Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Where are you and where are you going?
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mountainFrugal
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by mountainFrugal »

I like many of these quotes. Here is an older version of some of the same:

"The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it, and so it proves different to different men; to one it is barren, dull, and superficial; to another rich, interesting, and full of meaning. On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man's experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the significance they possess when he describes them; to a man of genius they were interesting adventures; but to the dull perceptions of an ordinary individual they would have been stale, everyday occurrences...

Since everything which exists or happens for a man exists only in his consciousness and happens for it alone, the most essential thing for a man is the constitution of this consciousness, which is in most cases far more important than the circumstances which go to form its contents. All the pride and pleasure of the world, mirrored in the dull consciousness of a fool, are poor indeed compared with the imagination of Cervantes writing his Don Quixote in a miserable prison."

---Arthur Schopenhauer- The Wisdom of Life https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10741/1 ... 0741-h.htm

Fish
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by Fish »

Jin+Guice wrote:
Sun May 23, 2021 1:07 pm
Money Isn't Real:
Nice post J+G. I also had a very similar realization a while back. It is a very interesting lens to view the world through. However, with time I concluded that it is just one of many possible lenses. It can be a limiting belief in my opinion. It is hard to accumulate when one doesn’t value money.

Now I’m back in the “money is real” camp, though with much less attachment to money than a typical person. I find this perspective improves quality of life by encouraging interaction with the money-economy, where win-win opportunities exist.

Nevertheless, I am impressed by your skill at living with minimal spending, and how well you comprehend the sustainability of the tactics involved.

ertyu
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by ertyu »

i mean, money is real the way all other social constructs are real: not real in their essence, real in their impact. like, is "race" real? are languages real? Gender? etc. Like money, these things aren't real the way a chair is real, but they have a very real impact on people's lives.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I am def benefitting from being a fit mid-thirties white male in a rich nation. Sleaze easy mode.
Well, obviously there’s only a thin line separating Lentil Baby ERE from Dirtbag ERE. I could also come up with some free living situations which are less available to young men. For instance, I could be a travel nanny.

It might be worthwhile to consider the means by which optionality, access, and power can be increased besides growing emergency stash into formidable financial resource base.

Laura Ingalls
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by Laura Ingalls »

Never underestimate the power of looking like a kindergarten teacher. :lol: I had a kid ask me in Hawaii I worked “here. We were at the beach and I had on street clothes not my swimsuit. I must have projected the image of some sort of naturalist or marine biologist or something.

I also think people that are non-threatening can say “Doh I’m sorry I didn’t know the rules.” and be believed regardless of the truthfulness of the statement.

G+J you have me excited to attempt dumpster diving on the regular again. I kinda got out of it because my most fruitful spot was very heavy close dated frito-lay products. Chips are my nutritional cryptonite.

white belt
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by white belt »

Laura Ingalls wrote:
Thu May 27, 2021 11:12 am
Never underestimate the power of looking like a kindergarten teacher. :lol: I had a kid ask me in Hawaii I worked “here. We were at the beach and I had on street clothes not my swimsuit. I must have projected the image of some sort of naturalist or marine biologist or something.

I also think people that are non-threatening can say “Doh I’m sorry I didn’t know the rules.” and be believed regardless of the truthfulness of the statement.
I think this is easier for women and white people who are generally perceived as less threatening due to implicit bias.

Laura Ingalls
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by Laura Ingalls »

white belt wrote:
Thu May 27, 2021 11:18 am
I think this is easier for women and white people who are generally perceived as less threatening due to implicit bias.
I agree 100%. White privilege is totally real and I benefit. I try to not be a part of the problem by being polite and accessible to others and not being fearful in a majority minority location. It helps me find the best tacos and pho. Luckily being culturally aware and polite are skills we can all cultivate.

Western Red Cedar
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by Western Red Cedar »

Jin+Guice wrote:
Sun May 23, 2021 1:07 pm
Money Isn't Real:
I can definitely see why you've emphasized social capital in the WL discussion and elsewhere. I also tend to place a high value on social capital and think it is under-leveraged in this community. Social connections and relationships are often more powerful than money. I basically owe my whole career to building strong relationships in graduate school and letting professors or colleagues open doors for me.

