Early Retirement Extreme Forums

ty @crusader!

@mF yeah I haven't quit figured out where the line between taking care of my needs and being an insufferable prick are with this. I think it's mostly just, anything anyone asks me that any reasonable person would expect to be compensated for in one way or another. Like if I'm swinging by for a few days, hell yeah lets stack some wood and turn wrenches and build a workbench and whatever. But if it's like hey, are you interested in helping me design and install a PV system in my tinyhouse?... then despite that sounding really cool and something that, in the future, I'm almost certain to say yes to as long as the logistics lines up... it's best for this phase of my self development to pass on it.

That makes a ton of sense, especially after more carefully reading your linked blog post. Your list of projects is inspiring either way.

Project NOPE - I love it! I'm stealing that concept.

AxelHeyst wrote: ↑

Wed Mar 22, 2023 11:04 am

There's lots and lots to that, obviously. I'm just going to mention a small experiment I'm running as part of my overall self regard cultivation focus: keeping a very tidy space.

It occurred to me that a messy, or even just averagely kept up, physical environment, could be acting as a signal to myself that all I deserve / am worth is a messy or average space. The flip of that is, if I intentionally raise my standard of picking up after myself and keeping things shipshape, that can serve as a signal that I deserve/am worth a tidier and higher quality space. It also might bleed into other areas of my life positively - I can imagine many positive incidental yields from a highly looked after environment. So I'm going to do this and see if there are any discernable effects.

(Similar dynamics with personal hygiene, beard trimming, clothing...)

If there's something to this, it makes me wonder what other old habits I have that are 'fine', but subtly contributing to a non ideal internal state.

I think there's also another flip side in here in that's also a reflection of the fun argument @Ego has been having elsewhere on the forum about apartment size and furniture size; which is that high standards are also in some sense an infinite trap (in the sense of in the sense of an unending resource sink). In this game / trap, now X% of your resources (time, money, attention, etc) are constantly tied up to keeping up some certain standard, and you start suffering psychologically if that standard is not met (and maybe doubly so if you find it a failure of self for not meeting the standard). The standards also tend to be degree-of-freedom limiting, which can be good up to a point but also detrimental if set too far in the same direction. Eventually these can add up to spending many hours a day just in service of maintenance of the heightened standard.

Tl;dr its probably net beneficial to spend 20 mins a day or whatever to keep your room decently clean, but it definitely hurts you to have mysophobia. Lifting weights and exercising is good but chasing a specific aesthetic can net you a 20+hrs/week just in maintenance, and stuff like that. Overall I think standards are good, as long as the price to keep them is relatively low.

@Slevin - AKA the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diderot_effect

jacob wrote: ↑

Mon Apr 03, 2023 4:56 pm

@Slevin - AKA the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diderot_effect

Yes, I've never seen it ripped away from the monetary context before, but totally a form of Generalized Diderot.

AxelHeyst wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 13, 2023 8:55 pm

I'm also reading Henry Miller right now, Tropic of Capricorn. Good lord, no wonder they banned the thing for so long.

My nym is an homage to Henry Miller. Well, at this juncture more habit than homage. After Tropic of Cancer move on to Celine for the flip side of the nihilistic coin.

@slevin and jacob - true, good points. I sense that on the sigmoid curve of tidyness I have lived most of my life at the mid-lower end of the linear portion of the curve, and I'm aiming to slide up along the linear portion to above mid. Keeping an eye out for the diminishing returns curve is wise advice. I'm probably constitutionally incapable of developing mysophobia.

One aspect of this is that a compelling built environment is a central theme of my wog/life's work. I'm more than averagely concerned about the function and the form of human crafted spaces, having spent over a decade concerned with the systems that make them habitable and now feeling free to put attention to aesthetic/form/subtler design considerations. But what's the point of designing and crafting a nice space if it's cluttered?

