The Education of Axel Heyst

[jacob]

While I agree that the current arrangement appears to be the worst form of doing things possible, except for literally everything else we've tried to date, I don't think we lack even a *concept* of a direction to turn.

https://thesimplerway.info/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DCNI8HE?ps ... uage=en_US
https://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Future ... ext&sr=1-1
https://www.amazon.com/Ecotechnic-Futur ... ext&sr=1-1
https://www.amazon.com/Retrotopia-John- ... ext&sr=1-1
DAFS bioregionalism, degrowth, etc etc.

Are any of these concepts viable/plausible/etc? Beats me. [...]

Almost all "imagining the future"-books and talks/presentations lack the "from here to there" both strategically and tactically. The current methods of organizing, meeting, debating, and/or focusing on increasing awareness and correcting wrong information haven't made a difference. Indeed, they're effectively counterproductive in that 1) talking often substitute for "walking"(*); and related 2) talk sometimes create countertalk and counterwalk that wasn't there before by turning important action into something people who otherwise didn't do anything can now disagree about or proceed to make worse.

(*) The percentage of people talking about change while changing only a small fraction in their own lives is ... a high fraction. This comes complete with trite slogans like "if we all do a little, we can do a lot together".

The world needs more who live out the full consequences of their beliefs. I should note that this is not to pick on specific authors or talking heads. It IS to pick on their books and talks which will almost always only make a few vague/abstract and therefore entirely unactionable recommendations in the final 5% of their books and presentations.

I still don't have a good understanding of why there's such a strong tendency to leave out the practical aspect of the transition. In my case, it's been entirely nontrivial, so I'm just presuming that it's nontrivial to others as well.

[Bytore]

...
Are any of these concepts viable/plausible/etc? Beats me. Am I an evangelist for any of these particular notions? Not really. Point is, plenty of people out there have ideas ranging in the broad space between business as usual and the total end of civilization. Most of the ideas involve the dynamic of resource constraints (in particular energy availability and cheapness) creating an environment where alternatives have a chance of taking hold. Growth capitalism is perhaps impossible to beat in a phase of society that hasn't yet run up against constraints.

That is roughly speaking my high level model of the future and how I relate it to my own life. Ruggedize self and work on responses/adaptations to a world where constraints start squeezing the logic of industrial consumer capitalist society. Be light on the feet and look for opportunities to implement ideas that can make life easier or at least less shitty as people begin to grapple with the fallout of the 20th-century logistics and infrastructure not working well. Watch out for being right too early, which is approximately as useful as being wrong. In other words, even though I might *think* I know what the world in 100, 200, 400 years 'ought' to work based on my values, trying to leapfrog my own life from 2025 to 2225 logistics might be a massive mistake. Perhaps I ought to relax into 'living the transition' instead, which is maybe much more difficult a task to wrap one's head around.
...

Do you practice divination at all, Axel? I find it helpful to determine courses of action at times when I am really confused/uncertain.

Other than that, as I am sure you know, the future is hard to predict; although humans do have a capacity to imagine the future. With that said, I am gonna paraphrase John Michael Greer here with some of his remembered advice. From the comment section of his Arch Druid Report blog... He responded by saying that we needed people trying all sorts of ways to live and that some of them might stick, some might not. I recall him mentioning the Transition movement and how he did not fully agree it was the best way, but he couldn't know for sure.

I believe your response sounds pretty generally quite strong. Definitely being light on the feet.

As JMG stated many times, it might be a bunch of steps down, some higher than others. Hard to say what we each will experience in our lifetimes.

-B

[AxelHeyst]

The world needs more who live out the full consequences of their beliefs.

Just going to quote this for the purpose of highlighting it for my own contemplation.

It IS to pick on their books and talks which will almost always only make a few vague/abstract and therefore entirely unactionable recommendations in the final 5% of their books and presentations.

I still don't have a good understanding of why there's such a strong tendency to leave out the practical aspect of the transition.

The canonical form of this for me is Quinn's Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Grand Adventure. Not a single damned actionable line in the whole thing for a topic that seemed to promise it. What a let down, especially after how impactful Ishmael was to me.

...and that explains why your book was such a profound shaft of light from the heavens for me. I was looking for that level of hardcore actionable-ness for YEARS. I also recently realized that this is one explanation of why I have have a disconnect between people who are lukewarm about ERE. Not everyone was dying of thirst in a desert like I was, so it 'means' something different to them.

@bytore I don't practice divination. I don't have an issue with it, except for how easy it is to impute more meaning to the practice than one ought - and to use it as a shortcut to other, more robust methods like reading a lot, running the numbers oneself, intro/extrospection, and fucking around in order to find out. I like the idea of divination as a stylized coin toss method.

ETA: I used to struggle with analysis paralysis, being unable to move forward in times of uncertainty. I've gotten much more effective in this regard. I don't remember how - if I employed some specific technique or process to change my brain wrt to it. The result is that when I don't have enough information to settle a decision, I'm very comfortable just dropping into a more intuitive/emotional space and letting that 'module' make the call. Risk and consequence estimation plays a big role in how quickly and how much free reign I give the fuzzy process, though.

Dissensus is one of my favorite ideas I picked up from JMG and it influences a lot of my thinking. "Free em all and let Gaia sort em out" is just another way of stating a dissensus-based perspective.

[Bytore]

@bytore I don't practice divination. I don't have an issue with it, except for how easy it is to impute more meaning to the practice than one ought - and to use it as a shortcut to other, more robust methods like reading a lot, running the numbers oneself, intro/extrospection, and fucking around in order to find out. I like the idea of divination as a stylized coin toss method.

Right on, yeah I do not use divination all that often; for a multitude of reasons. I mainly use it as an additional way to potentially get some insight into whatever it is I might be inquiring into. I would definitely agree it is very wise to practice the robust methods you mentioned.

When I feel like I am doing divination properly, I get the same feeling that I have gotten when really getting into drawing portraits, riffing on my guitar, or singing. I am just starting to learn about Flow, mostly thanks to your book [loved it btw]; but perhaps that is kinda the state I have gotten into in these cases... For the record, my main divination experiences have been with Geomancy, inspiration courtesy of one of JMG's books.

