency of the situation, and suggested "life-world," "personal ecology," "existential strategy," "self-organizing system," and/or "adaptive strategy" as likely to provide a more nuanced and accurate framework.

Life-World: This term, borrowed from phenomenology, emphasizes the subjective and intersubjective experience of reality. It highlights the importance of meaning, values, and shared understanding in shaping our lives. It acknowledges that our individual "life-systems" are embedded within larger cultural and social "life-worlds."

The most interesting indirect insight I gained from the conversation was that one of the reasons why ERE works in terms of avoiding multi-polar trap is that it shifts focus/function from competing in over-populated niche of "optimizing for earning-> spending money" to currently under-populated niche of "optimizing for skills/free-time." However, this aspect of the model could be generalized to include any goals that are not currently facing high level of competition in over-populated niche. IOW, the more unconventional your goals/preferences, the less likely your life-style-system-world will contribute to multi-polar traps, regardless of your intentions or awareness. For example, a truly eco-sexual human who holds the goal of having erotic encounters with 30 different species of trees is highly unlikely to contribute to a multi-polar trap in the dating market. Similarly, a human who is obsessed with optimizing time devoted to badminton and papier-mache is likely to earn/spend less money, so also burn fewer resources. Yes, some odd obsession do require supplies/resources to fulfill, but the weirder the obsession, the less likely there will be much competition for the tools/supplies needed, and the more obsessed you are, the more likely your obsession will extend to wanting to create your own supplies/tools. For example, gardening is only an unpopular activity when compared with earning/spending money, and can be a bit expensive at entry-level hobby buying everything at Home Depot level, but truly obsessed gardeners almost all get to the place where they are making their own compost.

The other problem with money is that the main reason why everybody competes for it is that it is so fungible. "Free time" and "health/vigor/longevity" or "life-energy" are also generally regarded as fungible. But the problem with fungible resources is concept-I-am-now-coining (or much more likely re-inventing) which I will call The El Dorado Effect. The El Dorado Effect is the delusion that you can never have too much of a fungible resource. Highly fungible resources are the ultimate hoardable, because unlike 2000 plastic grocery bags shoved in your pantry, it seems ever possible that future-you might have a use for an extremely fungible resource. Therefore, I would suggest that possessing a known collection of unconventional goals will also tend towards reducing the likelihood of contributing to creation of multi-polar trap through continued competition for money in already over-crowded niche, because if you know what the unconventional goals you want to pursue/optimize are already, you can/will pursue them directly rather than continuing to pursue the hamster wheel goal of earning/hoarding more fungible resources like money and longevity towards no known purpose.