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This is exciting, please pictures when you guys finally gather

@ertyu will do!

### Midweek Checkin ###
Current MMG Project Theme: Figure out wtf to do with my life / dial in a semiERE lifestyle process that suits me

I was listening to Cal Newport Podcast Episode 227: Visions of the Deep Life a couple days ago and I think I'm having an insight into freedom-to and how to design my life better.

He talked about stress management, which means understanding your personal stress tolerance profile and designing your life around that self-knowledge. He gives four categories of stress:

• Conflict, interpersonal. Hostile work environment, etc. Most people have a low tolerance for this - we're wired to be really upset by conflict.
• Overload. If you have a high tolerance for overload, you will do well in circumstances where if you can just grind you win.
• Expectations. This is when the level of quality of what you deliver must be very high. If this kind of stress tends to focus you and you deliver, you might do well to seek this.
• Uncertainty. This is when you don't know if what you're doing will work out or not. This is probably the same thing as what we call risk tolerance around here.

Almost everyone has a low tolerance for conflict. For the other three categories, people tend to be variable in the amount of stress they can tolerate before it begins to negatively effect their lives, mood, physiology, etc. The goal is to stay below your personal stress threshold in all categories.

If you know you don't handle overload stress well, probably don't join a startup. If you buckle under high expectations, don't become a nonfiction writer (where you have to deliver a good book after being given an advance). If uncertainty scares you, I'm guessing becoming a day trader is a bad idea.

These categories made me pause and think. My career, especially the first eight years of it, was pure overload stress. The quality expectations were not very high. You were expected to get it out the door in good-enough shape and then move on to the next deliverable.

I've had very few experiences of expectation stress, where it didn't matter how long it took me as long as it was really good. I can't think of any situations like this in my life, to be honest. The closest is maybe school, where classes had grades and assignments were judged by how good they were, and I was the only one putting expectation pressure on myself. I remember doing some assignments to a way higher level of quality than was necessary, and absolutely loving it. Those are small dimly remembered examples though, not exactly conclusive data.

I suspect I have a really high threshold of expectation stress, and a relatively lower threshold of overload stress.

I think I was conditioned in an overload mode of working for a decade or so. I learned overload-survival grind tactics and habits and they became my default. I'm conditioned to feel and act overloaded even when I'm not. The mere presence of projects seems to trigger this overload state. This conditioning seems very ingrained and difficult to unlearn.

A major freedom-to motivation for me is to make things of really high quality. When I free-associate envision an ideal life for myself, it's full of really high quality things (not just tangible things) that I've made. The spirits once told me, when I was extremely overloaded and uncertain in my life, to just relax and 'Make Beautiful Art', with 'art' being very loosely understood as 'the product of devoted attention to the experience of living and creating'.

One way to frame my ERE lifestyle design is freedom-from overload (bad) stress and freedom-to expectation (good) stress, aka below threshold of negative effects. And, generally, I want the high expectations to be internally generated. Taking on the high expectations of other people sounds terrible. (But also maybe irrelevant, because my own quality expectations are unlikely to be lower than anyone else's. Yet another way to frame my relationship with w*rk is the tension between my own high quality expectations were in conflict with other people's expectations for work volume output).


# Ideas for what to do with this insight
In another episode, I forget which one, Cal mentions his principles of Slow Productivity / the Deep Life:

• Do Fewer Things
• Work at a Natural Pace
• Obsess Over Quality

One reason I'm doing some of these projects is because when I got back from Europe, I knew I needed to figure out how to generate income. I said yes to every income generation opportunity that came my way. Now, surprise surprise, I feel overloaded.

Now that I've proven to myself that it's easy to get gigs to earn money, and taken away some of that uncertainty stress, maybe the move is to say no to any further remunerative projects for other people and instead focus on doing spec projects and obsessing over quality.

