The Education of Axel Heyst

[Laura Ingalls]

I think using FI as a symbolic goal is actually a better way to do it than using it as a marker to indicate your freedom. As I have argued over and over again, a high earning potential, track record of high savings rate, money in the bank and a low expenditure rate or more than enough to set you free. There is no magic number to reach for freedom (though I understand all of the practical arguments for getting there as long as it aligns with your WoG).
But symbolically and emotionally it is nice to have a symbolic goal.

This is golden. The act of declaring yourself FI is important whether you continue to work a salaryman job, wander the earth, make art, or tend to living creatures.

DH and I are coming up on our longest stretch of no earned income. I don’t take it off the table for the future but we certainly don’t need it either financially or emotionally ie sense of purpose.

[Frita]

Upthread you mentioned codependency with work. How does your current situation replicate that?

[Scott 2]

it was common to get the question "what was your favorite part of your trip?" like I was a kid coming back from his first trip to Disneyland.

I see this as inability to imagine what your world looks like. They are too many Wheaton levels removed.

Alone with nothing but your bike, is a lot harsher than even something like RAGBRAI - the celebrated communal bike ride through Iowa. Any failure or problem, is entirely on you.

Crossing the world to perform hands on labor, is not equivalent with buying into a university exchange program. Or even worse - a canned vacation tour. There's no safety net, only your merits ensure success.

Drawing two dozen people together, from across the country, in a remote desert - that's honestly bonkers. Who pulls that off, let alone has them excited to return?

All are very raw and authentic experiences. I can say with certainty - after mining a tech job for $$$$ per month - it does not make equivalent demands. The number in a bank account warrants little respect.


In fact - those are the types of accomplishments I see here, that make me feel like I might never grow up.

[AxelHeyst]

Upthread you mentioned codependency with work. How does your current situation replicate that?

I might be misunderstanding your question, but my current situation is not replicating my old codependent relationship with work. Due to doing a bunch of work on my codep patterns, I now a) believe in myself to the extent that I don't *need* validation hits from other people or organizations to find myself worthy of existence, and b) I take steps to keep myself out of situations where I might revert back into old behavior patterns.

[mathiverse]

There was literally a thread (my google-fu constantly fails me on the forum these days. I don't know what magic @mathiverse wields) on "when you realized/began to feel like an adult".

I got you covered: Are you an "adult"?.

[Frita]

I might be misunderstanding your question, but my current situation is not replicating my old codependent relationship with work. Due to doing a bunch of work on my codep patterns, I now a) believe in myself to the extent that I don't *need* validation hits from other people or organizations to find myself worthy of existence, and b) I take steps to keep myself out of situations where I might revert back into old behavior patterns.

Replication was a poor word choice on my part. Perhaps a better word is echo. It seems that external disapproval can still sting a bit and curious if it could be related.

[7Wannabe5]

He said "I notice none of those involve making money." Another neighbor offered me some minimum wage yardwork and commented "I know you need the money." I'm getting (incorrect) social recognition of being a failure to launch, because that's what adult humans living on the same property with their parents *means*.

When I was in my early 30s (in the 90s), and one of my primary occupations was old home renovation, I was frequently outside doing stuff like mowing the lawn or scraping paint off the carriage house, and one of my old "Greatest" Generation neighbors repeatedly would yell over the fence with the same comment, which was "Hey Blondie, why don't you get your husband to do that?" My external response was good humored, but my internal reaction, which in retrospect could have alternatively encompassed at least 5 or 6 different levels of functionality/perspective, was along the lines of "Because my husband doesn't love me enough to go out of his way to help me with anything. It's all up to me." My point here being that time will march along, and experience, therapy, and reflection will likely alter, perhaps significantly, your own perspective in another 10/20/30 years, and it will also be the case that society will change in terms of its median perspective. Yet, there will always be grouchy old wiseacre men.

@jacob:

I love "On Liberty" It is one of my 20 all time favorite books. However, I've always felt that J.S Mill was being a bit "sour grapes" with that quote, which was, I believe, written prior to his relationship with Harriet Taylor, whom Mill himself credited with rendering his perspective a good deal more generous and expansive. At the time he wrote that quote, one of his obsessions, from his own extremely intellectual and believed to be entirely physiologically chaste and berefit of almost all practical skills perspective, was how the poor indulged their sexuality towards producing too many offspring.

