Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

[Ego]

This is a put your own air mask on type operation though. So the question is are your physiological needs being met? Are they being met in a way that impedes your freedom?

Impediments to freedom? I see two major things that have changed in the recent past.

The people I know who remain in jobs that resemble slave-like conditions have one particular impediment above all others. They shoulder all of the responsibilities that would traditionally be spread among two or more.



Let's say that despite those challenges, they overcome the obstacles and work themselves into a position where they might consider retiring early. What is their typical impediment?

What does a Fiftysomething with a big bank account fear?

Borrowing from Szasz...

Theocracy > ruled by God or priests
Democracy > ruled by the people or the majority
Pharmacracy > ruled by insurance or medicine

[Frita]

What does a Fiftysomething with a big bank account fear?

Borrowing from Szasz...

Theocracy > ruled by God or priests
Democracy > ruled by the people or the majority
Pharmacracy > ruled by insurance or medicine

My spouse and I were talking the other day about this. It seems like many people we know spend their 50s and part of their 60s working for insurance in the US. Part of it is fear, which can have neurochemical addictive properties. There also seems to be a societal conditioning that getting cheap insurance by working at a slave-mentality job is a deal, that paying market rate on the ACA is too much, or being self-insured is crazy. Perhaps this is justification to self-flagellate with the job. And when coupled with stress-related conditions (anxiety, high blood pressure, etc.), there is the self-reinforcement of using said insurance to pay for Rx, therapy, and trips to the MD. And of course, due to working, there is no time to cook or exercise. In the small sample size of people I know, they can’t or won’t see alternatives. Classic YMOYL stuff.

[Western Red Cedar]

I'd second @ertyu's comment about a lack of movement in terms of physiological deficiencies. Even many of those who look fit in US culture are often static throughout the day, working behind screens, and leaning into one form of repetitive type of movement to keep calories in check (running, cycling, peloton, etc..). The discussion reminded me of this quote I had in my journal which I pulled from a Katy Bowman essay a while back, which ties the outsourcing of movement to the pathological culture:

Katy Bowman: Our daily life is composed of a lot of seemingly innocuous ways we've outsourced the body's work. One of the reasons I've begun focusing just as much on non-exercisey movements as I do on exercise-type movements is that I feel that the ten thousand outsourcings a day during the 23/24ths of your time hold the most potential for radical change. Be on the lookout for these things. To avoid the movements necessary to walk around to all the car doors, or just to avoid turning your wrist, or to avoid gathering your tea strainer and dumping the leaves and leaning the strainer (in your dishwasher?), you have accepted a handful of garbage, plastic (future landfill), and a battery. To avoid the simple movements, you have -- without realizing it -- required other humans somewhere else in the world to labor endlessly, destroy ecosystems, and wage war...for your convenience.

Sedentarism îs very much linked to consumerism, materialism, colonialism, and the destruction of the planet. If you're not moving, someone else is moving for you, either directly, or indirectly by making STUFF to make moving not easier on you. You were born into a sedentary culture, so 99.9 percent of your sedentary behaviors are flying under the radar. Start paying attention. What do you see?

I actually think you are probably on point in regards to the sleep and sex observation. I'd probably broaden sex into intimacy though. Self-reported surveys on things like sleep are always a bit dubious in my mind.

The more I thought about this topic, the more I think that people in the US are deficient in most physiological needs. Can we honestly say that a frozen meal with 70 ingredients is actually food? How many households cook most of their meals from scratch? Maybe a better way to phrase it is that we are deficient in nutrients.

Anyway, the sad thing is that we seem to be exporting this culture to other parts of the world.

[7Wannabe5]

I've been reading some books on the human immune system and the history of pathogens vs. humans, and I gotta tell you there was no golden era in which humans experienced better health than we now enjoy. Modern medicine is so hugely expensive it is obviously in alignment with wishful frugal thinking to believe that few gains have been achieved since the era of antibiotics, or that preventative lifestyle measures are all that is necessary beyond that, but the evidence is contrary. Mrs. Animal taking a modern epi-pen with her while trail hiking like a hunter/gatherer is the sort of intelligent, realistic, behavior we should all be exhibiting.

[Jin+Guice]

I'm feel like I'm having trouble tying my thesis to the details I'm writing about.

The initial question I asked myself is why we all ended up in Plato's Cave of Modern Consumerism? It seems to me that we lost our way in a pathological culture.

Pathological culture is interesting because it is really really really fucking good at a few things.

But pathological culture has also sold us this myth that we need its negative, and imo pathological aspects, in order to reap its benefits. Part of my thesis is that this is not true.