This ties into the question of how to even approach personal finance math when you're semiERE with very low expenses. Here's my situation:

• I'm converging on my Target CoL of $5k/year.
• My net worth is 25xCoL. (My portfolio is 20x.)
• My ideal lifestyle involves serendipitous and incidental income generation, e.g. from random projects that just sound cool, to the fact that a lot of the stuff I want to do/build is valued by other people and I can't keep it all in my tiny house, so I'll need to sell some of it anyway.
• So I suspect I'll be able to generate approximately CoL incidentally/serendipitously on an annual basis, and not need to withdraw from my portfolio anytime soon.
• I have at least one highly efficient earning potential skillset with a medium-long half-life, that I don't need to be physically capable for. If my brain, eyes and hands still work, I can get a job earning $75-125k/yr.
• I also like the idea of living in the woods outside a mountain town in the summer and getting service type jobs and earning my annual CoL in a couple months.

Point is, I have lots of backup plans that sound tolerable in case my whole incidental income scheme doesn't pan out the way I think it will.

With that in mind, I see no reason not to aggressively seek to deload my plate and obsess over quality.

Some specific ideas off the top of my head:

• Go from one blog post a week to one a month.
• Give up on social media once and for all (alternatively: only post when I've finished something of high quality).
• Finish the PV projects and don't take on any more.
• Finish up the main project with the neighbor (that I'm currently doing 9hrs/wk for) and then tell them I'm taking the rest of the winter and spring off.

tl;dr: Have fewer projects on my plate at any given time, and obsess over the quality of whatever it is I am doing

@AH when you write about obsessing about quality, do you mean thinking about quality all the time? And if so, would it be aiming for the highest quality at all times or optimal quality as in

'in this case this will do, but in that case I need something of a higher quality'

or

'not too little, not too much'

i.e. the Goldilocks principle?

I have read opinions on this forum that when doing something, just above (or maybe just about) average seems to be optimal more often than not, the lowest and the highest quality it is better off outsource to the environment. I would tend to agree as a becoming stoic, since moderation is one of the virtues to strive for.

I am asking, because for me, sometimes I find it easy to fall into the trap of trying to make things better than they need to be, or conversely putting in the bare minimum, which are perhaps precisely the modes one would prefer to outsource.

It's a good question, which I aim to put to the practical test in my life over the next few months. Here's how I'm thinking about it for now though:

If you are optimizing variables such as cost, profit, lifespan (e.g. this thing only needs to hold together for 20 years, no need to build it out of concrete and steel), opportunity cost, etc, you can say there's some objective amount of quality (and thus effort) that ought to be put into any given project.

Now add in the variable of Delight, specifically Delight per Unit of Quality. Everyone is going have have a different D/Q ratio for any given project. The amount of effort (quality) that is 'worth it' has increased by some amount. It's now subjective, because D/Q is subjective to that individual.

Now, due to low CoL and ERE praxis, turn the gain down on the variables of profit and opportunity cost (without completely switching them off). Delight is a higher valued variable than profit and opportunity cost. The amount of effort that is 'worth it' has increased even more (and is even more subjective because it takes into account questions like "how FI is this person?").

Now, add in the variable, or introduce a new equation, I'm not sure, that takes into account that person's unique stress tolerance threshold per category. This introduces a ceiling to the amount of effort. Stay below the Overload threshold, and stay below the Expectations threshold. If someone has a low Overload tolerance but a high Expectations tolerance, their lifeprocess design should weight Quality relative to Volume. If vice versa, they should weight Volume over Quality.

The 'right' amount of effort to put into the pursuit of quality has now been super customized. Of course, the only way to do this (for me) is to hold this loose model in my head while I experiment with different lifestyle processes. I'm not actually going to put it into a spreadsheet and attempt to quantify it.


...


Or am I?

You are talking about how one would optimize stress levels by adjusting what they focus on given, let's call them, personality differences. My struggle has always been about what I actually want (to choose) to work on. Any thoughts on that (i.e. not how you optimize for stress, but what projects you work on)? Surely, it's not just the organization of the work (a startup, large corporation, contracting, etc), but it's also your values (e.g. saving the environment) that come into play.

In your case, maybe you focus on what skill you feel like developing on the moment, or what opportunity presents itself?

AxelHeyst wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 21, 2022 10:46 am

I learned overload-survival grind tactics and habits and they became my default. I'm conditioned to feel and act overloaded even when I'm not. The mere presence of projects seems to trigger this overload state. This conditioning seems very ingrained and difficult to unlearn.