For some not entirely unrelated reason, I found myself dwelling on the "priggishness" of the husband character in the "It's Not About the Nail" video. And I imagined a second scene in which the couple are out in public, maybe they are in an elevator, and the husband is thoroughly engaged in doing something on his phone, and the wife still looks quite unhappy, and the nail is still in her head. The elevator doors open, and Liam Neeson or maybe Samuel L. Jackson steps in, takes 10 seconds to adjust his bearings in alignment with his current mission, then just before the elevator doors open again, and he steps out to continue on his way, he laser focuses on the unhappy young wife with the nail in her head, reaches out and firmly grasps her chin in one large strong hand and pulls the nail out before she has half a second to react. The elevator doors close after Neeson/Jackson makes his graceful exit, and the camera allows us a glimpse of the wife, now free of nail and softly smiling, and then we CUT//

Caveat here being that clearly I am in some outlier minority, because I scanned through a ream of comments left on YouTube in reference to this video, and only one remotely resembled my take; a male commentor who ended his remark with "Getting the job done since 1965."

[AxelHeyst]

Replication was a poor word choice on my part. Perhaps a better word is echo. It seems that external disapproval can still sting a bit and curious if it could be related.

Ah I see. It's a good question, and I often run "Hey wait, is this an indicator of codependent dysfunction?" checks on myself.

In this case I don't think it's related*. My codependent behaviors manifested as an addiction to helping/fixing/rescuing 'broken' people (girlfriends, mostly) and systems (w*rk). I was not capable of healthy self-validation ("it is okay that I just exist") and had to over and over prove that I was worthy of existing by helping fix people and systems. Because I was addicted to this form of validation, it wasn't in my interest to permanently fix these people/systems, because that would cut off my supply of validation dope. It didn't bother me one way or the other if these people or systems appreciated me or not: *I* knew they needed my help, and insofar as they accepted it (regardless of what they said) that was validation enough.

*External disapproval stings, but I associate that with being a normal human who simply desires to be seen and understood for who they are. I certainly would like to attain a level of self-validation such that external disapproval effects me not at all, but I see that as attaining a state of higher function. 'Solving' my codep patterns was fixing pathological behavior and bringing myself up to some baseline okay-ness.

[AxelHeyst]

The elevator doors close after Neeson/Jackson makes his graceful exit, and the camera allows us a glimpse of the wife, now free of nail and softly smiling, and then we CUT//

If you ever burn out on teaching math to kids you could consider becoming a Man consultant/coach. I'm not sure if I'm even half joking...

[7Wannabe5]

@AxelHeyst:

I briefly looked into becoming a sex therapist a number of years ago, but definitely a realm where I feared that professionalism would kill my enjoyment of amateur status. However, at this point, since I am nearing on Dr. Ruth's age, might be worth reconsidering.

When I was in a support group for highly intelligent people (nerds) with sex-starved marriages circa the turn of the 21st century, a somewhat younger West Coast male Deida-following successful player from the support group for people who had cheating spouses (his very early marriage to a Miss Southern California type had ended with her cheating/leaving him for an older very wealthy man) wandered into our group and took pity on me and helped me out by becomng sort of my Feminine Energy consultant/coach. He had dug himself out of pit after his wife left him and become very financially and sexually successful, while mostly just working as a bartender. He initially believed that my husband must be a very deep player, because I was still sexually enamored with him after 20 years of marriage, but finally came to the conclusion that I was just a sturdy indestructible.

Anyways, he's the one who got me started with reading Deida and many other related authors. I only recently came around to learning that Deida and Ken Wilber (Integral Theory) are associates, which kind of (Ah-ha!) closed an open loop in my reading/thinking, especially when combined with an internet search that revealed that it is likely that Daniel Schmactenberger's primary partner is a Pole Dance instructor.

[Jin+Guice]

He had dug himself out of pit after his wife left him and become very financially and sexually successful, while mostly just working as a bartender.

This is the single most important piece of dating advice on the forum.

[7Wannabe5]

@Jin+Guice:

Well,I should note that he was also physically attractive in that skinny California way. The point I was trying to make in describing him was that there are realms such as sexuality (and also personal finance and ecological functioning!) where people can be more or less threatened/resistant/defiant to advice depending on who is offering it. Somebody whom I saw as a "skinny kid' relative to me, although also obviously successful/competent and able to offer masculine perspective, was less likely to bring out my oppositional/defiant. Ergo, I think a chubby old woman, like Dr. Ruth, or Barbra Streisand in "Meet the Fockers", or current-me would maybe be least likely to raise hackles as a sex therapist. One of the pieces of advice he gave me which has proven to be gold was along the lines of "A man will not give you shit about your behavior/appearance/etc, if he does not give a shit." IOW, a man will not attempt to functionally/dysfunctionally "fix" anything that is not worth fixing.

