3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Where are you and where are you going?
chenda
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by chenda »

ertyu wrote:
Wed Jul 20, 2022 10:39 pm
now salaryman gig is my best idea even as it carries increasing amounts of geopolitical risk, I find myself too anxious to let go of the teat yet
Nothing wrong with that. FWIW unless your in Russia, Belarus or Ukraine the geopolitical risk is relatively low imo.

mathiverse
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by mathiverse »

The hardest part about Linux, if you plan to use it for web surfing, email, and document editing, etc is installing it. And there are step by step instructions online for that, so it's not that hard. You may have to type in the command line a bit, but you can pretty much copy paste from decent instructions.

Get a version of Linux with a GUI (that is, install something like Ubuntu or (according to earlier post) Mint which has a UI that is pretty close to Mac or Windows). Once installed, you can ignore the command line. No need to delve into the command line unless you have a reason or you are interested. If you can't think of a reason, you don't have a reason (that is, you're not missing anything important if you start out ignoring the command line). It's not mandatory that you use the command line post-installation.

This post is meant to be push back against the idea that Linux is a huge downgrade. It is slightly less convenient during installation, but day to day usage for a "middle class" (as mentioned in earlier post by zbigi), non-power-user, non-programming person is pretty much identical to other OSes. If you hit technical issues, my experience is that Windows, Mac, and Linux are equally frustrating if you start digging into the system admin details to figure out what the problem is.

disk_poet
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by disk_poet »

Just a tip for getting started with Linux: Make a list of the applications (audio, chat, photo management, etc.) you use and make sure they run in Linux. If not.. ideally find an alternative that you can also use on your current operating system. Once you're happy with your suite of apps make the switch to a different OS.

ertyu
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by ertyu »

shaz wrote:
Wed Aug 03, 2022 12:52 am
I add them to my basic vegetable mix (diced yam, onion, cabbage). Cook in a skillet. The yam takes the longest to cook and is yummiest if you let it char a little so put it in the pan first and add other veggies once the yam is soft. Stir frequently. Add seasonings to taste - salt, pepper, garlic, paprika are my favorites. Top with your choice of egg, salsa, green chili, plain yogurt, hot sauce.
dragged this over here because I want to make this.

as for other updates, i seem to have an "inner" focus lately. working through fears, insecurities, etc. - how successfully, time will tell. mostly trying to eliminate psychological resistance to taking action in various areas. i recommend this deeply: can't take action while you're still working on your resistance to taking action - it's great :lol:

no change to net worth: €200k at interactive brokers, 8k inaccessible in various bank accounts, 10k cash where I am, and my barely habitable hoarder home apartment.

ertyu
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by ertyu »

My drive to hoard shit because "I could use it/make something out of it" has been warring with an inner need for a minimalist living space to feel peaceful. Decluttering it is. I've only been in this apartment for a year and I have a drawerful of potentially useful take out containers/straws/single-use utensils, a big bag full of plastic bags, office supplies i brought over from the office because I thought I would use them but I never did, and so forth. In addition, some clothes need to go (yes, they could become rags or patches for other clothes. and no, they probably will not, given my itinerant lifestyle).

[and yes, I am aware the optimal solution here, both in terms of waste and in terms of spending, is to not order take-out. work in progress. im mostly sharing so you guys can amuse yourselves with my apparent tendency to hoard plastic starbucks cups :lol: ]

[and yes, i know about the starbucks also... *shame*]

Edited to add: when I am like this, by which I mean, I am fully aware my actions are irrational and suboptimal yet I continue to act this way, it almost invariably turns out that what's really going on isn't at all about the starbucks and the take-out but about something else psychological entirely, and my irrational actions are just actings-out. I wonder what it would turn out to be this time

ertyu
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by ertyu »

