The Education of Axel Heyst

[OutOfTheBlue]

BMR+Activity level to get an initial target, that I then validated with the daily tracking. (My calorie intake is lower now, that's just what worked for me at the time).

I read that the benefit of intermittent fasting (8/16, which is what I do now) at the same calorie level of no fasting, calories to satiety, is *almost* as good as absolute calorie restriction, as in, lower overall calorie levels. Am I recalling that correctly? Either way, yep, the less you eat, the less you have to pay for eating!

Thanks for the answer!

Fasting might actually be better (and more sustainable) than absolute calorie restriction, according to the Lifespan book, but I'm missing additional literature on this topic for now. 8/16 is good and quite comfortable.

From your post (and this has come up elsewhere a number of times), I especially liked where you say the point of crunching numbers is to cultivate an accurate intuition, and that you run the numbers to forget the numbers.

I think I may be (at least idiosyncratically) less systematic than you, but following specific metrics temporarily to build intuition is something that resonates with me and gives motivation to apply such metrics with that goal in mind.

I'd suggest looking at dollars per pound instead of dollars per calorie as the latter doctrine is biases towards rice and canola oil and away from celery and tomatoes. One can use a few different values for vegetables, meat, cereals, oils.

Dollars per pound (the local equivalents, actually) is what I have been using myself mostly too, but it is good to know low cost high-calorie (and still nutritious, not empty) foods as well. For instance, this can come in handy for backpacking, where you want to pack food that has a high calorie per pound ratio. I like @theanimal perspective on this too.

As AxelHeyst wrote, there is no need to rely on a single metric, but paying attention to some such as these two can help get better clarity and making informed decisions.

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At any rate, learning to enjoy cooking things (and consuming them) yourself is key to keep spending low.

It is not that hard, but some skill level is involved.

I improved mine a few years ago, when I followed Rouxbe online cooking courses for a few months and would recommend them.

Here is their "map of cooking":

[Ego]

I use cal/$ in the case when I'm in the store and see some thing and think "Oh, hm, I think I might want that, but I'm not familiar with that particular product", and I can do a quick check on it.

I often find myself in a similar situation where I see something I believe is a great deal but am not sure. I will often pull up this site that allows me to search Amazon at cost/ounce https://bangyourbuck.com/. If it is heavy, Amazon is not the best source of data but on a lot of stuff it is close to the lowest price.

[AnalyticalEngine]

@OutOfTheBlue - Do you recall which courses you specifically took? Were you able to get them somewhere at a better deal than what they cost on the site?

[OutOfTheBlue]

@OutOfTheBlue - Do you recall which courses you specifically took? Were you able to get them somewhere at a better deal than what they cost on the site?

Hm, I remember I took The Cook's Roadmap: An introduction and then Plant-based cooking: An introduction cooking courses, plus some additional videos from topic-specific courses. Both courses are great, and there is plenty of practice, not just text and videos. I see they have slightly modified their membership options, as these courses were accessible via the monthly membership. Now, it seems the membership only gives access to topic-specific courses, but in effect, if you compare the topic courses available for membership access with The Cook's Roadmap's syllabus, I think there is nothing missing, maybe apart from the useful "Unit orientation" texts and the Map of cooking unit.

Here are some ideas to get the cost down:

- Instead of taking The Cook's Roadmap, just take the monthly or annual membership. Costs a lot less (USD99 instead of USD299). You can follow that course's syllabus (and maybe complement with unit orientation texts from P2P sources) by taking the topic-specific courses in the same order.
- Share a monthly or annual membership between two or more people. That's what I did with a friend of mine, so the cost was effectively halved. It could be fun to learn simultaneously too! Maybe something for the MMG?
- Specifically for the Plant-based course (the contents of which don't seem fully available from the membership option), I see there is an older version still around in the P2P world, which includes "Unit orientation" texts and the Map of cooking unit.
- There are other active P2P versions too. One I saw includes only course videos, like a snapshot of their membership courses a few years back.
- Rouxbe offers a 14-day free trial (with no credit card needed), which I recommend before you commit. For instance, check out their Knife skills course. Just great! And I guess one can use more than one emails, too…

If you need more info, don't hesitate to drop me a line by PM : - )

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For inspiration and reference, their recipes page is actually publicly accessible: https://rouxbe.com/recipes/

That pilau rice recipe is one of my favorites: https://rouxbe.com/recipes/64-pilau-rice

[AnalyticalEngine]

@OutOfTheBlue - Thanks, that's super helpful. I think I might get the monthly plan then try to cram in as much learning within something like a three month time window as possible.