I also wanted to make clear that the advice I would offer to theyoung husband in the "nail" video vis-a-vis the elevator scene is NOT the advice I would offer to the young wife in the original video. I would advise that she take care of her feelings associated with the nail herself, or in the company of other women, or any other humans overtly choosing to inhabit adult feminine energy. IOW, I would tell her to not make her primary male sexual partner into her BFF/therapist, but rather to exert her own adult feminine energy towards soothing her juvenile feminine energy. I would also make clear that the reason she doesn't want to continue on her current path of behavior is that even the best-case end scenario (because Neeson/Jackson randomly showing up in the elevator is not to be counted upon) is that you end up with Massage-Guy as your primary partner. (The reason I probably will never actually succeed as a sex therapist is that I can't stop myself from making a face/slight-shiver-of-repulsion when I type the words "Massage-Guy.") And I would tell her that most men (also most women, but that's a whole 'nother Wheaton level) , most likely including her young husband, do have an internal Neeson/Jackson potential, but it's a dance to which her own behavior will contribute.

[zbigi]

He had dug himself out of pit after his wife left him and become very financially and sexually successful, while mostly just working as a bartender.

How does one become very financially successful, while mostly working as a bartender? Did he speculate on crypto?

[theanimal]

How does one become very financially successful, while mostly working as a bartender? Did he speculate on crypto?

If you are in a medium to big city in the US, you can make over 6 figures working as a bartender if you are in a popular and/or high end spot. Most of your earnings will come from tips as well, so potentially tax free, depending on if you report them or not. One former coworker of mine left forestry work to be a bartender/server in a champagne bar. She was making $10k/month in cash (all tips). This was in a mid-tier city, population ~400k.

[jacob]

For some not entirely unrelated reason, I found myself dwelling on the "priggishness" of the husband character in the "It's Not About the Nail" video.

The famous video is meant to make a stereotypical point in two minutes. It's easy to invert the video by putting the nail in the husband's head instead. Call this movie: "It's About the Nail". The conversation would go something like this:
H: "There's all this pressure. And sometimes I feel it's right up on me. And if I only got this nail out of my head it would obviously stop."
W: "Oh, I'm so sorry honey. I'm here for you."
H: "I just need some pliers out of the toolbox in the basement, if you would ..."
W: If you just tell me how you're feeling about it, the nail will go away! I'm here to listen."
H: "You always do this! I really just need you to get me the pliers. They're in the toolbox."
W: "You know I love you. If you'd just open up and talk about it you'd feel better" *tries to hug H*
H: "Ow, stop hugging me! The pliers!"
W: "Okay, okay, I'll get the pliers."
H: "Thank you!"
(W disappears for ten minutes, then comes back)
H: "Did you get them?"
W: "Sorry, what, hon? I on the phone with Betty. We're talking about nails."
H: "Wait what? Betty who?! Don't ..."

Stereotypes are great for making it a point. It works because stereotypes are real

What we have here is ... failure to communicate between Te (=> Fi) and Fe (=> Ti). These are two almost mutually incomprehensible (love) languages. Both care but in very different ways. It's only a gender thing if stereotyped. But a 70/30 split in contemporary internet culture is enough to create a recognizable stereotype that also goes beyond personal relationships and genders and gender theory. There's a cultural struggle driven by two different parts of the human brain being different. (I'm ignoring the third. Survival is a given. I know the triune model is a simplification.)

One of the pieces of advice he gave me which has proven to be gold was along the lines of "A man will not give you shit about your behavior/appearance/etc, if he does not give a shit." IOW, a man will not attempt to functionally/dysfunctionally "fix" anything that is not worth fixing.

Operant conditioning eventually works on everyone except the crazy and the stupid and combinations between those two. Plenty of those around of course. However, there's likely a long possibly drawn out process akin to Kuebler-Ross (denial-anger-bargaining-depression-acceptance) in which the surface [of the] "sphere of care" (Te or Fe) is adjusted towards acceptance insofar there's a solution or resentment insofar there's [eventual] dissolution. The problem could very well still be worth fixing except it's been deemed harder than finding alternative solutions on a sliding Fe- or Te-scale ranging between "improvement-prevention-mitigation-adaption-abandon". While it may appear that the fixer has given up on the fixee, the fixer's focus has simply eliminated the fixee problem as being unpossible and changed their focus to plan B.

