The Education of Axel Heyst

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Slevin
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Slevin »

I think if we keep moving towards solarpunk, the aesthetic needs to be both whimsical and ironic, as Gortz hints at here: https://youtu.be/PAEubUB_oKg?t=2563 (start of discussion of the piece of art, 44:53 is where he hints at the need for the postmodern irony). Maybe solarpunk but with corten. Kind of like a merge of the art noveau ideas we see here with the living and aging structures of Sea Ranch that try to integrate seamlessly with the natural world around them. Then it gets fun. Beautiful gaudy art noveau style pieces that wear and tatter with age, which to those not looking just appear to be aging sculptures that need upkeep, but to those who look with the right eyes see something profound and magical in the way something built so beautifully and precisely but still succumbs to the whims of time. Think something Usonian, but in a more art deco lowbrow sort of sense. The closest thing in existence today that I know of is the Polychrome Historic District in Maryland. I know that you're a pro in the field AH, I want to hear your opinion on the Solarpunk aesthetic.
Last edited by Slevin on Mon Apr 04, 2022 5:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by jacob »

Maybe check out https://www.amazon.com/Good-Life-Lab-Ex ... 612121012/

They had a youtube channel for a while. Maybe worthwhile to track them down and do an interview on a future podcast?

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Slevin wrote:
Mon Apr 04, 2022 1:00 pm
I know that you're a pro in the field AH, I want to hear your opinion on the Solarpunk aesthetic.
I'm far from any kind of pro when it comes to aesthetics... but this line
Buckminster Fuller wrote: You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
has always resonated strongly with me. I'm not ready to discard fighting existing realities as a tactic/strategy with no merit, but I see building new models as critical path. And I think aesthetics plays a role in that, broadly understood. Related:
Emma Goldman wrote:If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution.
(An important point is that if everyone is forced/expected to dance, I want nothing to do with your revolution either.)

I think the mistake I made on my first encounter with solarpunk was to criticize it as if it were some sort of monolithic set of ideas, as if there was dogmatism involved. I didn't understand at the time that it was mostly a heap of similarly-valued notions about the future and how to approach it, and no one owns solarpunk at all. I'm not at all comfortable saying things like 'solarpunk should have more rust' - maybe these folks over here are obsessive electrolysis nerds and part of their 'everything is sacred' relationship with the built environment is to hold a ten-day rust mitigation festival, involving prayers of thanksgiving to the gods of oxidation to remind them that death is inevitable but we can dance with it, with due reverence.

I do appreciate what Gortz said about solarpunk and irony and I think it's right on, and, I think the way it should mostly work is that if someone wants their solarpunk to have more rust they should just make some rusty solarpunk, release it to the world as a contribution, and let it fold into the solarpunk heap (or not) as the crowd wills.

For example, someone else's solarpunk undoubtedly involves hi tech bioplastic textiles. Mine happens not to - it's all natural fibers up in here... but maybe the sheep flocks are guarded from neolithic DNA resurrected megafauna by photosynthesis-powered droneswarms that emit specific frequency noises that drive predators nuts. Someone else's solarpunk might involve a lot of new construction, but mine looks more like extreme repurposement of existing built environment stock, Re-use and adapt at scales both micro and macro.

I'm workawaying on a fablab right now, and in fact just used a DIY CNC machine to cut out the pieces for the solar thermal panel I'm building. That's cool, and my solarpunk vision has fablabs all over the place... but myself individually am mostly interested in playing with traditional hand carpentry tools and quite small scale builds.

Image
(I modeled it in blender first, then exported to a vector format, did layout touchup in LibreCAD, then sent it to my buddy Joao to get the CAM settings dialed)
Image
(Joao firing up the CNC)

Philosophically, I find myself thinking of Dan Simmons Hyperion Cantos. (I think I have the right sci-fi universe...) At the end, one or several of the characters come to the ethical orientation that the aim of humanity is to help life to flourish. The more life, very broadly interpreted, the better, as a sort of prime directive for human engagement with the universe. And a key part of this perspective was not to hammer foreign worlds into environments conducive to basestock human meatsacks, but to adapt the human form to the environments they found themselves in and value the intrinsic beauty of the diversity of environments humans found. Radical adaptation, as it were (in the books, one form of humans had been modified to be able to survive deep space).

Ultimately the perspective is humans as gardeners, or perhaps tenders of the 'wild'.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Internalizing homeotelicity
I've been noticing increased homeotelicity emerge in my life, and while I feel it's a result of my actions and decisions, its remarkable to me how it feels like an indirect consequence (emergent behavior/attribute) of my actions. I haven't done much that, in the moment, felt like I was doing it in order to 'increase homeotelicity' in an explicit way. I've been making decisions while keeping in mind frugality, actual value for money, actual value for time, and first and second-order effects, etc.

