The Education of Axel Heyst

[Jin+Guice]

@Qazwer: I think that risks the semantics game. In some ways it is impossible to retire "early" if you are not young. I think the skills necessary for ERE become even more important as one ages. Our society is not kind to the elderly and building up robust networks to satisfy ones needs as well as having the time to maintain one's physical, emotional and social health seem like they would only become more important as one ages.

I also think that our societies enormous erection for employment benefits the elderly who wish to keep "working." Once you cease to have the ability to perform broadly defined "work," you are effectively dead in most cases.

[Ego]

Are all the forms of ERE a relative young person’s game? Young being defined as someone who has the strength to ‘work’ (however defined) and the mental capabilities to create a definition of ‘work’ that makes sense for that person.

Question the premise: Strength to work and mental capability to work are characteristics not exclusive to the young. Older people may experience diminishing capacities at a higher rate than young people but that gap is closing terrifyingly fast. I just had an Iraqi electrician working here who is in his 70s and is sharper and stronger than just about anyone I know.

[ertyu]

even if you're young, if you're in an accident or get otherwise chronically disabled (physically or mentally), you're toast. It seems to me that if FIRE is not resilient because it relies on all stash, the polar opposite is not resilient due to too little of it. Money might not be the only pillar of ere, but it is a pillar. A black swan might happen to the world at large and stashes could be meaningless, sure. A black swan could also happen on a personal level. It's unwise to be in denial of the risk on the macro scale as well as the micro scale.

[AxelHeyst]

Yes I think this is all dead on. The struggle with trad dirtbaggery is poor resilience because no stash or passive income: the lifestyle *only* works due to a strategy of extreme frugality, but has almost no buffer/stocks. A potential struggle with FIRE or accumulation>ERE is a continued *over*centralization of money/FI, which can become an actual obstacle or distraction from one's purpose, fulfillment, stoke, etc.

So the term dirtbagERE aims to find a certain balance between the two: a highly strategic and effective approach to money, multiyear stash, passive income, but constructed in such a way that stoke/purpose/freedom-to is what is being centralized, is what is being solved for. I mean that's semiERE I think, dirtbagERE just riffs on the semiERE theme with a superexplicit emphasis on purpose/stoke as feedback and guiding mechanism, and an acknowledgement that the dirtbagERE'er has some level of indifference to middle class comfort so the attainment of hyperfrugal middle class standard of living is not an element.

I'm still feeling a little handwavey on the "FI might happen accidentally anyway" thing. I'm still solving for the right balance of intentional focus on income and money matters, because I realize that in my own situation I'm flirting with magical "the universe will provide if I do good things" thinking, which is *not* what I'm actually trying to say or do. It works for some people, so far, but that's survivorship bias. I think the people who actually pull it off aren't doing magical thinking at all, they're just operating at a level that looks like magic to us N-2+'ers.

[Alphaville]

even if you're young, if you're in an accident or get otherwise chronically disabled (physically or mentally), you're toast. It seems to me that if FIRE is not resilient because it relies on all stash, the polar opposite is not resilient due to too little of it. Money might not be the only pillar of ere, but it is a pillar. A black swan might happen to the world at large and stashes could be meaningless, sure. A black swan could also happen on a personal level. It's unwise to be in denial of the risk on the macro scale as well as the micro scale.

yes

i'm thinking something that @bigato wrote once, and i am only paraphrasing from memory, and probably altering unconsciously to fit my purposes, so i apologize in advance:

everyone in the planet is invested in protecting the global economy, whereas only you, and some family if available, are invested in protecting you.

so if ere is a form of insurance (i tend to view it as such, "not losing," especially so since @qazwer started posting here and bringing attention to that aspect) it makes sense to assess realistically which system has greater chances of enduring a disaster and how many eggs to place in each basket...