[7Wannabe5]

H: "Wait what? Betty who?! Don't ..."

Excellent.

Stereotypes are great for making it a point. It works because stereotypes are real

Yup. Most common types in female population are ISFJ/ESFJ= The Nurturer/The Caregiver=SiFeTiNe/FeSiNeTi and most common types in male population are ISTJ/ESTJ= The Duty Filler/The Guardian= SiTeFiNe/TeSiNeFi.

As a rational female eNTP= Visionary-Explorer (towards introverted Thinker)= NeTiFeSi, not well represented in general population and much less well represented in female population, I have never related very well to any of the most common types of either gender, although I know that I can superficially vibe much like the Caregiver. My youngest sister who is an ENTp (very high energy, extremely assertive Explorer who still looks/styles herself like a cute little punk/choirboy in her late 40s and prides herself on occasionally being carded for alcohol purchase or hit on by gay men) considers herself to be gender queer due I'm sure in part to not being able to find herself in the stereotypes. OTOH, I can "pass" for normal well enough to benefit from a social circle that includes more conventional male types (some of the men I date) and more conventional female types (some of the women I teach with) as well as a wide mix of other unconventional oddballs.

I can't think of a nice way to say this, so...as a female rational with secondary Ti, the thing that mostly drives me nutz when relating to men with primary or secondary Te is that they are usually faster/stronger/more decisive/more assertive-but also stupider than me. I mean my tertiary Fe will almost certainly be generating some less than joyful emotions about the fact that TeSi just ran over part of my permaculture plantings with his big expensive high powered riding mower, but mostly I'm just quietly thinking "Idiot" with my secondary Ti. I generally deal better with such men to the extent that they are "street-smart" enough to see the benefit of having me ride shotgun as "consigliere." Although, as a highly intelligent female friend who tends to call me on my B.S. once noted, it may also be the case that I am having them ride shotgun with me as my "muscle." Dunno. Generally, ENTPs only lead because they don't want to follow, but this is even more of a near thing "lenticular printing" for a first-born heterosexual female eNTP in sexual/romantic relationship. The practice of polyamory allows me more leeway.

The problem could very well still be worth fixing except it's been deemed harder than finding alternative solutions on a sliding Fe- or Te-scale ranging between "improvement-prevention-mitigation-adaption-abandon". While it may appear that the fixer has given up on the fixee, the fixer's focus has simply eliminated the fixee problem as being unpossible and changed their focus to plan B.

Yes, in theory, any type could successfully form a relationship with any other type if they were both high-functioning enough. In reality, at level Orange/Green there is such thing as the "good divorce" or "the good-enough divorce", because our time on this planet is limited. That said, I might argue that at the level of community or tribe, all types at all levels of functioning/development simply must be included in overall model, because otherwise it is not (re)generative. However, since I am also a human who literally wept the first time she read "On Liberty", I would also suggest that the overall model does not have to include consensus or even simplistic democracy, but it must include the true honoring of emotions/preferences as well as respect for competence/authority. Humans who due to injury or defect have no access to the emotional center of their brain are unable to make decisions at all. Neeson/Jackson in my second scene is fully cognizant that pulling out the nail is an act of love. In my second scene attached to your "It's About the Nail" take, (it is so much more difficult to come up with example of high-functioning self-aware submissive in our society) Catherine Deneuve/Salma Hayek recognizes that while in "It's Not About the Nail" the husband mostly just keeps stating and re-stating the known-to-him facts, in "It's About the Nail", the husband is actually providing a literal instruction, "Go get me the pliers from the toolbox", and the prime directive towards the practice of high-functioning self-aware submissive is "ONLY follow (respect) literal instruction", so Catherine/Salma would go get the pliers from the toolbox in this scenario, BUT would not necessarily choose to do anything about the nail in a scene where the husband just says "There's a nail in your head." If a self-aware submissive acted/interpreted/respected all statements of known-to-be-facts as well as literal instructions, her functioning would fall more towards weak "door mat."

Whew, that was a lot. Sorry, Axel, hope maybe there was something in there for you.

[AxelHeyst]

Whew, that was a lot. Sorry, Axel, hope maybe there was something in there for you.

I love it, don't mind me, carry on. #nobrakes

[AxelHeyst]

February Update
I spent $300, including $100 'capx' of a new inverter* and battery charger since my old one is crapping out. I think I had a consumerism hangover from Japan that lasted through mid January, and then I flipped some kind of anticonsumer switch or dropped into a higher gear by February.