ETA: I used to struggle with analysis paralysis, being unable to move forward in times of uncertainty. I've gotten much more effective in this regard. I don't remember how - if I employed some specific technique or process to change my brain wrt to it. The result is that when I don't have enough information to settle a decision, I'm very comfortable just dropping into a more intuitive/emotional space and letting that 'module' make the call. Risk and consequence estimation plays a big role in how quickly and how much free reign I give the fuzzy process, though.

Dissensus is one of my favorite ideas I picked up from JMG and it influences a lot of my thinking. "Free em all and let Gaia sort em out" is just another way of stating a dissensus-based perspective.

I am still struggling with analysis paralysis. I wonder if Bill Plotkin's books may have helped?

Thanks for the reminder about dissensus. There is something there for me to ponder on.

[7Wannabe5]

As someone put it, it's easier to imagine end of civilization than end of capitalism.

I don't see emergence post capitalism as given. Asking the question "what's after capitalism" presupposes quite a lot, mainly that there is a state of affairs after capitalism, and that there is a causal, directed nature to history*. I don't see evidence (or accurate predictions) for either so for now I'm agnostic at best.

Well, I was referring more to Capitalism than "capitalism." IOW, I agree that there is something about "capitalism" that is innate, fairly analogous to how the humans in Vonnegut's "Player Piano" almost immediately start rebuilding all the machines they destroyed in their Luddite rebellion. In fact, when I read "The Way Home" by Mark Boyle (the Moneyless Man), I was disappointed that he didn't figure out how to primitive technology a radio from just nature, so that his girlfriend could have some dancing music. And I likely have more hands-on fun-with-capitalism experience than many on this forum since I actually supported myself for many years with a small business I started from scratch that held an inventory of real goods and hired a few employees. What I mean by big C, Capitalism is the era which I believe Greenspan overshot when he tried to calculate the net-worth of the median inhabitant of Colonial era United States in "Capitalism in America", because he assigned no value to the vast Wilderness available then and now no longer available, and all the other cultural variations that basically rendered his "market basket of similar goods" retroactive spreadsheet semi-ridiculous.

I guess I think about Post-Capitalism pretty much the same way I think about Post-Feminism. I sometimes think, "It's not yet safe to be Post-Feminist." and I sometimes think "It's not yet safe to be Post-Capitalist." I also believe that Feminism is an emergent property of Traditional-> Modern human culture that is likely to collapse in lower energy situation if not pro-actively conserved. OTOH, the reasons why it is not yet safe to be Post-Feminist are somewhat different than the reasons why it is not yet safe to be Post-Capitalist, but they both have something to do with Trust and Boundaries. For example, why do you trust that you can leave your beer on the bar and your stool unoccupied, and nobody will drink your beer or occupy your stool while you go powder your nose? How is possessing a wife at Level Red different than possessing a wife at Level Turquoise? How do Boundaries and Affluence (energy and materials available in useful forms) relate to both of these questions? What can you learn about Capitalism/capitalism and Feminism/feminism by engaging in an experiment such as minimalist rough camping alone in the forest for a month with a member of the opposite sex? etc. etc.

[AxelHeyst]

Right on, yeah I do not use divination all that often; ...

Sounds like you're doing it right and geomancy does look fun. I like your description and, totally off the cuff, I suspect getting into a Flow like state might be an important ingredient to proper divinatory practice.

I've done a tiny bit of sigil magic from the book Advanced Magic for Beginners and... enjoyed it? Not the right word, but you know what I mean I bet.

I am still struggling with analysis paralysis. I wonder if Bill Plotkin's books may have helped?

I found Plotkin after recovering from analysis paralysis, so that's not what did it for me. On second thought, I'm pretty sure what it was the decade of relentless, unrealistically-fast deadlines on high-stakes engineering projects that had to be "good enough" but with a much broader margin for error and lower consequence than, say, engineering manned spacecraft fuel systems. Failing too shitty meant we'd get sued for errors and omissions. Failing too good meant we'd blow deadlines, burn all our fee, and go out of business. Somewhere in the middle was just right.

The downside is that my capacity to slow down and really enjoy the process of learning and designing a thing deeply for pure enjoyment got seriously eroded. I'm still working on re-attaining the slow stoke burn I used to get from e.g. sitting down to a nice thermodynamics problem and working it out so that only did I understand it front to back and it was a good design, but my work was all shown very cleanly and neatly down to the alignment of the staple in the upper left 3/4" of the page.

--

ETA: but in terms of decisions in the realm of people and relationships, I think what did it for me was learning to know and trust myself more. For a long time I didn't know how to know what I myself wanted in the context of other people (whole long conversation about masking behavior here), and so I'd be trying to analyze the "right" response or action to take within some social dynamic. It's much easier to decide what to do when you know yourself, you know your own desires and motivations, your own mission and values and projects, and can use that as a north star. I had no navigation system to base it on, and experienced what seemed to be "random" positive and negative responses to similar actions on my own part, which made future decision-making even more difficult.

[Jean]

@thefox
I wouldn't be gloomy about it. I don't think we can destroy much more than ourselves, we might be able to expand before it happens, and if not, i'm confident that we can teach our children enough so that they have a good time during the possible slow downfall.

[Ego]

That is roughly speaking my high level model of the future and how I relate it to my own life. Ruggedize self and work on responses/adaptations to a world where constraints start squeezing the logic of industrial consumer capitalist society. Be light on the feet and look for opportunities to implement ideas that can make life easier or at least less shitty as people begin to grapple with the fallout of the 20th-century logistics and infrastructure not working well. Watch out for being right too early,

In a world that increasingly resembles the WWE, I believe your approach above is really the only option. I would add that it may be wise to concentrate on the things that are personally actionable, while avoiding fretting about things that are beyond control. Also, escapist activities are crafted to encourage people to avoid doing what needs to be done. Notice it.

[AxelHeyst]

I would add that it may be wise to concentrate on the things that are personally actionable, while avoiding fretting about things that are beyond control.