[AxelHeyst]

@alpha nice. I really like that idea of explicit acknowledgement that no one else actually cares about your well-being. I like the phrase "The world doesn't owe you anything" as a form of protecting myself against entitlement thinking. And making sure that I've got robust disaster insurance for my own life is the best way to ensure that in life, no matter what, I'm positioned to be able to help out and be useful. When SHTF, I want to be one of the people who is helping with the recovery/rescue operations, not one of the people needing a rescue from my rooftop (metaphorically and literally speaking).

[Alphaville]

yes but at some point or another everyone needs rescue. either now or tomorrow or decades from now. everyone becomes helpless at some point, and there is no shame in that.

[AxelHeyst]

Yes, absolutely. The best stance is to have a sense of humility - knowing that every time you reach a hand out to help, there's another time in life when you're going to be reaching a hand out to receive.

[Alphaville]

yup

[7Wannabe5]

It is also possible to try to overtly construct a local zombie apocalypse survival circle beyond natural interdependence with close family and friends.

[Western Red Cedar]

So the term dirtbagERE aims to find a certain balance between the two: a highly strategic and effective approach to money, multiyear stash, passive income, but constructed in such a way that stoke/purpose/freedom-to is what is being centralized, is what is being solved for. I mean that's semiERE I think, dirtbagERE just riffs on the semiERE theme with a superexplicit emphasis on purpose/stoke as feedback and guiding mechanism, and an acknowledgement that the dirtbagERE'er has some level of indifference to middle class comfort so the attainment of hyperfrugal middle class standard of living is not an element.

Okay, this statement really clears up what you are getting at with dirtbagERE for me. The notion of stoke or drive towards a passion is a central part of the dirtbag lifestyle, and I can see the benefit of prioritizing that drive within an ERE framework. It's been a year or so since I've read the SemiERE threads, but I think the discussion often revolved around the idea of taking time off to explore different ideas/lifestyles, taking a break from a soul-crushing job, taking an opportunity to try some part-time options that fit into the web-of-goals, etc... Essentially, realizing that life is long and you don't need to power through a miserable journey to full FI in the footsteps of someone like Dr. Doom.

When you talk about the purpose/stoke feedback mechanism, are you thinking about drive towards a particular pursuit (climbing/skiing/rafting/travel) or are you thinking about a more general approach? Or does it even matter?

I shifted my strategy towards SemiERE as a result of these forum discussions because I realized that I'm likely to pursue paid employment at some point in the future, or at least get creative about volunteer opportunities that will reduce costs. I also tend to be a bit financially conservative, so I've focused on getting to 60-80% of my FI goal. This allows me to leverage the investment I've already made in my education and career capital - to make hay while the sun shines - while also taking advantage of some of my youth to pursue other things (aka travel).

Also - you never started the dedicated HOWLI thread. Still waiting on that so we can share examples of HOWLI candidates.

[AxelHeyst]

When you talk about the purpose/stoke feedback mechanism, are you thinking about drive towards a particular pursuit (climbing/skiing/rafting/travel) or are you thinking about a more general approach? Or does it even matter?

I think that all I'm trying to say is that the dirtbagERE'r has a very clear Freedom-To Vision, which can be anything that is coherent to that person. They're all about _____, and ____ could be a thing that's easy to point at or maybe for them it's pretty abstract. Could be climbing, paddling, singing, math (Paul Erdos = total dirtbag), u-locking your neck to machinery in a CAFO slaughterhouse, making macaroni art, 'being an intellectual', living your life as a continually refined work of art, plumbing the depths of the difference between being and doing, etc. By my examples I don't want to imply that the freedom-to has to be something narrow (although, fine if it is for someone).

ETA: Another way to think of it, instead of 'pursuit', is 'identity'. The thinking is instead "I want freedom to do ___" it's "I want freedom to be ____". I like that this is a little more user-friendly towards a virtue ethics approach, where one thinks of The Good Life in how one fulfil's one's designated/chosen Roles (father, sister, citizen, activist, friend, protector, instigator, ...)