I took the shuttle to town twice for library and groceries, which involves starting my 4mi walk to the bus stop at 0520. Absolutely lovely walk. I didn't drive in Feb, although I rode shotgun with a friend to visit the temporary lake at Badwater in Death Valley.

(My bus stop)

(*On that: I'm experimenting with smaller and smaller scale components for my energy system. My absolute max operating power usage is 150w, and the efficiency of inverters drops rapidly below ~25% rated power. My old inverter was 1000w, which means I was 99% of the time in a very low-efficiency operating range. My new inverter is modified sine wave (cheaper, I think lower tech components?, lower efficiency) and only 600W (so it'll operate closer to the max efficiency point). So far so good.)

Side Hustle. We've booked three clients with the side hustle which feels max what we can handle while we're developing our main product. Once we've gone through at least one 2-4mo cycle we'll be able to handle more simultaneously, because it'll just be tuning. Right now we're building not only the product itself but the internal infrastructure to deal with it all - kickoff decks, email templates, figuring out our internal process, etc. It's going to be a bit of a crankfest for a couple months but then should feel less like we're flying by the seat of our pants.

The good news is that everything we're doing feels entirely in our realm of competence. We're in a weird niche where for whatever reason the number of people who 'get it' and are very good at this stuff are a very small percentage of the industry, and so we're positioned well to provide value for a lot of firms. I've never experienced firsthand having a skillset/service that people are so clearly eager to give me money for.

So far it's still enormous fun. I'm enjoying building the service itself and I'm also really enjoying building the solopreneur infrastructure stuff. It's great having this much freedom to decide exactly what kind of offering to create, and how to communicate it, and how to work with clients... and also the freedom-from having to earn $$$$/mo within X months to be able to pay my bills. What a validation of ERE principles - I'm in the black from month 1 and if it all goes poof, ah well, I'll go back to what I was doing before, which was also awesome.

Skillathon
I am pulling back on my skillathon ambitions due to the side hustle. Not enough space for both. I'm dropping altogether the idea of doing a video on every month, which I was beginning to think was a bad idea from the beginning anyways. And I'm modifying my selections to play better with how I'm organizing my life now - e.g. March is drawing now, instead of pulling my motorcycle apart and putting it back together again. April might be yoga. etc.

New Cooking Skills My bff was here for a week. She has some crazy health stuff going on and can only eat meat, lettuce, citrus, seeds, oats, and one or two other things. She also hates cooking. So I took it as an extension of Skillathon Cooking challenge. I cooked more meat in one week than I think I've eaten in the past six months (including steaks over a wood fire, which has been on my bucket list ever since a weekend camping trip with Argentinians a few years ago), and also learned how to make delicious vegan pancakes (1c oat flour, 1/2 banana, 2/3c coconut milk, 3/4tsp bp) which will make an appearance at fest24.

Quail Haven Infrastructure My friend is a building science nerd, passivhaus certified mechanical engineer, and former residential contractor, and I asked her opinion on The Burrow, my pithouse project that theAnimal and I started. Long story short, what it'd take to 'do it right' made me question the wisdom of making it a living space. It also occurred to me that no one really likes sleeping in a bunkhouse, which was my first plan for it, much less a bunkhouse that is a literal hole in the ground.

My new idea is to make the burrow a greenhouse with a shower in it, and to pursue my capsule/sleeping pod idea for accommodations for guests. Modular, lightweight, moveable, even sellable and trailerable. Way less dumb of an idea.

Longmont in April I'm housesitting for friends in Longmont ~April1 - 16th. Hit me up to hang out (see you there @AE).

My friend and I visited the shallow lake at Badwater, Death Valley. Yep. It's a big damn puddle all right. We also hit one of my favorite short slot canyons. (Hit me up for unmarked and uncrowded slot canyon suggestions if you visit DV by the way. The designated slot canyon hike a mile up the road was swamped with people. We had this one to ourselves. You never have to share a canyon in DV if you don't want to).

[Bicycle7]

It's inspiring to see the natural refocusing around your side hustle. It makes me imagine a life of function and flexibility.

I think I'd prefer lonely slot canyons so I'll need to ask where those ones are! Was this your first time seeing the big puddle at Death Valley?

[AxelHeyst]

The Animal Family and I saw the start of it in October from Dante's View, on the crest of the Black Mountains: