mountainFrugal Journal

[mountainFrugal]

Trick question? Everything I've ever done made sense at the time I did it, so nothing.

Yes. I think that having a strong, lifelong (stable) internally consistent world view is a great answer to this question. My guess is that for the majority of the lurkers out there reading this now or sometime in the future will not have this. So the question is still open for them and so this remains an open invitation to figure that out.

Having gone through my recent quarter life crisis at the age of 40, I am guessing 160 is more than enough life if all things go according to plan .

[jacob]

Yes. I think that having a strong, lifelong (stable) internally consistent world view is a great answer to this question.

And I think that the "common regret" (by survey) is someone or anyone having conformed to various external demands like work hard, make money, keep quiet/don't speak up, support family. IOW, SD:Blue and SD:Orange.

This is where SD:Green shines... as long as it doesn't go overboard and lose touch with objective reality.

[mountainFrugal]

This is where SD:Green shines... as long as it doesn't go overboard and lose touch with objective reality.

Ahhh yes, back to cultural value memes I see.

"Gasp! Are you ranking realities! Just because objective reality is true does not make it true to me! Don't put my reality on a hierarchy!" - Overboard Green

In theory, we can all create our own internally/externally consistent view of the world and move closer to self-actualization. Contemplating death is one catalyst in that direction absent any death of an immediate loved one.

[philipreal]

And I think that the "common regret" (by survey) is someone or anyone having conformed to various external demands like work hard, make money, keep quiet/don't speak up, support family. IOW, SD:Blue and SD:Orange.

This is where SD:Green shines... as long as it doesn't go overboard and lose touch with objective reality.

Although the survey showing regrets related to SD Blue/Orange being "the common regrets" may stem simply from SD Blue/Orange making up the majority of society. Greens could have their own, equally strong regrets when it comes their time. I'd be interested if you want to expand on what you meant by "This is where SD:Green shines."

[suomalainen]

Another viewpoint: when is enough? To borrow from @jacob, if I'm "essentially living true to myself, expressing and living my beliefs in the pursuit of whatever my regional maximum of happiness is", is it enough that I've been doing it for a day? If I start on Dec 19 and die at the end of the day ... was it a good life? What if I did it for a year? A decade? Five decades? How long must you feel good about what you did that day in order for you to say you lived a good life?

[7Wannabe5]

The most interesting one(s) to me involve altering your senses (blindfold, hearing loss, etc.) or being completely taken care of by someone for 24 hours. I think contemplating those and simulating them could be especially insightful for all the "rugged individuals" we have around here. Even if you did not do any of the exercises outlined in the blog post, if you have immediate reactions to any of them, it might be a place to be curious about as to why.

Reactivity may also be relative to where you fall on sub/Dom spectrum or experience. Learning how to release control can actually improve your ability to be more functionally Stoic in the sense of less rigid or locked, because instead of constructing barriers to feared experiences or emotions, you are forced to process them. For example, you could have a trusted partner wrap you in Saran wrap from ankle to shoulders thereby preventing your expression of agency if you are somebody who is highly driven/agentic.

Forget old age, it will be here soon enough for all of us (and maybe already here for you). If you were going to die on December 19, 2025...what, if anything, would you do differently?

it wouldn't change my plans dramatically. but I would make some adjustments such as I would likely choose to spend the entire summer up north on the lake rather than just a portion of the summer, and I would do more Swedish Death Cleaning type activities, and I would put aside some projects that although fun/fulfilling were more towards the long-term, and I would probably double-up on telling people I love them, even though I don't have a problem with doing that now. I would also, for sure, start eating all the Maple Walnut Doughnuts that I want.

[mountainFrugal]

@Suo It is up to you decide your own answers to those questions including coming to the conclusion that there is no universal answer. Enough has to come from within. A good life has to come from within. Judged by you and you alone.