I've also been critically examining my relationship with purpose and narratives of meaning, which is a tricky thing. It's not like I think having a sense of purpose is a bad thing, but when the fulfillment of the vision of the purpose becomes the locus of attention during striving and effort, that's a mechanism for leeching intrinsic motivation out of my soul. What to do?

This is always an interesting task. It reminds me of the notion of a grand narrative or metanarrative in the postmodern sense. That is, it's the structures outside of you that define the narrative you're able to tell yourself. Switching or unraveling a grand narrative is always a difficult task because it's what allowed your life experience to have any shape or meaning in the first place.

I've found I can't escape having a grand narrative on some level, but it is useful when you can learn to identify them and pick whichever one you think is going to suit your life goals the best.

[AxelHeyst]

The Renaissance Report |

It's hard to believe I've only been back two months. It feels like six. At least.

October was great. I'm eyeballs-deep in two photovoltaic design/builds, and started going over to a neighbors to help out with getting ready for winter. I'm easily earning enough money to cover my living expenses, learning things, being outside, building relationships, and enjoying myself.

Physiological
My feet took a month to heal from my 23mile walk to town last month. I got in a twelve mile hike last week, and on days when I work at the neighbor's place I walk there, which is just shy of four miles round trip. When I take the bus into town, it's a 3.8 mile walk up to the pass to catch it.

It's backwards to say that I walk because I don't have a car. Rather, I don't have a car because I walk. If there were something wrong with my legs, I would get a car. But my legs work fine at the moment. So a car is unnecessary. Also, my legs are much more efficient than an internal combustion engine. My whole body only uses about 2,000 calories a day, and at 400cal/$, that's less than $6 a day. For a long walk, I might consume another thousand calories. I can walk twenty miles in a day. There's about 30,000 calories (kilocalories) in a gallon of gas, which will get me about twenty miles.

Economic
For nearly three years, I've been very focused on habituating a durable postconsumer praxis, as measured chiefly by my burn rate. I feel that I am 80-90% complete on that. Buying things as a solution to a problem I have feels like a weakness in my system, and it's not the first thing I think of now. It's easy for me to not spend money. Arguably, there are some things that I should spend more money on.

But outflow is only part of my financial system. There is ensuring sufficient inflow, and there is also what to do with the money I have lying around that I'm not doing anything with at the moment. This is a particularly urgent issue now with inflation above eight percent: not doing anything with that money is the same as deciding to lose 8% of it every year.

My inflow has been basically zero for a year and a half. I've lived off savings, which, again, is easy to do if you spend very little. Now that I'm back home from my travels and I've got my expenses down, it's appropriate for me to turn my attention to generating income in a way that suits me.



The theory is that generating 'enough' money is just not that hard when you only need a small amount to break even. I'm now putting that theory to the test. I'm currently working on two PV design and build projects, and am helping a neighbor out with manual labor for a few hours a day. I have several other ideas for income generation that I'll be experimenting with in the coming months.

Balancing inflows and outflows is necessary, but not sufficient for a complete personal economic system. I also need to attend to the surplus, because NOT attending to it is the same as letting 8% of it vanish every year. I have no interest in get rich quick investing schemes, but I am interested in becoming a wise enough investor that my savings doesn't evaporate while I have my back turned.

Intellectual
I read a lot. It's uninteresting to me to list them. I rarely read just one book at a time; I typically have at least a half dozen in progress at any moment. With most books, I can only absorb a certain number of pages per day. Reading any more than fifteen pages of Jung is a waste of time. But I can read fifteen pages of Jung, and then twenty pages of David Fleming, and then twenty pages of something else, and as long as the topics are sufficiently different, it seems that the absorption rate stays high.

