The Education of Axel Heyst

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Jin+Guice
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Jin+Guice »

The first year I moved to New Orleans, I double covered expenses with incidental income and social capital. The situation wasn't sustainable and I wasn't happy or comfortable, but I did it, mostly as an accident of necessity. This was before I found FIRE/ ERE. However, I'd saved substantial amount to move to New Orleans. Without that backstop I think I would've been desperate.

I didn't advertise beyond telling everyone I met that I had just moved to New Orleans and was looking for work. I think another critical component was, somewhat oddly, that I wasn't trying to exploit a specific skill. This meant I was available for anything. My most consistent gigs became working in concert production, which did rely on my only skill at the time, but I found about 50-70% of my jobs by being available.

I can't say how to make this repeatable. I've seen many other people fail at it. Personally, I've always found that possessing at least average intelligence, having full physical mobility, being willing to do the work at work as well as being available and mostly on-time/ reliable have always lead to a multitude of employment opportunities.




@AH: The thing I struggle with about intrinsic motivation is the "things I should want to do" vs. "what I actually want to do." These things are often at odds and the tension between them is what causes most of my stress and sometimes short periods of depression. This is exacerbated by having too many things that I want to do. For example, I want to run right now, but I also want to type this response to you. I also don't want to run bc I am lazy. I know I will feel better if I run both now and in the longterm. There are so many rewards to running. Once I am running I will be happy I am doing it. It takes effort. Part of me doesn't ever want to expend effort doing anything. It's easier and more fun to type this response, which is also something that I want to do. There are longterm benefits to this conversation. I've found these are the biggest challenges of retirement for me. The fact that I almost always need to create this motivation intrinsically and manage all of my time myself is also difficult.


I think that Buckminster Fuller idea about disregarding renumeration is fascinating. You've posted about it several times before and I've always been tempted to try it myself. Thinking about it a little more deeply, I think it creates a false constraint which hurts the end goal. Ignoring renumeration diminishes your ability to help humanity (and probably your ability to do most other goals you might have).

I've noticed this is a pattern when trying to break free of existing expectations and societal patterns. It seems like an important first step is "fuck this," which ends up ignoring the purposes that the "this" you are fucking serves. It binds the escapee to another rigid set of social criteria, which was often what they were initially trying to escape. Applying this to Buckminster Fuller's idea would yield something like "diminish renumeration as a goal" or "do what you wanna, mostly." The conclusions are less inspiring, but more useful. I think it's also important to acknowledge the power of the norm you are escaping. It's a slippery slope to allow some renumeration, the tendency will always be to overemphasize money bc the importance of money is constantly broadcast at us.

In your personal situation, ignoring renumeration completely is an option bc you are FI or almost FI. I would still ask if it servers your end goal, with a cautious eye towards getting sucked back in for the sake of safety. I think you are still in an important period of change and decompression and that focusing on renumeration too quickly would likely be negative.

I think remunerative work can be useful both as a means of increasing personal motivation as well as increasing optionality in the form of employment opportunities and using the money you earn from working as a way to fulfill your greater goals. I don't think it's a necessity for everyone at all times, but I do think banning oneself from it completely and ignoring the benefits is a mistake.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Jin+Guice wrote:
Sun Jun 26, 2022 12:20 pm
I've noticed this is a pattern when trying to break free of existing expectations and societal patterns. It seems like an important first step is "fuck this," which ends up ignoring the purposes that the "this" you are fucking serves. It binds the escapee to another rigid set of social criteria, which was often what they were initially trying to escape. Applying this to Buckminster Fuller's idea would yield something like "diminish renumeration as a goal" or "do what you wanna, mostly." The conclusions are less inspiring, but more useful. I think it's also important to acknowledge the power of the norm you are escaping.
I can +1 this as my experience as well. I think early in the process, there's a tendency to cling to new paradigms as the global solution to all of one's problems. As the new paradigm fails to deliver global solutions, one starts to notice the problems the old paradigm solved. There's a risk here of going back to "the old ways" if the jump to the new paradigm isn't successfully made.

The solution is to realize one needs more than one hammer to solve problems, and that a given ideology solves some problems but not others.

(Sorry for the tangent in your journal, AH. I have more to say on this topic but I think I'll post it in my journal because it's getting unrelated to what you're trying to do.)