For me personally, I know that I will change with age in my interests, but I still feel like mostly the same person I did when I was wiping my dad's ass when he was dying of lung cancer (smoker) or speaking at my late wife's memorial service (single events that stick out). These intense experiences catalyzed a much more unapologetic version of myself and how I show up in the world. Being somewhat a loner most of my life it has been fun to actively work on more "extroverted" skills and spend time in that way even though it is very much against my nature. I am endlessly curious so it very hard for me to imagine that going away and sitting still even though I have done more than 2 decades of meditation. I just bring that into my curiosity practices. Materially I have more than enough. Which is a great feeling. I am unsure if I will ever extinguish my desire to learn new things.

DW plans to take up pipe smoking much later in life. haha.

[jacob]

Greens could have their own, equally strong regrets when it comes their time. I'd be interested if you want to expand on what you meant by "This is where SD:Green shines."

Background: Each Tier1 vMeme has so far been a formal counter to the vMeme that came before it. SD:Orange was strong on objective scientific [method] pursuit of interobjectivity (of the facts we can all agree on) but weak on subjective compassion ("those losers just need to work harder") and intersubjective understanding ("how can so many people remain so insistent on being wrong"). SD:Green aka postmodernism overcompensated by prioritizing the subjective "personally lived experience" and the intersubjective "tribal experience". It ignored objective reality and substituted its own "alternative facts" and "narratives".

Insofar I have to synthesis some conclusion, I'd pick "overreactive response". A good lifestrategy is to take what you believe. Add what other people believe. Then divide by 2 to get your prediction.

As such, as such, I think the regrets of postmodernism will be one of throwing the baby of science and individual agency out with bathwater. Pomo communities formed around feelings, festivals, talking, inclusion, ... only to fall apart because they didn't---more importantly couldn't---realize that those who knew how to get things done were leaving them all too soon.

[Western Red Cedar]

When I talk to my athlete friend he is actually so focused that he would never bother making an account here. Maybe he would do some reading.

@WRC - yes...and where are these folks? Not saying there are not people here from that path, but it seems like there could be a lot more. Are they on here and just do not participate?

@Ego - Where are all the freedom-to people? As a test I counted the "views" of my journal. I had nearly 10000 since I posted my monthly update. Who are these people? What are they up to? Are they all bots? We have almost 1000 journals and I am unclear how many accounts. Certainly some of them must be freedom-to. I am just really curious about this.

In terms of the action/theory continuum, I suspect the majority of people we are talking about lean heavily towards action. Just like your friend, they are too busy focusing on projects IRL to engage in a forum like this. They want to limit time in front of a computer, and maximize time outdoors.

With that said, a preference toward theory, long-term planning, and conscious lifestyle design has a number of benefits for someone with adventurous or dirtbag inclinations. We are able to craft a lifestyle that allows for the adventures to keep rolling, without the stress of poverty or debt. You can see the yields in journals like stasher, axel heyst, C40, the animal, jiimmy, ego, 2b1s, mooretrees, and yourself.

(Also, I suspect there are a lot of bots out there lately. I noticed rapid, unreasonable jumps in my journal views on a couple of occasions over the last year).

[Ego]

@Ego - Where are all the freedom-to people? As a test I counted the "views" of my journal. I had nearly 10000 since I posted my monthly update. Who are these people?

Yeah, they go dark after accumulating enough to go out and do their thing. Because their thing is the thing.

For me personally, I know that I will change with age in my interests, but I still feel like mostly the same person I did when I was wiping my dad's ass when he was dying of lung cancer (smoker) or speaking at my late wife's memorial service (single events that stick out). These intense experiences catalyzed a much more unapologetic version of myself and how I show up in the world.

In 2000, we "retired" to do our thing. Six years later, we were in the middle of a yearlong bike tour through Southeast Asia when I called home for Christmas to learn that my father, who had retired earlier that year and was filling his days with distractions, had been diagnosed with cancer. The next four years were a blur. By the time I joined the forum at end of 2011, two parents and two siblings were dead.

Experiences like that tend to focus the mind on what is important.