Technical
My knowledge of off grid PV systems continues to level up. I built a loads analysis and system sizing tool that allows me to tweak and tune demand assumptions and system parameters and see how those changes effects total system cost and infrastructure requirements. Building the tool took a lot of digging into the dynamics of PV systems and fixing some misunderstandings I had of how electricity works.

My friend who was here for a week this last month gave me a shove in the right direction for getting my studio properly seismically braced. At the moment, a moderate quake would send it off its piers and probably cripple it. I went down a rabbit hole of researching mobile home seismic bracing, which is the nearest analog to my studio. I'll be addressing that this month as well - I'll sleep better once that's done.

It's cooled off here, and the studio doesn't have any heating systems or south-facing windows at the moment. The easy thing is to just put a tiny wood burning stove in it. I'm more interested in doing something creative with sunlight: thermal energy storage, custom radiant devices, etc.

[AxelHeyst]

Also: I feel like I'm going through a transition phase in my ERE journey and I haven't figured out how to talk about/communicate it, both here and on my website and podcast. I'm kinda struggling to figure out how to proceed in an authentic way. Just had a great deep dive with my MMG and they gave me loads to think about wrt that.

Couple highlights: I have Skynet now, so I can do conversation style podcasts instead of the super writing intense ones I have been doing. I'm going to move in that direction after I finish episode 9 which is in recording phase.

For blog posts, I'm going to do some more serious thinking about the style I want. I've been trying to move away from the advice writing style and more personal narrative style, but haven't nailed it. Partly because I'm somewhat stuck in advice style writing, and partly I think I'm concerned my personal narrative is either boring, self-important, or both. Ironically, I think writing comes off self-important the more self-conscious one is about it, so the trick might be to just relax about it...

[jacob]

For blog posts, I'm going to do some more serious thinking about the style I want. I've been trying to move away from the advice writing style and more personal narrative style, but haven't nailed it. Partly because I'm somewhat stuck in advice style writing, and partly I think I'm concerned my personal narrative is either boring, self-important, or both. Ironically, I think writing comes off self-important the more self-conscious one is about it, so the trick might be to just relax about it...

This is interesting. A big reason why my second book keeps going nowhere is that I've been stuck in the "interview/forum Q&A"-style for years + I keep getting dragged back into it. I never practice introductions and conclusions and at this point I've functionally lost the ability.

There does not seem to be a direct transition from Q&A style to book writing. I think book writing is a very specialized skill that comes out of the "blog-post -> long-form article -> review article -> book" tech tree.

Maybe be strategic about where you're going.

Also, I suspect that as a writer thinking about how one comes across or who the audience is is very destructive to the writing flow.

[AxelHeyst]

Hmm. I think I've got a notion that people only want to read 'useful' stuff, and so I try to justify my writing by making it useful/informative. But that's not really the style I enjoy, and I have no writerly ambitions in that direction. This tension I'm describing might be me fighting with the version of myself that is thinking about how it comes across and who is reading it. So a direction to explore is digging into thatself and prying his fingers off my writing process. Oh... Oh. I know who it is, now that I've phrased it this way. Thank you Jacob and thank you Plotkin...

[AnalyticalEngine]

Also, I suspect that as a writer thinking about how one comes across or who the audience is is very destructive to the writing flow.

The advice I've always gotten from published writers is that you should write your first draft as if you were the only audience then edit it for the audience you want to receive it.

[jacob]

@AE - I agree. It's hard [for me] to avoid doing/thinking both at the same time though.

[AxelHeyst]

Transportation in BFE
My place is about thirty miles from town. There's a smaller town that's only 18 miles away, but it's pretty much just a gas station and a bar. There are no services whatsoever between my place and these towns, it's just desert.