There's a reinforcing effect I'm noticing. It feels like the more homeotelic my WoG gets, the more sensitive I am to anything that's not homeotelic. This makes sense: when your life is a soup of random goal vectors, that's just normal and it's not obvious that life should feel any different.
Image

I feel like I'm now at this mid frame, or maybe a bit before it:
Image
...where a number of vectors are snapping into rough alignment and all of a sudden I can just sense that there's an attractive force ->over there<-, and importantly misalignment is more obvious and jarring. The more time I spend with it, the more of an intuitive feel I get for where any given vector should point based on where it is in my life-field.

So whereas a year or two ago I evaluated each vector based on how cool it intrinsically seemed, I now evaluate each vector based on how harmoniously it contributes to the overall field's aligned flow pattern. But evaluate is most of the time the wrong word, it's just a sense that I'm sometimes not aware of.

I also care less about each individual vector. It's easier for me to drop any given activity or goal, because what I mostly care about is the integrity of the uber-vector, (vector math nerds help me out here with a good word). Whereas before I had identity and ego mostly wrapped up in individual vectors (engineer, 3d artist, climber, freeride/DH mtber, dirtbag), and adopting or dropping one felt significant to my identity (if I don't MTB, who even am I??), it's now quite easy for me to do this. When I dropped MTB, it was months of thought and it ached a bit.

Now, I haven't climbed in over a year, and it's no big deal. I still cherish many of my climbing memories, but it's quite likely that I'm going to become one of those people who used to climb a fair bit but now just goes out every once in a while for fun when the opportunity arises. This intentional letting go of getting after climbing felt much easier than when I let go of MTB, even though climbing has meant more to me than MTB ever did.

I think this is because where my identity and ego is at is at the level of the whole vector-field now, or is transitioning there.

I've used the climbing and MTB stories a fair amount, and in a sense they are trivial because they're just hobbies. Another recent example is that only a week ago I realized that I had the sense that I ought not be a part of this 3d studio startup. It was just a sense at first, a realization that I simply wasn't as stoked on it as I thought I should be, and so I allowed my mind to follow the sense and do a bit of analysis on it. I'm sitting with the realization that involvement with the studio isn't actually very homeotelic. There are easier and less risky ways to make money, it's unlikely that I'd have the sort of control over the kinds of projects we'd do to really fit into my mission, the most likely day-to-day work I'd do isn't stuff I'm very interested in, and involvement in it would tether me to a computer and the internet in a way I'm not into at the moment. In particular, the opportunity cost of involvement with it seems high, because there are a lot of other things I could do that feel much more on-mission.

If I didn't have a vector-field perspective, and if I didn't have the beginning of an intuitive 'feel' for vector telicity, I think I a) wouldn't have noticed that the studio didn't feel right in the first place and b) even if I had noticed, I would have stuffed down the feeling because on paper the vector in and of itself is cool and makes a lot of sense.

--

A mini-revelation about social pressure: I think it's easier for me to resist consumer behavior peer pressure now, and I attribute this ease to the field-focus rather than vector-focus. For example, I just finished five weeks at this workaway with about 10 other volunteers. In week 2, it became a new normal for whoever went out to town to buy fruit, snacks, and beer and wine, and to split the bill evenly between the volunteers.

Around this time I decided to take a month off of drinking at all, but not everyone noticed or remembered and just included me on the split bill. I had to bring it up to the group that I wasn't drinking at all and didn't want to pay for other people to drink, and for that matter I wasn't eating their snacks either. So not only did I have to choose and stick to not drinking when literally everyone else was, I had to bring it up and 'daylight' my non-in-group behavior, and we had to figure out how to extract me from the bill split app.

In the past I almost certainly would have just gone along with things, rationalizing it as 'part of the experience'... and that would have been fine, but it would have been a vector pointing away from the pattern I'm trying to cultivate in my life. In the past my sense of this misalignment would have been subtle, but I would have just repressed it or shrugged it off. Now, the pain of a badly misaligned vector is conscious and felt enough that I don't tolerate it.

I continue to participate socially in the group with enthusiasm, and they continue to be lovely people who think it's not a big deal at all. I don't feel that my choice to not drink or participate in the snackfest has made any significant negative effect on my or other's experience here. In fact, it's given me opportunity to talk about nonconsumerism, ERE, freedom, the skill ratchet, etc, and a couple people have shown enough interest to make telling them about ERE appropriate). #showdonttell

At any rate, the point is that it's much easier to notice and act upon non-aligned vectors, because the pain of misalignment is greater and the joy of aligned vectors is higher. The sense of contentment I get from operating a mostly aligned vector-field feels richer and more enduringly satisfying than the contentment from executing any individual vector well. And the act of dropping or heavily modifying an individual vector to align feels good, not like a loss.