The nice thing about living in a 68sf house and a 114sf studio is that keeping it picked up and clean requires an extra 3.5minutes a day, if that. It's mostly about setting things back down where they go, instead of where they don't go, which after the initial investment in defining where they go is zero marginal time cost.

@henry thanks for the rec! I had to put capricorn down for a bit...

I've aborted my april internet fast, clearly. The internet started working here and a lot of internetting cropped up necessary to finish my neighbors PV project, which I might be done with by end of next week !!!!! so Im calling an audible and using the internet while ive got it. It started working high speed again, randomly.

Still, the last few weeks of internet isolation have left an attentional residue, meaning, I'm less drawn to the internet and I feel better able to focus. I DO feel my mind slipping back to the lure of random rewards for checking email forum etc, so I'll be revisiting this when my wog can handle internet resstriction easier. (Another way to think of it: this experience encourages me to continue to develop my wog to rely less and less on internet access, a state I feel is within reach for me.)

I'm 98% going to bail on the PCT and do something else. Conditions up there in June/July look above my head/stoke level, and the logistics of LASHing another section are unappealing. I will seriously consider thru-ing the whole thing next year.

My plan B almost certainly will involve bikepacking, and it might involve my climbing gear. A climbing friend in the Bay offered to have me crash with him in May/June and to train/coach me, which is going to be difficult to come up with a reason not to go for. From there the loose plan is a wedding in norcal in june and then ??? and then visit some friends in Bend in early august, and then return to Ft Dirtbag by end of august to get everything prepped for EREfest.

A forumite is going to crash with me for all of September! (Not naming because not sure if fits their opsec, feel free to chime in if it does). I'm extremely excited about it, not only because I've been wanting to meet this person irl for a long time but also it's a wonderful first pass at the eventual dream of having ft dirtbag set up to accomodate autonomous ere folk. The overlap with EREfest is another layer of perfect timing.

My obligations here are to finish the PV system, attempt to fix my family's propane generator, and get whatever kit I need for the summer sorted. Then I can go. I might hit the road by early May depending on how quick I get these things wrapped up.

.I did my taxes without shelling out 70$ to turbotax for the first time this year. Feels good.
.Taking another crack at analog GTD as these projects are wrapping up. Also part of building a wog that runs internalized enough that it doesn't require sophisticated software to manage...
.I recorded a book review episode of jmg's The Long Descent. Oh man. I'm excited for this one. Should be ready to go by next week.

Neighbor's PV project is in the final stages. We swapped the new batteries in on Friday and I'm now burying the conductors between the panels and battery room (160ft). Then it's just wiring up the components and getting everything properly conduit'ed etc. It's looking like it'll be done sometime next week.

Offgrid PV design and/or install is now something I feel confident saying is above the 'can get paid for' line. I'm probably in the 1-2k hrs range of study and experience, and this will be my 4th design build. I've been spotting people explicitly offering to pay money for design help on their offgrid systems on forums and can see the outlines of a path to an online business of system design focused at DIYers who don't want to spend the 100's of hours required to scrape together the Knowledge themselves. I'm putting this idea in my pocket for now.

This past weekend and next I'm spending at my chosen-brother's in town, helping him build a sun fence on the west facade of his house that gets blasted by the setting Mojave sun. This doesn't violate project NOPE because a) the scale of two weekends is under the cutoff and b) he's my chosen brother. Whatever weird self indulgent things I'm doing at the time take back seat to our relationship, and our relationship is glued together by Projects.

The neighbor I was doing handyman stuff for over the winter asked me to come back over and help him with something. I told him no. It wasn't difficult and it felt like winning to say no. Personal growth!

I'm feeling discouraged about the podcast. I keep making rookie mistake after rookie mistake, I throw out 80% of what I make because it sucks for any variety or combination of reasons, and the quality of what I do put out keeps me up at night sometimes. I get that this is just the learning curve, but I'm reconsidering if that's a particular sigmoid curve that I'm willing and committed to climbing. I *could* get good at this, but I'm not sure if I *want* to get good at it. I think the way I'm approaching it, even if I were more competent, isn't the best fit for my WoG. This is primarily because the time required to make good stuff has an opportunity cost and I think there are other more homeotelitic things I can spend my time on.