I sold my truck in February. My motorcycle doesn't run at the moment, and when I fix it I'm probably going to sell it. I have a broken MTB I'm trying to sell. My parents have two vehicles - 17mpg and 14mpg - that I'm welcome to any time I want them, which is almost never. So far in two months I've only borrowed one of the cars once, to pick up 170lbs of bulk food, otherwise I've stacked errands to coincide with picking up stuff they needed in addition to some things I wanted.

I walked all the way to town once. That was a lot, I might do that once a month at most.

There is a bus, three times a day, MWF. I can walk 3.8miles up to the pass to catch it. On the way back they'll drop me closer to home. The bus costs $3, if the machine is working, $0 if not.

The situation suits me fine for now. A couple friends have come to me to visit, which was great. I visit my friends in town every other week or so. I don't run out of food.

Sometime within the next six months, though, I'm going to want to spread my wings a bit. Go up the eastside and climb, go over to the coast to hang with a buddy whose going to teach me to make beer, maybe rock up to check out mooretrees' setup again, etc. Definitely by the time the weather starts to warm I'm going to want to roam a bit.

I've had the notion of building an expedition cart. The cart would allow me to go multiple days without resupply in the Mojave in warm weather, which is very difficult to pull off with a backpack. The places I want to go are multiple walking days apart. I've backpacked that much water weight, and it's not fun. The Wheel is brilliant.

However, carts would be awkward on single track, or on narrow shoulders. Carts can tip. Also, looking at the distances of places I want to go, damn, that's a lot of days of walking. I might want my life to move along at a slightly faster pace than that.

So I'm thinking fatbikepacking. Why a fatbike? I really dislike riding on road shoulders, many of which are very narrow around here. There are gobs of dirt roads, but many of them are very sandy. The off-highway route to town, for instance, is hell for even a normal 2.5"mtb tire. I wouldn't carry as much weight on a bike as I could in a cart, but since I can move faster on the bike I wouldn't need as much.

A fatbike would make trips to town much easier, medium distance trips (e.g. to climb the eastern sierras) only a couple days journey, and opens up longer distance trips like up to OR (multiple friends there) or NM. Or Baja. I think I could live off a bike for quite some time, although the proof's in the pudding of course. I think a bike, a fatbike in particular, would suit my transportation nexus really well.

I don't know much about fatbikes, beyond to start my search with Surly Pugsleys. Any fatbikers out there?

Process
Up a level, I'm finding myself with less focus on the particulars of what I'm doing, and more focus on the structure within which I do stuff. For instance, study. I want to learn stuff efficiently. What stuff? Lots of stuff. All the stuff. Whatever interests me. Investing. Ecology. Botany. History. etc. There's some risk in studying useless stuff, I suppose, but I'm not terribly worried about that. There's a much greater risk of just not studying at all, or studying poorly. So, studying well, and consistently, is of prime concern.

This fortnight I'm working on habituating an hour of nightly study (consistency), using the techniques from Ahrens's book (quality). I'll process investing books, books I read a long time ago but never processed into my system, papers I find referenced in podcasts, whatever. I recently was studying Bodie, but something it said about how banks are intermediaries reminded me of a Hagen's podcast where they said that banks actually create money via loans, and that most textbooks don't discuss this, and so I went and found the paper they referenced and processed the whole thing into my system and now I'm less clueless about how banks work. The bunny trails and tangents are an intrinsic part of the technique/process.

I also want to write consistently. I do that first thing every morning. I'm not anxious about What specifically I'm writing, but if my schedule gets off and I go three days without writing, that's something I want to fix.

So that's the top and tail of my days. In between, I want to spend some structured time a) engaging in remunerative or potentially remunerative activities, and b) build projects, of which I'll never run out. For now, the process/structure I've settled on is two 1.5hr chunks of time that are spent focusing on projects that are on The List, which only has 3-4 things on it. Right now, The List has my two PV projects, the other neighbor I'm working for, and the seismic retrofit on the Studio.

So that's about five hours a day that I've got some structure to, that I'm running a process on. But it's categories: write for an hour, spend three hours 'working' being productive in some way, and then study for an hour. I have my GTD system that helps me decide what specifically to write about, crank on, or study, but the larger idea is that if I'm consistently spending days in that sort of order, I'll be clipping along in the general direction I want to go.