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

AE, post it where you like, bit it feels relevant to me. I certainly can fall in love with a new idea/paradigm, coupled with a distaste for the old paradigm, and it narrows the number of tools I think I have available to me. This is part of why I chew over this stuff so much (and why I post it here to get awesome high quality feedback from everyone) - to make sure I'm not digging a well for myself and hopping in feetfirst.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Jin+Guice wrote:
Sun Jun 26, 2022 12:20 pm
@AH: The thing I struggle with about intrinsic motivation is the "things I should want to do" vs. "what I actually want to do." These things are often at odds and the tension between them is what causes most of my stress and sometimes short periods of depression. This is exacerbated by having too many things that I want to do. For example, I want to run right now, but I also want to type this response to you. I also don't want to run bc I am lazy. I know I will feel better if I run both now and in the longterm. There are so many rewards to running. Once I am running I will be happy I am doing it. It takes effort. Part of me doesn't ever want to expend effort doing anything. It's easier and more fun to type this response, which is also something that I want to do. There are longterm benefits to this conversation. I've found these are the biggest challenges of retirement for me. The fact that I almost always need to create this motivation intrinsically and manage all of my time myself is also difficult.
One of my current ideas is that these two things:
1) Making peace with who I am and letting go of the things I think I ought to want to do, and
2) After doing due diligence with step 1, to convert the remaing 'i want to want to do this but I dont' activities into 'aww yeah let's DO THIS!' activities

...Are both skills that I can develop, and that I will have to develop to a high level in order to pull my strategy off. 1 is more about internal work, 2 is more about dopamine scheduling, flow hacking, growth mindset, designing projects for intrinisc motivation, dopamine-healthy lifestyle habits, etc.

This is actually emerging as a big ur-motivation reason to pursue this strategy, which I'm only starting to wrap my head around. The strategy demands/requires that I get good at... Enjoying the everloving hell out of my life. At finding meaning and fulfillment in the process and the present moments of my activities.

...

The idea of being a bad employee, or halfassing, comes up from time to time. The idea makes my skin crawl. We can leave it at that.

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Ego
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Ego »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Sun Jun 26, 2022 4:21 am
I think I'm reaching diminishing returns on thinking about this at the abstract level - excising the word 'incidental' feels like a last big theory/strategy hangup I had to deal with. From here on out I ought to be more focused on actually doing stuff, aka trying my ideas out in the real world and see what works and what doesn't.
At least three times now I began typing a reply essentially saying the same thing, but each time it came across as more critical than intended.

The second point I've repeatedly been tempted to make is that all of this (rules, definitions, levels, canon, WOG, flotilla, lifeboats) has the potential to completely kill serendipity. If it gets to the point where you become unwilling to set it aside for a time - for instance - to chase a pretty girl around Europe, then maybe it is time to set it aside for a while and focus on finding a pretty girl to chase around Europe.

You are young. Free. Smart. Good looking. Healthy. You've got some cash stashed and you are backpacking around Europe.

None of those are permanent.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Sun Jun 26, 2022 12:50 pm
AE, post it where you like, bit it feels relevant to me.
Sounds good. Gimme a bit to write it up and then I think I'll post it in Emergent Renaissance Ecology.
AxelHeyst wrote:
Sun Jun 26, 2022 1:02 pm
One of my current ideas is that these two things:
1) Making peace with who I am and letting go of the things I think I ought to want to do, and
2) After doing due diligence with step 1, to convert the remaing 'i want to want to do this but I dont' activities into 'aww yeah let's DO THIS!' activities
This is the essence, I think of "chop wood, carry water." Once you realize paradigms are only tools and not absolute truths, you realize there's really no framework/ideology/paradigm that's a "fundamental truth." At the end of the day, you still have to live your life on a daily basis, and that reality of your day to day life is all there is. To that end, learning the person you enjoy being and how to interact with the world as that person, with all the nuances and difficulties of the human condition, becomes the ultimate goal.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

theanimal wrote:
Sun Jun 26, 2022 12:01 pm
In my experience if you do good work, then others will advertise for you. And if you are not pursuing things for their monetary purpose, then marketing isn't necessary. My understanding of incidental is that it is something happens occasionally, without regularity. Since AH is more or less already FI, he doesn't need to pursue the customer list or advertise to others. He's not looking for a regular paycheck. If he makes money, that's great. But that's not the purpose. The purpose is to follow stoke, build skills and maintain intrinsic desire in developing his lifeboat flotilla. If money comes as a bonus, that's great.
Yeah, nailed it. Although I can see that for some of my projects, I will want to do marketing anyways as part of making the project succeed on the terms I'm interested in, or in case I'm trying to find / filter for specific people to notice what I'm doing. From the bits I've read, I actually suspect I'll enjoy this process at the level of success that I require at a minimum. And - small craft business operations experience is one of the skill genres I am keen to develop, everything from proper accounting and taxes to marketing and BD. It's a hugely relevant skillset for the world, and I'd like to suck less at it. I think possessing a smidgen of business sense and experience is also one of those skills that allows you to convert serendipitous encounters into realistic opportunities. (Opportunity = luck + preparation).

