The Education of Axel Heyst

Where are you and where are you going?
AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Currently in Bend, OR, killing time until my covid test comes in and then I’ll ride up to hang out with @Mooretrees. The smoke is gnar (I can *taste* it). I’m sleeping in a tent in the forest outside town, coming in to cafes for internet, hanging out in the park, reading a lot of books. I’m on my motorcycle, starting point was near Death Valley, end point will be near the Washington border. I did most of the route along the Pacific Coast Highway, which was beautiful. After last weekend, a lot of the campsites along the coast were full up with Calder Fire evacuees from Tahoe. I rode past a few empty lots with signs that said “Free Parking For Fire Refugees”. Last time I came this way was early June, before delta had taken off, and most places were “if you’re vaxxed, no masks required”, half the places didn’t give a shit one way or the other, and the pandemic seemed to be winding down. Now, *every* place I’ve been through is strict about masking up. The difference is obvious.

The Renaissance Report
August was as weird month. I finished my 2-month road trip with DGF, and then rode down to my parent’s place to housesit for them while they RV’d around the US. It was quite hot (105F by 10am typically) and the second half of the month was quite smoky (visibility <1mile).

At the end of the month I went up north to a good friend’s wedding, which was amazing. Dancing, partying till dawn, camping, hanging by the river, it was a much needed relief from the solitude of home and also a much needed emotional re-connection with all of my solid friends, many of whom I hadn’t seen since 2019.

Physiological
I did my exercise routine on cruise control consistently the whole month. The goal was just to cast consistent votes for being the sort of person who exercises every day, including mobility and pre-hab stuff.

My ankle still comes and goes with pain. Being barefoot most of the time is definitely helping, but it's annoying that the pain comes and goes. Docs say "wear a brace", which doesn’t help.

I’m now in a situation where sleeping on lumpy dirt on my z-lite results in a better nights sleep than a mattress on flat bed springs. And I use either a lumped-up shirt, or my dromedary as a pillow. The dromedary is *lux*.

Intellectual
I re-looked in to Zettelkasten, and am going to implement it (using Obsidian probably) in September. It appears to be an excellent complement to GTD, which doesn’t have much to say on *knowledge* collection and organization (GTD is about doing stuff/actions, somewhat obviously).

Emotional
Oh wow. I've been getting some work done on deeper and deeper layers of my codependent tendencies, and thinking through how codep is a way of avoiding owning and acting on who I am as a person, which gets down to a deep belief that I'm not worthy of love, not worthy of being who I actually am.

I'm realizing just how introverted I am, and I'm starting to acknowledge how certain things affect me and what my boundaries are. I'm seeing how certain things effect my mental health, and starting to grapple with the perspective that it's okay for me to do what I have to do to manage that, even if it’s not what other people want to hear.

The introverted thing is pretty easy. I'm just becoming more and more comfortable saying things like "I need to be alone this evening / this weekend", and I'm also finding myself comfortable saying things like "I know I said I would go on this trip, but life threw me some unexpected circumstances and my "people" bucket is overflowing. I'd just go into a coma if I attended, so I'm not going to go."

Another angle is my misophonia. For those new to the idea, certain sounds trigger my fight-or-flight response - my frustration/anger/panic nodes just go off the charts. It's not like nails on chalkboard. It's like sound-induced road rage. You know when something happens, and you get stuck in a loop fantasizing about mortal danger, and how you'll react? And your body gets pumped full of chemicals, your blood pounds, you grit your teeth, your fists ball up, and you can't concentrate on anything besides flight, violence, or both? It's similar to when I get stuck in a rumination about how I would act if DGF and I were ever in a situation where she was threatened with fatal sexual violence (and me, by extension, collateral or incidental fatal violence). That's *sort of* what I experience when I hear a trigger sound. And it takes a while to come down, maybe 30 minutes, because my mind plays the trigger sound in a loop, what I call trigger echos. And if I'm exposed to the same trigger sound from the same source enough times, I set up an aversion pattern to the source. For example, I'm uncomfortable in my parent's living room because my dad frequently and unpredictably snacks there. I also am uncomfortable generally around people I know to randomly chew gum, snack, chew their nails, or sniffle when they have allergies instead of blowing their noses. It's the random reward motivation thing, except in reverse.