To the extent that I trust this system, it frees up my mind from clutching on to Goals and Plans and Dreams for the future, which I realize I used to do a lot, because I trust that if I put in the focused hours, good things of some sort will come of it. And, well, the further point is that the *way* in which I'm doing this stuff makes doing the stuff it's own reward. I like writing. I like studying. I like working outside, or building stuff, or whatever it is I'm doing in the middle of the day. And I'm learning the techniques of ensuring that I continue to like spending my time on these sorts of activities - I'm learning to let go of dwelling in the future, which makes it easy to become trapped in extrinsic motivation, and just enjoy the process itself.

Everything you want is on the far side of hard work.

I like that quote, but for where I'm at it puts the emphasis dangerously into the future, and sets me up for extrinsic motivation. I've modified it:

>>>>Everything I want is inside of hard work.

I know this is a strange thing to say on a FIRE-proximate site, but it's working well for me. The more I've been tuning and tweaking and figuring this angle out, the calmer, happier, less neurotic, and more energetic I've become. The frequency of days where at the end of it I give a nice big sigh and go "THAT.... was a really nice day" is increasing. I've never had a frequency of days like that at any point in my life.

There are some risks/vulnerabilities to my situation, which I spend some time thinking about. This turned into a longass post though, so maybe I'll talk about those later.

[ertyu]

>>>>Everything I want is inside of hard work.

I know this is a strange thing to say on a FIRE-proximate site,

I don't think so. Hard work and having a job are two very different things. Who puts you to work and towards what goals matters. It's no coincidence that Marx started Das Kapital (sp?) with an exposition on how capitalist labor is alienated labor and this makes a deep difference to whether a person is whole.

[shaz]

The fatbike sounds like a fun and useful acquisition.

If you revert to considering walking with a cart, you might want to check out this guy's rig. He even adds "skis" for snow. He is getting ready to head over Rabbit Ears so chances are he will need the skis in the next couple of days. https://www.jakewalksamerica.com/

[guitarplayer]

Definitely, fatbike if it is not very wet there which it probably isn't because, well, it's a desert. Otherwise all the mechanism could turn very mucky and require a lot of time to clean or degrade probably rather quickly (but by quickly I still mean more than, say, weeks). Saying this without ever owning a fatbike, but used a trekking bike to cycle over hills in the Scottish wet weather. Maybe best to find one for free / very cheap and see how it feels like to commute this way? Along the lines of the 'least viable product' thinking.

Thanks for the link to the Arthen's book thread. Sometimes reading the forum first thing in the morning is like playing google 'feeling lucky', I like the anticipation of some potentially good stuff. Heading to read it, might turn useful in my current affairs!

[Mouche]

The more I've been tuning and tweaking and figuring this angle out, the calmer, happier, less neurotic, and more energetic I've become. The frequency of days where at the end of it I give a nice big sigh and go "THAT.... was a really nice day" is increasing. I've never had a frequency of days like that at any point in my life.

Thank you @AxelHeyst for providing an inspiring example of life design !

[theanimal]

I have a fatbike and use it more on an annual basis than any other kind of bike. I think it’d be a good fit for what you are trying to do. I have a Salsa Mukluk that I got used off eBay for under $1000 incl shipping, but that was before they became more mainstream popular. Mrs. Animal has a Salsa as well (Beargrease I think?) that she got off Craigslist for $1500 a couple winters ago. They are widely used in AK and there is a strong secondhand market for them. I am not familiar with elsewhere but I’d be somewhat surprised if the same was true. Generally, the cheaper the bike the heavier it will be. Fatbikes are inherently heavy, as such I’d steer clear of any that people offer as free or that you can get for lower prices in super stores. Like packrafts, they hold their value well.