Yep... although a certain amount of attention spent on certain of the things outside of personal control can be used to increase gratitude and present-moment focus. Nuclear war is out of my control, but I've found that a certain amount of contemplation of it boosts my sense of the preciousness of aliveness without being overwhelming. My life experience is of higher quality when I contemplate nuclear catastrophe a little bit, rather than not at all. A dab'll do ya.

Also, escapist activities are crafted to encourage people to avoid doing what needs to be done. Notice it.

I theorize a threshold of engagement beyond which escapist activities completely lose their luster, perhaps unalterably, due to the sublime rush of intense meaningfulness of... all the shit happening, once you've engaged deep enough in them. I've never successfully articulated this to anyone, based on the amount of sideye I get, so I also hypothesize an atypical association in my head having to do with 'horror' and 'sacred awe'. I think I get a dose of both when other people only get one or the other.

[AxelHeyst]

Prelude to my MMG Deep Dive this Sunday re: Actualization
This weekend I'm doing a Deep Dive with my mastermind group. My project that I selected for MMG Cycle 8 was figuring out this self-actualization business and what to do about it, specifically, in my own life. In WL terms, you might say that I've been really focused on internalizing WL7 and this project is about getting my head wrapped around WL8.

The Big Idea, from others:
From the wiki,

Since the system now meets all the lower needs and wants (shelter, food, transport, stuff) without much effort and attention, the focus switches to maximizing the person's potential as a human being on a full time basis by increasing capital in the form of skills and access.

And

"A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing".

Some top-level ideas from Maslow:

The self-actualized person is in a state of good psychological health: his basic needs are satisfied so what is it that motivates him to become such a busy and capable person? For one thing, all self-actualized people have a cause they believe in, a vocation they are devoted to. When they say, ‘my work,’ they mean their mission in life.

“One gets the feeling of beloved job, and, furthermore, of something for which the person is a ‘natural,’ something that he is suited for, something that is right for him, even something that he was born for. It is easy to sense something like pre-established harmony or, perhaps one could say, a good match like the perfect love affair or friendship, in which it seems that people belong to each other and were meant for each other. In the best instances, the person and his job fit together and belong together perfectly like a key and a lock, or perhaps resonate together like a sung note which sets into sympathetic resonance a particular string in the piano keyboard.”

“Let us think of life as a process of choices, one after another. At each point there is a progression choice and a regression choice. There may be a movement toward defense, toward safety, toward being afraid; but over on the other side, there is the growth choice. To make the growth choice instead of the fear choice a dozen times a day is to move a dozen times a day toward self-actualization. Self-actualization is an ongoing process; it means making each of the many single choices about whether to lie or be honest, whether to steal or not to steal at a particular point, and it mans to make each of these choices as a growth choice. This is movement toward self-actualization.”

My Hot Take
The most succinct phrase I'm working with is "applied self-mastery." Self-mastery for the sole purpose of self-mastery is maybe naricissistic. It's the *applied* bit that makes the concept sing for me. Self-mastery *applied* to creative self-expression via actions taken in the real world.

(I'm going to hand-wave at the being vs doing question and say that I think it's an important issue to grapple with, and that I'm not trying to imply that one must "do" rather than "be", and perhaps even a form of applied self-mastery is indeed being-based rather than doing-based, and everyone needs to work through this understanding for themselves, and I haven't really gotten there, and that's fine. And I'm not really interested in a conversation at this point about whether or not *I*, right now, ought to instead focus on being rather than doing. I'm making a deliberate and at least half-informed decision to focus on doing, while imputing no moral imperative to the choice, and also not shuttering my mind to being-ness. However, the balance of my current emphasis is deliberately on doing.)

The beauty of ERE is that we take Maslow et al's concepts of applied self-mastery and we integrate them with systems thinking, resilient strategy, etc etc and then we really have something interesting. From reading Maslow's thoughts on the self-actualizers he studied you get the sense that they're just lucky SOBs who got lucky and really like their j*bs. Without post-consumer praxis I could imagine studying self-actualizers and thinking "but dammit, how do I pull that off?"

ERE makes it pretty apparent at least how to arrive at the threshold of self-actualization: close the loops, eliminate friction/muda and heterotelicity, "solve" baseline physiological needs ~forever so you won't be distracted by "how to pay the bills" or shelter/food/etc logistics, etc.

It seems to me that it's possible to do all of that stuff ("build a WoG") and then realize that you haven't necessarily organized your WoG around your deepest values, stoke, and sources of intrinsic motivation. In other words you might have a technically well-constructed WoG, but it isn't actually resonant with who you are deep down as a unique individual. Ideally this won't happen because you'll be aligning it as you go but maybe you're so focused on the technics of self-rescue that you miss.

This is important because I think that MAGIC happens when you get aligned with your values, stoke, and sources of intrinsic motivation. There's a resonance that amplifies your life as a vessel for actualization when you get into the grooves of doing what you were made to do. I think about (what little I know of) Taoism as applied at the scale of the individual, conceptualizing my 'Way' as in the unique imprint of how energy (metaphor) 'wants' to flow through and be expressed by me, and how in a way the trick is to let go of attachment to my conscious clenching/forcing/Planning/Linear/Command and Control approach to directing my life so that I can be quiet enough to hear/sense/intuit/feel how the energy *wants* to flow through me, and let it happen, and then as my life starts to orient and reshape into the grooves of what I 'want' to be, then - that's the resonance, and as I apply effort to that Way-aligned process of applied self-mastery, things happen *and* it feels really good although not in a shallow hedonic way, I mean in a deep satisfying way.

(I suspect there's an easefulness to this, but not easiness.)

