The Education of Axel Heyst

[berrytwo]

Visualization: If a WoG is a 3dimensional closed topological surface with internal geometry undulating through time (think like a big watery blob except it also has intricate internal structures), then a list of my goals is like a picture someone took of it at a particular time and from a particular angle. You can’t see what’s on the far side, nor what’s inside the folds of the WoG, nor the internal structure of it, nor what it looked like a month ago nor how fast sub sections of the shape is changing.



What is useful is observing the trends of my goals over time.

I think what a lot of people think they want is a formal repeatable process that they can wrap their heads around and empower them to ‘command’ their lives. Like a function box that they feed inputs, pull a lever, and out pops goals. I think this is a bad idea because it is impossible and is based on a fallacious understanding of the universe.


The way to get a good system is the same way to have a good idea: have a lot of ideas and throw the bad ones out. Similarly, give up on the idea of shopping around till you find The Right system. Start making a system and then fall in love with the process of endlessly tweaking it, which looks like trying a lot of things and stopping the things that aren’t working.

Dang! Super helpful insights/ imagery into WoGs and goals. I was really struck by the sentence about observing trends over time. For myself I notice at least two types of goals that I see over time, the type that is super authentically me and the goals that I can't let go of the image (despite not actually being homeotelic.) I think it is helpful to look at both. Related, before I made my formalish goals for this quarter I read through my journals of this past year and jotted down what I kept repeating over and over. Can I let go of any of these goals if they are just swimming in my head and not actually something I want/ plan to do? What is the essence of this image/goal? EK? I laughed several times when reading your post because I realized how much I want to control things/ goals and make the Right System. I value the perspective of adapting and orienting towards process.

[AxelHeyst]

Related, before I made my formalish goals for this quarter I read through my journals of this past year and jotted down what I kept repeating over and over. Can I let go of any of these goals if they are just swimming in my head and not actually something I want/ plan to do? What is the essence of this image/goal?

This! Such a powerful practice. It can also be... some kinda feeling, to read a journal entry from 5 10 15 years ago and realize I was having an insight or thinking through a goal that I also wrote down last week, thinking it was a novel insight/goal!! On the one hand it's like 'what've I been doing with my life', on the other its an affirmation that it's important to me if it keeps resurfacing. At least now I've daylit how much my mind returns to it and can start to make some intentional decisions about how to deal with it. I've used this practice to intentionally drop many ideas.

[AxelHeyst]

Jan 12 or so was my Five Year ERE Anniversary.

Actualization and Autonomy (AnA) Notes:
Related to my two posts above in reply to @sodatrain about WoGs and such, I am going to be taking another intentional dive into thinking about my goals/systems/etc. My methodology: Copy mF.

I was reading through his posts on WOG creation: viewtopic.php?p=279690#p279690 and also viewtopic.php?p=277205#p277205 and his method on Randomization: viewtopic.php?p=242959#p242959 and his idea (and practice!) of Renaissance projects, and intend to work with all of this material and come up with some systems/mechanics/ideas/etc of my own on the far side of it.

Most concretely I'm working on a goal randomizer for novel ideation to see if there's any 'there' there.

Digital Minimalism aka Attention Gardening:
Switched to Brave and full-blocked IG and Pinterest. IG had been set to 60sec/day, and Pinterest at 20min. I also set this forum to an hour, but I might need to reduce that. (I can draft responses and posts like this off-site, so I only need access to check/read and post. 60min is too much. I'll try 30min for February.)

A tweak: Only Fine Things
Think I read this in The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, the idea is to filter the quality of stuff you let in in order to cultivate a sensitivity and 'sense' of good works. For me, an obvious low-hanging fruit is the music I listen to in the background while working. I got into a habit of putting on low-quality 'electronic' music, probably AI-generated, with thirst-trap thumbnails while I work on the computer. The stuff is, technically speaking, garbage, and probably not doing great things to my dopamine system besides.

In February I'm going to listen to either Good Stuff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIFIziJWo-Q) or ambient (I find 'radio chatter on alien planet terraforming mission' style music remarkably focusing).

