Early Retirement Extreme Forums

I had so much fun, and it was great to meet so many interesting people. I mirror the feeling of "I am usually an introvert, but at this event, I was more extroverted than usual". I get really drained by usual social interactions because people talk about childish topics that I don't care about, or people basically compete at talking over each other, and I hate that dynamic. Everyone was very respectful and allowed everyone to talk, which was a nice change. I also absolutely loved the guitar playing. It was also wonderful to meet more people from my MMG as well!

On a more personal note, I enjoyed being barefoot. I came to the festival with my plantar fasciitis flared up, and right now I don't even feel it. Maybe this is a sign to buy zero-drop heel shoes at some point.

P.S. @grundomatic, you didn't wear me down in the improv workshop. I found it quite educational/fun.

Reading all this I regret a little that I didn't want to attend it so short after our own travelling!! If/when there will be a next time I will seriously look if/how I could attend it also!

AH, Quadelupe, enjoy your trips to Yosemite etc.!

I am smuckered that I couldn't partake this year, but vow to make the next one! There better be a next one

Everything about this experience was great! The surroundings were lovely, the people were lovely, the workshops were engaging, the whole thing was just a blast. It felt like I had more interesting conversations in the last four days than I did in the preceding four months. I can't say enough good things about it.

Thanks again to @AxelHeyst for being the driving force behind all of this and for sharing your space with all of us!

2Birds1Stone wrote: ↑

Tue Sep 12, 2023 11:57 am

There better be a next one

Yes. And now you have a year's heads up so no excuses.

So chuffed for you all that it was a massive success! Very much considering making the journey for the next one.

@Crusader minor tangent to say that barefoot shoes have done wonders for my plantar fasciitis.

That sounds like you had an awesome time; amazing! Now I'm imagining 3 extroverts and 20 introverts of which at any time about 5 are recharging at some docking station.

My takeaway from reading this thread is the question: what are social systems where introversion is built in and extroverts have to adapt in a similar way extroversion is built in the contemporary corporate model and introverts have to adapt. I am thinking library as one example (first thought church because upbringing) - how can you throw a library style party / party in a library library-style?

Anyway, happy you had a good time!

Good. Happy to hear you guys had a good time. And props again to Axel for hosting.

DutchGirl wrote: ↑

Tue Sep 12, 2023 3:55 pm

That sounds like you had an awesome time; amazing! Now I'm imagining 3 extroverts and 20 introverts of which at any time about 5 are recharging at some docking station.

Indeed, there were 3 people that openly identified as extraverts, with maybe one more that was too busy cracking jokes to discuss MBTI. The recharging station was an area with a small porch and large shade tree, explicitly designated as the introvert porch/no talking zone.

guitarplayer wrote: ↑

Tue Sep 12, 2023 4:11 pm

My takeaway from reading this thread is the question: what are social systems where introversion is built in and extroverts have to adapt in a similar way extroversion is built in the contemporary corporate model and introverts have to adapt. I am thinking library as one example (first thought church because upbringing) - how can you throw a library style party / party in a library library-style?

How about an internet forum where interactions are asynchronous and text-based, and there is at least a small bookcase of required reading just to understand what everybody is talking about?

Hehe, nice one

EREFest has concluded. A(t least a) three day weekend where many forumites gathered to experience desert living, workshops and share the ERE lifestyle. In this post I will do a write-up of how the weekend was structured. I encourage attendees (like they already did) to share their experiences as well! Edit: Everyone whose face I show here have consented to it. If I did made a mistake somewhere, let me know!

The reason I am doing a write-up of the weekend is not just because it is a fun read, but also it can be a good blueprint for future meet-ups. Especially the workshops and the different roles can turn a good meet-up into a great meet-up.

Attendees
We had twenty people who attended the meetup, including one child. Most of them where from the forum, but there were also some partners from forumites and a friend of AxelHeyst. The attendents came from North America, Latin America and Europe.

Location
The event was held at AxelHeyst's place, somewhere in the Californian desert. It is a beautiful place, with enough place for everyone.

How the weekend was structured
When you are having twenty people over for three days, you need some structure. Who is responsible for what? What activities you do? What will you eat? What facilities are needed?

Roles & rules
To make sure that we could run a smooth operation, we had some people assigned to certain roles. We had

• Head Chef - responsible for brunch and dinner everyday
• Senior Poop Engineer - responsible for clearing out the compost toilet
• Clean-up manager - responsible for cleaning up dishes and keeping a clean kitchen and festival grounds
• Fire starter/marshall - responsible for the making and dousing the campfire.

Note that being responsible did not mean that you had to do everything yourself!

I was the clean-up manager, but I really had to do very little. I asked for some volunteers every day and they got to work and made the world a better place. Sometimes I didn't even had to ask anything, people would simply clean up after themselves.

Having these roles defined beforehand made it clear who would do what and who you could ask questions. It made the cognitive load for AxelHeyst smaller, though next time I think we should have more roles to decrease the load even more!

With respect to rules, there were very little. The main ones were: don't set the desert on fire and don't loiter in the main house.

Timetable
The event was held from Friday evening to Monday morning. We did not have a very strict timetable, but it was roughly structured like this for Saturday and Sunday:

08-09 Group walk
10-11 Free time
11-12 Brunch
12-16 Workshops
16-18 Free time
18-20 Dinner
20-00 Free time


The schedule. The cardboard got recycled immediately after EREfest to be used for a mouse trap.

We thought we might need some kind of group activity at the start of EREFest to get everyone acquainted with each other. However, since there were various waves of people arriving, the absorption rate of new folks was high enough that everyone could get to know each other in a natural way.

Food
We had communal dinners twice a day, except for Friday since people would arrive at different times. We enjoyed:

• Raclette made from Swiss cheesed brought and prepared by Jean
• Pasta Peperoni
• Pasta Spaghetti
• Burritos
• Pizza

Jean working his Raclette consultant magic.


Example of a the foodstation in action.

After the WOG workshop, I gave people their edible certificate of WL7, an Californian ice-cream sandwich called It's-It.


The prize for becoming WL7+

Facilities
Most of the people slept in tents on tent sites AxelHeyst and I created the days before, some slept in their car, van or trailer. The theanimal clan slept in the main house.

We had a compost toilet and a solar shower. The toilet in the main house was also available, but we of course tried to close the loop as often as possible by using the compost toilet.


Jin+Guice once more showing of the compost toilet and shower

We also had an introvert zone. It was in the shade under a big tree. Whenever you would get overwhelmed or just wanted to relax for a bit, you could sit there and everyone would respect your privacy.

Workshops
We had various workshops during the weekend. Some where about skillsharing and some about an interesting topic. Forumites going out of their way to share some knowledge with others was one of the reasons that EREFest was a great success!

We had the following workshops:

Saturday

• Zine making by MountainFrugal. He taught us the basic skills to fold paper into zines and what the structure of a zine is. We then each made our own zine.
• Improv workshop by Grundomatic. We did some hilarious exercises and learned the basic of improvs
• Talk about geopolitics by mathiverse. They talked about various factors to consider a countries place on the geopolitical stage.

MountainFrugal showing how zinemaking is done


An sampling of the zines the forumites made


An attentive crowd listens to mathiverse's talk about geopolitics

Sunday

• WOGshop - an introduction to web of goal thinking by AxelHeyst and Quadalupe. We talked about reverse fishbones and how to draw web of goals. The attendees also practices with them and shared their experiences. At the end I congratulated them since they had now all leveled up to WL7.
• How to start a YouTube channel. The talk was an excellent how to tutorial in how to start a channel. Main take-aways: audio is very important and don't be afraid to agressively alienate people who are not your intended audience.
• Introduction to chainsaws by Mrs theanimal. She talked at length about the different parts of a chainsaw, how you could use one and what kind of maintenance you had to do.

There was also an impromptu workshop on tortilla making by theanimal on Monday morning, though I was pretty much passed out at that point.


Two excited nerds explaining the intricacies of Web of Goals.


Expect many ERE YT channels to pop up after this talk!


A Mrs theanimal lecturing about all parts of a chainsaw

All in all, it was amazing to see the various topics that people could easily talk an hour about. If EREFest had been a week, I am sure we could have done this everyday.

Fun and vibes
Fun

During the free time, we didn't just sit in our introvert corner in silence. We had many conversations with one another about various topics. It ranged from "Where are you from?" to "Are you retired" to "What is your favorite boardgame" to "What is the overlap between Kegan, Wheaton levels, spiral dynamics and Plotkin?"

A non exhaustive list of activities I have seen people do were:

• Trailrunning through the desert
• Sitting at the campfire, talking about Life and Deep Thoughts.
• Short readings from The Book. Did you know that finding box-shaped containers is trivial?
• An ERE Sins Confession Circle. One of us has been to an all inclusive resort and liked it. And another one of us has an electric egg boiler and uses it!
• Stargazing and photography
• Guitar playing + sing-a-long. We discovered that you can use barbecue tongs to produce a beat and two forks and a propane tank for drumming. I also sang "House of the rising sun" by The Animals with theanimal, so I have achieved another life goal.