Of course, I don't think this is the destination, and I recognize that from one perspective all I've done is ratcheted my ego-attachment to one arbitrarily higher level. But I am okay with enjoying feeling this sense of accomplishment or leveling up while I'm here.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Gilberto de Piento »

Sorry if you already explained this and I missed it, but why did you drop mountain biking and climbing? It seems like you did it on purpose and possibly didn't entirely want to.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Why I gave up MTB: Because the first and second-order negative effects outweigh the positive ones.

Clarification: I gave up technical downhill and freeride mountain biking, not the activity of riding bicycles offroad. The $ cost, injury risk, near-requirement of owning a vehicle and putting miles on it, considerable amount of time involved in maintaining a safe level of technical ability, etc overbalanced the positive effects of physical exertion, challenge, being in the outdoors, etc, all things that I can get from other activities with far fewer negative sides.

Climbing: I haven't actually given it up, I've just currently got a lifestyle that is arranged around other priorities, and I'm okay with that. I'm not about to sell my rack - my life is likely to shift in such a way to be amenable to climbing at some point in the future.
Gilberto de Piento wrote:
Sat Apr 16, 2022 10:47 am
It seems like you did it on purpose and possibly didn't entirely want to.
Yes, I miss strapping on my gear and hucking 20' gaps and hitting drops that twist my insides up with fear (and make me whoop with exultation when I nail it) - I certainly don't entirely want to give up extreme mountain biking, but on balance, it's a choice that I feel good about. The things I've filled my life with instead of extreme MTB make me happier/more content than if I hadn't dropped it. Can't do everything.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Project TTM5k (Trailing Twelve Month spend of $5,000)
My new financial goal/game is to spend $5,000usd over the course of a year. April is month 1. March was, uh, a bit of a learning experience wrt spending money and traveling. Also my birthday is in April, so it's easy to remember that the Axel Fiscal Calendar begins this month. No more 'Cost of Living' vs depreciated capx accounting trickery, the goal is that only $5k leaves my accounts this year.

5k/yr is 416/mo, 96/wk, 13.7/day.

I'm likely to still be traveling in a year, so this represents a frugal slowtravel burn rate goal. My vision for my lifestyle upon returning to the states is a similar burn rate, but I'm not thinking about that too much.

The only fixed cost I think I have is my travelers health insurance, $42/mo. Everything else can be gamed a bit - I can sleep and eat for free or close to it with workaways, or choose to do inexpensive hostels and the like. It'll all be a learning experience.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Travels
I finished my Portugal fablab workaway last weekend. Took a bus from Lagos to Malaga, except I missed my second bus in Seville due to forgetting the time difference so I spent a night in Seville, then a night in Malaga, and then bused down to the ferry and crossed over to Tanger yesterday, Wednesday. The ferry was €45, and when I got to the hostel people were talking about having flown in on Ryanair for €5. I'm not sure I'd have flown even if I knew that, since I've got two bags so my flight cost would actually be €25 at least and flying as little as possible is part of my travel ethic.

I've got a workaway lined up in the southeast of Morocco for May 4. I'm going to hostel it from here till then, I think here in Tanger and then Marrakech. The hostels are about 7 or 8usd.

It's Ramadan this month. I've already been playing around with fasting the last few days, so I'm sort of kind of tagging along with the sunrise to sunset fasting thing.

My previous workaway was a lot of social time and a fair amount of 'responsibility' for my project of the solar thermal panel. And through it all I was going through separating from DGF and divebombing into the inner workings of my psyche, with Bill Plotkin as my guide. So I'm looking forward to a couple weeks of 'solitude', such as can be had in hostels, both as a rest and a chance for integration/digestion. I have some things to think and feel about.

I am a fervent lover of good hotel lobby/sitting spaces. Some of my favorite travel memories are nothing more than a well laid out space with comfortable chairs and the understood social convention that this is a place people come to read and/or write by themselves while drinking coffee. I intend to do a fair amount of that over the next couple weeks.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Ego »

Nice!

Good routes from there are Tangier > Chefchaouen > Fes by bus then Fes > Casablanca or Fes > Marrakech by train. If you want to get right to Marrakech there is an overnight train Tangier > Marrakech.