Business:
In January I began a support contract with my bff (who many of you met at fest) who has started her own engineering design company for high performance buildings (passivhaus, healthy building, etc). At least initially my role is help getting her Revit infrastructure dialed in as well as project modeling. Door is open to expansion of involvement to whatever makes sense for me to pick up - energy modeling software, visualization/communication, etc. Kind of a dream gig for multiple reasons:

• Deployment of a skill I'm really good at.
• Helping a bff deliver her (considerable) gifts to the world. Revit production was a bottleneck for her work, and seeing my involvement un-bottleneck that part of her business-as-gift-delivery-mechanism is very gratifying.
• Her projects are very cool and values-aligned, and I'm learning a lot as I go.
• Potential to inject some of my own ideas and design into her practice in the future (e.g. small-scale TES systems).
• We dropped into a five-hour two-person engineering/3d modeling flow state the other day (on videocall). Awesome.

Besides that RevX continues to be mostly gratifying, interesting, and challenging. It feels like we're very close to an inflection point with revenue - just have a couple clients to finish up with, a few things to polish, and the system will be mostly productized and we'll be able to work on scaling sales. It seems pretty likely I'll cross my FI number this year, which, interestingly, was one of my stretch goals from back in 2020 or so (although I thought it'd take me 5 years of fulltime grinding from that point! Little did I know I'd work full time only a few more months, then go one day/wk, then go full dirtbag for three years. ERE is *amazing* when you put a little faith in the process of internalizing the principles and details).

Accounting tweak:
I had accounted for my moto purchase last year as a depreciating asset, so in my expenses I didn't say I spend $3,750 in July, I said I spent ~$100/mo from July through to the present (I guessed a resale value). I felt like I couldn't really think clearly about my finances with $100/mo 'ghost' expenses on there that I didn't actually spend. I changed my sheet to reflect the one time purchase last July with no ongoing expense. It feels less fuzzy to me this way: if I sell it, I'll record a negative transportation expense. When my 'sheet says I spent 450 this month, that's how much actually left my accounts.

solarpunkMEP:
I reconfigured my salvaged solar array to feed 450w into my 14gal thermal energy storage tank under my bed, instead of the 120w or so it was sending before. (Same panels, just all in parallel instead of series-parallel, sends 28amps instead of 11amps). Gets too hot to touch, but never starts to simmer, and very nicely dampens the interior temp in my studio - never too cold to write in the early mornings, although I get cozy in a puffy and mukluks on the coldest mornings.

Reading:

• The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond.
• The Day the World Stops Shopping.
• The Art of Seduction.
• A book on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.
• The Secret Agent, Conrad.
• Goodbye, Things. Sasaki. I started reading this and then got out of bed and started decluttering my studio lol.
• Arete, Brian Johnson. Gave up, it's like reading a bunch of youtube video titles stitched together.
• Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito.
• At Work in the Ruins, Dougald Hine. Really good.
• The Creative Act, Rick Rubin

[calamityjane]

Thanks for the book list! I added the Diamond and the Sasaki to my library requests.

[jacob]

Sasaki did a 1hr lecture+interview on youtube some years ago. It's minimalism at the Peter Lawrence level, likely not suitable for homebodies.

[AxelHeyst]

The World Until Yesterday is going on my "books that changed your mind" list wrt hunter gatherer society violence. I need to follow up on more references to lock in the perspective shift, but it's having a positive effect-wave on my stance to life.

[theanimal]

How has it changed your stance to life? Are you now viewing the lower violent times of present day more favorably and valuing your circumstances more?

[AxelHeyst]

Yep. I'd previously missed the detail that although hg violence is **typically** a lot less intense than state-level warfare (due to lack of organization and the technology being variations on pointy sticks), it's apparently a much more constant state. So while any given hg violent conflict is likely to have much lower casualty rates/capita per encounter, they're going to have more encounters than for state level violence. Hence, the death rate as a percentage of population via violence (not talking infanticide/eldercide/accidents/or anything else here) is significantly higher.*

A main thing that tweaked my perspective was him relaying the perspectives of Papua New Guinean peoples who were compelled to cease warfare in the 20th century. Long story short, they were happy about not being afraid of ambush every single day of their lives. He also notes that it was generally easy to get some hg cultures to drop warfare amongst themselves with very minimal effort, due to the fact that they were relieved to have a face-saving excuse to not have to be engaging in violence all the time.

He does speak to the difficulty in *knowing* what it was like in various cultures, and he also does a good job of painting a picture that the spectrum of hg culture is wider than state-culture (e.g. cultural norms are more diverse across hg cultures than across state cultures), but the does lay out an argument that, generally speaking, this picture he's painting of the state of violence was common. He also speaks a little bit to the rosy interpretations (e.g. of anthropologists interpreting archeological evidence of extensive fortifications as something to do with religion or etc, rather than something to do with real and common violence).