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Jean
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by Jean »

I think I've couchsurfed on the property where you live, about 8 years ago.
I talked to the owner about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geopolymer, but didn't have time to give him the reference, because my travelmate didn't like to camp bellow freezing temperature, and we moved to a motel in the middle of the night.

Jin+Guice
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by Jin+Guice »

@Jean: It must have been a different spot, my homie has only been out there for a year or two. There are a bunch of Urban Gardens in New Orleans though.


I went to back-to-back rich people parties the last two days. I just wanted to remind myself and everyone here, that money does not in fact buy fun and that paid for experiences are often less fun than free experiences where you make things.

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Jean
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by Jean »

Several urban garden with people camping on it? nice!
Anyway your friend might still be interested by geopolymer, it's a way to make great brick out of clay without cooking, or with a low (400°C) temperature cooking. It depends on your clay if you need cooking or not. Apparently there is clay everywhere in New Orleans.

Jin+Guice
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by Jin+Guice »

I've been doing this ERE mastermind project, which I'm kind of not even really doing bc I abandoned my two projects almost immediately. I replaced them with trying to do this learn about everything thing, which is going pretty ok. God damn there is a lot of stuff to learn. Rn, I'm reading a bunch of books and trying a bunch of things and writing myself book reports in google docs. We'll see how that goes.

Anyway I feel like I'm embodying WL 6 pretty hard, but I think Jacob recently said that you just have to be at the Levels for awhile and there's no point in sprinting through them, which was never my goal anyway.

I've gotten a lot out of doing the mastermind group and I'm enjoying doing my learn about basic home economic stuff project most of the time.

Jin+Guice
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by Jin+Guice »

I started doing a WL 6 learning project as part of the ERE mastermind group. I'm trying to learn how to do a host of real life things. The goal has shifted from not spending money, to improving the life that not spending money has afforded me. I am making progress, but it is going rather slowly. If anyone is interested in helping out, I have a whole range of topics I'd like to learn about.

I'm about to move from the research to experimental phase in two of my projects. I haven't been able to find clear information about hygiene/ skincare, so I need to do some personal experimentation. I've learned some interesting nerd stuff and I think I've reviewed enough book stuff to develop a strategy. I'm also redoing my weight lifting routine to make it more efficient and trying to change my relationship with food in order to have a better body/ be healthier. I'm considering some experiments in these realms as well. It seems like the process on a lot of stuff will be doing research to make action plans to do more research to make more action plans.


ETA: One major thing I've gotten from ERE is a sense of control and reclamation. I feel like I have a control over my own life that I see very few people exercise. I have also been able to reclaim a lot of the industrial/ consumer/ commercial society that I was born into. For example, many people see money as evil, but money isn't the problem, it's a system which biases money above all human and environmental relationships. People see capitalism as evil, but it's not the problem, the worship of an economic system which is good at efficiently making transactions with strangers is the problem. People see communism as evil, but it isn't. I think communism is a great way to strive to handle personal relationships. It addresses the alienation that a purely capitalist way of thinking creates, our longing to be part of something greater than ourselves and our need for some semblance of equality. Viewing that through the lens we've adopted where economics/ politics becomes religion, this longing to belong turns into death camps and famine. It's not evil to want to be in good physical health, be well groomed and take pride in your appearance. But it's detrimental to hold ourselves to ridiculous beauty standards, buy into a system which is expensive, wasteful and environmentally disastrous and to reject the aging process all of us inevitably face. Wanting to be a productive member of society isn't bad, worshipping a job for the sake of money above all other life/ relationships is bad.

It was clear to me from a young age that something was very wrong. I went from a curious and happy kid to an angry and depressed teenager. I turned to music, art and literature, which is very good at identifying and magnifying problems, but not very good at solutions. What I wasn't seeing was human wants/ needs and how those are neither intrinsically bad nor good, but how our social structure was failing to address those needs and obscuring the problems/ solutions. Doing these individual skill learning projects helps me think about each individual facet of life, what want/ need it is providing for and how to deal with that need in a way which adds to the way I'd like to live my life and ideally does the least harm to the environment around me and helps foster the person relationships I seek to build.




I've been reading a lot and it seems like most people who write books, give "guru" type classes are stuck in the WL5 trap with their particular subject. This is perhaps also a necessity of needing to be good at promotion as well as whatever you are teaching. What I mean is, they all seem to be convinced that their one particular skill, which they have optimized in a certain way, is the key to leading a better life. If only you too could optimize this skill, all of your problems would be solved. Separating the actual information from this type of salesmanship is as much a part of the learning as the actual learning is for me.