Recording on multiple devices, transferring large files to my main computer, and then editing on a computer that can handle AV editing, takes a lot and requires a technical infrastructure that I don't otherwise need. Pushing to both podcast platforms and video doubles ship time and potential for errors. I have one or two episodes in the hopper that I want to ship before I go, and then I'm considering pausing it/putting it on the shelf for a time to reconsider my options.

"Am I doing this because I want to, or because I think I should want to?" is my current theme. I'm learning to question all of the things in my life, even the things that I have identified really strongly with for decades.

AxelHeyst wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 19, 2023 11:39 am

I'm feeling discouraged about the podcast. I keep making rookie mistake after rookie mistake, I throw out 80% of what I make because it sucks for any variety or combination of reasons, and the quality of what I do put out keeps me up at night sometimes.

I think you should ditch podcasting it if it's not brining you joy. It does sound like a ton of work. But as someone who recently listened to several episodes in a row, I just want to let you know that it's a great podcast. You are passionate, you ask good questions, you cover interesting topics, and you get good guests. That makes for a good show in my book. It sounds like your headaches are around the production side, but I thought I'd just give my n=1 opinion that you can't notice any hiccups (besides the early audio volume problem) on the listener side.

I really appreciate that you took the effort to do it at all. You provided some really interesting audio content that would never have existed otherwise. You provided random EREers like me with hours of entertainment and you sparked interesting ideas in your listeners that could ripple out in who knows what kind of ways. That's pretty cool, even if it ends here!

I definitely empathize with the stress of feeling like your creative output is not good enough. It seems that's just part of the game and it never goes away even at the highest levels.

+1 to everything Smashter said.

Would it be better to simplify and just do audio instead of both audio and video? I imagine the misophonia doesn't help matters at all when you're working on production but the production quality of the recent podcasts has been excellent. I imagine it's similar to building anything else. Maybe there's a bolt that's off in a PV array, or in my case a very slight gouge in the wood when making a blanket chest. It's glaringly obvious to you, but nobody else sees it. It's very hard to detach from that.

Also, another 1+ to what both Smashter and theanimal said. I've listened to almost all of the podcasts, some three times at least. I am not a big podcast listener as I don't feel like I have a lot of time to listen so it's got to be worth it for me. Your podcasts are worth it for sure. However, I do get that this might not be the way you want to spend your time so absolutely no pressure from me to continue.

Great job on project NOPE!

Hitting the road might happen soon, that's freakin' exciting! Can't wait to hear about your future adventures.

i think you should not ditch podcasting because the serendipity benefits of a mildly successful podcast way outweigh any disadvantages of "makes me have to keep extra equipment"

instead consider

- changing how you podcast + think about ways to improve the efficiency of the process
- changing the perfectionist standard you have in your head about what the product should look like.

I think you have excellent taste. The Gap by Ira Glass: https://vimeo.com/85040589

Thank you for the encouragement all. I won't throw in the towel. It occurred to me that part of my struggle might be due to latent monomathic/specialist thinking patterns. The idea that you've got to be good at one thing, and you'd better get good at it fast, contributes to a sort of panicked omgf I need to be good at this *now* feeling.

Another thing that is particularly frustrating about podcasting is that I think I'm competent in 2-4 of the skillsets of production (writing, speaking), and bad at 1-3 others (recording clean audio, editing, shooting good video, lighting, figuring out a audio-visual software-hardware ecosystem that reliably works). Seeing the potential of my competencies get trashed by my incompetencies is painful.

@theanimal going back to audio only is a solid idea. Iºm noodling on how to constrain the production side in some way to make it simpler so that I have fewer variables to goof. Once I feel comfortable with the content I can create at that level of simplicity I can think about adding from there.