The other sources I've read to date painted a different and rosier picture. I think I was inadvertently reading inside a certain perspectival echo chamber - I wasn't aware of **contemporary** narratives about h/g violence based on anthropological work from the angle Diamond is relaying. All the stuff I was pointed at in the past was "old" (pre-20th century) and thus easy to dismiss as infected with colonial and racist biases.

I wouldn't say my reading changed my mind by 180*, more like it has tweaked it by ~45*. And part of that tweak is to be slightly less disappointed in the Current Arrangement, and more encouraged/enthused/engaged in the project of making what comes next suck even less than all the other stuff we've tried in our species' history so far.

*Interesting exercise: compare and contrast the stories in the book about how easily some of the New Guinean people kill with the profile of the psychology of violence in *On Killing* by Grossman. The tribespeople are aculturated from birth to be able to kill easily (there's a story of 6yo boys stabbing a nearly-dead 'enemy' with their toy spears while being drug into camp after being ambushed, and that's a socially celebrated thing to do). Grossman talks about how they figured out that in the US Civil War and the two world wars, soldiers had a psychological aversion to killing other humans as reflected in modeling kill rates. Soldiers would miss on purpose, consciously and half-consciously. The US changed its training and got 'better' kill rates by Vietnam. (Grossman's books and the studies his books are based on are not slam-dunk accepted, by the way - methodological issues pointed out with the original studies etc. The study of violence is a whoooole thing, of course.)

[AxelHeyst]

'course, if any one single thing goes wrong with our nukes or any of the other fun xrisk horrors we've spun up due to our cleverness, then that wipes out the whole argument, and it would have been better to spend the rest of eternity poking each other with sticks. However, toothpaste out of the tube, and all that.

In a way, these two things (evolution of violence and increased xrisk) combine for perfect equanimity.

1: Many things having to do with the human experience are probably better now, at least from a violence perspective and certainly others as well. Sweet! Gratitude for those things!

2: Also, it's **totally possible** that we'll all die horribly starting tomorrow. Impossible to say. The only rational option is to appreciate and cherish every single moment we've got until whenever we blink out.

Being a human is strange.

[7Wannabe5]

One of the reasons I am somewhat opposed to the practice of herding large groups of toddler-aged humans into childcare situations is that many of them have not yet developed the aversion to harming each other. Socialization has to occur in order for them to learn peaceful or violent behavior and/or that peas do not belong in their nostrils. I slept for 12 hours straight after spending just 4 hours substitute teaching for a group of 15 three year olds last week. Luckily, they are also cute at that age and lacking the muscular ability to do too much damage.

I'll be interested to see what you do with randomization. Currently, my lifestyle is being randomized by an almost constant semi-bizarre stream of unsolicited offers. It has always been my experience that simply being available leads to some offers, but right now it's like others are knocking at all possible entry portals to the boundaries of my slacker room of my own. I keep making up excuses utilizing variations on the theme that somebody who just had hip surgery needs my help.

[Smashter]

I really liked The World Before yesterday.

He also notes that it was generally easy to get some hg cultures to drop warfare amongst themselves with very minimal effort, due to the fact that they were relieved to have a face-saving excuse to not have to be engaging in violence all the time.

This part reminded me of the book Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony. I haven't actually read it, but I read this fantastic book review: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-sic ... y-robert-b

A section of it talks about different cultures who were thrilled to finally have a good reason to stop their bizarre and destructive practices. That included warfare, cannibalism and, uh, other stuff

Highlanders who had practiced brutal initiation ceremonies “in which they were forced to drink only partly slaked lime that blistered their mouths and throats, were beaten with stinging nettles, were denied water, had barbed grass pushed up their urethras to cause bleeding, were compelled to swallow bent lengths of cane until vomiting was induced, and were required to fellate older men, who also had anal intercourse with them” gave them up after only minimal contact with outside disapproval. Some later told anthropologists they felt “deeply shamed” by their treatment of their own sons and were relieved to stop.

[AxelHeyst]

Yeah, humans are wacky. This also supports my longstanding general view that it’s not so much specific humans or “human nature” that we ought to be mad at, but the dysfunctional **systems** we get trapped in, and the worthwhile work is to develop better systems for extracting us from those systems, noticing when our systems start to go off, improving existing systems….

