Hristo's FI Journal

Where are you and where are you going?
Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

Was talking to a friend from my old firm who was lamenting about the (very, very real) stresses of managing kids while being a top-performing BigLaw partner, and she (jokingly) said something along the lines of: "whoever said kids were a good idea was WAY off!" I of course said something along the lines of: "I'm more inclined to think it's the BigLaw job that is the bad idea." She agreed, of course, as she was totally joking about the kids thing; and I only said it because I knew she is as jaded as I am about the whole BigLaw thing. But, it's crazy the corners we (I'm really talking about myself, not her) paint ourselves into these days, and call it success. There's so much that is just sinful about this modern world we've built for ourselves (sinful as in it severs our relationship with God); and there's so little that is good about it that we can point to. Air conditioning? Seems like that's one of those things where the more you use it, the more you need it (both b/c of your body's acclimation and b/c the use of it is making the world warmer). Healthcare? This never-ending COVID quarantine might be slowly poking holes in that talisman. International travel? Ho-hmm; what's to see, really? The Internet? As a Gen-Xer I remember a world without it, and it was kind of glorious. What else?

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

Ambitious reading goals for the rest of August and for September:
  • Finish Homer's The Iliad (just a few more chapters to go; Achilles just donned his freshly forged god-made battle armor and mustered his soldiers, so "here go hell come!")
  • Finish Junger's Storm of Steel
  • Start Homer's Odyssey
  • Start Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography
  • C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves
  • George Washington's Rules of Civility
  • Louis L'Amour's Education of a Wandering Man
  • (Maybe) Start James Schall's Another Sort of Learning

Qazwer
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Qazwer »

I sing of the arms and the man

If you go with Romans too then the Aeneid might be the sequel of the Illiad

7Wannabe5
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I hear you, but the problem is that you alone can’t pick and choose which aspects of modernity to keep in the reduced budget if the efficiency gains due to specialization are abandoned. For example, it has been my observation that poor people need their cell phones even more than affluent people, because they don’t have cars, they are more reliant on gig work apps, and they are more in need of emergency communication system.

I am definitely not actually arguing or in favor of the other side, but Marie Antoinette enjoyed designing little hobby farms for herself, and there is some logic behind the tendency to view “back to the bucolic” as elitist. First question being “Where do all the other humans go?”

Salathor
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Salathor »

If you haven't read them, I strongly recommend as well the Tai-pan and Noble House books by James Clavell. A rip-roaring tale and a unrepentant love letter to capitalism and the far east. I gave up nearly all US news and started reading just the South China Morning Post for about a year after I read them.

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

Some random thoughts, as I ease in to a new work week.

First, I listened to C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man this weekend while I was doing my weekend chores. It wasn't on my immediate reading list, but it popped up as available on the Libby app, and given that it's only about 1.5 hours long, I thought I'd give it a listen. And wow, good stuff; excellent defense of objective value. And crazy to think that this was written (or that the lectures were delivered) ~75 years ago, given how relevant all of this is to today.

Second, I've been having a lot of success at work lately using the pomodoro technique--using my laptop's timer app to do work in 25-minute chunks, followed by a 5-minute mental break where I give myself permission to do some Internet surfing, to check out this forum, to get out of my chair, to catch up on personal emails/texts/tasks, etc. I've been much more productive and efficient; and there haven't been any days where I find come 5pm I've only billed like an hour or 2 because I've been screwing around all day looking busy.

My plan/hope, is that as I get better at NOT wasting time at work, I'll be able to use some of my time at work to focus on productive but not necessarily (or directly) work-related tasks while I am at the office; whether that's working on my ever growing reading list, or writing articles for my various trade association journals or even writing small hyper-local history books (I've also been meaning to write down my family's own genealogy in narrative historical form).

Third, also on the topic of trying to work on some productivity skills, I've been incorporating some better note-taking habits into my routine. I'm still trying to refine my system, but so far it's been very fruitful. It's not quite Zettelkasten (I'm not that OCD), but we'll say it's Zettelkasten adjacent. It started because I needed a better way of taking notes and absorbing the reading I'm doing for my great books book group--so that I can be better prepared for our book clubs and also, of course, so that the significant time commitment I'm making to doing these readings will be worth it.