This stood out to me. Lately, I'd been wondering why after about a year of not-even-that-hard work, I am feeling the beginning of burnout again. It makes perfect sense that the above is exactly what's happening. High-stress work situations generated stress, body associated the presence of stress alongside other strategies for coping with having a j*b (keeping w the spelling ), therefore by now generating the state of stress is a conditioned response to w*rking because that's what lizard brain thinks having a job takes. So the mere presence of a j*b leads to these states emerging, regardless of whether they're necessary -- they were, after all, necessary last time

@ertyu yes! I think this conditioning is huge. I don't really know how to fix/heal/undo it, short of avoiding all responsibility, but knowing it's a thing is a good step.

Crusader wrote: ↑

Thu Dec 22, 2022 12:58 am

You are talking about how one would optimize stress levels by adjusting what they focus on given, let's call them, personality differences. My struggle has always been about what I actually want (to choose) to work on. Any thoughts on that (i.e. not how you optimize for stress, but what projects you work on)? Surely, it's not just the organization of the work (a startup, large corporation, contracting, etc), but it's also your values (e.g. saving the environment) that come into play.

In your case, maybe you focus on what skill you feel like developing on the moment, or what opportunity presents itself?

Here is the short answer :

https://tylerjdisney.com/manifesto

It's worth noting that that manifesto is a) version 6 and b) due for an update. I began drafting yearly manifestos in 2015, I think.

Point is, the question of what to spend my time on is a question that I've long felt is worth however much time and effort it takes, up to and including "an insane amount". There is no other question. In a sense, the reason I exist is to come up with and test increasingly refined answers to that question.

One reason that I 'speedran the ERE curriculum', for example, is because learning postconsumer praxis fit so perfectly in my 'what to do with my life' system of questions that it justified spending the same amount of effort on it that you would spend on your Life's Work. Because in early 2020, I literally saw internalizing postconsumer praxis as the clear and obvious next Project (or Area of Focus, really, to put it in GTD terms) for my Life's Work.

(To expand just a little further: I saw that my Life's Work, aka the web of Projects I really wanted to work on, was necessarily outside of Plato's Cave, and that for many years I had been trying to figure out how to begin those Surface projects while still milling around near the fire projector. I knew that I had to drop my visions of Surface live and actually put in the work to get to the Surface/exit the cave first before I could make any real progress on them. This narrative of purpose fueled the k's of hours I've spent here on the forum and doing things like eating my own body weight in lentils. j/k. (???))

At this point, I've spent so much time and effort in the pursuit of answering What do I Want to Do With my Life that my day to day and month to month planning decisions are almost purely intuitively aligned. It's not like I have to go re-read v6 of my personal manifesto. The effort of writing the manifesto in a clear way was part of my process of internalizing my high-level goals, aims, values, identity, etc. It is important, I think, to check in on all points of that hierarchy in the diagram on some regular basis. This is to make sure I haven't strayed from my values, or forgotten some lesson I learned and documented years ago, for example.

AxelHeyst wrote: ↑

Thu Dec 22, 2022 12:15 pm

@ertyu yes! I think this conditioning is huge. I don't really know how to fix/heal/undo it, short of avoiding all responsibility, but knowing it's a thing is a good step.

like you would heal any other conditioning, i assume:

1. decide how you want to be instead
2. consciously practice this
2a. at first you will suck
2b. then hopefully suck less until
3. new mind state while working (hopefully)

I think it's a bit of the ADHD as well; confronting a project is inherently stressful because in the absence of executive function the only thing we've got is terror and brute force -- or terror and procrastination / kneejerk escapism

even if you have a conscious system you execute (eg gtd), the cognitive load of any one task is still magnitudes larger

### I took the new bike for a shakedown cruise
On Monday I rode the new bike (mF's Long Haul Trucker) into town, to my BFF's place. It's 28.2 miles. From Ft Dirtbag it's a 1,000ft climb in 3.5miles, then down 2,200ft over the rest. I made it in three hours. At least half of it is dirt road, but I have a lot of choice whether to take the dirt or pop over to the highway most of the way.