I’m not much of a gear head so I am only familiar with some of the bikes like Salsa, Pugsley and 907. I know the first 2 are good brands, last one is middle of the road and I couldn’t name any others off the top of my head. Rather than brand, one thing to focus on is tire size. Wider sizes will offer you more flotation but will be heavier. I run 4 in tires and Mrs. Animal runs 4.5 in , which seem to be becoming more common. You can go up to 5 in, but I think that’d be overboard. Most of my use is in the snow which is very granular and dry, similar to many of the conditions I figure you’d face.

Flotation is an art rather than a science. Having big wheels doesn’t mean you float over everything automatically. On non compacted trails/roads you have to fiddle with air in the tires to find the right sweet spot. In really soft stuff (fresh snow/deep sand) you will run almost deflated. Generally can go up to about 6 in of loose material(sand, snow) before having to push. Those conditions aren’t the most fun. In general fatbikes are slow, if you are going 15mph with a load you are going downhill . On my long trips, i average about 8 mph, though that is with breaks so average moving speed may be slightly higher. It feels very slow when on a paved road, but plenty fast in areas of it's intended use.

Tubeless tires are all the rage now and may be appropriate for your use. They are lighter and more expensive and are very useful in environments with lots of sharp poky things.

The bikes are durable in all kinds of conditions, there are guys up here that do multi week fatbike/packraft trips in the wilderness in the mountains and on the coast. I don’t think you have to worry about the bike degrading.

You may enjoy these videos from this guy who's done some very big fatbike tours on his own creates routes near your area. It's a very good illustration of what it's like and the challenges he faces. He mainly uses old roads, trails and right of ways.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P88L0mySkpo

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5aoF3gH6ym0

That's all I have on my mind now, hope some of it is useful.

[Gilberto de Piento]

You mentioned the pugsley, I think technology wise they are a bit outdated now. Still a good bike but time has moved on as far as design goes.

Also consider "plus" bikes with extra wide 29" and 27.5" tires if you don't need maximum flotation. They were a fad a few years ago. May be outdated now too so make sure you can still buy tires. Examples are surly krampus and ecr.

[AxelHeyst]

If you revert to considering walking with a cart, you might want to check out this guy's rig. .... https://www.jakewalksamerica.com/

Oh cool, that's really inspiring.

@guitarplayer yeah, the Mojave and the eastside of the Sierras (my nominal habitat) is extremely dry. Rust is almost a non issue. You mostly just have to keep sand out of the moving parts... but there's a reason they mothball airplanes out here. Park it and come back to it in twenty years and it won't have aged.

Sunlight on plastics and rubbers is what goes first, really. Hoses crack, seals dry out and degrade, plastics go brittle and flake off, etc.

@theanimal amazing! thank you for the info dump, and for the links to that guy. Those are my stomping grounds. Yes.

Gilberto - What aspect of the tech is outdated? I was reading that Puglsey's had a redesign in 2018ish. Which excited me, because I figured pre-redesign Pugs' would be less expensive. I might be naïve here, but what technology improvements are worth the $$$ on a rigid steel 1x10?

[Gilberto de Piento]

Gilberto - What aspect of the tech is outdated? I was reading that Puglsey's had a redesign in 2018ish. Which excited me, because I figured pre-redesign Pugs' would be less expensive. I might be naïve here, but what technology improvements are worth the $$$ on a rigid steel 1x10?

There may not be any for problems you. Some aspects of the old pug might even be an advantage for you. Depends what you are looking for in a bike. I don't remember the details but I'm sure you can find articles about it. I think it was something like narrow rims, offset wheels, offset fork, inability to fit really wide tires, lack of modern drivetrain.

For me, the main thing I disliked about having an old school fatbike (I've never owned a pug, I had something else) was that the lowest gear available was 32 front 34 rear. Friends with modern drivetrain with more range could stay sitting and gently pedal to maintain traction while I was standing, spinning the tire, and using up a lot of energy to get up hills. I couldn't install a chainring smaller than 30 because the bolt circle diameter wouldn't allow anything smaller. An issue like this may not matter to you if you are not riding icy, hilly singletrack or doing anything else that requires grinding it out. Good luck with your purchase, fatbikes are fun and open up a lot of possibilities in the winter or on sand.