At any rate, at the abstract level, the purpose of my MMG project is to get my head wrapped around a general process/procedure of self-actualization so that I might take action and design my life to support a life of applied self-mastery. To break it down, I think applied self-mastery involves at least three pillars:

• A process of ever-increasing fidelity of self-knowledge. (Who am I? How am I wired? What are my strengths/weaknesses/preferences? What do I care about? What is my baggage and pathologies? What aspects of my'self' are just social constructs, and how cool am I with that?)
• A process of ever-increasing competence at *operating* myself in accordance with self knowledge. (How best to show up in social spaces? What actions burn me out in short order? What activities rejuvenate me? What strengths should I double down on, what weaknesses should I mitigate vs delegate around? What 'wiring'/preferences ought I strive to overcome vs. accept and run with? What's a good daily/weekly/monthly/yearly routine/tempo of life?)
• (The first two points are what I consider "self-mastery". The next point is what I consider "applied".)
• A process of endeavor ever more-precisely resonant/in alignment with self-hood. (Taking knowledge of what I'm very interested and curious in, combining with what I am or can get very good at, and matching these up with specific projects in the real world at a scale larger than just myself).

Shorthand:

• what are my gifts?
• how can I develop/cultivate/nurture my gifts?
• how do I deliver my gifts to the world?

In ERE-lingo: A WoG that is both technically well constructed as well as finely tuned for delivering the individual's gifts to the world in accordance with their Way.

Narrowing This All Down for my Deep Dive
Applied Self-Mastery is a whole thing, too broad of a topic really for a one-hour discussion. I'm going to try to guide the discussion to the topic of ever-deeper-integration of my emerging sense of vocation in my overall WoG.

I have to give some historical context:

I began my career as a mechanical design engineer for systems for "green" buildings. Don't get me started on greenwashing and Jevon's paradox etc, the point is that I was very interested and engaged with the work of making buildings suck less.

The industry was switching to Revit, a 3d building information modeling (BIM) software that allows us to model the building and systems in 3d.

I became my firm's Revit Guy. Mostly due to the sheer amount of hours plus the breadth of interesting projects I had to make work, I got really good at it. I have 'the knack' for it, I'm really fast, and I also learned skills related to running a team, managing client relationships, executing a large and very complex project on a fast schedule with novel technical and social challenges, etc. That sounds more impressive than it was, I made it up as I went and never got any kind of systematized training or mentoring.

I also had an interest in 'engineering visualization' - making animations and renderings to communicate technical aspects of sustainable buildings to non-technical (or other-technical-field) audiences. In 2016 I switched to doing that full time. In 2020 I went down to 1day/week in a bid to save my new hire's job, and in 2021 I got laid off.

I was pretty burnt out on the whole industry by then and was learning ERE praxis so I figured Revit and even visualization were probably behind me. I was going to semiERE my way to a dirtbag/solarpunk ever after.

In late 2023 a guy cold-emailed me about my old Revit tutorial videos on youtube. He was like me except for plumbing services, and was making online courses and selling digital assets, and asked me to join up. I saw it as a way to accelerate my way towards FI doing something I didn't totally hate and so I agreed.

The business plan evolved over 2024 and long story short we created a b2b package which is a major need in the industry for small/medium firms at a certain level of their implementation, so we haven't had any problems getting clients. It's been a lot of work, but we're now in the phase of productizing RevX and thus making it increasingly a passive income generator. As a result of RevX I'm likely to hit "my number" in late 2025 with a passive cashflow machine running in the background.

But the interesting thing is the doors that RevX has opened. In particular, I've started doing Revit for an old colleague and good friend who started her own design firm for PassivHaus/high performance building projects. She's a total badass (Festies know) and we're very aligned in our values and solarpunk dreams of the future. I started helping her out in January, and pretty soon had some aha moments:

• - I *like* the work, particularly when the projects themselves are dope.
• I'm good at it, and it's really gratifying to deploy high levels of competence on worthy projects where you can see how you're helping someone else's practice.
• I'm interested in it, and in particular I'm interested in acquiring more skills related to a role I'm thinking of as 'digital design' for high performance buildings (loads modeling, dusting off my visualization skills, etc).
• There's a whole huge world of bespoke high performance buildings that could be a playground for me and my skills.
• This world involves lots of really cool and interesting people.
• The current state of passivhaus/high performance buildings that my colleague is embedded in is one half-step away from being pretty hardcore solarpunk praxis- arguably it is already.

Those aha moments made me consider how I could/would want to fold this kind of work into my WoG. The skills, activities, opportunities, people, and networks in this unfolding node cluster map or connect pretty well to a lot of other nodes and clusters in my WoG. I'm conscious of how long this is getting so I'm not going to try to map it all out explicitly right now.

Long story short: I've got an idea for a direction that looks like pursuing a role of Renaissance Man digital designer of the high performance built environment in high alignment with an aim of applied self-mastery. There's a lot more to this, but I've been working all week to get this communicated *this* concisely. I plan on having a great discussion with my MMG which will undoubtedly stir up a bunch of other insights/blind spots, and I'll come back and try to document that and integrate with questions/feedback here in my journal, if anyone makes it through this wall of text. (The zeroth order goal of this post was to organize my thoughts enough to be able to present the issue to my MMG in an approachable way.)

Ideas for Discussion Points

• Opportunities/blind spots wrt full-WoG integration?
• Skills that might not be obvious that I can work on? (Web of Relationship cultivation skills!)
• Ideas for integrated seemingly unrelated node/clusters, like bikepacking/moto overlanding, time outdoors, building up a life in Alaska, etc.
• Devil's advocate: am I going specialist? Am I narrowing focus? Am I asking for another round of existential disillusionment?
• How far am I willing to go with this? What constraints or boundaries do I want to do to ensure I don't get sucked it? Why do I care one way or the other, if I'm chasing stoke?
• Ideas for spinning up a Venture cycle out of this soup?

Further Reading / Resources that I've been going over as part of my project to date

https://www.sloww.co/self-actualization-maslow/
https://www.sloww.co/transcendence-maslow/
https://www.sloww.co/maslow-theory-z-transcender/

"“Put all these points together, and we see that self-actualization is not a matter of one great moment. It is not true that on Thursday at four o’clock the trumpet blows and one steps into the pantheon forever and altogether. Self-actualization is a matter of degree, or little accessions accumulated one by one."

mFs thoughts on WOG creation: viewtopic.php?p=279690#p279690 and also viewtopic.php?p=277205#p277205

mF's thoughts on Randomization: viewtopic.php?p=242959#p242959

mF's thoughts on identity based goals: viewtopic.php?p=242903#p242903

Paul Graham:
https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html

That sounds straightforward, but it's often quite difficult. When
you're young you don't know what you're good at or what different
kinds of work are like. Some kinds of work you end up doing may not
even exist yet. So while some people know what they want to do at
14, most have to figure it out.The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you're not
sure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going.
You'll probably guess wrong some of the time, but that's fine. It's
good to know about multiple things; some of the biggest discoveries
come from noticing connections between different fields.