I helped assemble a bed/desk thing for his daughter that day. Tuesday we installed a new sub in his Leaf. His crimper tool wasn't working for some reason so I inline soldered the speaker signal connections. Today I rode back up into a headwind. Took six hours and I was pretty physically done by the end. Knees a little twingy, bum quite sore, quads smoked. By the end I was getting mild pain nausea. mmmm. But! My body is FAR from wrecked, like it was when I walked. I just need to break it in to long rides.

I am really, really psyched about spending a lot more time on that bike. Getting to town and back is cool, but I see long wanders around the desert and up the east side in my near future. I was really impressed with how well it handled the weight. It's a monster if you try to pick it up loaded, but it pedals way lighter than I thought it'd feel. There was some mildly techy descents that it had no problem with. It climbed technical terrain as well as can be expected, although it's geared for road climbing, not mountain. I'll sort that eventually with a 1x11 at some point.

Also, at least on the terrain I covered in the past few days, a true fatbike is not necessary. There were only a couple places where a fattie would have been a significantly better option... so I just walked it then, no big deal. The 2.3"'ers handled everything up to deep dry sand very well - and, presumably, handled everything else (97+%) better than 4"+ tires would have. Until I find myself in consistently deep sandy terrain, I'm happy with the LHT.

### semiERE money revelations
A week or so ago, kicked off by uncovering BSoG's post from 2019, there was a text discussion in our Signal group (the same one JnG mentioned in his journal). I had some epiphanies.

Some records of my thought process. Skippable:

• I'm not at the moment pursuing an accumulate>FI strategy. I'm figuring out some sort of semiERE path. But I was using a lot of accumulate>FI thinking and metrics. I don't think my mindset was really in a semiERE place. I was basically still doing accumulate>FI, just in the most terrible way possible. I thought I needed to be making money all the time.
• To cut myself some slack: this came from the fact that by the time I'd returned from Europe in September, I hadn't earned money in over a year. I needed to make some money, sometime. And I'd only ever made money as a salaryman. So it felt urgent to me to prove to myself that I can in fact earn money outside of the normal formal economy.
• I immediately found myself awash in paid work. None of it very efficient, but it was well in excess of my CoL, and it was all in pretty good alignment with my WoG. So my "I wonder if I can earn any money without a W-2?" stress was immediately relieved. Sweet!
• Except I took on too much. I've four projects to juggle, three to four clients, competing deadlines, on top of my own projects. So my own projects slowed to a crawl and got stuck in between the cracks. And I dropped a fair amount of other stuff. Not good! By last week, I'd consciously realized I was overloaded and needed to adjust something.
• This was my mental space as I read BSoG's post and had that conversation with my MMG (Many thanks to WRC, JnG, Crusader, and mooretrees who were in on that).

These are my personal insights.
1. At the moment I don’t believe in the possibility of long term financial security over my lifetime. Medium term is about the longest planning horizon that makes sense to me, three to ten years. Beyond that, my confidence that just because I have some multiple of CoL saved means I’ve got financial security out beyond 10, 15, 40 years, doesn't add up to me. Hence, I don't believe in making a life-energy opportunity cost sacrifice now to reach some number that I think will mean I won't ever run out of money... because I don't believe such a number exists. Therefore, FI as traditionally understood is not a goal of my WoG, although it's possible it will be an effect.
2. If accumulate to FI is not a goal, then it is a mistake to use metrics and heuristics from FIRE mechanics without understanding them very well.
3. Finances ought to be integrated and aligned with my WoG, not bolted on (credit to c_L for making this insight explicit). My money system ought to support and enable me to live my interesting Renaissance life, and my Renaissance approach ought to keep my money system healthy.

This is a draft of a FU-centric asset stewardship system, as opposed to an FI-centric one:

(Current NW is 20-30xCoL. Also, the vehicles I've indicated for various tiers might not make sense. I have studying to do.)

Tier 1 is where money enters and exits the system. From there, money floats up as high limits are exceeded, and pulls down as low limits are hit. When there’s not enough money to pull down, that triggers the pursuit of efficient remuneration to refill the buffer. The idea is to build a system with heuristics so I don't have to constantly hold the big picture in my head. Follow the heuristics, the asset management plan, and do a high level strategic think about it every three months or so. Otherwise, live life.