At any rate, I've only recently come to grips with the fact that as much as I wish misophonia weren't part of who I am, it is, and I might as well stop pretending it isn't. So I have earplugs in a cylinder on my keychain, I'll use fans for white noise as necessary, and I'm comfortable simply explaining to people what's up and that if I suddenly get up and walk away, that's what's going on. I no longer try to force myself to whiteknuckle through it, because it's bad for me as well as the people around me.

--

I'm reading Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, and it’s extremely resonant. I need to finish it before writing more, but it’s definitely relevant to my ideas about motivation, purpose, belief, values, etc.


Economic
//Investing//
I realized that in a lot of investing writing, I'll come across statements like "don't do X, you'll get clobbered! you'll lose your shirt" and what I thought they meant was "you'll end up with less money than you put in". Often, what they actually mean is "your portfolio will perform y% worse than if you did this other thing instead." The trick of course is that sometimes what they mean is, indeed, you'll lose a lot of money. But it took me a while to know that I had to look to distinguish between losing money = making less than your neighbor and when losing money = having less than you started with at the end. Basically, I learned that a lot of investment writing assumes that your goal is to maximize returns. But my goal is to avoid portfolio failure. Reading in between the lines is important.

I've also started to read things like "if you can't handle being at a cocktail party and hear about your friends who are at the moment doing better than you with sexy stocks..." -- the peer pressure / social element of investing. I always thought investing was a very solitary endeavor where everyone is in some form of competition with themselves, and their metrics are based on somewhat reasonably calculated financial targets. E.g. I might set as a long-goal real portfolio returns as 3% and anything over that is gravy, and Ed Bob III might set 5% as his goal. I'm getting the sense that this is not how a lot of investors operate. Their goal seems to be "as much as possible, and if I can find any tricks to get more than is possible, I'll do that."

Maybe a more succinct way to put it is, if the gist I'm getting of the average investor attitude is right, most investors fundamentally don't understand the relationship between risk and reward. If someone is getting higher returns than me over some time period, it's likely that they're just running at a higher risk tolerance than I am. It also occurred to me that a method for avoiding social pressure is to not discuss my allocation/strategy at all, so as to avoid pollution of commentary on my strategy. [Note: I’m still a super noob here, folks, just working through some probably really basic notions wrt this stuff.]

I read The Permanent Portfolio and it sounds like the least bad idea I’ve heard so far, so I’m planning on implementing it by the end of September.

--
//Income Generation//
My situation is resolving around two poles:
1) Visualization studio startup. My old employee and I (and a couple others) are founding a viz studio. We’ve got a couple potential promising contracts we’re working on, while also working on the infrastructure of it. All of us either have jobs or don’t need one (that’s me), so there’s no rush/urgency. I’m heavily inspired by Friedman’s “It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work”, basically the story of Basecamp, and “calm” is one of the operative words for the studio. I’m really enjoying working on the studio, I like the other founders, and there’s great potential for the kind of work we do to be highly aligned with my purpose/values/etc.

2) Dirtbag design/build construction. Mooretrees is hiring me to come up and help with their skoolie build. My dad wants to hire me to help with some projects around the property (a rear deck, a portico, etc). Being able to balance mostly “knowledge work” (@Hristo :P ) of the viz studio with mostly skilled labor work of construction projects is something I’m super into. And both of these kinds of activities are highly aligned with my WoG. I want to do digital-art visualization of world changing systems and solutions. And I want to build with my hands cool New Alchemy Institute /dirtbag stuff like tiny/natural shelter, greenhouses and walipinis, greywater treatment systems, aquaculture, etc. It feels like what’s happening right now is that the doors to doing both of these things has opened, and I’m walking through, and all I have to do is keep an eye generally on the direction I want to go (e.g. true NAI stuff) and follow the opportunities as they crop up, and I’ll be there.

I had the realization yesterday that I’m actually *currently* doing something I started fantasizing about over a decade ago. I’m traveling solo through an apocalyptic landscape (pandemic and smoke/fire), en route to an informal gig helping some friends out with a cool punk build of some sort, while continuing to work on a variety of projects I’m just interested in (writing, personal art, etc).