Also - you never started the dedicated HOWLI thread. Still waiting on that so we can share examples of HOWLI candidates.

I thought there was enough overlap with Ego's "Life is a Daring Adventure" thread that I just put some stuff in there (although, guilty, I haven't done much with the notion since. Honestly I've been finding more inspiration in the effort to write *my* story instead of reading about others!)

[RoamingFrancis]

Love that you're including Paul Erdos as a dirtbag, and the imagery of the CAFO slaughterhouse. "Freedom-to" has been at the top of my mind recently.

[AxelHeyst]

Incidental Yields
There is Passive Income; some asset that throws off income without much work, like revenue on a book or dividends from a security. The initial asset must be acquired somehow: capital growth, an injection of energy/w*rk/work, etc. That asset might be acquired via grinding at a soul-crushing job, or pouring your soul into a beautiful artwork that you sell, or a trust fund, to anything in between. The term passive income is path-independent; the term says nothing about how the asset was acquired.

On the theme of Purpose+Stoke, I've been thinking about Incidental Income, but to bring the discussion to L6 and up I'm going to say Incidental Yields. Incidental Yields are path-dependent: the term says something about how the yield was procured.

An Incidental Yield is a yield (money, access to shelter, food, whatever) that is generated through the pursuit of an activity where procurement of the yield is not the primary motivation. An Incidental Yield is a beneficial flow into my life as a result of something I wanted to do anyway. Assuming I had the freedom to, I would have done the thing just because I wanted to even if those yields were zero.

To get really precise: An Incidental Yield is a yield thrown off by an activity that I would do even if the only yield was fun/thrill/stoke/purpose fulfillment/interest/curiosity/etc.

Examples:
I helped my buddy tile his house. I wanted to do it - I love spending time with him workin' on stuff, and I had nothing better to do that week. He gave me his old iPhone 6s, which has been my primary phone for three years now. The phone was an incidental yield (also all the beer and whiskey we drank, and the food we ate, and the couch I slept on).
A certain prostitute loves having sex. They like having sex all the time and really enjoys working with their clients (whom they has total agency over selecting). They'd have sex with them even if they didn't get paid for it, but they happens to get paid nicely for it; that income is incidental yield.

I'm getting dangerously close to "do what you love and YOLO" territory here, and also "careful turning what you love into your primary income stream, because there's no faster way to kill your fun hobby than to make it your moneymaker". I think we're getting into subtle territory here. Incidental Yields only work if they're truly incidental - if it really doesn't matter to you if you generate the yield or not. Turning something you want to do into The Way You Make Money corrupts its Incidental-ness. The trick is to arrange your affairs such that doing what you want to do is the way you happen to make money/yields, without turning it into the thing you do in order to make money. Subtle.

Most people do what they gotta do to make their cheddar, and then do what they want in surplus time. I'm talking about inverting that: do what you want, and only do what you gotta do to make your cheddar if necessary - but ideally it's not necessary.

Let's say that I only do things I want to do, and say "no" to doing anything I don't. And let's say that in the process of doing those things, it happens to throw off >2x CoL, some food, some housing, some other stuff. I've somehow managed to cover all of my necessary flows incidentally and then some.

I think that most people who try to Follow Their Passion and make money from it likely fail (or burn out and start hating the things they used to enjoy) because they're putting the pressure of "needing" to throw off 40k or 60k or even more if they're trying to get a business with overhead off the ground. The income becomes Primary - it's no longer incidental. Extreme frugality unlocks the ability to support one's lifestyle with incidental yields. Pulling 100k incidentally is difficult; pulling 6k incidentally far less so.