I guess I’m attempting to design my system such that FI is more of a potential, incidental yield of the operation of my system, and not some half-thought-through, inefficiently pursued thing. I ought either to pursue FI aggressively and efficiently (e.g. get a real job and accumulate quickly with a 85%SR), and then switch to Renaissance lifestyle, or I ought to pursue Renaissance lifestyle aggressively and efficiently and let the FU stash approach FI as a result of system momentum. I choose the latter.

I do see the value in being FI, and so I’m not going to avoid it. I see that there are qualitative lifestyle differences when money is considered to be completely solved. For now, I see the slight burn of needing to make money as a positive side effect of not being FI yet. It will encourage me to learn some set of skills that I don’t yet have, that I think would make me a more rounded Renaissance person, before I flip over to full FI status.

This is still not fully baked. Obviously, probably.

So, okay, cool, whatever, I've got some heuristics and a table, how does that change how I run my life?

Well the main thing is I don't need to work as much as I am. There's literally no point. I'm actually really flush on FU. So I'm going to finish my current projects, drop the regular handyman gig, and devote attention to my personal projects - getting Ft Dirtbag squared away is the big one. Also, riding the LHT out into the desert for days or weeks at a time. And my writing projects. And learning to make beer, or something. I'll drop back into my own stuff for at least several months, and most likely until my PCT walk starts. And I'll reevaluate when I return in August or September.

Before getting into the TIPS and iBonds game, note the tax consequences. TIPS are best kept in tax-deferred accounts and iBonds in taxable accounts.

LOL'd at FU-centric. I like that idea haha.

AxelHeyst wrote: ↑

Thu Dec 29, 2022 1:31 am

[*]I'm not at the moment pursuing an accumulate>FI strategy. I'm figuring out some sort of semiERE path. But I was using a lot of accumulate>FI thinking and metrics. I don't think my mindset was really in a semiERE place. I was basically still doing accumulate>FI, just in the most terrible way possible. I thought I needed to be making money all the time.
[*]To cut myself some slack: this came from the fact that by the time I'd returned from Europe in September, I hadn't earned money in over a year. I needed to make some money, sometime. And I'd only ever made money as a salaryman. So it felt urgent to me to prove to myself that I can in fact earn money outside of the normal formal economy.

I've found a lot of value in planning out a withdrawal strategy over the last few months. It is a little challenging because projecting more than a couple years into the future presents a lot of unknown variables. Nonetheless, to @Jacob's point, it requires a more careful examination of where you hold certain investments and how you might access those in the future.

In the case of SemiERE, it may represent a particular robust tactic when paired with periods of low/no income. For example, what is your approach to Roth IRA conversions? How could this be integrated with other plans and goals like extended travel through Europe or trekking across the Sierras and the Cascades? How do ACA subsidies affect those options?

These are the kinds of questions that may lead to a more tightly coupled financial strategy and WOG.

@jacob thank you for the heads up on that.

@wrc: The idea for now is to not withdraw/spend from Tier 4 at all until maybe 10-20 years, if and when it makes sense to do so. However, I just read your post about your Roth conversion strategy, which I'm now going to be looking into. I had the idea that you had to withdraw from the Roth after 5 years, not sure why.

At any rate, your post which I misunderstood at first made me realize there's something I didn't explain very well. I think there is a decent chance that the activities I'm intrinsically interested in doing in the next 3-8 years will begin to generate passive(ish) income and eventually I'll have an inflow in excess of my cost of living. This is actually maybe a big point that I didn't mention above, that helps this make more sense:

One of the reasons I'm deciding to pull back from these workman quadrant gigs is because a) they're distracting me from my Renaissance man stuff and b) I believe that at least a couple of my WoG nodes will throw off roughly 1xCoL income in 3-8 years, making the workingman stuff a non-holistic opportunity cost. Add on the fact that c) I have 5 or so years of living expenses in Tiers 1-3 means working any more than I'd like at the moment is stupid.