Social
August was a month of extremes: the solitude of housesitting for my parents in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and the intense embrace of a wedding weekend spent with 100 of my friends where we all just love-fested each other. Some interesting clarities came out of these experiences:

1) I am indeed an introvert, and the more I own that, the better my life is.
2) I do indeed need meaningful relationships with good people. Humans are social creatures, and I’m no exception. Being alone forever would suck. My friends, those 100 people at the wedding, are scattered across the West Coast and doing mostly their own thing. There’s no one place for me to go to be near them all, and most of those places are a) expensive and b) on fire. I’ve started turning my mind towards intentionally cultivating relationships/community that is geographically clustered and not on fire. More on this later.
3) The last couple years has mostly been a pendulum swinging between Too Much and Too Little social contact. Either crammed in the closet-sized space of Serenity with DGF in winter (Too Much), or completely by myself (fine for a week or two if I’m coming off a Too Much spell, but then unhealthy thereafter).
4) I might be somewhat eccentric in terms of my personal living space requirements. It’s hard for me to share “my” kitchen with other people, for example, unless they are fastidious AF. (If it’s “my” space, I take people leaving dirty dishes lying around as a sign of either disrespect towards me personally, or a lack of concern for me as a human being, for example. This isn’t a problem in truly shared spaces or spaces that belong to other people - I roll with their habits). It’s difficult for me to share living space with extroverts - DGF is about all I can handle well. My misophonia exacerbates this. Point 4 is maybe nothing I need to change, it’s just something I need to Accept and design for, and learn to communicate effectively and with compassion. I have a long history of living really well with roommates, so this point is a new-ish revelation I was a little surprised by and am still working on incorporating into my self-sense.)

Technical
I'm studying load-bearing strawbale construction methods. It was recently incorporated into the IBC (international building code), and is specifically authorized in Michigan among other states. It seems an ideal construction method for cold climates (DGF's dad, who was a builder in MI: "You could probably heat those things with a fukin’ candle."), as long as you do a good job keeping water off the bales. There are >100yo strawbale structures still standing in Nebraska, where the method was first used in the US.

The key, it seems, is to have all your ducks in a row and be able to just jam when the bales get dropped off, so you can minimize the amount of time the bales are at risk of being rained on. The advantage of going post-and-beam is you can put the roof on, and then build up the bales. But that's more expense and materials, and I'm not convinced that the wood structure is at all necessary for a single story building. It seems a very expensive way of not having to worry about getting your bales wet (and not having to worry about weight compression). Load-bearing seems like a no-brainer to me, with the caveat of being on the ball with keeping the bales dry.

I attempted to rebuild the rear shock on my mountain bike so I could sell it. TL;DR: I broke it. Either my torque wrench was lying to me or I cross threaded the nut, but I stripped the threads on the damper shaft. Disappointing. I attempted to sell the bike as is but was unsuccessful before I had to leave. So still have a ~$2k broken mtb sitting in my parents garage. Silver lining: I now know what the inside of a mtb shock looks like. Shit lining: I don’t think this matters, because I don’t intend on ever owning a bike with a rear shock again.

Ecological
I mostly finished Peter Bane's Permaculture Handbook.

mooretrees
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by mooretrees »

So much in here! I'm really excited to talk about straw bale building with you. After watching DH work with so many power tools and gross chemicals, I'm day dreaming about a more mellow build with fewer extension cords and more natural building materials. From what DH has read, Oregon only has building code for non-load bearing straw bale construction. Lots to learn there.

Travel safe and see you soon!

RoamingFrancis
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by RoamingFrancis »

Cool stuff. I’m interested to hear about how Zettelkasten goes for you.

I’ve begun incorporating body weight training as a more habitual practice. Any insights from your experience diving into it recently?

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

@RF honestly no, no insights yet. I don't know if there are any coming, or the "insights" to be had from bw are similar enough to the insights I've already had from weight training, which I've done over a decade of. "Everything you want is on the far side of hard work."
--
Examining my Expenses:
Image
My monthly CoL is mostly flatlined. My 12mo rolling lifestyle CoL is 1.7jafi as of August, actual CoL closer to 3. That includes things like the shipping container and my surgery. Here's a shot breaking the Big 3 out from rest-of-categories:
Image

Some of the expenses are "just life" (like my $4k surgery, or mandatory suit rental for wedding). Most of the rest of it falls under the category of "strategy isn't dialed". Specifically, this goes back to the whole "my life is not stable" thing. Part of my high food costs is execution/tactics, but also I have like three different stashes of bulk foods in different locations, none of which I'm currently anywhere close to. I keep deciding to go here - no there - oh eff it I'll go over here - so my fuel expenses are high (not to mention my lifestyle still relies on vehicle ownership). The shipping container might turn out to be a "waste" from a pure $ ROI perspective, in that I might not wind up spending much time there at all.