What should your projects be? Whatever seems to you excitingly
ambitious. As you grow older and your taste in projects evolves,
exciting and important will converge. At 7 it may seem excitingly
ambitious to build huge things out of Lego, then at 14 to teach
yourself calculus, till at 21 you're starting to explore unanswered
questions in physics. But always preserve excitingness. There's a kind of excited curiosity that's both the engine and the
rudder of great work. It will not only drive you, but if you let
it have its way, will also show you what to work on.What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that
would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.


Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier,
notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone
who's done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.Steps two and four will require hard work. It may not be possible
to prove that you have to work hard to do great things, but the
empirical evidence is on the scale of the evidence for mortality.
That's why it's essential to work on something you're deeply
interested in. Interest will drive you to work harder than mere
diligence ever could.The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the
desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and
that combination is the most powerful of all.

Following your interests may sound like a rather passive strategy,
but in practice it usually means following them past all sorts of
obstacles. You usually have to risk rejection and failure. So it
does take a good deal of boldness. But while you need boldness, you don't usually need much planning.
In most cases the recipe for doing great work is simply: work hard
on excitingly ambitious projects, and something good will come of
it. Instead of making a plan and then executing it, you just try
to preserve certain invariants.The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements you can describe in advance. You can win a gold medal or get rich by deciding to as a child and then tenaciously pursuing that goal,
but you can't discover natural selection that way. I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most
interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call
this approach "staying upwind." This is how most people who've done
great work seem to have done it.

[7Wannabe5]

I think there is a good deal of gold in your post and the quotes you chose. I also believe that recognizing the cyclical nature of any model like Maslow's Hierarchy is towards integrating "doing" with "being." Otherwise, for example, you preclude the possibility of touching self-actualization on a day spent mostly engaged in shitting blood. Because of this cyclical nature, I don't necessarily believe that you either have to theoretically have taken "earn needed money" completely off your ToDo list or be earning money at or only at your level of self-actualization. For example, you could be cyclically earning money in a manner that mostly coincides with meeting your needs at level of Belonging or Security. Spending 16 hours/week teaching at low-income nursery school might fill my Money and Belonging tanks, and still leave me plenty of life-energy to spend on self-actualizing through permaculture or publishing. I mean, you don't have to somehow have automated/deleted the cyclical task of "brush teeth" in order to touch up into self-actualization. Every level at least requires attention/maintenance on a cyclical basis.

An odd new thought that occurred to me as I read your post, which may or may not hold much universal truth, is that as you periodically cycle up into self-actualization, the humans around you may exhibit more emotional/mental health problems. IOW, something occurs in your social circle which is like a generalization of the tension that builds in a sexual relationship when one partner achieves new quantum level of growth. I also think this negative vibe is different or more complex than, for example, simple envy of success at Level Orange, etc.

[AxelHeyst]

I also believe that recognizing the cyclical nature of any model like Maslow's Hierarchy is towards integrating "doing" with "being."

Ahh, nice, yes, cyclicality/tempo/rhythm. This may (?) tie also into an idea for a skill I've been fiddling with I've been calling "state surfing", a minor goal of my MMG project. The idea is to recognize in realtime what my state is at a high level of fidelity (level of stoke, energy, creativity, etc) and make decisions about my actions based on that. Is it not just this:

A process of ever-increasing fidelity of self-knowledge.
A process of ever-increasing competence at *operating* myself in accordance with self knowledge.
A process of endeavor ever more-precisely resonant/in alignment with self-hood.

at the scale of my fluctuating state in the present moment? There's who I am generally, and there's who I am at 08:41 on Saturday, Feb 15. For example two weeks ago my energy levels went from normal to 1.5-2x normal: lots of stoke, creativity, insight, drive, etc. Partly because of this I chose to do a blitz on a couple of projects that are near completion and just needed a final push. Five to 7 days ago my sleep quality fell apart and I started averaging 4-6hrs/night, despite my state remaining high vibe. I did my best to maintain sleep discipline but I've known the come-down was imminent. It appears to be arriving now. If I'm smart about it, I'll accept the change in state, adjust my expectations, make more time for staring out the window and sit-spotting, probably dial my workout intensity back a little bit, etc.

Thinking about this as a doing/being balance modulating through time is interesting.

Because of this cyclical nature, I don't necessarily believe that you either have to theoretically have taken "earn needed money" completely off your ToDo list or be earning money at or only at your level of self-actualization.

I certainly agree with this - I think there's plenty of evidence of actualizers who haven't solved such and such 'base' line needs, or cycle in and out of it - and I also can't help thinking that it takes a special kind of personality to be able to really drop into applied self-mastery, which involves moving the locus of attention from the self to the object(s)/arena of application, while some of these 'needs' are fluctuating in and out of solved-ness.

Speaking from my own experience, I really struggle to get out of my own head when certain aspects of my household logistics are not well sorted according to my own rulebook. I think that for me 'solving'* certain clusters of needs really helps unlock my attention and energy to be focused on whatever it is I'm meant to do. This is similar to how some people can come home from w*rk and flip a switch and not think about it, whereas I'm not very good at that.

*I wholeheartedly agree that it is a fiction to think that we can truly and permanently "solve" problems like money in a way that they can never come back to bite us in the ass later, that financial or other-dimension "security" is a story we tell ourselves to SWAN. That being said, there is a qualitative difference *in my attitude* and SWAN between I have '3 months of CoL saved up' and I have '30 years of CoL saved up'. This difference lowers the cognitive barrier to dropping into self-actualizing behavior.

[Jin+Guice]

Since I am doing my own series on self-actualization I'm going to pop in over here and put my spin on your post... also where my comments are likely to be coming from tomorrow in the MMG.