[AxelHeyst]

ventureERE, a short brain-dump
Similar to the idea of using ERE principles to attain DIY Tenure (mF's concept) or become a self-sponsored action-adventure athlete (dirtbagERE, also arguably an mF thing), ventureERE is using ERE principles to deploy resources (autonomy, financial, social, skills, etc) towards ventures (expeditions, projects, inventions, explorations, etc) intended to move humanity/the world forward/towards a better place, per the interests of the individual.

Patterns:
Alfred Loomis, wealthy American in the early 20th century who decided (in the early 30's?) what the US needed was a research and development laboratory to work on technologies relevant to not getting hosed by the Nazis. So he made one (Tuxedo Park). Podcast, book link in there somewhere.

Victor Vescovo, podcast episode, another rich guy interested in deep sea and space exploration, biotech, a number of other things, is deploying his wealth and skills (program management, capital allocation, etc) to advancing these fields. (My favorite line from that episode: "I don't have yachts, I have research vessels.")

Loomis and Vescovo are non-ERE exemplars of the pattern, but I think worth study for the aspiring ventureEREr. The basic pattern is, essentially:

• -Accumulate wealth (hence deployable capital, hence autonomy)
• -Accumulate relevant skills in the process of accumulating wealth (personnel and financial management, organizational skills, networking/persuasion skills, sales, etc)
• -Accumulate venture domain expertise (or at least sufficient knowledge to be able to direct and manage teams of domain experts) via intense pursuit of curiosity (stoke alert!).
• -Deploy assets (wealth, skills) to spin up and execute projects aimed at moving certain fields/domains of practice or knowledge forward.

Loomis and Vescovo deployed tens and hundreds of millions of dollars of personal wealth on their domains of interest. Loomis advanced radar technology, Vescovo went to the deepest part of the world's 5 oceans, for just two examples of what they got up to.

A "perfect" HWLI (high wheaton level individual) Venture pattern might look like:

• Accumulate just enough wealth to secure durable autonomy (33xttmCOL or whatever).
• Immediately focus efforts on the domains of interest (bonus points if this can be pushed into the accumulation phase with no degradation of WoG integrity), aiming for increasing domain expertise, contacts, networks, relevant social capital, etc.
• Spin up and execute domain projects at whatever scale can be pulled off based on capitals.
• Bonus points for deploying OPM (other people's money) where necessary, rather than having to accumulate it personally. (Of course there are risks and downsides to OPM, the HWLI understands and integrates these risks into the WoG. There are benefits to deploying personal wealth, which Vescovo talks about in the linked episode).
• Extra bonus points for creating a venture brief so compelling that it attracts other FI howlies (not a requirement! I'm not describing howlieball 1.0 here).
• Ideally some of the ventures become financially self-sustaining and even wealth-generating, feeding back into the howlie's stash of deployable capital for the next venture.

(High Wheaton Level thinking is assumed in this pattern and not noted as a discrete line item, although it is something that needs to be developed along the way.)

Non-ideal modifications to the scheme would be to push the accumulation phase past the point of personal autonomy to either go runaway or to try to generate a seed fund for ventures. Ideally the Cycle of Ventures gets off the ground via bootstrapping or OPM, but maybe a specific path looks like enough seed capital to get Venture 1 off the ground and then it becomes a self-sustaining cycle of systems from there.

[7Wannabe5]

Accumulate just enough wealth to secure durable autonomy (33xttmCOL or whatever).

All autonomy truly requires is gonads. The wealth just provides cotton-padded armor for whatever gonads you got. The “durable” addition as adjective is dependent on functional rule of law at the level of each and every individual.

I think one reason why some (okay, maybe just one) of us are experiencing some ennui is that although, absolutely, ideal endgame of ideal ERE would be fantastic, the fucked up second order macro-effects which we are currently experiencing to which conventional FIRE has contributed with its pragmatic “when in Rome” philosophy may not be survivable.

I so saw this coming in my own micro-business dealing with J Bozos at Jumbo Corp. I feel kind of like the protagonist of “Quo Vadis.” Not quite sunk to the extent I’m ready to slump down and just watch the dumpster fire burn from my thrift store lawn chair, and not yet ready to ride with orange jumpsuit posse, but I think it’s past time to also stop filling my tiny bic energy human scale lighter off the runoff from the convoy of Big Bic energy megacorporous runaway tanker. Mostly because that’s the only way I can functionally reframe them as the ridiculous tiny-proboscis wielding insects they are.