I feel like I'm at a place in terms of skills and mindset where if I had a real home base that was strategically solid (meaning, in a location where I can go #carfree that has minimal property taxes and utility costs), my expenses will easily stabilize down around the 1jafi level I want them at without a ton of effort. Another way to put that is, I'm not actually spending much if at all slop money on "splurges" or "guilty pleasures", it feels like it's mostly just throwing money at logistics. And my life is just sort of a logistical nightmare, so that friction rate is high.

The good news is that I feel that my thinking is much clearer about our strategy, vastly clearer than I was a year ago. I've let go of some options and visions, and committed to a narrower range of options that I think are viable. We're both feeling clear on the vision, and see how what we're doing right now connects to this path. tl;dr: build up some capital this year, keep expenses as low as possible, and get after finding a strategically solid bit of land to work with in the spring.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Hmmm... you're making me wonder about the possibility of exterior straw bale insulation retrofit of my project house.

I also have had a good deal of trouble over the years, and definitely in this current year, with assorting expenses to various projects and business vs. lifestyle or "owner draw." Sometimes it just has to come down to "What was your intention?" and/or IRS code. The common psychological dilemma is between the desire to write off as much expense as possible vs. desire to be earning a competitive wage as self-employed individual. If you also throw desire to lower personal expenditure to JAFI then it becomes a real cluster-fuck. One thing to bear in mind is that even if one of your self-involved tangible business/projects is a complete failure/write-off/loss, this is no different than a "hidden" loss you might suffer as bad year of one of the many different businesses you invested in as bundle in form of shares of index fund. IOW, the fact that you wouldn't have these sort of difficulties if you confined your productive activities (beyond simple domestic production for own use) to "intellectual" or "passive, diversified investment at a distance" doesn't necessarily recommend that you abandon these more tangible/close/hands-on projects/investments/businesses. You might decide they are too much hassle for low ROI, but IMO you definitely should err on the side of NOT considering associated expenses to be part of personal expenses towards total yearly JAFI. Actually, I think you are at or very near to a juncture where you might be better served by deconstructing and reconstructing your own take on a metric like unto JAFI.

Scott 2
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Scott 2 »

Your post speaks to me. My life got a lot smaller once I started nurturing my introversion. It also became a lot happier. It's a tough trade off.

The strategy I now favor is to preserve my capacity for disruption. No to crowds. Stores off hours. Managing hours of conversation per day, etc. Having clear discussions about what is important with my loved ones. If I want to draw upon my pool without draining it, the capacity is very limited. Mellowing myself with intense exercise can help slow the rate at which it empties. I do make every effort to keep a commitment, if I've made it. This can mean ramping up the coping and preservation strategies leading into an event.

Using good noise canceling headphones a few hours per day helps me. I paid $350 and don't regret a penny. They are great relief in noisy high distraction environments, but I also see benefits in "quiet" environments. Dunno if they would play nice with your misophonia, but if so, I highly recommend. They both cut background noise and provide a strong visual signal to everyone around - this is my quiet time.

When I was making a bigger life, I attempted to acclimate to the stressors instead. The theory was through repeated exposure, I'd desensitize and everything would be fine. In practice, sometimes scripts would develop that made things more bearable.

But more commonly, I just got better at suffering the discomfort and coping when I returned home. To some extent, the coping could refill my pool, but it was often a mere puddle. I'd run projects with 15-30 people all day, then hide in my basement playing video games until bed. Constant and ongoing stress. Not good for me at all.


Some books:


Quiet: The power of Introverts - I liked this one, but it is clearly written to say things introverts want to hear:

https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Intr ... 0307352153


Your Complete Guide to Factor-Based Investing - I liked this one for concise (but smart) discussion of risk/reward and the trade off implications

https://www.amazon.com/Your-Complete-Gu ... 692783652/

IMO far more people lose their shirt chasing high returns than plodding along with mediocre investment strategies.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Tue Sep 07, 2021 7:50 am
Ooo. If the lifestyle instability gods will it and things line up, I'd be stoked to help buck some bales on your project next year.

Your post made me see more clearly that the accounting can indeed be different for a semiERE and self-employed lifestyle WoG. Only the shipping container has felt like a legit "business-ish"-related expense, with all else being symptomatic of a floppy rudder. But as I'm starting to track closer to a consistent strategy and looking forward to several years of investments in shelter, food production and preservation, craft production space, and also potentially some cash investments in the visualization studio, the utility of a tailored way of looking at expenses makes a lot of sense.