Another part of this thesis is that pathological culture obscures us from ourselves. We're so enmeshed in the culture we are in that we ignore our own needs and the needs of those around us. I think this is how we ended up in the cave.


Referencing what @7w5 said, I agree that we live in a miracle age of healthcare, although I'm not sure most of the expensive stuff is the good stuff. By this I don't mean that no expensive procedures are necessary or miraculous, but that, like most other areas, we waste a lot of our healthcare advances on dubious healthcare spending. As healthcare consumers we lack complete information. Healthcare providers use outdated decision and communication models. Healthcare policy is misinformed by poor models as well.

I can't tell you which procedures are necessary and which aren't. I can tell you that healthcare is delusional and hard decisions are obscured from everyone involved. Part of the miracle is that we have advanced so far in terms of healthcare that we still experience a golden age of health in spite of all of this.

The problem isn't one part of healthcare, it's our entire approach to healthcare. I believe that drastic improvements in our healthcare system are possible, but they would require difficult cultural changes. The same can be said for most of the problems we currently face*.

*Which might not matter for much longer because of climate change and peak oil. I'm not sure humanity is equipped to face these challenges, but I think pathological culture has us in denial that they are happening.

@WRC:

I agree that movement is lacking. I've been trying to write a post about "needs of modernity" but am having trouble figuring out what exactly to say about it. One thing that is tricky is that many needs are manufactured by our current environment. Another example would be not smoking. But is that a physiological need? It becomes one as smoking kills us.

The tricky things about most of the "needs" we pay attention to is that they are technically manufactured by modernity. For example one does not need a house, yet those who do not have houses rarely live lives we wish to emulate... which sort of makes housing a need.

The needs of not smoking and not moving enough are thanks to amazing wealth and technological advancement, but it is thanks to almost equal amazing culture failures that these "needs" (not smoking/ lack of movement) are so difficult to achieve.

[Jin+Guice]

Here's something else to ponder. Stoic in its modern form means living an austere form of life. However, in its original form it meant living in harmony with nature. A life without friction. The point of ERE is to reach this state. This is a life where you don't have to struggle for anything. Just by living the way you are, all your wants and needs are satisfied automatically.
In the name of "personal growth" I think, therefore, it's helpful to identify where one is on this scale of development. I'm definitely not quite there yet. However, I am quite removed from the initial perspective.

(bold is mine).

I like the idea of ERE as trying to remove frictions from your life. My idea for examining needs is examining what other hidden frictions are imposed on us. The culture is pathological because it nefariously imposes these frictions upon us.

Another reason for examining needs is thinking about why these frictions exist, how pathological culture meets our needs and how we can meet these needs while removing the frictions imposed on us.


I also seek to live a more social and artistic life than *I think* Jacob does, which adds additional frictions, but also additional opportunities.

[Jin+Guice]

Needs of Modernity

I’m adding a section to Maslow’s Hierarchy. It’s called “Needs of Modernity.” I’m placing it above physiological needs on the pyramid. I’m placing this on the hierarchy before safety, social and emotional needs as without these needs, because I think that someone who lives in our modern world will find it difficult to get those things without fulfilling their needs of modernity.

Needs of modernity are needs that are imposed on us by modern society. Needs of modernity are not necessary for life or development, though they do indirectly fulfill or affect the ability to fulfill other needs. Needs of modernity are the most flexible and negotiable, with the most difference person to person.

Everyone will have to generate their own “needs of modernity” list. These needs will differ from country to country and culture to culture.

Here is my list:

Properly Zoned Housing
Transportation
Bathroom (Toilet/ Shower/ Dental/ Grooming)
Kitchen (Stove/ Food Prep)
Gas
Electricity
(City) Water
Internet
House for cats
Computer
Cell Phone Service
Cell Phone
Exercise Facility
Healthcare
Dentalcare
Education
Caffeine
Alcohol
Food for cats
Litterbox for cats
Healthcare for cats
Taxes

Feel free to add your own or point out glaring deficiencies in mine!

No one needs these things, but not having them disrupts our lives. Needs of modernity are often needs that pathological culture uses to imprison us. We are raised in a world where many of these services are ubiquitous and we are unable to operate without them.

Unlike physiological needs which predate humanity, needs of modernity are new needs from our own era. Using frugality and elimination, ERE minimizes the cost of these needs. Of the big three expenses (house, transportation and food) two of them are needs of modernity.

[Jin+Guice]

Needs of Modernity Part 2

Assuming one wants to break from consumer=pathological culture, needs of modernity are what we seek freedom-from. Needs of modernity are expensive because they are of consumer culture.