Here's my current (and ever evolving) system:

- I keep a 3x5 card and pen/pencil in my pocket at all times, for writing down what might be called "fleeting notes" in the Zettelkasten method. This 3x5 cards has everything from the main takeaway from Sunday's homily--yesterday's was "How is your heart?"--, to every other sort of idea I want to capture, to my daily to-do list, to my grocery list, to the names of people (and a detail or two) I meet during the day I want to remember, etc..

- At the end of the day, or whenever, I transfer each of the more important fleeting notes to its own permanent 3x5 card--so, the "How's your heart?" takeaway got it's own card, but the grocery list did not--and the to-do list just get's transferred over to a new card for the new day, bullet journal style. And for people, I might create a permanent card that has the names of all the kids and their parents from my daughter's soccer team, or my son's baseball team, etc.

- For my reading, I'm pretty generous in my marginalia as I make my initial read through a text--including writing down a particular idea that's come to mind based on the text--but I don't take any notes outside of the marginalia. Then, after I've finished the book (or article, etc.), I go back through my marginalia and create a number of permanent 3x5 cards, the topics for which will vary on the book. So, e.g., for the Iliad (finished over the weekend), I made the following notecards:
  • 1 card that names all of the primary characters
  • 1 card for each "book" (chapter), that in 1-3 sentences summarizes that book/chapter, in a creative/clever headline form, if possible.
  • 1 card that identifies the 3 or so things I think the book is about--i.e., the themes (mortality, honor, fate and free will, love/friendship, war)
  • 1 card for each true thing/assertion I think the author is trying to tell us about those various themes
  • 1 card for each idea, etc. from the various marginalia, trying to limit to no more than 3 or so permanent cards from each chapter/book
- For work, when I have a brief to write, or some similar writing, I'm trying to completely scrap my prior writing method and replace it with a 3x5 card system, whereby I'll write each of the main arguments I want to make (and if it's a response brief, each of the arguments the other side made), each of the sub-arguments I want to make under those arguments, with a separate card for each case/statute/fact (evidence) that supports that sub-argument. And then I won't even open a new document in Word until I've completely mapped everything out with the 3x5 cards, by which point the brief (or letter, or article) should really just write itself.

I haven't tried this system yet for a significant piece of writing; but I'm really hoping it works--I see no reason why it shouldn't. And this also should really help with all the other efficiencies I'm working towards. Because the 3x5 card system should allow me the ability to go in and out of significant writing projects; without worrying about being distracted. My current system (and the system I've used pretty much since law school) is to knock everything out at one sitting (so, I still have more all-nighters than anyone my age should!). I open a Word document before I know what I'm going to say, and then I just start writing and researching and reviewing the prior pleadings and case file, etc. all at the same time. It works, BUT it's very taxing and it is not at all systematic.

It also means that anytime I get pulled into something else, and have to stop working on the brief, or whatever, I end up losing about 75%+ of my progress; because my "notes" to the extent they exist, are a bunch of random and incomplete writings on this word document, and a bunch of tabs left open on Westlaw of cases that I had opened for some reason or another. So I have to basically start over because I'm unable to really recall where I left off. So this means I write very early in the morning, or late at night, or overnight--so that I can have large chunks of uninterrupted time. And this is stupid. I'm hoping with the 3x5 system it'll be much easier to drop something and come back to it later and not lose any progress in the process.

It also means that I often don't develop arguments as well as I should. One problem I know of with my current system, where I figure things out as I'm writing, is that the result is often that I give more sway to how I write about an argument than I do to developing the argument in the first place (or even scrapping arguments that end up being unpersuasive). Really, how I say something is nowhere near as important as what I'm saying.

I thank Mortimer Adler for this particular insight, as his "How to Read a Book" method doesn't really concern itself with how an idea is being conveyed; it's concerned with identifying what the idea is, what is being said about it, whether it's true, and what of it. Seems like this translates extremely well to legal writing (and really any writing). Figure out what you want to say first; then figure out the how.

Anyway, a work in progress, but one with lots of promise.