A Reddit quote I liked:
It's an easy trap to fall into as it is so very sensible: Why would you spend six hours cleaning (doing a chore you hate and doing it badly) if you could just work an additional hour and outsource that? So you hire a cleaner. And a cook, a personal shopper, an interior designer and a nanny. But if you don't watch out, all your little self worth eggs, so to speak, are kept in the same work basket - and, step by step, you start to live the life of a stranger. You eat the food of someone else, wear the clothes of not-you, in an apartment that might as well be a hotel room, with kids that are more attached to their nanny than to you. Your vacations are glamorous, but there's little connection to anyone or anything in them. At this point you might start to feel a little unease. You might start to wonder why you're unfulfilled and try to treat yourself better - so you double down. You get a PA because dealing with a schedule is annoying, you get a personal trainer because mens sana in corpore sano and while you're at it, you also start therapy, where you learn techniques that help somewhat and where you analyze childhood events. But what somehow is kept at bay, in a fish-not-having-a-word-for-water-way, is that you identify with your job of optimizing processes to maximum efficency to a degree that you treat yourself like any work project. What I am getting at here is: Watch out. It may be easier and more worth it to develop an interest in cooking or join a sports club or a gym that you like. But also: Screw cleaning.
This will of course be nothing new to people here, but I found it interesting because it comes from a shrink who works mostly with people striving for fatfire.

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Lemur
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by Lemur »

An article making the rounds on the forum lately is "A Dent in the Universe" by Venkatesh Rao (same individual that wrote the Gervais Principle). I'm thinking that the FatFIRE types are also doubling down on careerism / money accumulation as a way to deal with the following:
But at higher levels, imagination is necessary for tackling life. This is because, at higher levels of the hierarchy, the problem is surplus freedom: what do you do when there is nothing specific you have to do? Where there are many sufficient paths forward, but no necessary ones?
So maybe they outsource these things to free up time to pursue their universe denting? Or they're just sticking to career to keep the existential questions buried in the unconscious. They're also not necessarily thinking about consumerism or anything like that but at this point I'm making too many assumptions.

See I like cleaning, cutting my own grass, cooking my own food, etc. because I continue to build skills such as maybe cleaning techniques or when my lawn mower inevitably breaks down, I have to figure out how to fix it or cooking my own food - I'm down a whole food plant-based rabbit whole lately so I'm learning a bunch of different meals/recipes and stuff there.

But it is also a convenient time filler for me. I'd rather not outsource these things by nature. Perhaps even as a way to just fill my time so I don't have to think too much about existential questions. But occasionally...try as I may I still find myself pondering that same question. Yes - truly a first world problem so to speak but on the other hand, I never have thought about this existential thing as a "life or death" situation. Seems kind of dramatic.

Any thoughts on that?

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Interesting stuff. That reddit comment reminds me of a quote from The Society of the Spectacle, "The more you consume, the less you live."

The dent in the universe piece posted by Lemur seems to tie into some comments from the Pre-FI life thread, namely this one that I've been mulling over for the past few days:
ertyu wrote:
Tue Aug 23, 2022 8:21 pm
ERE requires you to have a set of social skills where you are different from other people. So, to successfully combine ERE and a social life with your older cohort, you need a new set of social skills even if you have the same people as friends...I never quite acquired those social skills - the ones that would allow me to be both different and liked - and heard and respected.
The ability to be both different and liked seems to be tied to self-actualization inside the Dent in the Universe piece.

OutOfTheBlue
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by OutOfTheBlue »

AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Tue Aug 30, 2022 1:04 pm
The ability to be both different and liked seems to be tied to self-actualization inside the Dent in the Universe piece.
Strikingly, these are also, in a nutshell, the developmental tasks of the Oasis, or psychological ecocentric early-Adolescence, as per Bill Plotkin's Eco-Soulcentric Developmental Wheel (cf. Nature and the Human Soul).
Bill Plotkin, The Journey of Soul Initiation wrote:The nature-oriented task is the cultivation of authenticity, the capacity to know who you are psychologically and to express and embody this identity in your social life with friends, family, and coworkers. The culture-oriented task of the Oasis is to obtain social acceptance from and belonging in at least one desired peer group.

This doesn’t sound so difficult, does it? Well, it is. This is, in fact, precisely where the majority of contemporary people get stuck in their personal development. Either task of the Oasis is not so hard by itself: Authenticity is a piece of cake if you don’t mind alienating others and possibly being friendless. And social acceptance is a snap if you’re okay with being an impostor, willing to act in whatever ways are necessary to be accepted. But succeeding simultaneously with the two tasks of the Oasis can be immensely challenging. This is due in part to how formidable it has become in the contemporary world to be authentic — to even know who you are, let alone be able to embody the real you in your choices and relationships. In our advertisement-saturated and fear-infused society with its emphasis on looking good (or even merely acceptable), driving us to act within narrow prescribed bandwidths, most people have lost the ability to identify their bedrock values, needs, desires, and limits, or their genuine opinions, attitudes, and personal styles.