Since Iºm going to be traveling for the next few months (starting in a few weeks), one simplification is a phone-only system. Record, edit, and post all from the phone, since Iºm not going to bring my computer. One way or another, I plan on experimenting with different approaches to find a method that is lower friction.

My misaphonia isnºt actually a problem, as long as I remember not to eat peanut butter before recording. The feedback of that is so fast and the consequences so high (I throw the whole track out) that it's one of the first things I figured out how not to screw up.
a
@ertyu solid point about serendipity. Two guests and @sodatrain plus a bunch of other random people who've reached out in one way or another happened because of it. The positives outweigh the negatives for sure... and yes I probably just need to chill and learn to put in the reps over time, do my best to approach it with a sense of play and curiosity.

How I'm Different from this time last year / Lessons Learned

### Solitude
I like solitude. I already knew that I enjoy solitude. But I didn't know how much solitude I want.

I assumed I'd get lonely sometime over the winter. I wanted to learn at what point I got lonely, and so I chose not to try to solve the problem in advance. It never became a problem! I never got lonely. This is interesting.

It occurs to me that many of my struggles in life might be due to the mismatch between desired solitude and actual solitude. Getting drops of the stuff when my soul craves buckets of it.

It's not that I can 'handle' a lot of solitude without going nutso. It's that I LOVE, I crave an amount of solitude that appears to be significantly far from population average. My lower bound of acceptable solitude is probably much higher than the average *upper* bound of acceptable solitude.

It's also possible that this is just a phase, that solitude is exactly what I needed this season and my optimum amount is coming back down. I'll keep an eye on this.

### Parallel projecting
I don't like doing one project for more than a few hours a day. Almost all of my projects are novel to me, meaning that I'm either designing them or learning them as I go. I can absorb a couple hours of progress a day, but any more than that and my mind feels like it's being forced too hard to keep up. I need another sleep cycle to process what I've learned, to ponder what reality has told me that day, before I'm ready to make more progress on that project.

But I can do this with many projects per day. Most days I
Work on my book for 1-2 hours
Spend an hour writing for a blog post or podcast episode
Spend 1-3 hours on projects around Ft Dirtbag
Spend 1-2 hours designing / thinking about Ft. Dirtbag projects
Spend 1-3 hours on someone else's project (the well PV system, neighbor's PV system, etc)

Which comes out to something like eight hours of project work a day. It doesn't feel anything like my previous experience of work aka a real job: it feels like I just wander around doing things that interest me all day, taking breaks when I get hungry or tired or when it's time to work out.

I also read about two hours a day. I've always been a parallel reader. At any given time I'm reading half a dozen books, and I just pick up whatever book I feel like reading in the moment. If I get bored with it, I put it down and pick up another book. It often takes me weeks to finish any particular book, but I finish about one book per week.

This experience running parallel projects is important for me to understand and to build into my lifestyle. It implies that any given project will take me a while to complete, but that there is a rolling churn of project completion happening.

I actually think this explains some of my stress over the winter. I took on projects for other people and I had a sense of how long these projects "should" take as if they were the only thing I was doing. But I didn't want to be only doing those projects, I also wanted to be doing all of these other projects in parallel.

My mind, I think, isn't fast enough to handle a fast single-project pace. It gets overwhelmed and, thus, stressed and unhappy. This only applies to novel projects, meaning projects where I'm learning something or designing it as I go. My brain doesn't get overwhelmed by projects I already know how to do. It gets bored and I usually find an excuse to not do or finish boring projects, although this is an area that needs further study.

### I've reduced my FOMO around earning money but not completely eliminated it, which might be fine.
I get ideas for money-making schemes (like starting an offgrid PV consulting practice) and start to feel a sense of urgency to DO IT because I could be making money!

And then I'm like, but would I do that if I didn't make money? No. And do I need to make money anytime soon? Also no. And are some of the other things I'm going to do anyways possibly going to throw off some money before I run out of FU$? Yes. Okay so chill.

I still have to go through this loop once or twice a week of talking myself down.