ETA: Another side effect of the way I write now is that I tend to over rely on "forms." Forms are great for certain things, like run-of-the-mill cease and desist letters that don't necessarily need to be reinvented each time (and the client isn't going to pay for that reinvention). But for most other writing, starting from a form and trying to actually just find/replace as much as possible ends up being counterproductive and inefficient. Use the form as a resource, sure, like any other piece of research you do; but don't try and fit square pegs into round holes.

Another negative side effect of the way I write now is that I don't retain ANYTHING. And I think a big reason for this is that my style of writing tends to use things (facts, cases, etc.) in a very one-off, utilitarian model--i.e., I want to say X, and I need a case that supports X, and I don't really care what else the case says so long as it doesn't say something that happens to be really bad in addition to saying X. I've worked with plenty of people who began practicing law during the days when they would still dictate all of their writing to secretaries (either live in person or via Dictaphone). And those folks really just seem to think differently, and better. They know what they are going to say before they say it (I don't usually); and they write that way as well. And all of them seemed to have memories like steel traps; they could remember facts of 20 year old cases they handled, or what a specific opinion from a case might say that might be helpful (sometimes they even remember the specific legal citation). They actually absorb the cases they read in a more holistic manner. I always thought it was damn near magic (or unique cognitive ability); but I'm realizing it's probably more to do with the way they were taught and had taught themselves to think and write and process information.

guitarplayer
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by guitarplayer »

Thumbs up for pomodoro technique, I got it from @jollyscott's journal and A'ed my 1st year of BSc in Maths and Stats which I am pushing along a 40h/week job, gardening, family and some adventures.

I wish I could read your journal sometime but might struggle time-wise because it's so long by now! Do you think you could spot a few 'best reads' with a page number of the journal?

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

guitarplayer wrote:
Tue Aug 31, 2021 2:31 am
I wish I could read your journal sometime but might struggle time-wise because it's so long by now! Do you think you could spot a few 'best reads' with a page number of the journal?
Like a Summa of the Summa? (just kidding)

Here's the summary (based on my very hazy recollection): first 20 or so pages I get real, real touchy and defensive about my spending; second 20 pages or so I vent, a lot, about all sorts of things that we'll say are politics adjacent; and the last 10 or so pages is a diatribe of sorts against secular culture in general, and in particular the tendency to treat ERE as some sort of golden calf--interspersed in there somewhere are 2 near-death experiences (I've had the sacrament of last rites given to me TWICE! CLEAN SLATE!!!). I also lie A LOT about how much my family is actually spending (hmm, so much for the clean slate; back to confession I go).

Have fun! (Though, if I were you, I'd spend my time elsewhere.)

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

This guy just continues to absolutely nail it:

"When I lived in the city, my main skill was tapping keyboards. This is still my main skill - here I am - but since coming here I have supplemented it with a dozen others, from coppicing to composting, construction to chainsaw use. In the country, you have no choice but to remember what your body is for. In the city, even if you want to be self-sufficient, everything will militate against it. "

https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-great-wen

2Birds1Stone
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by 2Birds1Stone »

Paywalled....

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

2Birds1Stone wrote:
Wed Sep 01, 2021 1:43 pm
Paywalled....
But so worth it.

That said, I REALLY hope he turns this series of essays into a book collection once he finishes it. It's something I'd certainly want on my bookshelf, so that I could keep going back to it without having to log on to substack to do it (I mean, it's a diatribe against the Machine; having to log on to anything to read it seems antithetical to the whole venture).

Another fantastic nugget (I won't take any more, for fear of running afoul of copyright):

But this global Gomorrah we have built, whose ideologues criss-cross the world by plane, selling the ideology of the Machine, invincible in pursuit of their progressive destiny - it is founded on sand. The more the global metropolis expands, the more fragile it becomes. The more it ravages, destroys and cuts off alternative lifeways, the more monocultural its picture of the world grows and the more it begins to work against the laws of nature. A centralised Machine society which must drain the natural world in order to continue its expansion is the very definition of ‘unsustainable’; which means it will not be sustained. Something will have to give; it is already giving. We can all feel it.

white belt
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by white belt »

