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.