I'm considering attempting to fund my life with purely incidental yields. I'm not sure I can formulate a cogent argument for why anyone else would explicitly try to do this, since it's far easier to imagine constructing a life where you cover your necessary flows with Intentional Yields (whether that's accumulate>FI or a bread job), and then anything else is gravy. I honestly like the idea of the challenge of it - "is it possible to truly incidentally cover all my yields?" - and I'm also very interested in if there's any difference in kind of a life/mindset that has decoupled from the pursuit of intentional yields.

ETA: I see time spent doing things that aren't aligned with stoke/purpose/etc as waste of my life-force-energy. From one perspective I'm just proposing a way to think about life-force-energy waste elimination from one's system.

ETA2: Oh, duh. All I'm saying is that I'm trying to arrange a WoG such that all my activity node's reverse fishbone diagrams have $, shelter, food, etc as first or second-order side-effects, not zeroeth order. All I'm adding is that I'm not engaging in the node *because* of that first or second-order positive effect. Yeah I'm not sure if I'm saying anything that interesting here tbh.

[AxelHeyst]

In my efforts to grok ERE over the past year and a half, I never at any point feel like I'm getting smarter or leveling up. I just feel like I'm getting less stupid. And pretty much just re-phrasing the book in my own words, realizing that the 5,000 words I wrote are captured in 500 or 50 words there, and I don't need the words I wrote anymore (but the process was probably necessary).

[daylen]

You can visualize that process as a frame spiraling inwards as you press out any points causing polarity. A polarity inside a frame will tend to distort the frame itself and prevent internal spiraling towards a cohesive point of perception (becoming unconscious competence). Pressing out these points in a setting like this goes a step further, bringing out the circuits you use in a social setting (which are likely where most of the knotting has occurred prior).

[7Wannabe5]

“Money flows in your direction when you do the work that other people want you to do.” I read this in a very good book with title/author I can’t recall. The general topic was varying money myths taught by families of origin.

This could be generalized to “Yields flow in your direction when you do the work (enact behavior)that creates attractive vacuum for those yields.” It can be made more specific or corrected to “Money flows in your direction when you do the work that other people who have more ease with money than other yields want you to do.”

This speaks to why most humans basic conception of social capital is flawed. Other humans aren’t exactly like banks you can fill up with favors or love deposits which you are then entitled to withdraw at later date. Social flows are created and maintained through creation of attractive vacuums for varying types of flows. Some humans don’t like this, because it implies that you are “only as good as your last book”, but it also implies that you can always be as good as your next book.

Anyways, the seemingly obvious point I really wanted to make is that incidental yields of money or other social goods/flows can only occur in social context. For instance, if you are stoked by writing secret poetry alone in your secret garret, highly unlikely that you will generate incidental social yields of any variety. OTOH, if you are engaging your stoke on a gardening project on a fairly busy city street, you will attract all sorts of incidental social flows, both positive and negative. IOW, something something something ...gradient of social commons. I will leave the math to daylen.

[daylen]

gradient of social commons.

Precisely what is on my mind right now! Presses diverge point/frame flow from attention creating a volcanic mountain-chain or channeling river. Operators converge point/frame flow into attention creating turbulent lava swirls or a cavernous complex. Visualized by multi-spiral diagrams with variable convergence/divergence rate and revolution count for each layer/region.

[Ego]

I'm considering attempting to fund my life with purely incidental yields.

Funding life with non-incidental yields takes effort. While it may not be hard, it is not easy. To what extent is non-incidental earning a use-it-or-lose-it skill? How hard would it be to have no choice but to go back to non-incidental work after 1, 2 , 5 or 20 years of purely incidental yields? I wonder if an 80/20 incidental/non-incidental distribution may work better than pure incidental.

[Qazwer]

Incidental yield also gets close to salaryman job who actually loves and excels at their field - I know plenty of tenured professors who do what they do for that reason - those who fail at it (most) get eaten up by the machine
There are also successful artists, doctors, lawyers and even bankers who work far past retirement age or need of income
Incidental yield is easier when you happen to be ridiculously successful (by definition not everyone) and you enjoy the work