Here is my structural theory of self-actualization in cherry-picked quotes from your post:

From reading Maslow's thoughts on the self-actualizers he studied you get the sense that they're just lucky SOBs who got lucky and really like their j*bs.

The self-actualized person is in a state of good psychological health: his basic needs are satisfied

ERE makes it pretty apparent at least how to arrive at the threshold of self-actualization: close the loops, eliminate friction/muda and heterotelicity, "solve" baseline physiological needs ~forever so you won't be distracted by "how to pay the bills" or shelter/food/etc logistics, etc.

Let us think of life as a process of choices, one after another. At each point there is a progression choice and a regression choice. There may be a movement toward defense, toward safety, toward being afraid; but over on the other side, there is the growth choice. To make the growth choice instead of the fear choice a dozen times a day is to move a dozen times a day toward self-actualization. Self-actualization is an ongoing process; it means making each of the many single choices about whether to lie or be honest, whether to steal or not to steal at a particular point, and it mans to make each of these choices as a growth choice. This is movement toward self-actualization.

So while some people know what they want to do at
14, most have to figure it out.The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you're not
sure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going.
You'll probably guess wrong some of the time, but that's fine. It's
good to know about multiple things; some of the biggest discoveries
come from noticing connections between different fields.

My interpretation: in order to self-actualize we have to meet our basic needs and meeting our basic needs is very difficult because society has obscured those needs from us, hiding them behind walls of fear, shame and guilt. We are materially rich but emotionally, socially, intellectually and aesthetically impoverished, and our fear, shame and guilt keep us from seeing our wealth along with our poverty. This creates a perverse cycle where we attempt to fulfill our emotional, social, intellectual and aesthetic needs through financial and economic means.


Actualization requires figuring out what your true core values are and to do this you need to go out in the world, fuck around and find out. I think this is well explained in Paul Grahams's final quote; however this process will only fully work if you feel you feel fulfilled and safe at different levels of Maslow's hierarchy. The fear trap that is very difficult to escape is that we are currently all very safe at the physiological level (exception: health conditions). This is where ERE meets Maslow. ERE points out that physiological needs are actually very easily met in the current socioeconomic paradigm. If we can recognize and internalize this, the rest of the emotional, social, intellectual and aesthetic work is on us; however, we are free to experiment using something like Paul Graham's process and develop our values as we explore our talents.

As @7 points out in her last post and as I tried to explore with semi-ERE, getting our physiological needs met does not require a pile of money. The pile of money is for some a strategic move to take worrying about physiological needs off of their psychological plate. However accumulation of financial resources can easily become a trap, a projection of our collective fear that we will never have or be enough.





ETA:

(*) The percentage of people talking about change while changing only a small fraction in their own lives is ... a high fraction. This comes complete with trite slogans like "if we all do a little, we can do a lot together".

The world needs more who live out the full consequences of their beliefs. I should note that this is not to pick on specific authors or talking heads. It IS to pick on their books and talks which will almost always only make a few vague/abstract and therefore entirely unactionable recommendations in the final 5% of their books and presentations.

I still don't have a good understanding of why there's such a strong tendency to leave out the practical aspect of the transition. In my case, it's been entirely nontrivial, so I'm just presuming that it's nontrivial to others as well.

This is also my working theory on why this is happening. In my estimation, the reason we are not solving the metacrisis and ERE was not adopted by just about everyone and why everyone is not actualizing is the same. Primarily, being heavily stuck in the perverse narrative of the modernist social meme, which tells the richest people in the history of the world that they are not rich enough and the solution to their problems is more wealth. The shadow problem is that modernist constituents believe they can meet emotional, social, intellectual and aesthetic needs through financial means. In this sense truly no one will ever have enough since this is the wrong path to meet these needs. Thus meaningful suggestions will never be made, because all meaningful suggestions include reducing our perceived wealth by reducing our current intensive natural resource dependent and slave labor dependent and fossil fuel dependent production/ consumption cycle.

[J_]

The answer do I have enough (shelter, money for food) is a simple arithmetic. For a cool head. And the knowledge and acceptance that everything can change. Future is beyond control.

[7Wannabe5]

Speaking from my own experience, I really struggle to get out of my own head when certain aspects of my household logistics are not well sorted according to my own rulebook. I think that for me 'solving'* certain clusters of needs really helps unlock my attention and energy to be focused on whatever it is I'm meant to do. This is similar to how some people can come home from w*rk and flip a switch and not think about it, whereas I'm not very good at that.

Yeah, I think this quality, let's maybe pin it as Conscientiousness, is a big difference between INTJ and ENTP. However, I am coming to grok it as being similar to how INFP functions in terms of Aesthetic. Since as an eNTP, I don't have much going on internally to drive this, when I see it in others, I may tend to project it as something external to which they are reacting. By analogy, it's like when I see my beautiful INTP sister fussing about her appearance, I might project that she is concerned about the opinions of others, but really it's her own internal strong aesthetic standard she wants to meet. Since my aesthetic standard is the female equivalent of jolly guy who just throws on a Hawaiian shirt, sucks in his gut, winks at himself in the mirror, and goes for it, her focus on achieving high aesthetic makes me think she is either overly pessimistic or overly concerned about the opinion of others. I think this sometimes similarly applies to my take on INTJ Conscientiousness. For instance, lacking full awareness of this innate difference, I may feel compelled to point out that it is not a Law of the Universe that you can't relax and read a book in an untidy room or that you have to eat your meat before your pudding or that you have to completely solve all your financial issues for life before you can quit your miserable job. And, even when inhabiting full awareness of the innate difference, I still might feel compelled to exude chaotic feminine energy if/when I observe an extremely J man spending 5 minutes to neatly remove his clothing before joining me for a frolic. (The dysfunctional co-dependent attraction that this sort of man sometimes feels for eNTP female frequently involves a thought bubble along the lines of "WTF? She just kept talking about post-post-modernity or some such nonsense and almost walked into traffic.")