Imagine that I transport you to a world where housing is free and the built environment is such that cars are not necessary for personal movement. I imagine I've just granted anyone interested in ERE or FIRE who doesn't suffer from chronic illness* instant freedom.

*Now imagine I add a functional healthcare system.

Needs of modernity tend to exist at all levels of the pyramid, or they satisfy multiple levels of needs. Think of how many needs a house satisfies!

While I believe needs of modernity possess many of the levers that pathological culture uses to control us, I'm not for or against any of these things. I think technology, electricity, capitalism, healthcare, etc... are all tools. Many of them have improved our lives drastically and I don't think the solution is getting rid of them. However, we don't have healthy personal or cultural relationships to them and what is initially a blessing becomes a curse that imprisons us in a culture no one likes but everyone insists we need.

Thinking about needs of modernity is important as we try to reduce costs and gain skills. If we are going to get rid of or downsize one of the needs of modernity, we need to consider all of the needs they satisfy.

I think a lot of resistance to ERE is fear that a need won't get met. We've convinced ourselves falsely that specialization and consumption lead to happiness and have trouble believing another way of life is possible.

In my estimation, pathological culture downplays the importance of emotional and social needs. I think a lot of people are using consumption as well as substance abuse to primarily make up for lack of emotional and social deficits they are unaware of. Combine that with a lack of intellectual stimulation (boredom/ lack of variety) from specialization, lack of or excessive physical movement from a sedentary or overly physically demanding job and lack of aesthetic pleasure.

At least for me, these are the drivers for my pathological behavior. Having a map of needs reminds me what NOT to get rid of as I try to remove/ minimize the behaviors and connections I have to pathological culture. It allows me to rewire myself as I see the ways pathological culture and behavior has served me and frees me (if painfully slowly) from the fear of losing the things I value while allowing me to get rid of the things I don't.

[Jin+Guice]

Needs of Modernity Part 3

The modern world charges a premium for modern things. Smart phones, computers, modern medicine and air travel are recent inventions. We’ve dedicated ourselves to ensuring these things are as cheap as possible so that some recent advantages may be enjoyed almost free (aspirins and vaccines).

Remember that technological improvement can positively impact us, but new technologies are likely to be expensive. Slow traveling the world means paying more for the basics of day to day life. Getting cutting edge, life changing or saving medical care for only a few thousand dollars is a deal. Whether or not the increase in expense and time working is worth it is up to you. Whether or not the technology is used constructively or destructively in your web of goals is up to you.



Technology traps us when we 1) quickly make it a need (smartphones) or 2) try to substitute products for other needs in the pyramid (consumer culture).

Cars are amazing until they are needed by everyone to survive.

Overcoming technological invention that becomes necessity is difficult. The difficulties include: denying social convention, going against default options and environmental changes. Learning to think and do for yourself is great, but constantly fighting social convention, default options and the built environment inflicts a heavy cognitive and emotional toll.

At very least, a first step is identifying expensive technologies that have gone from novelty to necessity, thinking about the ways these things actually improve our lives and the ways they detract from it. Additionally, thinking about the ways the world has been reconfigured to necessitate them and the way things used to be done before they were invented. Avoiding technological set backs and waste can be as fun of a game as saving money.



Watch a commercial. Note how little time the commercial spends emphasizing the utility of the product. Instead the commercial is selling you a lifestyle. A clean, well lit, organized and attractive home. A close group of friends. A caring family. A lifetime of achievement. None of these things can be bought and yet we are sold them every day from every corner of our lives.

Believing a dish soap brand will bring you domestic bliss is insane. This is worse than status buying. At least a well known designer shoe will actually bring you some social status. Bud Light will never get you friends, State Farm won’t keep you safe and Tide laundry detergent won’t give you a happy family.

Ignoring our needs to be part of a family, a tribe and a community makes us vulnerable to having these needs co-opted by needs of modernity and their marketing campaigns. Being out of touch with our emotions means we let others control them and by extension us. Who needs friends when you have adderall, prozac and xanax? Hard to feel lonely when you can’t feel anything at all.

As we’ve hidden our own needs from ourselves, we ignore the fact that these are needs that we all possess on some level. Our lack of sleep, physical activity, affection, honesty and friendship will be compensated for. Consumer culture would very much like you to compensate by trying to buy happiness. Didn’t work? Buy more, buy different, consume.

[ertyu]

Ignoring our needs to be part of a family, a tribe and a community makes us vulnerable to having these needs co-opted by needs of modernity and their marketing campaigns. Being out of touch with our emotions means we let others control them and by extension us.