So in, say, five years, I'll quite possibly have a near-FI level portfolio, an income flow from projects that approximately matches CoL, skills and experience at generating income from workingman quadrant, and still have efficient earning potential from salaryman quadrant skill that I likely will have done some work here and there for old colleagues. And I'll have been spending most of my time in the Renaissance man quadrant, making my WoG more and more well designed every year, and living a version of my life that I've been stoked on for decades.

AxelHeyst wrote: ↑

Thu Dec 29, 2022 1:04 pm

@wrc: The idea for now is to not withdraw/spend from Tier 4 at all until maybe 10-20 years, if and when it makes sense to do so. However, I just read your post about your Roth conversion strategy, which I'm now going to be looking into. I had the idea that you had to withdraw from the Roth after 5 years, not sure why.

At any rate, your post which I misunderstood at first made me realize there's something I didn't explain very well. I think there is a decent chance that the activities I'm intrinsically interested in doing in the next 3-8 years will begin to generate passive(ish) income and eventually I'll have an inflow in excess of my cost of living. This is actually maybe a big point that I didn't mention above, that helps this make more sense:

You may have figured this out by now, but conducting a roth conversion doesn't mean you have to move that money from Tier 4. It just means that you are limiting your future tax liability while creating a little more financial flexibility. The fact that you may be earning passive income (or even regular income) in the future makes an even stronger case to complete a conversion during low/no income years. This could equate to a significant return depending on your future tax bracket.

Perhaps one dimension you can add to your graphic above (or at least your internal model) is whether those investments are in pre or post tax accounts. I also consider whether those are tax advantaged in my personal model/spreadsheet. So, I have three general categories - Pre-tax/tax advantaged (i.e. 401k), Post-tax/tax advantaged (i.e. Roth IRA), and Post-tax/non-tax advantaged (brokerage, savings, cds, etc..).

Jacob has referred to post tax accounts as "good money" in the past. It is easy for people in the FIRE sphere to look at a large NW, but fail to account for taxes and early withdrawal penalties.

One question I like to ask myself periodically is if I needed to make a large capital purchase (land, house, tiny house, skoolie, etc...) how would/could I pay for that? How much flexibility do I have with my current portfolio and how would that affect assumptions moving forward.

This is great stuff wrc, thank you. I'll be folding this all into my approach and report back.

I'm super curious what thoughts you have on doing the PCT from an ERE approach. Certainly walking and camping are mostly free. I have thought about doing the PCT, and have considered the generally heavy reliance on packaged convenience foods, town meals/beds a reason to increase the normal spending budget for that year.

I came across an second hand account of someone who walked the PCT spending about $2,000 for the whole trail a few years ago. I can imagine someone could save a lot by committing to camping only (no hotels/hostels) and keeping town food (restaurants) to a minimum. I've also wondered how far a person could get by buying whole foods instead of the processed stuff I see so many hikers rely on. Food weight and satisfaction seems to be a big consideration.

Heh, me too. I haven't seriously begun planning for it yet. My thoughts so far parallel yours. I suspect that a lot of the typical expense comes from the hotels, restaurants, and town b33rs, but what percentage of total cost that is I don't know.

Since I'm not doing the whole trail, pace is not of primary concern for me. I can take my time. So I'll probably just use the pack I already have, which is stupid heavy by ultralight standards, but I won't need to be averaging 16mi/day including zero days.

I'll be getting a lighter tent or tarp+bivvy setup, since my current tent is just too heavy. I'll also use the new shelter for my bike trips, so it'll just be another node in my shelter system.

I might be able to get away with the quilt I have... but I might need a warmer one for the High Sierra in June.

I'll need a couple more pairs of shoes, probably.

Without having even cracked a spreadsheet, I guess I'll need to spend no more than $500 for gear, assuming I don't wait until the last minute to start looking.

Food is the biggie, then. One of the first things i'm going to look into is dehydrating my own meals ahead of time and getting into a routine of making X meals per day starting in January, or maybe doing a big cook every Sunday, so I've got the bulk of my calories pre-made ahead of time. Then, it's what might make sense to bring in terms of ingredients - e.g. is it stupid to pack the ingredients for the rye pancakes I've been eating recently?

I'd love to hear anyone's input on this (Jimmy where you at ) and I'll be posting updates as I go.