I joined and remain relatively active here because I recognized how the desire to add distractions to ones life is a recurring temptation, especially for those of us with control over our time. Typically, as we age, we are seduced by comfort to remove from our lives the things that are meaningful but have challenging or unpleasant aspects. Those things get replaced with passive consumptions and mindless scrolling. Smarter people contemplate overwhelmingly complex issues or ruminating about overlapping theories.

Ruminate long enough and it becomes unthinkable to introduce anything uncomfortable into the system. A new hobby, friend or idea that induces even slight discomfort is nuked, in favor of pondering the unsolvable or fruitless. There is always a theory or combination of theories to rationalize the nuking. It can feel deliciously productive to spend all of that surplus free time treasure hunting for the lens through which the outcome looks good.

Time tends to heal, or at least lessen the pain of, wounds. I find that important lessons tend to migrate to the back of my mind. So, thank you for the reminder!

[7Wannabe5]

@Ego:

I'm not sure if I agree with this entirely. I think when people possess the reguired range of wherewithal to plan their own time to include a reasonably wide spectrum of activities from the easy to the challenging, it's not so much that they stick with the easy, but more that they stay in their own lane with the challenging, or if they don't stay in their own lane, they choose activities that are generally valued as appropriately challenging by society in general or their milieu in particular. For example, theoretically ESFJ (FeSiNeTi) The Caretaker would be driving in the lane least likely to be traveled by an INTJ if/when choosing challenging, worthwhile activies for retirement:

Activities an ESFJ (Age 72 Midwest U.S.) Might Choose as Worthwhile and/or Challenging

1) Become a part-time foster grandparent. Rock an infant born addicted to drugs until he falls asleep and then read 5 picture books to his sister.
2) Join a stitch and bitch group down at the new yarn store. Knit cute holiday presents for everybody in your social circle.
3) Take your grouchy aunt who didn't have any kids of her own out to do her grocery shopping each week. Then sit and talk with her for a while over coffee and muffins.
4) Write a funny country music song with your BFF and perform it together at your annual trip you always take with your oldest friend circle.
5) Bring some extra flowers from your garden on Veteran's Day to place on the graves nobody else is tending to.
6) Go out and power walk 3X/week because you still have people who are depending on you, and that book Oprah wrote with her doctor.

So, these are the sort of retirement activities/challenges that would be towards least likely to seduce INTJs out of their personalized comfort zones of much more grueling physical fitness challenges, extreme frugality, strategic planning and problem solving, building/fixing stuff, visiting/living in unique travel destinations, and occasionally attempting to boss other humans around (on a high Te day.)

[jacob]

Ruminate long enough and it becomes unthinkable to introduce anything uncomfortable into the system. A new hobby, friend or idea that induces even slight discomfort is nuked, in favor of pondering the unsolvable or fruitless. There is always a theory or combination of theories to rationalize the nuking. It can feel deliciously productive to spend all of that surplus free time treasure hunting for the lens through which the outcome looks good.

I have an uncomfortable project for you to enjoy Study up on the metacrisis (I can provide an extensive reading list but it would be more uncomfortable to just start from scratch) or a similarly scoped problem (I can provide another list of complex issues to pick from) and ruminate about it long and well enough to be able to go on a podcast or similar and answer questions for an hour. I can pretty much guarantee that this will be uncomfortable to most people who go down that rabbit hole. It includes many things that a majority of people find thoroughly unpleasant like reading [actual books], writing, thinking, and public speaking!

Activities an ESFJ (Age 72 Midwest U.S.) Might Choose as Worthwhile and/or Challenging

1) Become a part-time foster grandparent. Rock an infant born addicted to drugs until he falls asleep and then read 5 picture books to his sister.
2) Join a stitch and bitch group down at the new yarn store. Knit cute holiday presents for everybody in your social circle.
3) Take your grouchy aunt who didn't have any kids of her own out to do her grocery shopping each week. Then sit and talk with her for a while over coffee and muffins.
4) Write a funny country music song with your BFF and perform it together at your annual trip you always take with your oldest friend circle.
5) Bring some extra flowers from your garden on Veteran's Day to place on the graves nobody else is tending to.
6) Go out and power walk 3X/week because you still have people who are depending on you, and that book Oprah wrote with her doctor.