As a small example, I think there ought to be more composting toilets in the world. I think one of the (many) reasons there aren't more is because there aren't great options for sale. They are expensive and plastic and ugly, or DIY out of rotting plywood that isn't ergonomic and looks like spiders live in it. I think I could build some dope artisinal composting toilets. But it's one thing to build them, and another thing to successfully turn it into a business in order to crank em out and fulfill my desire for their to be more out in the world, and to change the perception of what composting toilets are like. I'll need business skills in order to fulfill my desires here. Incidentally (thank you Jacob for correcting my understanding of the definition!) I'll make money.

Or, y'know, have a garage full of dope toilet boxes no one wants. But that's okay, part of the process.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Ego wrote:
Sun Jun 26, 2022 1:30 pm
The second point I've repeatedly been tempted to make is that all of this (rules, definitions, levels, canon, WOG, flotilla, lifeboats) has the potential to completely kill serendipity. If it gets to the point where you become unwilling to set it aside for a time - for instance - to chase a pretty girl around Europe, then maybe it is time to set it aside for a while and focus on finding a pretty girl to chase around Europe.
Thanks for saying this. I've been wrestling with this issue, and it's related to the last sentence of AEs post:
AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Sun Jun 26, 2022 1:32 pm
To that end, learning the person you enjoy being and how to interact with the world as that person, with all the nuances and difficulties of the human condition, becomes the ultimate goal.
Basically, I'm not at all sure I'm the kind of person who would like chasing a pretty girl around Europe. Or - there's a whole list of stuff that falls under the category of 'things young people who look like you would love to do' that I'm not at all sure I would actually love to do. I admire the stories of people who do things like that, but every time I find my self doing something like that, it becomes obvious that I'm forcing it and am actually pretty bored.

The trick is - is it actually because I authentically don't want to chase a pretty girl around Europe? Or is it because of some internal blockages/past trauma/unresolved hangups that I need to sort out... Potentially via the method of saying fuck iiiiiit and chasing her anyway, and the judicious application of alcohol?

Qazwer
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Qazwer »

Mom, I hate candy. I know everyone else likes candy.
Mom responds, ‘Have you ever tried candy?’

I am not the kind of person who …
How do you know?

You can hate candy and only like broccoli. But if you never try candy especially when you have structured your life to the point that candy would not cause much damage (metaphor being pushed here) …

You get to choose what you like and value but that can only be determined by experiencing what is out there. I am guessing you have done the judicious use of alcohol thing and did not enjoy it but have you done the just for the sake of it and don’t look back.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Any identity, source of meaning, or activity you "should" enjoy is inherently arbitrary and context dependent. You might not enjoy an activity that people in a similar demographic to you commonly enjoy, and it's easy to spend a lot of time wringing your hands about how to make yourself normal, ie, "Everyone likes X, but I don't like X. Therefore there must be a pathological reason I don't like X that I need to resolve."

But there is nothing intrinsic about X. There is nothing intrinsic about you. These are all just experiences that may or may not have any meaning unless we assign them meaning through a paradigm/framework/ideology. This is why it's so hard to know what the "authentic" you even is--because what "you" actually are is the experience of a self inside a context.

Having a lot of freedom is actually a challenge because you have to construct a meaningful paradigm and sense of self in a way that people with more constraints don't have to.

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Ego
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Ego »

AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Sun Jun 26, 2022 6:23 pm
These are all just experiences that may or may not have any meaning unless we assign them meaning through a paradigm/framework/ideology.

Having a lot of freedom is actually a challenge because you have to construct a meaningful paradigm and sense of self in a way that people with more constraints don't have to.
Yes, this!

In my example above, "chasing a pretty girl around Europe" is whatever it is that one wants to do that does NOT fit into the paradigm/framework/ideology they've built.

Freedom is extremely challenging because we have to build meaningful paradigms AND there is a temptation to overbuild to compensate for the untethered feeling that comes with freedom.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Ego wrote:Freedom is extremely challenging because we have to build meaningful paradigms AND there is a temptation to overbuild to compensate for the untethered feeling that comes with freedom.
Very true, even if you are "the type of person" who is likely to do the old lady equivalent of "chasing pretty girl around Europe" at the floppy boundaries of !!GREAT PLAN!!