Campfire


A great performance!


Star phography


Vibes
It is always exciting and a little scary to meet a new group of people. But in this case, I could not have asked for a better group of people. The conversations were high quality, the people where mindful and friendly.

Even though most of us were a long time from home, it did feel like we were home, with our tribe. For once you did not have to explain why you wanted to live frugal and that it's not only about sacrifice. For once you weren't the only weird person in the group.

I had a really great time and I am already looking forward to future editions!


All EREFest2023 graduates

Looks like a great time! Thanks for sharing. The zine cover photo, ooo, I am curious to read them.

The ERE sins confession circle made me chuckle personally, I purchase coffee outside the house and partake in the occasional baked good mall treat (though less often than last year!)

Thank you all for the pictures and write-ups!

Really happy for you guys! Seems like it was a really all-around great experience for everyone involved. I would love to make it next year if life circumstances permit.

Thank you for sharing, it sounds like an amazing experience!

What fun! It seems like you guys did bring some of the library spirit into the fresh air.

What I Learned
I'd never organized anything remotely like this so I learned a lot. Some things I learned that I think are fairly generally known about organizing:

Create a Role for everything that needs to be done and delegate everything. mF counseled me to delegate, but there were many roles I didn't realize existed or just didn't think hard enough about. I realized over the weekend that the most responsible thing I can do is to delegate *every single role* with the aim of having nothing to do when the event happens. This will keep me free to help troubleshoot/adapt to unfolding circumstances through the weekend, which is what my real role is. Also, my ability to perform Roles is diminished because I'm more likely to get distracted by a decision halfway through doing something and forget about it. I'd have done a better job if I wasn't also trying to fulfill a few roles.

I created roles for master chef, meal cleanup, and fire marshall. I also created the role for compost toilet tender but delegated it to myself. The helper who signed up to assist/learn from me on that told me they'd own it for the rest of the weekend and I could forget about it, which was very important that they did that because I definitely would have dropped the ball a couple times. And that is the very wrong job to drop.

I ought also to have created and delegated roles for:

• coffee/tea station setup
• Meal setup (laying out the dishes and flatware for meals)
• Welcomer (greet new arrivals, show them where to park, help them find tent spot, help them psychologically process travels and arrival, introduce to the group and ensure they've gotten integrated).
• Travel coordinator (someone to help run logistics on rides, transportation, carpooling, etc).
• Workshop coordinator

Probably others but that's all that occurred to me so far.

Another thing I learned is to create very clear and specific SoPs for the actions that need them. For most things it is best to communicate the desired outcome for the role (e.g. make sure people can make tea and coffee when they wake up in the morning) and let the person take their own initiative for the how. Some things need specific instructions, though. Ashley was helping me make pancakes Friday morning and she helped me mill flour. I forgot to tell her that you need to start the motor unloaded and then add grain to the hopper otherwise you'll clog/jam it. So it clogged/jammed. (The cool part of the story apropos to the theme of the fest is that Ashley is a competent Renaissance woman so she just downloaded the manual for the mill, verified that the unit wasn't damaged, followed the instructions for dissassembly, cleaning, and reassembly, and then carried on milling flour).

For things like 'How to mill grain' and 'how to clean composting toilet buckets' it's best to document the specific instructions, teach it, and then let the person go on with it.

More things can be workshopped.

The most obvious thing is meals: every meal is an opportunity to skillshare recipes, kitchen workflow, techniques, how to make a meal for 20 out of whatever random stuff is in the pantry, etc.

The coffee/tea station was pretty basic because I didn't delegate it and basic is all I had bandwidth for. But next fest someone could workshop different ways of preparing coffee/tea, roasting, methods for making low-quality beans taste good, etc.

My expectations for workshops was exceeded. They were diverse, interesting, and concise, ranging from cerebral (the WoGshop, geopolitics) to practical (chainsaw maintenance, tortilla making) to creative (zine making, how to start a youtube channel), to spiritual (hermetic meditation). The questions and discussions were interesting.


What I didn't nail
It wasn't at all easy for people to be self-sufficient outside of the main two meals a day. I'd set an expectation that people would take care of themselves if they wanted breakfast, snacks, or got here early/left late, but that just wasn't reasonable based on the conditions and available infrastructure. Next year I'll design the constraints and infrastructure such that either a) it's reasonable for people to be self sufficient for non main meals or b) we take care of *all* meals cooperatively.