I think I'm related to this person.

I agree that people tend to stay in their lane. It's just that some lanes are perceived to be cooler than others. In some sense, retirement is very much like HS. You do what you want with the added benefit that the older you get, the more you know about what you like and what you don't like. I do agree with @Ego that this means that people increasingly avoid their discomforts, but I don't think this is a bad idea. Nerds gonna nerd and party people gonna party.

Just for fun, here's what an ISFP (Age 62 Midwest US) might choose as worthwhile/challenging.

1. Take an annual trip to another country and post the pictures on facebook.
2. Teach a weekly scrap-booking or stretching class at the Senior Center.
3. Patiently let the gregarious ESFJ above take them grocery shopping each week while smiling and nodding as they go on and on about their children and their boring lives while eating rotisserie chicken from the deli.
4. Frequent yard sales and antique stores to increase their "collection" of tools or figurines.
5. Talk about how they'd always wanted to learn more history or science but never get past the first 15 pages of the books they pick up at the yard sales.
6. Inflict a changing variety of homemade crafts on friends and family (and innocent bystanders). This year it's baking biscuits. Next year it's crochet. Then wood burning.

[Frita]

Just like high school, some retirees still just like what their peers like either out of routine, to fit in, or whatever. Our society in general tends to avoid discomfort. Perhaps retirees just have more time to do it?

The Can’t-Stop-Working is another flavor of retiree: My ISTJ spouse just went back to work and seems quite happy with the distraction, enjoys bossing people around/doing math/making spreadsheets, and the positive attention his pathological people-pleasing garners. He is now “officially” too tired to interact with anyone and only has time for sleeping and sports. Actually, I enjoy being early retired more that he’s gone back to work and have more freedom to do my thing. He once again needs the wife for functions like his holiday Christmas party. I took plastic Ziplocks and cutlery to the white elephant exchange (gifted after our daughter died because I “wouldn’t want to wash dishes” and moved around, but still not used). A gal at my table stole them and was thrilled to get such a “good gift.” (I got a bottle of brut rosé.)

[7Wannabe5]

Ruminate

Thanks! Got it now. "Retrospecting", that's what I've been up to lately. Apparently, that's my turn of decade project this time. Kind of like humming to yourself while you take your time sorting the cluttery cupboards towards "What next?"

Study up on the metacrisis (I can provide an extensive reading list but it would be more uncomfortable to just start from scratch) or a similarly scoped problem (I can provide another list of complex issues to pick from) and ruminate about it long and well enough to be able to go on a podcast or similar and answer questions for an hour. I can pretty much guarantee that this will be uncomfortable to most people who go down that rabbit hole.

Do you choose the problem first or does the problem come to occur to you through your reading? My final project for my grad degree which I just finished a couple months ago was a database that was logically organized to provide information and produce visualizations related to survivability in context of changing hardiness zones for a range of edible perennials under various climate change scenarios for all the counties through which I75 passes from North to South. This project kind of wrapped together some of my permaculture experience, some of my metacrisis knowledge, and some of my data science skills, and tied them together in a bow. I could pretty easily do a videocast with Q&A demonstrating it to anybody curious about stuff like whether it might be too hot to grow apples in southern Kentucky by 2075.

One of the questions I've been contemplating since wrapping it up is "What makes a project appropriately challenging?"

The Can’t-Stop-Working is another flavor of retiree: My ISTJ spouse...

Yeah, I think ISTJ and ESTJ might experience the most difficulty with leaving traditional employment, because Te in first or secondary makes you want to work at something, and Si in first or second makes you like routine/structure/convention.