Amen.

As guys in particular, we often fall into the trap of confusing being out of touch with our emotions with being in control of our emotions - when all we really are is stunted and ripe for the pickings of anyone who susses out what we feel and want and dangles the correct carrot in front of our faces. Could be consumerism, often is a female, very often it's political populism/voter behavior, could be an "investment" fad or scam, etc.

[Jin+Guice]

@ertyu: I strongly agree. My working theory is that most people are being taken advantage of because of suppressed emotions, unacknowledged "trauma" and loss of social and cultural connection.

[Jin+Guice]

Safety Needs

If physiological needs are what you require to stay biologically alive, safety needs are freedom from things that would injure or kill you.

When people talk about safety they mostly think of other people harming them and environmental disaster. However, the top killers of Americans are (in order): heart disease, cancer, accidents, stroke, lower respiratory disease, alzheimer’s, diabetes and liver cirrhosis. Accidents are dominated by “poisonings” (poisonings are 95% drug overdoses) and traffic accidents. Most killers of Americans are either lifestyle diseases or diseases which are difficult to prevent (cancer, alzheimer’s and some strokes). The other notable killer is traffic accidents.

Instead of spending money on good neighborhoods for safety, it’s perhaps a better idea to avoid lifestyle disease through exercise and healthful food, maintain catastrophic health coverage in case of cancer, alzhiemer’s or stroke and avoid motorized transportation as much as possible and keep drug, alcohol and tobacco use to a minimum.

The modern world tries to sell us safety in the form of “safer” cars as well as expensive houses in neighborhoods removed from other people. Instead it is wiser for most to spend money on healthier food and, if necessary, exercise.

[delay]

The modern world tries to sell us safety in the form of “safer” cars as well as expensive houses in neighborhoods removed from other people. Instead it is wiser for most to spend money on healthier food and, if necessary, exercise.

Well said! People have images of nuclear disasters, floods and immigrants in their head. It's hard to argue against.

People avoid public transport out of fear, and then eat at McDonald's. It's perfectly irrational.

[Jin+Guice]

Emotional and Social Needs: An Introduction

The next two levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy are called “belonging and love” and “esteem.” I’m co-mingling these two need levels and replacing them with “emotional” and “social” needs.

I believe our society pushes emotional and social needs into the shadow. I was taught that logical needs trump emotional and that “being emotional” was undesirable. While this is likely partially the result of gender norms, women’s work, which is also social and emotional in nature, is often viewed as less than men’s work. The boiler plate for men is to be told that emotions are unmanly and for women to be told emotions make them less valuable than logic-centric men.

Society values money above all else. Going to a job performed for money is almost always seen as more important than other tasks which are not performed for money.

Consumer culture ]commodifies all aspects of human life. Recent acknowledgement of the emotional deficit in our culture is usurped by things like “self-care” which has become an industry of therapy, spas, hygiene products and resort weekends. Self-care no longer comes from the self, it’s something we purchase.

We ignore our own emotional needs, stuffing them down in the pursuit of more stuff. We are sold the idea that emotional needs are met with more money. More things or paid experiences are supposed to be synonymous with more happiness. We are sold fear that if we do not have enough money we will not be able to afford to express our emotions or purchase the things which cause positive emotions.

We are trained in school to perform all manner of tasks that we will never use again, just in case they might be needed for a future job. Yet strangely absent is an education in the basics of our own emotional world, how people relate to each other socially and culturally as well as personal finance, which are commonalities we all share.

Socialization is not so much ignored as used to threaten us. Humans are social creatures and fitting in was and is crucial to survival. Excommunication from ones people used to mean death. This was in a world where ones people were few enough that one could know all of them and the boundary between “my people” and “everything else” was relatively clear.

Today we have the benefit of many different “tribes” to select from as well as the benefit of opting out, sitting secluded in our apartments, ordering everything we need without human interaction. Yet most of what is pleasurable about life involves other people.

A fear and genuine problem for many pursuing ERE is loss of social group. Indeed this is the tacit threat consumerism levees at us through the increased escalation of needs of modernity. If you don’t get the cell phone, no one will talk to you. If you don’t follow current trends, everyone will make fun of you. If you don’t have the expensive house, everyone will think you’re a failure. If you don’t come out for expensive cocktails, you will have no more social activities. If you come out for cocktails but get water, everyone will think you are weird.

While the need for acceptance of others sometimes comes from a negative place of desperation and a lack of confidence, the need to fit into and ultimately be accepted by a group of other individuals does not. Shared experience is the foundation of human interaction and removing yourself from the entire shared experience of a given social group or class will make socializing difficult if not impossible.