My FOMO also is decreasing due to

• diligent frugality practices leading to a ttmCoL of $7,000 as of this month, with ttm5K by end of year in the realm of possible. In other words I'm accumulating evidence that I can live a good life on very little, increasing my confidence every month in my estimated simple runway numbers of 5-10yrs cash and 20-30yrs total.
• Moving chunks of cash into 'safe' buckets like iBonds, CDs and HYSAs,
• And developing a plan/method around asset management.

### I solved a big fault in my WoG of overcommitting myself to other people's projects, or at least I identified and built a response to this WoG fault. I'll be keeping a very close eye on this fault over the next year.

--

It feels like I've addressed or am in the process of addressing some really important... topological issues?? ... with my WoG. Stuff that you can spot from across the room while squinting. And over the next year there are still some major clusters of activity to put attention to, but the trend is in the direction of WoG bonsai gardening rather than emergency field surgery under fire. Opportunities and frictions that reveal themselves only when I'm in a calm space and able to listen to intuition closely.

I built a thing and put white gravel on the roof of my tiny studio because it's otherwise a giant solar thermal collector.



I made a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NjXsijTMXQ

Notably, a phone-only production. Easy. Youcut for the video editing and voiceover recording (right in the editor), and Canva for the thumbnail.

AxelHeyst wrote: ↑

Tue Apr 25, 2023 2:07 pm

I like solitude. I already knew that I enjoy solitude. But I didn't know how much solitude I want.

I assumed I'd get lonely sometime over the winter. I wanted to learn at what point I got lonely, and so I chose not to try to solve the problem in advance. It never became a problem! I never got lonely. This is interesting.

It occurs to me that many of my struggles in life might be due to the mismatch between desired solitude and actual solitude. Getting drops of the stuff when my soul craves buckets of it.

In The Nature Fix, Florence Williams talks about the benefits of nature for human health and healing in degrees based on the depth of the natural environment. A view of a tree from a hospital window is better than no window at all. Time out in a park or courtyard is better than looking at a window. Time on a trail or natural area is better than time in a city park. Time in deep nature is the best of all. Multiple days is the most restorative. I suspect that multiple months or years has the ability to completely transform someone.

It seems like you have an ideal setup right now for a balance of solitude and some human contact. Whenever you need some human contact, you can connect with your parents or neighbors, but you also have the ability to do your own thing for days at a time. I've been monitoring the social network more closely near my parent's land and it seems that those loose social connections, particularly as people age or their partners pass away, is a really nice balance to the solitude.

Smashter wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 19, 2023 12:46 pm

I think you should ditch podcasting it if it's not brining you joy. It does sound like a ton of work. But as someone who recently listened to several episodes in a row, I just want to let you know that it's a great podcast. You are passionate, you ask good questions, you cover interesting topics, and you get good guests. That makes for a good show in my book. It sounds like your headaches are around the production side, but I thought I'd just give my n=1 opinion that you can't notice any hiccups (besides the early audio volume problem) on the listener side.

I really appreciate that you took the effort to do it at all. You provided some really interesting audio content that would never have existed otherwise. You provided random EREers like me with hours of entertainment and you sparked interesting ideas in your listeners that could ripple out in who knows what kind of ways. That's pretty cool, even if it ends here!

I definitely empathize with the stress of feeling like your creative output is not good enough. It seems that's just part of the game and it never goes away even at the highest levels.

I'm a bit delayed here, but I want to throw another vote behind this. I really like your podcast AH. As @Smashter said I know your frustration is around production so I can't speak its net value/the fit to your WoG, but you should know from the listener perspective it's unique, valuable, and appreciated!

I found your comments on solitude really interesting. I've noticed my desire for solitude oscillates over time, and that there are times I feel I should be more social but don't really want to, but also times where I think I want to do things but it burns me out. Seems like one of those ongoing shifting things, but it's definitely valuable to zero on in what is best for you. This dose of solitude sounds like just what you needed.