Okay, I will shut up now. ENTP can’t not mention elephant in room. Otherwise, total thumbs up on your ventureERE outline.

[AxelHeyst]

Yeah, bear in mind (thou reader) when pointing at Loomis and Vescovo I'm pointing at their pattern of deploying assets towards improving humanity/Gaia, not their specific domains. (If you listen to the last 5 minutes of the Vescovo interview you'll be able to spot exactly where I'd say he's got an incomplete mental model of the world-system.) e.g. I'm not advocating ecomodernism here, a venture could be something like 'replicate this pattern or this pattern' (h/t mF).

So to explicitly address this in my model of ventureERE: the ventureERE'r would be second-order macro-effect aware in ways that conventional venture'ers are not, and incorporate that systems-effect understanding into their venture practice.

An example more towards ERE effects-aware venturing would be Geoff Lawton, with his greening the desert ventures.

[zbigi]

An example more towards ERE effects-aware venturing would be Geoff Lawton, with his greening the desert ventures.

I always saw such activities as noble, but ultimately pointless. Same as with sustainable farming and permaculture's goal of restoring the health of a piece of land - what's the point of doing that, if eventually you either sell it, or die and pass on, and somebody who doesn't share your values quickly reverses it back to the mean? Perhaps the only activities which can have a lasting effect are attempts at changing other people's values, everything else is pissing in the wind.

...however, restoring a piece of land can affect other people's values (especially if promoted in media), can inspire them etc. - so it can very much have value as a PR prop.

[AxelHeyst]

I recommend The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence for anyone who doesn't have a personally satisfying answer to the above.

Also, if everyone waited until the zeitgeist arrived to alter their behavior and to justify their actions 'mattering', the zeitgeist would obviously never arrive. Somebody's gotta go first.

[7Wannabe5]

So to explicitly address this in my model of ventureERE: the ventureERE'r would be second-order macro-effect aware in ways that conventional venture'ers are not, and incorporate that systems-effect understanding into their venture practice.

Cool, and I liked the examples you linked. However, to be clear, what I was communicating is that I am no longer at all down with investing in the U.S. stock market to achieve FIRE -> safeguard personal autonomy. And given current events, I call complete bullshit on this being "naive" or "histrionic" at Level Green. It is exactly as described/predicted by Donella Meadows in her systems discussions at Level Yellow/Turquoise. The core purpose of a corporation and/or its human figurehead is Domination of the Field. Or as Level Yellow thinker and former CEO Tomas Bjork has argued, any bottom up individualist solution is pretty much doomed as long as no top down change to the broad legal rights as individuals currently held by corporations and not currently held by complex natural resource entities are addressed. Top down alone is not enough, but neither is bottom up alone, and acting "as if" it is will only lead to more negative second order effects. IOW, if you are currently broadly invested in the U.S. stock market, you are definitely part of the problem, even if your reduced consumer spending and your beneficial ventures afforded with your free time and funds are towards the solution. The vector-space friction and cognitive dissonance is just roaring too loud in my ear at this juncture for all the particular reasons that I will not delineate, but which should be dead clear to anybody with half the brains to be reading here.

Also, everyone knows that coupon clipping is for old widow ladies. Are all the young men just going to let the old baboons reign and/or just cup up their monkeypaws for sloppy seconds? Damn, if I was 30 years younger and not so bottom heavy...

[Jean]

I think in our individualism, we fail to see that life is a number game, and that even if the most likely result of our attempt is failure, one success among millions of failure might be enough.
That's how i cheer myself up when i think i'm a loser
The fact that you aren't this success doesnt mean you could risk not trying,because the workd might have been slightly different, and you could be life's next success.

[AxelHeyst]

However, to be clear, what I was communicating is that I am no longer at all down with investing in the U.S. stock market to achieve FIRE -> safeguard personal autonomy.

Ha, yeah, that was not clear. You gotta be a little more specific about which particular dumpster fire of second-order macro-effects you're referring to when talking in a polycrisis-aware space! From where I sit it's flaming dumpsters from here to the dusk horizon.

So - you were critiquing step 1 = secure freedom via conventional investing. I don't disagree, but I also don't have a more pragmatic and attractive praxis that occurs to me at this point in my life as a means of securing good-enough autonomy that I can leverage into further post-consumer education, activity, and 'being', very potentially towards eventual divestment. I welcome any information or advice towards accelerating the expansion of my Overton window in that regard, though.