It feels like with a couple broad strokes I could get my "lifestyle" costs below $5k/yr (ditching the truck and moto and having my own kitchen and pantry will just about do it). But I also see dropping 20-40k on land and construction materials over the next couple years. Having more refined and intentional buckets for these activities will help me see my situation clearly. That said, I *think* an eventual total CoL goal of 1 jafi or whatever is good to hold on to... it's just not very helpful to at the moment flagellate myself for not achieving it.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Scott 2 wrote:
Tue Sep 07, 2021 8:38 am
Good over-ear headphones are Essential Misophonic Kit! There are lengthy headphone discussions in the misophonics forums. I don't have the noise-canceling variety, but my genre of choice is death metal and not much noise gets through. Misophonic triggers tend to be worse in quiet environments because e.g. chewing noises have nothing to mask them. It's better to be surrounded by fifty people eating food (e.g. in a pub) than two in a quiet dining room (my fingers curl thinking about it). Being trapped in a car with a snacker is murder.

My understanding of my own introversion is still pretty new - I wasn't entirely aware of how much I was allowing myself to get drained, or maybe rather I didn't allow myself to care/acknowledge my own needs/desires/function. I wonder if it's possible for my life to get smaller and bigger at the same time? Maybe I'm using the wrong words, but what I'm thinking about is, with a more healthy balance, my "forays" out into the world of disruption can be richer and more beneficially impactful than when I was drained all the time. Maybe a useful phrase is "deep big" vs. "shallow big".

e.g. the wedding I attended. I had an *amazing* time, and it was non-stop interaction from a Thursday evening to a Sunday afternoon (and then I hung out with my ENFP gf for two more days). And it was amazing, and I feel like I showed up for that event in a 'big' way. But - to your point - I was able to do that because I'd just spent two weeks as a desert hermit.

Maybe the Pareto Frontier idea is useful here. For my (/our) personality, there's a pareto optimization of engagement and solitude.

Thanks for the book recs!

RoamingFrancis
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by RoamingFrancis »

I think there’s an optimal balance of engagement and solitude for just about everyone - it just lies at different points. Though I think I’m primarily an extrovert, I also require quiet time to think and write.

Maybe better than introvert/extrovert binary would be something like the Kinsey scale.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Introversion/extroversion is indeed a scale. Scott2 and I are alluding to The Scale when we talk about our "reservoirs" and capacities. The trick in life is in having a good sense of where one lies on that scale (how large one's capacity is, and what it's current level is) at any given point in time, and designing for it, and not falling into the trap of thinking that that "balance" is a static thing. Dynamic equilibrium and all that.

The next trick, once that is internalized, is perceiving where *other* people lie on that spectrum, and designing/managing good relationships/interactions through time. e.g. If I can sense that DGF "needs" some extroverted time with me, and my "need" for solitude is low, at a specific point in time, I can flow with showing up for her in that way. And when I need solitude so powerfully I'm on the verge of shutdown, she can sense that and give me space (and I have learned how to compassionately communicate it to her without making her feel rejected by me).

Scott 2
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Scott 2 »

Your wedding experience would wreck me. I'm good for a couple hours, and then it's all pretend. As I've gotten older, I am less willing to fake it. I know the price I'll pay over the following days or weeks. We're to the point where if my wife is going to travel, it is usually with friends or a group, instead of me. Everyone's experience is better. But, again, a smaller life.

Are you able to relax with the death metal going in your headphones? For me, noise cancelling makes it very easy to enter a parasympathetic state. If I can hang around in that ultra relaxed frame of mind, my reservoir recharges much more quickly. Loud or aggressive music would hinder the benefit.

I think that's the crux of "high extroversion" environments draining me. My body is overly sensitive to the stimulus, pegging me into a sympathetic state. In controlled bursts (ie lifting) it's ok. I revert to baseline and am more tolerant to repeated bouts. Extended exposure, especially that I cannot control, is crushing. The social stress rapidly becomes physical.

I used to think alcohol helped, but more accurately - it defers my experience of accumulated stress to the following day. Because I'm not feeling it in the moment, I make deeper inroads, which are slower to dig out from. I think there's a fundamental aspect of my nature that just isn't going to change.


I'd agree that managing this carefully can favor depth of experience over breadth. I cannot, however, deny that I was taking "more" out of life fighting my introversion. The world is setup to reward extroverts, which also leads the introverts to pretend they are extroverts. There's just much more to be had if you play the preferred game.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Yeah, oddly, I find death metal soothing. I have no data but I'm pretty sure a lot of metalheads are introverts, actually. But too much can be too much, and I switch to chillstep or "ambient rain noises" or suchlike. It's pretty rare that I can handle complete quiet. It feels like something bubbles up inside and is trying to get out, violently. The metal calms that sensation down. (Jam bands exacerbate it...)