As @7 points out in her last post and as I tried to explore with semi-ERE, getting our physiological needs met does not require a pile of money. The pile of money is for some a strategic move to take worrying about physiological needs off of their psychological plate. However accumulation of financial resources can easily become a trap, a projection of our collective fear that we will never have or be enough.

Yes, this can be true, but as I outlined above, some may simply be attempting to meet an innate internal standard with their money piling rather than fearfully reacting to externalities or processing trauma. The quality that would vibe the most this way for eNTps like us would likely be Logic (Ti.) We internally want to meet a standard to have everything more logically worked through than most other humans before we take action. Actually, I kind of hinted at this with my description of my thoughts about Conscientious over-saving; over-saving bothers me, because it is not strictly logical, and it inhibits the maximization of exploration/fun (Ne)= hours available for free reading. IOW, it does not make sense in the manner that we eNTP make sense.

[AxelHeyst]

Deep Dive Debrief:

I found it really difficult to present this whole thing in a clear way, but my MMG was great (as usual) and we had a good discussion.

One of my concerns is in getting out of 'balance' - of trying to go too fast and burning myself out again. It's easy for me to drop in and crank for long periods of time (at all scales), and I have to be careful to check in to see if I'm going off the rails or have lost sight of the forest for the trees.

Building in social obligations is one method - setting up times to meet other people to work out or go on a hike etc is a good way to stack social time as well as "go outside and look at a tree" time.

Another bit of advice was to structure checkins with myself in regard to my emotional/psychological/etc state, so I can't get too far in the direction of burnout without course correction. I already have a structure/space for that (my weekly review), but I can tune it to specifically check in about these indicators of how my life is going.

The question of serendipity is interesting as well. A major strategy of mine for the past few years has been to create pockets of space that allow me to notice and be able to respond to serendipitous opportunities. It's entirely feasible that as I'm getting a clearer sense of what I want to be doing, that I use up all that space and reduce my ability to take on serendipitous opportunities.

But the flip side is, what if you turn down/ignore opportunities because you've internalized 'keeping yourself open' to opportunities? There's a give and take here.

The most powerful question/comment of the call was when Quadalupe reminded me that an attribute of self-actualized people, per Maslow, was a very strong sense of values that connected to purpose/mission/etc, and so the tactical discussion was all well and good but what was it that I actually cared about?

I've taken the Amtrak through California's central valley a fair amount, an experience which affords hours of staring out the window at the ass end of the modern built environment. This is always a deeply negative experience for me, because I'm almost forced to contemplate how fundamentally and tragically shitty the human built environment is. It feels like spiders crawling on the inside of my skull. We claw precious resources out of the guts of the earth, compose it into toxic assemblages of shoddy components, and tack it together into piles of moldy, poisonous and energy-consumptive shacks we call "houses" which give firefighters cancer when they burn. How awful the built environment is is something that has always affected me deeply, and is one reason I don't live in a city or a town. It's an emotional hardship for me to have to see such a horrible trainwreck every day. So: shitty buildings *deeply* bother me.

Conversely, I find a well put together building to be an inspiring piece of art, an expression of human goodness. I don't even mean 'architectural masterpieces' (many of which are just well-sculpted piles of poisonous garbage anyways, which bothers me almost more than the commodity junk), well built vernacular environments are among the most deeply satisfying kinds of projects as well.

This sense is what got me into my first career in the first place, and upon further reflection, probably explains why I burnt out so hard. I cared too much to safely participate in the kinds of projects we worked on. The necessary compromises necessary in the industry we were in, particularly towards the middle of my career as the company grew and got more corporate, and the uncertainty as to whether or not I was contributing to the creation of yet more poisonous garbage, was very difficult for me.

This is all stuff I knew (and even wrote about in my book), but Quadalupe's question really cut through some muddled thinking I had in the context of aligning my WoG for self-actualization. There isn't really anything that I've cared about more or for longer than the built environment.

After my career ended, I figured involvement in that world beyond DIY'ing my own shelter was behind me. But my recent re-introduction to that world, plus remembering how much I actually care about it, is making me thing that maybe really I've just taken a sabbatical from it. But a few things are different this time, the two main ones being:

• I've resolved a few internal dysfunctions that manifested as workaholism and self-sabotage (Ch 11 in DR).
• I've attained a high level of freedom-of-action thanks to ERE/post-consumer praxis (not to mention picked up the ability to apply systems thinking to multiple domains).

In my old career, I had no strong sense of autonomy with respect to the projects I worked on, despite having a lot of autonomy wrt how I executed my projects due to being the one who figured out how to do what I did in the first place (no one to teach me, I was the 'export'). Someone else won the projects, and I just cranked on whatever projects came across my desk. Some were very cool, worthy projects that I'm still proud to have worked on. Most were meh, the sorts of projects that I was pretty conflicted about but saw no way to avoid. One project I refused to work on.

Now, thanks to ERE, my freedom-of-action is nearly total. And thanks to autonomy + systems thinking + broad skillset, I can cultivate a WoG that is broader than the standard 'career/job' options available in the mainstream where you have to choose one specialty. I can integrate 3d/digital design work, my own hands-on builds, even writing into the overall purpose of making the built environment less shitty and more appropriate to the transition decades/centuries we have ahead of us. The emerging vision is integrating a Renaissance Ideal approach to my values wrt the built environment.

I think dropping into and being really clear about what I care about and see as my mission helps clarify my relationship with other elements of my life. In a sense, many other modules in my WoG like exercise, time outdoors, etc can be seen as support behavior - things I do at least in part for the purpose of keeping me healthy and able to focus on my core modules. Activity designed to help me stay healthy and focused so I can show up and work on deploying my skills towards the world I want to see.

This makes me think of the recent Tim Ferriss podcast episode with Brandon Sanderson, where he described how his org is set up around the principle of "let Brandon cook" - other people handle the stuff he doesn't strictly need to, so he can deploy as much of his energy towards writing as is appropriate. This is also something @Scott2 talks about, which I've had noodling away in the back of my mind as an open question. I think I'm now in a place to be able to front-mind it and figure out what system works for me.