Jin+Guice
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Jin+Guice »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Sun Jun 26, 2022 1:02 pm
One of my current ideas is that these two things:
1) Making peace with who I am and letting go of the things I think I ought to want to do, and
2) After doing due diligence with step 1, to convert the remaining 'i want to want to do this but I dont' activities into 'aww yeah let's DO THIS!' activities
But my god man, how?!?
AxelHeyst wrote:
Sun Jun 26, 2022 1:51 pm
Basically, I'm not at all sure I'm the kind of person who would like chasing a pretty girl around Europe.
Oh, I thought gaining more time to chase hoes around was like most of the point of retiring early?

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Lemur
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Lemur »

AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Sun Jun 26, 2022 6:23 pm
Any identity, source of meaning, or activity you "should" enjoy is inherently arbitrary and context dependent. You might not enjoy an activity that people in a similar demographic to you commonly enjoy, and it's easy to spend a lot of time wringing your hands about how to make yourself normal, ie, "Everyone likes X, but I don't like X. Therefore there must be a pathological reason I don't like X that I need to resolve."

But there is nothing intrinsic about X. There is nothing intrinsic about you. These are all just experiences that may or may not have any meaning unless we assign them meaning through a paradigm/framework/ideology. This is why it's so hard to know what the "authentic" you even is--because what "you" actually are is the experience of a self inside a context.

Having a lot of freedom is actually a challenge because you have to construct a meaningful paradigm and sense of self in a way that people with more constraints don't have to.
"How I found Freedom in an ̶U̶n̶f̶r̶e̶e̶ Deterministic World." But the problem is the framework is always being edited...

That is what happens when you try to bring too much order to chaos. :idea:
It sure does make finding a theory of everything a worthy pursuit though...

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Lemur wrote:
Mon Jun 27, 2022 4:05 pm
But the problem is the framework is always being edited...
Thomas Kuhn gets into this idea with his theory of paradigms:
Successive paradigms are incommensurable. Kuhn says that a later paradigm may be a better instrument for solving puzzles than an earlier one. But if each paradigm defines its own puzzles, what is a puzzle for one paradigm may be no puzzle at all for another. So why is it progress to replace one paradigm with another which solves puzzles that the earlier paradigm does not even recognize? Kuhn used his incommensurability thesis to disprove the view the paradigm shifts are objective. Truth is relative to the paradigm.
Image

Basically the struggle is that because paradigms are required to give structure and meaning to experience, comparison between paradigms is impossible because a paradigm is the water that fish can't see. What's meaningful under one paradigm may be nonsense under another. An existential crisis under one paradigm may be the goal of another.

The goal then is to find the most useful paradigm, but this isn't an easy task because a paradigm itself is what structures the very idea of what is useful or meaningful. I think we in the West are going through a major paradigm crisis right now where our old paradigm of western rationalist capitalist liberal individualism is falling apart in the face of current challenges, a trend that started with WWII, but there's no compelling paradigm replacement yet. Finding that paradigm is the current difficulty of our era, but it's not an easy task because a paradigm is something you can't really see because it's the set of guiding assumptions for all parts of your life.

chenda
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by chenda »

I recommend you read Henry James's The Ambassadors. And The Talented Mr Ripley.

There is much wisdom in these novels for the FI.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Aw good stuff. Let's see if I can catch up.
Qazwer wrote:
Sun Jun 26, 2022 4:56 pm
Mom, I hate candy. I know everyone else likes candy.
Mom responds, ‘Have you ever tried candy?’

I am not the kind of person who …
How do you know?
There aren't many kinds of candy out there I haven't tried. I have the sense that I'm not the kind of person who wants to chase a girl around right now because... I've chased girls around, in a number of different ways. I mean I'm no don juan but I've done more than read the manual, y'know? I'm not into the idea of joining the hostel kids to go out to the bars and clubs because, after SF and NYC and London and Barcelona and Los Angeles and Vancouver and Las Vegas and Oakland and the Electric Daisy Carnival and Fresno (!).... I'm just not a nightlife kinda guy, not now and also not really when I was doing it, although it's not like I hated it. I'm just over it.

The main change in myself recently actually is that I'm becoming a person who is more aware of what he does and does not like that much, step 1, and step 2 is becoming cool with that.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by jacob »

Each paradigm offers different kinds of candy to reward different kinds of behavior within the paradigm. Few behaviors break the paradigm, usually once the candy no longer tastes like candy.

Dave
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Dave »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Tue Jun 28, 2022 2:00 pm
The main change in myself recently actually is that I'm becoming a person who is more aware of what he does and does not like that much, step 1, and step 2 is becoming cool with that.
Amen to that, brother! I am in the process of trying to do this (Step 2) across a couple areas of my life, too.

Seems like it should be a relatively simple and clear thing to realize one's preferences and then adjust accordingly. But it seems to take a lot of folks a long time to do so, even when actively trying to move forward. Frustrating.