Do you identify as an HSP (highly sensitive person)? Besides my misophonia, I don't at all... there is a big difference for me between "intense environmental stimulus" (which I generally thrive off of) and "social stimulus" (which drains me). I think that explains why I love dancing - the strobes and intense music etc amps me up, and since no one can hear themselves think it's not really a super social experience (at least not the way I dance haha). Interestingly, my highly extroverted GF is an HSP, which is rare. She loves dancing because of the people, but if the scene is too loud, flashy, etc she can't hang. Sorting these different kinds of stimulus in/sensitivities out has been an interesting journey.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

I tidied up the motivation diagram.
Image

I now see that it is indeed pretty much the OODA loop. The stuff at the top in particular is obviously Orientation, "desired outcomes" are essentially Decision, and Observation is represented in the intent/effect loops.

The utility of having sketched this out, for me, is that the impact/importance of having a local attractor or eddie (Purpose/Why) for aligning my personal carrot-vectors (I'm going to use that term As Much As Possible from here on out) is just a lot clearer. Dropping activities that are off-vector just makes total sense, and in fact feels good, because it feels like my attention is more concerned with the overall vector field rather than optimizing individual nodes. Spending lots of time extreme mountain biking is just not even appealing at all, for example, because while doing it I can almost *feel* the counter-flow, the turbulence in the vector field, screwing up the beauty/flow of the field as a whole which is what I actually see and care about now.

What I mean is this: If you lack strategy and tactics, your "WoG" might look like this mess:
Image

As you define your purpose, your going to start pointing in the right-ish direction, but there's going to be execution turbulence (this is what I'm dealing with right now).
Image

Once you've got purpose *and* execution dialed, your WoG carrot-vector field might look like this:
Image

And here's an animation of it.
https://youtu.be/7h5g0xhP3-Q

...I may have gone off the deep end with this one.

jacob
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by jacob »

No, this is really great!!

Goethe made some comment about the impossibility of "wanting your wants" (anyone?). I think the "OODA-why" loop perfectly illustrates seeking vector-alignment with meaning/fulfillment around WL8-8.5. I think the 8->9 step occurs when one transcends the idiosyncratic position and move to the territory/pattern.

Scott 2
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Scott 2 »

I have not run into the Highly Sensitive Person label, but it describes my experience. I threw her book into my queue.

It's not all that unusual for people to have problems with total quiet. It comes up every now and then in the yoga space, with enthusiastic teachers blindly pushing meditation and yoga nidra. For some people, it's a really bad time.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

@jacob This?
Goethe, according to the internet wrote:Our desires presage the capacities within us; they are harbingers of what we shall be able to accomplish. What we can do and want to do is projected in our imagination, quite outside ourselves, and into the future. We are attracted to what is already ours in secret. Thus passionate anticipation transforms what is indeed possible into dreamt-for reality.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Mister Imperceptible »

To live within limits. To want one thing. Or a few things very much and love them dearly. Cling to them, survey them from every angle. Become one with them - that is what makes the poet, the artist, the human being.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@MI: Might be wrong, but that sounds more like Fi humans than Fe humans to me. Fe kind of wants to harmonize/love on everything.

@AH: I didn't mean that you should abandon JAFI as metric. More like you might abstract or expand from it. Kind of like how a person who was really into health/fitness wouldn't just look at BMI. For instance, I am currently reading a new book you might also like, "Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives" by Heller(real estate law) and Salzman (environmental law) which might make you wonder how different human conventions of ownership might apply to the JAFI calculation. Also, in more practical terms I was thinking that maybe the human who wants to help other humans build straw bale houses should be one of the humans who does own a truck. IOW, don't let the good be the enemy of the great.

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jennypenny
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by jennypenny »

@daylen -- I really like the term 'execution turbulence'. It will also help when trying to distinguish between internal and external turbulence (<- on which a lot has been written).

Sorry if I'm clogging up your journal AH.

RoamingFrancis
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by RoamingFrancis »

That animation is fucking dope and accurately sums up the last year of my life. More and more clarity and alignment.

@jacob

“Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.”

“Man can do what he wants; he can however not want what he wants.”

- Schopenhauer

Is that what you’re talking about?

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