I also bought a shipping container house and need to buy land to put it on. If I am able to buy land and get the house zoned properly and get it off grid and keep the property value low enough, I will effectively be at $0 of expenses (this is only theoretically true, in practice I will continue to spend money, but it's all on things that I could eliminate if I had to without suffering a huge decrease in pleasure/ logistics).

I would like to start my own tiny house village of friends and musicians and also work on developing small "offgrid" housing to help homeless populations. I'm also interested in learning about waste streams and repurposing waste materials to ease the slow decline into eco-horror that I think it's more than likely we are heading towards. Like ERE, I'd like to do it in a manner that improves people's lives whether or not the eco-doom happens in their lifetime/ ever. But before all that I need to get my own shit going which will probably take me 5-15 years, depending on how lucky and lazy I am.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Did you work out how low your assessment must be to negate property taxes with tax credits?

I think your note on cycle of research towards action plans is very true. I also think that learning how to perform this cycle efficiently might be a key meta-skill. For instance, I am currently spending more money than I would like because I am simultaneously facing a new fairly major health challenge and tackling a fairly huge project inclusive of smaller tasks where I am currently lacking skills. IOW, change can be expensive, whether externally generated and unwanted or internally generated and wanted, but you can’t experience growth without change.

Jin+Guice
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by Jin+Guice »

@7: Ya, New Orleans has a homestead exemption that is fairly well known, bc you need to have one to get an air bnb license, which is the ticket to $$$$$$ for a lot of people and the ticket to a lot of rage for other people. The exemption is 75k, so a property valued under that *should* be tax exempt. If I can't get my house zoned properly it will be zoned as a lot with a garden and an office on it. The property taxes for that should be under 2k a year, I believe, maybe much less.


I've found what you're saying about change to be true. Even dumpster diving, which seemed like a rapid and easy change has turned out to be somewhat of a progressive skill (mostly learning what not to take and how long to wait for things that are only diveable sometimes). It does make the question of how much money to have stacked and how much to have on top difficult, bc the expenses of unknown change are hard to predict.

Jin+Guice
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by Jin+Guice »

Semi-retirement update/ WL 6 project/"PirateCaptainERE":

One of the (OBVIOUSLY VERY FEW) drawbacks of semi-ERE is there is no specific date where you give your boss the finger, ask the cute receptionist out for drinks and walk your ass off the job and into everlasting freedom forever. I consider my official semi-retirement date the start of the coronavirus pandemic, bc I was on unemployment for 5 months consecutively, and then intermittently for another year. This infusion of government money carried me over the point where I felt confident I could abstain from full-time employment ever again, if I wanted to. I also broke up with my longtime girlfriend during this period, which led me to move onto the urban garden where I currently live, and greatly reduce my already low living expenses. However, I'm back to work at my pre-pandemic job (though working less hours, getting more kush surgeries and exercising some FU money to get called in less and less), so in some senses not much has changed. I am planning to look for different/ more interesting employment after I move into my shipping container house, although I'm unsure if I'll completely leave my hospital job, though I will reduce it from 2+ days a week to 1 day a week.

So what have I learned in my self-appointed 18ish months of semi-retirement? First and foremost, I don't need a job at all to keep myself doing stuff/ interested/ busy. This wasn't much of a shock. I've worked only part-time for years, but it's still nice to have the reassurance. I do like working 1-2 days a week. Even working for someone else for 3-6 hours a week serves to reinforce the value of the rest of my time. I also enjoy the social aspect of employment, working on a team to get something done, and working on a project where I am not at the top of the responsibility ladder or responsible for managing my time (as all of my other self-directed projects are).

The extra time from "retiring early" has been really great. It's given me a lot of time to work on personal relationships, work on music and work on moving towards WL 6 through skill acquisition. The WL 6 skill acquisition has been really rewarding. Previously I've talked about being lazy and anti-DIY, which in some ways is still true. The main breakthrough was getting out of the optimizer mentality and into the curious/ let's just fuck around mentality. If I was still optimizing I'd be really stressed that I wasn't progressing fast enough or DIYing absolutely everything. I still occasionally get stuck in this trap, but I try to focus on just having fun. It's been nice to get back in touch with curiosity about the world. I was a really curious kid, until I hit 1st grade, which is when the shitty boss (I had a really mean teacher!), pointless paperwork and rat race mentality began. Getting back in touch with my curious inner-child has been a delight.