Being left out may not be the equivalent of physical death anymore, but social death (and the resulting emotional pain) can be worse. While many of these threats are amplified in our own minds through the subtle fear mongering of consumer culture and it is possible to find clever or assertive work arounds for many of them, doing this takes real personal work.

Consumer cultures ultimate trick with emotional and social needs is to devalue them to the point where we ignore them and thus deprive ourselves of them, to fear monger us through our repressed needs we are often unaware of and then to sell us a “solution” to both our needs and the problems caused by repressing them.

[ertyu]

It's bigger than that. Devaluing and suppressing social and emotional needs is what makes good soldiers - whose social and emotional needs can then be reoriented towards their fellow soldiers to the ultimate benefit of the military. Devaluing and suppressing social and emotional needs is what makes good employees - those who are able to put aside their own selves so they can produce output according to another's goals. Etcetera. It's turtles all the way down

[Jin+Guice]

@ertyu: What made this click for me was an old @RiggerJack post where he was talking about how economic poverty doesn't actually exist in rich countries. Instead there is social, emotional and cultural poverty. But we often try to improve these things by improving economic conditions only.

I don't think there is a vast conspiracy with people at the top pulling the strings though. I think those people are also suppressing their social and emotional needs. I think it's more like we are all pulling each other's strings in service of a cultural narrative that we have to.

[sodatrain]

My spouse and I were talking the other day about this. It seems like many people we know spend their 50s and part of their 60s working for insurance in the US. Part of it is fear, which can have neurochemical addictive properties. There also seems to be a societal conditioning that getting cheap insurance by working at a slave-mentality job is a deal, that paying market rate on the ACA is too much, or being self-insured is crazy. Perhaps this is justification to self-flagellate with the job. And when coupled with stress-related conditions (anxiety, high blood pressure, etc.), there is the self-reinforcement of using said insurance to pay for Rx, therapy, and trips to the MD. And of course, due to working, there is no time to cook or exercise. In the small sample size of people I know, they can’t or won’t see alternatives. Classic YMOYL stuff.

I think this is spot on. It's part of why I moved to Central America - to escape this paradigm. There are of course problems here and the whole medical care thing is still probably my biggest concern, but I feel like its easier to solve and more manageable here yet.

[sodatrain]

I like the idea of ERE as trying to remove frictions from your life.

I love this. When I think about the life I'm trying to lead, my friends (who understand) and I talk about "living the slow life". I see this, despite it's semi-contradictory definition to the idea of removing friction (move faster?!), as the ability to do less things in a day. to do simpler things every day. to be more able AND more likely to appreciate something simple like a sunset or watching a squirrel eat something in a tree.

Fewer "Needs of modernity".

[sodatrain]

The initial question I asked myself is why we all ended up in Plato's Cave of Modern Consumerism?

Thanks to @theanimal, I'm currently reading How to Want What You Have by Timothy Ray Miller and it's excellent.

I wrote this text message to another friend the other day who recently read the book... it speaks to your question. Basically we all have this insatiable desire for "more" because of evolution and the way it works.

It's just fascinating to see how we have evolved to want all these things and to always want more. And to see those insatiable/unlimited desires be the cause of all the BS in the world we see now. And it seems to suggest that we exist as we do because of evolution and that we will cease to exist because of ... evolution being so successful at reproducing. How could Evolution possibly have known it needed limits for a particular species to persist. Or maybe it really just says that we are amazingly fortunate to exist and we should be happy with that - and accept and understand that the species will end. That we are in fact part of the earth and that the earth is not here for us as separate entities. Our species has flaws and we will eradicate ourselves. The earth will persist. We are so insignificant to the earth.

[sodatrain]

Ignoring our needs to be part of a family, a tribe and a community makes us vulnerable to having these needs co-opted by needs of modernity and their marketing campaigns. Being out of touch with our emotions means we let others control them and by extension us. Who needs friends when you have adderall, prozac and xanax? Hard to feel lonely when you can’t feel anything at all.

Not exactly to your point about family, but I read this article (sorry, may be a paywall) by David Brooks and it was fascinating. The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake: The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together.

It very carefully points out motivations and (I believe largely unintended) consequences of living the life of the typical family in the US (and I believe large parts of Europe). As in I'm from the midwest US. I live in Central America. My sibling lives in Europe. Our parents live in SE US. Compared to closer (physically) and larger families living in a more multi-generational sort of way. And the benefits and challenges of this.