Hristo Botev wrote:
Wed Sep 01, 2021 10:43 am
"When I lived in the city, my main skill was tapping keyboards. This is still my main skill - here I am - but since coming here I have supplemented it with a dozen others, from coppicing to composting, construction to chainsaw use. In the country, you have no choice but to remember what your body is for. In the city, even if you want to be self-sufficient, everything will militate against it. "

https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-great-wen
I also got paywalled, but this quote reminds me of some earlier discussions we had about the ideal community population density/layout. I'm still not convinced to throw the entire idea of cities out the window, but I'm also not convinced that highrises and extreme density are the right answer. I think Jacob got it right with his spot just outside Chicago proper. Close enough where you can take public transportation or bike to the city center in 30-45 minutes, but far enough away where you're not paying a premium to be near downtown (the appeal of "downtown" dropped off a lot for me when I decided to stop spending as much money on eating out and going to bars).

I'm currently in a streetcar suburb and it feels to me like it's the right balance.* There is density enough to interact with neighbors and collaborate, but there is also ample yardspace to nurture some independent connection with nature. I can reach the downtown cultural/economic center area within 30 min on public transportation or by about the same time on bike. The past few days off I've felt my main skills are cooking, fermenting, fixing my bike, reading, and I guess to an extent tapping on my keyboard (mostly to post on these forums though). This Winter I hope to make the preparations for more of a permaculture style outdoor garden come Spring (I'm particularly looking forward to ordering some dormant dwarf fruit trees).

* = With the caveat that most home prices are over $1 million and property taxes are extremely expensive, so I would never live here if I wasn't tied to my employer (who happens to be the warmachine to rule all machines).
Last edited by white belt on Wed Sep 01, 2021 2:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

white belt wrote:
Wed Sep 01, 2021 2:39 pm
I also got paywalled, but this quote reminds me of some earlier discussions we had about the ideal community population density/layout. I'm still not convinced to throw the entire idea of cities out the window, but I'm also not convinced that highrises and extreme density are the right answer.
Oh man, you REALLY need to cough up the $5 for Kingsnorth's family and read these essays. Here are the other two quotes I'd transcribed onto 3x5 cards for later reference, which get to your point. (We'll call this defensible under fair use, under the educational purposes exception?)

First, re city size:

As so often, this is a question of scale. Plato, according to Mumford, ‘limited the size of his ideal city to the number of citizens who might be addressed by a single voice.’ Everyone should be within hailing distance of that voice in order to ensure human-scale living.


And on highrises, in particular:

This is the modern machine city: global in scale and ambition, bland, homogenised and empty at its heart. Plato’s ideal city, and the real cities of the pre-modern period, were a combination, sometimes uneasy, sometimes harmonious, of ambition and aim. They were religious centres, cultural hubs, marketplaces, dwelling places, loci of power. The 21st century city exists for one purpose: profit, and the growth of profit. Everything that exists there, from schools to art galleries to concert halls to government buildings, is pointed towards this end. You can judge a culture, I think, by its tallest buildings; what it chooses to reach towards is a reflection of its soul and purpose. The tallest buildings in a modern city are not cathedrals, temples, or even palaces: they are skyscrapers, housing banks, financiers and global corporations.

white belt
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by white belt »

@Hristo

Which one of Kingsnorth's books do you recommend starting with? Or do you think his essays are better?

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

@WB: I too am in a streetcar suburb (viewtopic.php?p=232141#p232141), and I agree that it's the right balance for us, currently. But yeah, the prices are astronomical, and what's funny about folks paying a premium for a "walkable" neighborhood is that it sure as hell seems as if I'm the only one actually walking. The appeal for most (like 99%) folks of living in these streetcar suburbs outside major metro areas appears to be that it's just a closer suburb to the major city center; so the car commute is shorter and generally involves only surface streets. So while I think a streetcar suburb makes sense for the weird ERE-minded outsider (including myself in this category)--who is trying to find the right balance between car (in)dependency while still having some room for exercising your self-sufficiency muscles--it's not as if I'm really surrounded by folks who share those values (I used to think I was; but I'm not).