It occurred to me that ESFJ might kind of resemble third most likely "identity" for a female ENTP. Since our tertiary Fe is our first extroverted judgment function, it can be where we sometimes go when in defensive mode, especially since it is so much more prevalent as a female type in the general population. I recently read an amusing article written by another female ENTP who described a female ESTP as being like a woman with a little boy trapped in her body and a female ENTP as being like a woman with a teenage boy trapped in her body. I wonder whether male ENTPs are as likely to go to FeSi ? Or maybe it's more a matter of how strongly you are T vs F? I would describe the manner in which I might functionally exhibit it as third down the line from NeTi being something like "It's Halloween. Time to celebrate with candy! Maybe I will carve a pumpkin. Not a boring pumpkin. Maybe I will use my hole saw to carve it and then figure out how to hoist it to the top of the flagpole. What a cute costume! Here's some candy you can use to help solve the attached math puzzle. Brrring. Timer going off on the roasted pumpkin seeds. I wonder how many square feet of pumpkins I would have to grow to make one quart of pumpkin seed pesto? How many to provide for annual protein requirement of an adult human? How many...Crrrrrash!Splatt! "

[suomalainen]

One of the questions I've been contemplating since wrapping it up is "What makes a project appropriately challenging?"

Hasn't this been discussed a lot with the flow state idea? Or are you coming at it from a different angle?

[7Wannabe5]

@suo:

Yes, I was thinking of the flow model, but was considering variations in terms of temperament, interests, abilities/disabilities, etc. Also, since I've been doing this "Freedom to" structuring my own day/year thing for most of my adult life whether post-modern-frugal-homemaker, self-employed-generalist-bookdealer, slacker-semi-employed permaculturist-tutor, etc. etc, and it's a bit of a never ending process. I've gone through phases of attempting more zen "just do the work in front of me" , GettingThingsDone-ish, constructing a "practice", applying rough templates such as Renaissance Soul, etc.

My final grad project went very well for me; brought me to the realization, once again, that I am very project oriented, because too much routine or too many maintenance tasks grinds me to a hiking-through-molasses-bog halt. Even exalting any sort of extended routine or schedule by referring to it as "my practice" does not fool me for very long.The contrast between how much I enjoyed the final project vs. my grad program in general was also quite notable. Partly this was due to the fact that although some of the topics were quite interesting, the overall orientation was towards popping me out as a mid-level corporate-employed IT project-manager report-to-uberlords-writer. The final project provided for a good deal more autonomy in terms of topic, tools, and intended audience of stakeholders. Since I was taking one double-time course every 10 weeks, I also learned that to the extent that I am not self-directed, my ADD* attention span does not extend to even 10 weeks (and this matches pretty well with my gut-feeling that the maximum commitment I would like to make to any form of full-time employment would be around 3 months, whereas very part-time employment (12 hours/week-ish) I am fine with forever.) However, I did manage to pick up some project management
skills/knowledge/frameworks/methodologies that I can apply to my own self-directed projects, and which can also serve to make a project work within my attention span limitations. So, I'm trying to integrate all that with more generalized "life-system design" in alignment with some "retrospection" of my needs and interests. But, I'm about to turn 60 and there's no particular big ride I'd still like to hop on before the amusement park closes, so this is all very low-key, low-stakes, nerdy puzzle-experiment fun.

*Not to be confused with ADHD. My body and emotions are more on the sedate side of spectrum.

[delay]

I have an uncomfortable project for you to enjoy Study up on the metacrisis (I can provide an extensive reading list but it would be more uncomfortable to just start from scratch) or a similarly scoped problem (I can provide another list of complex issues to pick from) and ruminate about it long and well enough to be able to go on a podcast or similar and answer questions for an hour.

The metacrisis sounds interesting. I'm still puzzled by the Peak Oil phenomenon. When I was in primary school in the early 1980s, we were given leaflets that said the world would run out of oil by 2000. The world disagreed and filled China and India with asphalt roads and coughed up materials for cars for all their citizens. China now produces more than twice the number of cars the USA produces.

If it's little effort to point to a few books or links that you liked about the metacrisis I'd appreciate it!