It's also nice to feel like I'm making my own small difference in the world through reducing carbon emissions and oil usage by further disconnecting my reliance on the monetary economy and fossil fuel technology. I spent a lot of time over the past few months reading John Michael Greer's collective works about peak oil and technology. It's clear to me now why Jacob and other forum members are so hellbent on reducing their own and others oil consumption. I've started to understand the oncoming crisis that is likely in the next century as well as what we can do to help minimize it. From a purely monetary perspective, there's not much motivation to move past Wheaton Level 5. From an interesting life/ peak oil perspective, there is a lot of incentive.

Though climbing the WL scale wasn't my major reason for thinking about and doing semi-ERE, it has been an unattended side benefit. I think it's hard to get out of the salaryman mindset when you are living the #salaryman lyfe. Not impossible, but difficult. There were a lot of mental shifts that happened/ are happening for me as I get used to paid employment being background noise in my life. Not obsessing over planning for every dollar to get me a centimeter closer to freedom has freed up a lot of time and mental energy to focus on other things, like learning to garden and doing different research projects.

The most challenging part has been managing my own time. I'm still doing a lot of work for different music projects and I have a pretty active social life. These both instantly swelled to consume a lot of the time that normal people spend working. Once you own your time, you realize how little focused time you actually have in a day. I'd say it's 3-4 hours max (I have found this can be boosted by doing different kinds of activities and/ or changing venues, which also makes the day more stimulating/ interesting). There is a lot of downtime in an 8 hour workday and it can be frustrating when you're no longer getting paid for all the time you spend procrastinating.


piratecaptiainERE:

@AH asked me to expand on this a little bit. My original description was which @AH turned into "piratecaptainERE" is:
Jin+Guice wrote:
Fri Jul 30, 2021 9:14 pm
Since the start of the pandemic I've had a lot of break throughs not using money and just really fucking around. It's actually pretty easy and fun on this side, when you have a shit ton of money, especially if you haven't severed all ties to the money tap. There are a lot of bullshit artists out there pretending to do hippie shit, but actually backstopped by money. The real move is that the money is there to save you when you fuck up. It's like literally me and two other dudes just banging chicks, doing drugs, shredding guitar licks, throwing dinner parties, amateur farming and stealing trash to give to homeless people. It's like being a fucking pirate captain who only hangs out with other pirate captains. Building financial capital sucks. Building social and personal capital is pretty fun, if you can get over the existential crisis of being responsible for your own time/ direction. Eventually using money becomes the boring/ lame way to get anything done.

I think what I was trying to emphasize and what @AH wants me to talk more about is that, beyond WL5, you can use ERE to do some really fun shit. Like upper level ERE shit, not just travel the world and play video games bc you have infinite free time and a bunch of money (though no hate if that's what you wanna do for a few years). Like actually becoming more involved in the world around you through finding unconventional ways to do shit, learning more about the world and becoming involved in local groups/ with local people that share you interests/ passions. I enjoy doing this through trying to further reduce expenses, but I think trying to start a business/ find a "jobby"/ somehow earn income from something you enjoy/ are passionate about/ solves a problem is an equally opportune way to do things. The key is not to get sucked back into the usual time/ money nexus everyone else is wallowing in. Remember you just broke your back to buy freedom, no reason to throw it away because convention insists you must.

For me, this looks a lot like what I described above. I tend to attract people leading a similar life to me, but it could look totally different for someone else. I think it's important to emphasize this part of the transition. ERE should appeal to green/ voluntary simplicity types, but IME there are more people who come from science/ engineering/ relatively affluent investing minded backgrounds, who get convinced to be more frugal. Emphasizing the fun/ interesting/ unconventional aspects appeal to a different subset of people. The hardest sell to my friends (I've succeeded exactly never, though I've never tried that hard) is convincing them to save money. The relatively simple logic of "if you saved some $$ you could spend some time doing whatever you wanted" gets lost, even among the less conventional, bc there are so few visible examples of people successfully doing this. The two wealthiest "piratecaptainERE" people I know effectively blow their money having a bunch of fun, but they've essentially resigned themselves to work their jobs forever. So, instead of emphasizing the WL3-5 phase, which is the carrot for the "normie" crowd, emphasizing the WL6-8 stuff as a reason to maybe do some of the WL3-5 stuff or at least pay some attention to money, will appeal to a different crowd.