I know this was addressed above by @Ego and you AH, but I wanted to reiterate the thought that:
Ego wrote:
Sun Jun 26, 2022 1:30 pm
...all of this (rules, definitions, levels, canon, WOG, flotilla, lifeboats) has the potential to completely kill serendipity.
These forums a certain type of person who is wont to do this, and I wonder how often we overintellectualize life here and prioritize using "the drawboard" to design the perfect set of actions beforehand rather just getting out there, iterating, and learning from those experiences, often in positive ways that we are unable to conceive of in our planning/models.

I'm not saying you're doing this AH - I'm ever amazed at your journey and progress - but I just see strands of it from time to time across the forums, and (most obviously) in myself! It's just a balance worth keeping in mind, because obviously our manner of thinking has hearty benefits as well!

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Totally! I am *definitely* the kind of person who needs to be reminded to not get stuck in a mental construct of my own devising. I take the spirit of Ego's post to heart, he's dead on. This topic spurred a lot of thinking for me yesterday on the bus from Glasgow to Skye yesterday - some ramblings:

I've expended quite a bit of effort trying to have fun on the world's terms. And it's a good thing: I used to be very ignorant of the buffet of experiences the world has to offer, and I was genuinely missing out. A good friend had to drag my mopey ass out to the bars and clubs and pool parties every week for most of a year (when I was 21/22) before I got to a point where I could handle it on my own and continue independent explorations of the world's hedonic offerings. And many of those offerings are things I happily indulge in to this day. Some of them poison my brain or put my body at some risk, but, fuck it, y'know?

My social environment is actually quite hedonic. Maybe most people (?? Not sure) experience a lot of pressure to be more serious, responsible, strategic and long term thinkers. That's not my experience. For at least a solid decade, definitely the last five years, my social environment pressures me to lighten up, chill out, live a little, be more fun, etc.

And it's good for me to have pressures like this, because I can get lost in my head. Its healthy for me to have external voices reminding me to loosen up. In a similar way, I actually think it's psychologically healthy for me to get hammered every once in a while.

And yet... it feels like I've been beating myself up for not being more fun for years, and now that I am in an extremely high-freedom environment, and for some other reasons resulting in a higher level of self acceptance, I feel... Permission? To acknowledge how much I enjoy a number of things that look super boring from the outside.


One of the sensations I've had becoming single, having a lot of freedom, is relief at being free from the pressure to perform at having fun, and to just go with my gut sense of what I want to do.

It turns out that I really enjoy thinking, reading, building and rebuilding paradigms and mental models, tweaking and tuning them. I also like seeing stuff, being social, getting hammered every once in a while, and flirting with girls. But I don't like doing that traditionally fun stuff for very long. My meat and potatoes is stuff that looks boring from the outside... And I'm also pretty sure it looks like someone who doesn't know how to have 'real' fun and let go, someone who needs to be less afraid to try stuff and get out there a bit.

I've been out there. It's not that it isn't my thing, it's that a little bit goes a long way with me, and as far as I've been able to figure, there's just other stuff I like doing more. What I get stoked on spending the majority of my time on is weird shit. Am I'm tired, exhausted from trying to force myself to spend time having 'fun' in ways the world defines it.

I've long had this sense that I didn't have enough time to do the things I really wanted to do. I felt like I had to stuff and cram things I wanted into the nooks and crannies of obligations: work and partners. Now that I have neither, I finally for the first time feel like I have the space and time to fill with the things I want to, and so that's largely what I'm doing. My anxiety has gone down. Tightness in my hips has disappeared, despite doing zero yoga in the past four months. The days feel longer. I feel like I am at my leisure. I like myself.

I honest to god do. Not. Want. To chase any girl anywhere right now. I want to spend time with myself because for the first time in ever? I feel like I can, like there are no other demands on my attention, and no sense of obligation to fill my time with things I'm not actually stoked to do.

Some people travel and they have a bad time because they thought they could get away from themselves but 'wherever you go, there you are'. Im having an amazing time because everywhere I go there's nothing but me, I've managed to shed almost everything in my life that isn't just me, and it's amazing. Because I'm fucking awesome, and I've been stuffed in a jar in a cranny for forever but I'm not now. And I really like me. I don't think everyone else should like me, I'm kind of an intense weirdo sometimes, but *I* like me and I really enjoy spending time with just myself. At least for now - it somewhat feels like I'm in a honeymoon phase with myself (is it getting awkward in here yet?). Likely I'll be happy to spend less time alone soon... But I'll come out on my own terms, much more grounded in who I am than I was before.

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