[jesmine]

Indeed! My worry is that I might regret not having worked harder or that I somehow could have done more to make a difference [that made a difference].

How would you define "making a difference?" I'm not specifically asking how you would quantify it.

[jacob]

The metacrisis sounds interesting. I'm still puzzled by the Peak Oil phenomenon. When I was in primary school in the early 1980s, we were given leaflets that said the world would run out of oil by 2000. The world disagreed and filled China and India with asphalt roads and coughed up materials for cars for all their citizens. China now produces more than twice the number of cars the USA produces.

If it's little effort to point to a few books or links that you liked about the metacrisis I'd appreciate it!

The "run out by <date> suggests a bathtub model for natural resources which is too simplistic. Rather, as resources are depleted, the get increasingly more costly (in terms of existing resources) to dig out until eventually it costs as much to dig them out as the cost of the resources used (net zero). In practice this looks like an increase, a peak, and a decline. If you add all these up you get a giant bell curve. For conventional oil&gas that bell curve peaked in the US in 1972. It peaked in Europe around IIRC the early 2000s, and it peaked on a global basis in the late 2000s. As predicted. What happened was the US discovered a viable method for fracking that pushed the total fossil peak out by a good 15-20 years and made the US the largest oil producer in the world. Fracking is banned in many other places due to environmental damage. However, it may just be a matter of time before the increasing cost of gas overrides those concerns. The squeeze is on in Europe.

It's useful to distinguish between the metacrisis and the polycrisis. The polycrisis is an aggregate of "everything going wrong at the same time" e.g. energy, climate, politics, finance, etc. A good overview (minus pandemics) is https://www.amazon.com/Users-Guide-Cris ... 745330533/

Whereas the metacrisis is more of a philosophical/psychological perspective on WHY everything is going wrong. For example, is there something wrong with our thinking? Is modernism and/or postmodernism not up to the text? Does the world need therapy? Here I would suggest the Hanzi Freihnacht books that have been mentioned around the forum, particularly the first one.

Most published works and mainly detailed descriptions of what the problem is and only treat "what to do about it" as an afterthought, typically by making some grand sweeping statements about what somebody or everybody ought to do in the final chapter.

The practical side will rarely mention the metacrisis or the polycrisis per se. In some sense, they're doing the opposite of the above. They'll briefly mention "all the problems the world is facing" in the intro and then get down to practice. There are three kind of practice.

The individualistically oriented. Here ERE is in my humble opinion the one with the most in depth treatment. Other approaches include "buy nothing", zero waste, minimalism, [the original] parts of FIRE. My recommendation here would be the book @AxelHeyst just published, see viewtopic.php?t=13295

The collectively oriented. Here Permaculture has the most in depth. I personally like David Holmgren's writings. The Deep Adaptation movement also has philosophical backing although they lean heavily on Permaculture when it comes to practical application. Indeed, perhaps DA belongs more to the third branch, which is ...

The spiritually oriented. Here the idea is that the world wouldn't have a polycrisis if we all just became better humans. Smarter, more caring, less focused on beating each other up, etc. I hesitate to recommend anything here except that Ken Wilber has probably written the best overviews.

How would you define "making a difference?" I'm not specifically asking how you would quantify it.

It's a difference that makes a difference. Making a difference is pretty easy. I could, for example, write a book. I have now made a difference in that the book now exists and before it did not. However, if nobody reads the book or if the people who read it didn't understand it or if they understood it but proceeded to ignore its message, then the difference I made didn't actually make a difference.

So, I am making a difference by explaining this concept to you (I could just have ignored the question in which case I wouldn't have made a difference). However, if you didn't understand my explanation and didn't include it in your thinking, I would not have made a difference that made a difference.

As such, lots of people are "making a difference", but very few are actually making a difference that makes a difference. It's a much higher barrier. Making a difference that doesn't make a difference (like much of my scientific career was) is just noise.

[chenda]

It's only 10-15% insofar you live an average life span of 75ish.

Good point.