I thought two meals/day starting with a late brunch would be fine. It would have been better if there was at least light breakfast food for people. Not only do many people not skip breakfast, many people were on more eastern time zones so their hunger cycles were running earlier.

I was trying to strike a balance between overly rigid structure and total formlessness. I think I erred slightly on the side of formlessness. People are fine with a lot of oddity as long as they know what to expect, and I think I let a little too much uncertainty exist about when meals would be ready, when workshops would happen, etc.

What I'll do different next year

• Create a role for everything
• Delegate everything
• Make SoPs for things that need them
• Create a structure such that everything can be workshopped
• Create a clearer structure for the workshops ahead of time. This was something that came together during the weekend because I didn't have a vision for it. Someone suggested aiming at 50% unstructured time, 25% defined structured time, 25% undefined structured time. Defined structure: the workshop on roasting coffee beans is after lunch. Undefined structure: there is a chunk of time after the bean-roasting workshop. Has anyone thought of a workshop to give?
• Provide light morning food for people who don't IF/are on different time zones and/or provide more decentralized cooking infrastructure and food storage.
• Build more shade.
• Consider making it last longer, up to a week.
• Have a group project people can work on a bit every day (e.g. a structure build, an erosion control earthworks, outdoor kitchen improvements, offgrid bathroom improvements, ...)

Personally: I'll schedule my pre-event time so that I can come in well rested and charged, and I'll go out of my way to try to get as high quality sleep during the event as I can. I was pretty drained by the time the weekend started and didn't get good sleep during the event. I felt not as mentally sharp / creative as I would have liked to be, and not as capable of being engaged / exuberant in the way I like to be during gatherings. I suspect a good portion of this is just due to it being my first gathering -- next year I'll be less stressed simply because I'll already know what I'm doing and have some evidence that the whole thing won't crater.

Ideas for consideration for next year:
Make a point of inviting ERE-adjacent people who aren't forumites, SOs or lurkers. Attract them to the cult--ahem community, and learn from them. (A good example of this is Ashley, the one ERE-adjacent attendee this year, who gave some great comments during the WoGshop about being mindful to step outside purely logical/analytical approaches and gave some pointers to resources for people to investigate themselves).

I see EREfest primarily as a celebration of our community, a chance to learn from each other, strengthen bonds, enrich our mental models of these anonymous internet strangers we know strangely intimate details about, cultivate serendipity, etc. But also I think we can make the boundary of the event a bit porous and carefully invite people who will be friendly to our vibe and are likely to like what they find.

...

After everyone has had a chance to document their reflections I'm going to draft one or two pieces, a summary of erefest2023 and a 'how to host an erefest v1.0'. I'm already planning on hosting an erefest here next year, and I'd be thrilled to see others pop up.

Would one of the attendees mind sharing some of the content of the "cerebral" workshops? Chainsaw maintenance would probably not be a suitable candidate, but i'd be curious what was discussed in the wog workship, geopolitics, youtube channel one, etc. A quick summary of material covered would be very interesting for those of us that can't make it.

The hyperTLDR of the WoGshop:

• Explain reverse fishbones, show a couple examples.
• Give out paper and writing utensils and have everyone sketch reverse fishbones for a few minutes.
• Discuss the exercise, if people thought it was useful at all.
• Discuss what happens as you start to sketch a lot of fishbones and how you start to 'see' the first and second order effects of actions in your life without having to do the actual exercise.
• Show some examples of how clustering up reverse fishbones can lead to interesting insights like 'what i want isn't this activity itself, it's the first order positive effects of this activity' which helps you to be less precious about what exactly it is you do.
• Discuss what a Web of Goals is.
• Discuss the results of attempts to sketch WoGs, and stress that we've found that the WoGs themselves aren't useful but the activity of sketching them is.
• Show several examples of WoGs, demonstrating that there's no one right way to do it, and that the best way to approach this is to just start sketching and not be precious about it. insights are derived from the process and rep count matters.
• Give a suggested way to seed/start a WoG sketch and give 5-10 minutes for everyone to sketch.
• Discuss the exercise, insights, etc.

Quadalupe and I plan to develop the format of the session a bit further and iterate a process/workflow for learning chapter 5. We think a lot of people read about reverse fishbones and WoGs but don't every really attempt it and so leave insights on the table. We think there are a few fairly accessible exercises that people can play with to generate insights and develop more rubust systems thinking in their day to day. We'll of course be posting about this as we go.