Social self-design is a foundational skill with which few contemporary people receive guidance in childhood or teen years.

Because psychological authenticity and social belonging have become rare, they are perhaps the greatest and most pervasive longings in the contemporary world. This is what most people mean when they say they yearn for greater meaning or purpose in their lives or for the opportunity to participate meaningfully in the world. They want to feel more real and more in communion with the web of life. They want their lives to make a difference. This, indeed, is the ultimate goal of the journey of soul initiation. But the necessary foundation for the Descent to Soul is an achieved sense of psychological belonging (knowing who you are, a feeling of personal authenticity), social belonging (acceptance in a peer group or human community), and ecological belonging (communion with the more-than-human world, what you experience after Eco-awakening).

When most contemporary people say they want more “soul” in their lives, they usually mean they want to experience more psychological and social belonging. For those who are Eco-awakened, they also mean greater ecological belonging. For those in the Cocoon [late-Adolescence] stage, they usually mean the kind of mystical belonging to the world implied by the way I use the word Soul.

ertyu
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by ertyu »

OutOfTheBlue wrote:
Tue Aug 30, 2022 4:34 pm
Excellent quote, and very relevant. That's exactly the crux of things here.

It is interesting to me that Plotkin implicitly assumes the harder journey for most people is accessing their true values and desires. Belonging has always been the harder task for me. See: I work on the other side of the globe from where I grew up and my family is, move every 1-2 years, rarely keep in touch with people between moves. I have more stable relationships with people online, who I can be authentic with but I still stay anonymous from through what privacy the internet affords me. I have had many authentic, vulnerable discussions with people online who, for example, I've known for years but who don't know my age and haven't seen my picture.

ertyu
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by ertyu »

In other news, I boiled rice using Seppia's method

Image

Please clap. It is even not that stuck to the pot:

Image

Edited to add: behold, rice and beans in repurposed take-out containers:

Beans were boiled before

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Miscellaneous frozen + fresh veg w salt and so on

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Reduced:

Image

MIxed:

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And finally, portioned:

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Not bad at all.
Last edited by ertyu on Sat Sep 03, 2022 5:29 am, edited 1 time in total.

ertyu
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by ertyu »

@Lemur and @AE:

A theme that resurfaces around the forum every now and then is, "how do you recapture your own agency and motivation now that you're out of the salaryman system (FI)?" A common first answer is to substitute your boss at work with your ego who is now the substitute setter-of-tasks-you-don't-quite-want-to-pursue. Treating yourself like a work project to be optimized, as per the Reddit quote I posted above, rather than striving for an authentic connection with yourself. For instance, as was discussed elsewhere recently, searching for external models, landing on the Wheaton table, and taking it as an external prescription, a checklist of steps to be followed and levels to be mastered much like one mastered the externally set system of one's school curriculum or career ladder promotion hierarchy.

It could be the answer is simple: tend to your life. As @Lemur mentioned, in-house your life and ground yourself in learning the skills needed to tend to your daily existence. As @AE mentioned, one of those skills is the skill of being able to relate to others from a place of authenticity. An ERE system, with the relevant nodes and a web of homotelic goals, would emerge organically as long as one is conscious and reasonably intelligent at this effort.

MBBboy
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by MBBboy »

Really enjoyed the Reddit quote and the ensuing discussion. What's interesting to me is the parallel between the "FatFire" types and what Lemur described in approaching life - How to address creating and then dealing with free time while we blindly strive to find things to do with "meaning".

The method chosen seems to be based on a mixture of skills + resources. High skills + no resources = doing things yourself (and learning to enjoy the learnings and follow on skills this brings), No skills + high resources = outsourcing the things you don't like (and filling the time with higher utility things), and then all the areas in between where most people live, where consumerism thrives.