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

white belt wrote:
Wed Sep 01, 2021 2:51 pm
Which one of Kingsnorth's books do you recommend starting with? Or do you think his essays are better?
I think one of the first things I read from him (introduced to him by @Jacob) was the "Manifesto," which he wrote with Dougald Hine when they launched the Dark Mountain Project. It's been awhile now since I read it, but I remember it being impactful (and it's free): https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/

I LOVED his Buckmaster trilogy (https://www.paulkingsnorth.net/buckmaster), which is the only fiction writing he's done (or at least they are the only fiction novels he's published). I recommend reading the first book, The Wake, along with the fantastic audio book narrated by Simon Vance, who is perfect for it. I say that because it's written in a made-up dialect that is supposed to be kind of a version of Old English updated so to be readable and understandable to a modern audience, but I had a hard time making sense of it. But once you hear Vance reading it it makes total sense.

I'll say that the final book in the series, Alexandria (which takes place roughly 1,000 years from now), has probably stuck with me more than maybe any other book, short of perhaps the Bible. I find that I often filter things I see through the imagery, characters, themes, happenings of that book.

I've actually never read Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, which is what he is most known for--though I mean to. I really enjoyed Savage Gods, which is like reading a really, really well-written ERE journal in a way (it's sort of a memoir of his family's attempt to transition from city life in London to rural life on a 1-acre homestead in rural Ireland).

There are some good YouTube videos/podcasts floating around there as well. I think @Jacob sent me this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_s8Vo00Xug.

But the best writing I've seen from him is the current series of substack essays, which dives deep into the main theme from his last novel, Alexandria--which is humanity being subsumed (or maybe consumed) by the Machine. I'm particularly drawn to them because they are reflective of his recent (earlier this year) conversion to the Orthodox Christian faith; and so the Garden of Eden and the Fall feature prominently, as does the concept of the golden calf, sort of. Some of those essays are not paywalled. E.g., https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/t ... f-the-rood

theanimal
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by theanimal »

I've only read his Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. It's a collection of essays, some of which I thought were outstanding. I also really enjoyed the podcast linked above. Thanks for mentioning the others, I'll have to see if the library has them available.

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

I'm currently reading The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and this passage made me laugh as a true ERE/Web of Goals insight from a teenage Franklin:
When about 16 years of age I happened to meet with a book, written by one Tryon, recommending a vegetable diet. I determined to go into it. My brother, being yet unmarried, did not keep house, but boarded himself and his apprentices in another family. My refusing to eat flesh occasioned an inconveniency, and I was frequently chid for my singularity. I made myself acquainted with Tryon's manner of preparing some of his dishes, such as boiling potatoes or rice, making hasty pudding, and a few others, and then proposed to my brother, that if he would give me, weekly, half the money he paid for my board, I would board myself. He instantly agreed to it, and I presently found that I could save half what he paid me. This was an additional fund for buying books. But I had another advantage in it. My brother and the rest going from the printinghouse to their meals, I remained there alone, and, despatching presently my light repast, which often was no more than a bisket or a slice of bread, a handful of raisins or a tart from the pastrycook's, and a glass of water, had the rest of the time till their return for study, in which I made the greater progress, from that greater clearness of head and quicker apprehension which usually attend temperance in eating and drinking.

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

Wow, tracking down that post where @Jacob suggested I check out Kingsnorth (viewtopic.php?p=229242#p229242) prompted me to re-read some of the "A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?" topic (viewtopic.php?f=20&t=11677); and it made me realize it's been just shy of a year since my worldview was crushed with the realization that CC really will (has already) drastically impact(ed) the world that my kids will inherit. Since then DW and I have doubled down on the ERE aspects of our lifestyle, we've purchased a used camper trailer to provide us with some mobility, and we've begun laying the groundwork for what we expect will be a summer of 2024 climate migration to the north. Also starting a Creation Care Team group at my parish (https://catholicclimatecovenant.org/pro ... care-teams), and who knows, I might still run for City Commission as a single platform candidate--SHUT DOWN THE CITY CITY TO ALL CAR TRAFFIC. The juxtaposition of a conservative candidate in an EXTREMELY progressive city running as a CC radical should make a headline or two.

Salathor
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Salathor »

Those are some awesome changes. I'm right there with you--my wife and I are both very conservative climate activists. I'm hopeful that there will eventually be a space for us as a group in the public sphere somewhere.

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