Part of it depends on what your definition of healthy is. Generally, fruits and vegetables are not practicable in large quantities on the trail because they are not calorically dense and hence very heavy if you are going to bring any sufficient quantities fresh. Dehydration is possible of course, but again, you'll want to be maximizing the quality and quantity of food (both in volume and energy density) you are bringing and eating because after 10 days or so you will be operating in an energy deficit.

Packing your own food offers a lot more options for healthier eating than trying to resupply along the way in towns without grocery stores, with convenience stores as the only option. But packing your own food will require shipping it, which will make the costs more or less equal out from what I've gathered. I think @Jimmy wrote about this more in his journal.

It is possible to buy dehydrated lentils, beans etc in bulk at reasonable prices. Tasty too. I've bought 15 plus pounds of each before for I think somewhere around $3/lb. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some places close to you that make dehydrated goods where you could pick up a bulk shipment.

Andrew Skurka has a ton of meals, snacks and recipes on his blog if you are looking for ideas. https://andrewskurka.com/58-recommended ... ckpacking/

As you mentioned, I see gear, hotels, restaurants and alcohol as the only things that make for an expensive trek. Otherwise it's just walking, camping and eating a little more food than normal. And for most of it, not a store to be seen. Hard to beat that!

ETA: Also, in my experience, your taste buds and cravings change quite a bit after a few days out and about. There are things I eat in civilized locales, that I will not eat when out and about for multiple days. I have hopefully finally learned this lesson after returning home too many times with certain foods untouched. I guess to say make sure you REALLY like the foods if you prepare them in bulk ahead of time.

AxelHeyst wrote: ↑

Fri Dec 30, 2022 5:30 pm

Food is the biggie, then. One of the first things i'm going to look into is dehydrating my own meals ahead of time and getting into a routine of making X meals per day starting in January, or maybe doing a big cook every Sunday, so I've got the bulk of my calories pre-made ahead of time. Then, it's what might make sense to bring in terms of ingredients - e.g. is it stupid to pack the ingredients for the rye pancakes I've been eating recently?

I recall one guy on the PCT who dehydrated all his own meals. His food looked and smelled really good. One evening I remember him eating this amazing looking Jambalaya among a group of random hikers who were all eating freeze dried backpacker meals. That would probably be the most ERE compatible IMO, but might use quite a bit of plastic. My friend and I bought a bunch of dehydrated vegetables and brought bouillon cubes to make different kinds of soups most nights (we were only scheduling 3 weeks). We also had a few backpacker meals to switch things up, and oatmeal and granola with dried milk for breakfast.

I think the stops in towns/bars/hotels/stores are much more common on the AT. It is more densely populated and passes through civilization more frequently. The PCT is more remote and I think it takes a bit more effort to actually get into town.

I think the hardest thing to figure out is your own caloric needs and eating/hiking/resting preferences for a long-distance trek. I always encourage people who are thinking about tackling the AT or PCT to try out a week long trek first. It will teach you a lot about your gear, eating habits, and what kind of weight you should shed. I hadn't backpacked more than 3-4 nights before attempting the OR section of the PCT. I ended up bringing way more food on my first leg of the trip and ditched a bunch in a hikers box.

I'm assuming Jiimmy is somewhere deep in a Central American forest right now, but you might be able to glean some insights from his journal. I did my best to pick his brain along the way about trekking tactics:

viewtopic.php?p=249945#p249945

Everyone I know who thru-hiked the AT or PCT described it as a life-changing experience. In terms of bang for the buck, it is probably hard to beat.

I've never understood the whole 16-20 miles days on the PCT. Why go that fast just to finish? Maybe that's just me. Of course the longest trail I've done was about 250 miles and that was over 25 years ago so I am not the one to listen to. I just wanted to point out that dehydrating an entire PCT worth of food is a massive undertaking. Even doing seven days worth of food for a recent family of five backpacking trip took me three full days of cooking and dehydrating to pull off. And I do mean like, cooking for five, six hours a day. It's probably still what I'd do if we ever did do something longer, but to dehydrate that much is going to take... a while. Also, FWIW I like this guy's recipes: https://www.backpackingchef.com/backpac ... cipes.html