The other aspect I would emphasize aside from the fun/ playful aspect of "piratecaptainERE" is the use of waste streams as income sources. I was recently interviewed for a podcast about urban farming and food waste, which forced me to answer some questions about the sustainability of dumpster diving. What I tried to convey was that dumpster diving is absolutely not a desirable outcome for a perfect society, but utilizing waste steams is as close to an ideal solution for our shared goals in the society WE ACTUALLY LIVE IN and fixing the "problems" that cause dumpster diving to be so "lucrative" is actually a confluence of relatively complicated problems, none of which I personally have any control over. What dumpster diving does do, right now, is cut down on food waste, cut down on the necessary food supply (addressing issues like animal cruelty and migrant labor), cut down on the oil used to transport the food to the waste facility and cut down on paying large corporations/ government bodies money to keep enacting a system that is not viable (amongst other things). It is not a solution that is expandable to everyone, nor is it sustainable, but insisting on only those solutions means you keep yourself from the only solution that can effect, in some small way, the change you would like to see today.

Anyone who excepts peak oil and climate change realize that a resource shortage is coming. If you believe these things, it shouldn't be a hard sell that salvage will play a big part of future economies. Learning how to DIY shit is great, but learning how to get what you want from the existing economy as it refuses to be dismantled and slowly collapses is likely going to be an important skill in the coming centuries. Even if the energyDoomers are wrong and the technoOptimists save us all, salvage will still be a valuable skill.

Personally, I take a certain pleasure in living, as exclusively as possible, from what those who insist that they can't possibly have enough discard.

RoamingFrancis
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by RoamingFrancis »

Just wanted to chime in and say I'm inspired by the life you're living. Great insights about breaking out of the optimizer mentality, and I'm also glad to hear you're able to have an active social life in a semi-ERE context. As an extrovert I have recently been enjoying going to work just because I get to socialize.

Can you elaborate on how you've learned to manage your time and the venue switch?

Happy to hear about PirateCaptainERE, keep being awesome :)

oldbeyond
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by oldbeyond »

Great post! The gains in skills I’ve had have come from a place of “let’s try to so something cool and see what comes of it” rather than “this must help me save $10 a month”. I guess that if you try to jump ahead you’ll get stuck.

To me it is very ERE to exploit a waste stream like that. It won’t scale to everybody doing it, but in a world where everybody were prepared to, a different economy would emerge (like the classic FI criticism). Sort of like picking up used stuff in thrift stores (or from the curb) is an appropriate strategy for this crazy ecology we find ourselves in. Nobody is helped by the dumpster food or the used furniture going to the landfill. I guess some people have a desire for purity, but that ends up a unsustainable luxury when resources abound in our waste streams.

AxelHeyst
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by AxelHeyst »

NIce. I like that you compared piratecaptainERE as a specific carrot vector for a different crowd than the voluntary simplicity types and the engineer/tech/efficiency types. I think an easy criticism to make of both voluntary simplicity and “enginerdFIRE” types is that it doesn’t look very cool or fun, even though those who pursue it might be having a ball. Simply put, those styles aren’t aesthetic.

pcERE is aesthetic AF, and not just visually but in a sort of “life as art/circus” way. It has a Fight Club, Catch Me If You Can, pirates of the caribbean, Nail Gaiman, The Beach sensuality to it that’s lacking in the (outward) expression of other types. It’s brash and bold where the other types tend to present as meek, reserved, under the radar.

Which is all fine, I’m not saying one way is right or the other, I just love the added diversity that pcERE brings to the scene. You’ve explicitly inspired me / awoke latent desires that I’ve had on the shelf for a long time to pursue skills and activities in this direction, so thanks for that and keep up the great work.

Jin+Guice
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Re: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

Post by Jin+Guice »

Thanks everyone.

pcERE is the WL6 incarnation of my angry 15 yr old self. It's the adult version of the kid who used to blast metal and smoke weed, only to realize that the metal was distributed by multi-national corporations and the weed was financing drug cartels on the Mexican border. Back then it felt like I couldn't win. Now most days feel like a win. You might not be able to stop "them" but you can live off of "their" trash.

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