The FatFire method gives you immediate time NOW....but your'e still working and don't know what to do with it. It comes with the potential trappings listed in the Reddit quote, and the universe of things you can do with this free time is necessarily limited because you're still working, so the time comes in small chunks. You can't just take off on a multi-month adventure to hike the PCT. Once you save all the money you need to exit work, you face the common early retiree / retiree problem of having no idea who you are or what you want to do now that you aren't working.

The Lemur / ERE style doesn't give you the free time now, but you're working to create a situation and lifestyle where you have "unlimited" free time later. Moreover, you are likely stretching and learning as you go, with the hope that you'll actually know what to do with the free time once you get it. There's more of an "enjoy the journey" theme

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

ertyu wrote:
Sat Sep 03, 2022 3:33 am
As @AE mentioned, one of those skills is the skill of being able to relate to others from a place of authenticity. An ERE system, with the relevant nodes and a web of homotelic goals, would emerge organically as long as one is conscious and reasonably intelligent at this effort.
I'm going to write a longer post in my journal about this at some point because I've been mulling this over for a few days. It seems to me when very wise people suggest connection/wholeness/service to others, they are actually suggesting a method for building a system to relate to people authentically. Which is to say, relation without "the mask" can be found in providing an authentic service to them, which helps avoid the isolating problem of being true to yourself when you're not quite a social normie.

In particular, being an abnormie might give you perspectives that normies miss, so finding a way to provide insight/service to their experience/life through your authentic experience/life is a way to be liked and different. I think it requires learning to channel your difference into something that can add value to the world, aka, what Jung's process of individuation (and what a lot of Plotkin is an extension of) is meant to do.

ertyu
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by ertyu »

Caved in and, inspired by the discussion all over the place, spent 60 dollars on a pair of xero sandals. Interesting experience, I'm still getting used to them but I'm enjoying them so far - much better than regular shoes.

An year of work is drawing to a close. $30k saved on a consumer potato lifestyle. Resolving to do better next year.

My phone broke yet again, had to take it to a repair person again because without a phone, I can't log in anywhere or pay for anything and so I can't order parts to do repairs myself. Quite annoyed by the dependence; colleagues etc. say they deal with this by having a back-up phone but the cheapskate in me resents this.

sky
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by sky »

Previously I recommended moving to a Greek island near Turkey. Since it looks like the Spartans and Trojans are once again going to rattle their bronze swords, I retract this recommendation. The USA is the best place to be, if you can get back in with a visa, that would be my current recommendation.

The rice and bean dish looks good, I would like to meal prep something like that.

guitarplayer
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by guitarplayer »

ertyu wrote:
Fri Sep 09, 2022 1:59 am
Caved in and, inspired by the discussion all over the place, spent 60 dollars on a pair of xero sandals.
I looked these up on ebay. Funnily enough, I have scavenged a pair of neat looking shoes from our local skip (big garbage bin) about a year ago without taking note of the brand. Just checked and they are indeed xero shoes. I have been using them indoors when it is not too cold (when it is too cold, I use the slippers from my old lamb skin coat you had convinced me to make), very comfortable. When I move to a city, I will use them more in summertime.

ertyu
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by ertyu »

ha, that's great, @gp! I love the xeros, took a couple of days to get used to them but now I don't want to take them off. Just finding a pair in my size would have been the best.

In other news, I'm doing basic commonsense frugality things to bring in my savings rate from 65-70% per month as has been the pattern for the past 10 or so months to 80% per month (targeting around $500 in additional savings per month. main targets are uber rides vs public transportation and take out vs preparing my own lunch for work - as I said, commonsense :lol:).

ertyu
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by ertyu »

just a musing: if I save diligently, I could probably save 3.5k a month - 4k if I am being really, really restrictive. My liquid net worth is now ~ €200k, and just swung from €197.5 to €203.5 as the dollar fluctuated over the last month. I may have reached the point where skillful investment and money management has greater marginal impact on my financial situation than frugality and continued gainful employment.

Of course, I don't yet have the ability to invest skillfully so I'll likely just lose money, but it's interesting to see the effect in action.

guitarplayer
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Re: 3 yrs to FI: ertyu's journal

Post by guitarplayer »

And you still have the place you have been renovating a while back?

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