One kind of random thought: I sometimes get anxious or impatient with 'being outside time', and then I feel guilty like I'm supposed to intrinsically enjoy it more than I do. It's not actually that I don't enjoy it, it's that my Drivenness (from ICD intensity/complexity/drive framework) makes it difficult for me to relax into being in certain states. I get anxious to get back into the flow. However, I also go septic if I don't have enough outdoors etc time, so it's a non-negotiable. It's easy for me to spend too little time outside/riding my bike in nature/etc because I get pretty consumed by what I'm stoked to be working on. The perspective shift of seeing activity like this as *support* activity might help, though. Maybe it's okay that certain activities like that are ~medicine. And maybe I'll be better able to show up for those moments and let the magic happen with this perspective, that I'm out there to heal and rejuvenate and recover in support of the core modules of my WoG.

So, what's next for me on this initiative:

• More tuning/experimenting with daily/weekly tempo of actions. In particular I'm going to take bigger chunks of time per object of focus - 4hrs of writing in the morning on Monday, 4hrs digital design in the morning on Tuesday, alternate, with afternoons being more discretionary and support activities of yoga, working out, riding my bike in the forest, etc being a sort of exo-skeleton around that.
• My system for designing in annual-scale activities like bikepacking, trips, etc is pretty good already, so it's just maintaining that.
• Using my sense of purpose/mission to help clean up some friction/muda in my life, like inconsistent sleep discipline.
• Take a pass at eliminating activities I don't really have to do ("Let Tyler Crank"). Related to Essentialism, I guess.
• Continue to wrap up current projects/obligations that are almost done.
• Add more explicit practice of internal emotional-state check-in on weekly basis (as a backstop so I at least don't go longer than a week without a state check).

[7Wannabe5]

Spending time outdoors in nature ( if you are actually present to being in nature as opposed to just happening to be in nature doing something you could also be doing in the gym) is theoretically restorative of receptive feminine energy rather than directed masculine energy. However, all of us have to keep both our masculine and feminine energies strong and healthy even when we are primarily engaged in one or the other. For example, even when I was primarily engaged in being present and caring for an infant or helping somebody die, in addition to spending time in nature to restore my feminine energy, I also had the need to spend some time engaged in activities such as attending an advanced math class with other adults to exercise my masculine energy.

I don't mean to rib you too hard, but I am wondering if you are aware that what you described in your post is exactly why in the olden times driven, successful men often greatly benefited from having a wife to "handle the stuff they don't strictly need to" so that they could "focus on purpose." Or a less sex-specific example would be the benefit of having a valet or an aide-de-camp or personal assistant. In affluent contexts, the "woman behind the man" would also have her own back-up staff. When I was working on being more consciously in my feminine energy, one example I considered was why I enjoyed having my calm, competent daughter help me in the kitchen. Even though many of the tasks are similar, being in the support mode is quite different than being in authoritative caregiver mode. For example, bringing somebody a glass of lemonade while they are intensely engaged in a project vs. instructing somebody on how to pour the lemonade into their glass without spilling it.

Anyways, the dysfunctional manner in which many humans who are driven in their purpose unconsciously meet the needs of their feminine energy is by consuming alcohol or similar substances in order to intermittently relax themselves. So, consciously spending some time in nature, with animals or young humans, relaxing in a bath full of bubbles, or spending down time with your lover are much better choices.

Okay, now I gotta get back to cleaning my room and tracking my metrics in spreadsheet*, so maybe my internal Tom Sawyer maturity-level masculine energy can be directed just a bit towards the more purposeful


*Obviously, the type of activities that promotes masculine energy like being in nature promotes feminine energy.

[AxelHeyst]

I don't mean to rib you too hard, but I am wondering if you are aware that what you described in your post is exactly why in the olden times driven, successful men often greatly benefited from having a wife to "handle the stuff they don't strictly need to" so that they could "focus on purpose."

I am. Is it 'ribbing' because if I were ignorant about it it'd be yet another cringe example of an obtuse male unaware of the implicit/hidden/unacknowledged-by-males social support infrastructure that holds up the patriarchy of "self"-made men? I've read my Gloria Steinum.

I think that one of the incidental effect-benefits of ERE praxis (in particular minimalism, low-friction/muda lifestyle design, essentialism, etc) is that it reduces the amount of logistics and 'stuff' that needs to be handled by the household, reducing the burden of non-purpose stuff that's got to be done, reducing the dynamic of needing to rope humans into serving as domestic laborers to support one persons ambitions. I mean cool if that’s a role someone wants to play, but reducing the burden of expectation is a positive thing I think. The olden times households had to run staff for their aristocratic or just middle class social obligations, which is thankfully something I don't have to do. (Also obviously the #childfree aspect of my household is the majority contributor to low logistics/high discretionary free time.)

[7Wannabe5]

I am. Is it 'ribbing' because if I were ignorant about it it'd be yet another cringe example of an obtuse male unaware of the implicit/hidden/unacknowledged-by-males social support infrastructure that holds up the patriarchy of "self"-made men?

No, in that case I would be "chiding" not "ribbing." Also, I know that your perspective is feminist towards post-feminist. It's "ribbing" because you asked above not to be hassled about currently choosing to deep dive in the "do" drive of primarily masculine energy. From my old lady perspective, it strikes me as kind of cute; like a kid who wants to keep his cowboy boots on even at naptime.

I mean cool if that’s a role someone wants to play, but reducing the burden of expectation is a positive thing I think.

Yeah, expectations suck. Still, rule of Formation of the Attractive Vacuum will make it likely that the more you vibe masculine energy, the more those around you will be likely to vibe feminine energy when they are around you.

[SouthernAlchemy]

The 'let Brandon cook' quote and mindset kind of struck the wrong note with me. Other than not liking Ferris too much, I wasn't sure why until I read 7w's reply. It just seems to have some kind of Randian 'great man' vibe to it that is so annoyingly prevalent these days. Your writing generally seems to imply you want to move towards holistic and integrated systems, which I think are necessarily participatory (as in 'well, nobody else is going to dump the humanure bucket so I'll have to do it') if they are to be maintained. More permaculture than '4hr Work Week'.