Lots of European dirtbags around Todra and the beaches south of Essaouira. Is your workaway out in the Atlas Mountains?

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Cool, thanks. :) I think I might be spending a fair amount of time in/around Essaouira after my desert workaway. The workaway is a little southeast of Zagora, so on the other side of the Atlas I believe?

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Ego »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Thu Apr 21, 2022 4:25 pm
The workaway is a little southeast of Zagora, so on the other side of the Atlas I believe?
Wow. There isn't much southeast of Zagora but the Sahara Desert and the Algerian border. That is bound to be an adventure. I look forward to your report.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

The Renaissance Report | April 2022
April is month one of the Heystian Calendar. Because it's my birthday month, it's the first month I'm single, first full month I'm traveling solo, and because I think it's funny. The only real effect of this is that I'm thinking of April as Month One of Project TTM5K

I'm still wrapping my head around being single. Half of the factors I was solving for in my decision-making for the past 3.5 years are now gone from my life.

Physiological
I'm not exercising or eating according to any regime. When I feel tight I stretch, when I feel antsy I go for a walk, when I get hungry I go find some food that looks tasty, when I feel dirty I take a shower.

Intellectual
I've been spending some time with Absurdism, my old friend. Found a copy of The Myth of Sisyphus and am enjoying it again. Reconnecting with some resonances there. Books I'm currently reading:
  • The Intelligent Investor, Graham
  • The Wealth of Nature, Greer
  • Wild Mind, Bill Plotkin
  • Some solarpunk stuff
  • On Writing Well, Zinsser
  • What I learned losing a million dollars
  • Myth of Sisyphus, Camus
  • Useful work vs. Useless toil, william morriss
Emotional
So. Much. Going. On. Here.
Plotkin's book wild mind is my guiding star here. It is NAILING IT for where I'm at.

I've really developed a comfortable relationship with my North Sub, the Analyst, which for those not in on the Plotkin jargon, my Analyst is the side of me that tries to keep me safe by being as inoffensive and as useful as possible at all times. This behavior manifests in my relationships as codependency.

Main thing is, I'm treating my analyst with love and honestly I'm not trying to get him to STFU, I'm trying to build a strong relationship with him and work with him to do cool stuff. Because he's a really, REALLY good analyst, he's just been following goals/directives that weren't super relevant anymore. If I can get him to believe in better designed directives... damn, I think he's going to be a monster. In a good way.

And, after doing a great amount of work with my Analyst, I started rereading Wild Mind and what stuck out to me was Plotkin's point that often these issues we have are symptoms of not being whole human beings, and the necessary work isn't to totally focus on fixing the bad, but to work on wholing the human. So I'm easing off the 'FIX ME NOW' gas pedal, having done some good work understanding my north sub, and am turning towards encouragement of positive attributes.

For me, a key to getting my analyst to catch a break is to let my South facet out of the closet. The South is code for the wild indigenous one, the side of ourSelves that knows he belongs in this world, delights in sensous experiences, and has an erotic love for life. My name for my south facet is the Exuberant Puddle Jumper, or just the exuberant one, and I've started working with

a) recognizing that my exuberant one is a HUGE part of my personal identity, and
b) working on ways to let him out of the closet i've mostly kept him stuffed in for the past two and a half decades.

In particular, I've started to notice ways in which my south facet and my north sub can make a great team. My analyst can confirm that it's safe to come out and play, and then when my exuberant one does, he churns up and generates a TON of experiential data that my analyst loves to take and just mull over for hours and days... and this data crunching leads to better simulations of the world and of my self, which I can put to use to better fulfill my new directives of knowing and celebrating myself, and doing what I truly desire.

My Analyst's old childhood survival directives were 1) Be Inoffensive and 2) Be Useful. All data was crunched in order to supply suggestions that fulfilled those directives. My new proposed directives that I'm working with my Analyst on replacing with are

1) Know - and thus celebrate, honor, and love - thyself.
2) Do what thou wilt; from none but self expect praise. (Ripping off both Alastair Crowley and Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton here).

(Quick note here: these aren't the prime directives/purpose *for my entire life*.... they're the directives *for my analyst*. And they might just be temporary.)

Economic
Project TTM5K Month 1:
.Spent $653/$416=1.56 over my target. (annualized that's $7,849)
I was doing SO GOOD and then I bought a rug. :( I did not want to buy a rug, or any other thing. I don't really want to talk about it (already talked a bunch with my MMG, <3), except to say that it ties in to the Plotkin South sub work I'm doing, and I've learned an expensive lesson about haggle culture and pressure tactics. From that perspective it was good, in that it churned up some deep rich mud to play with. So, a financial cost that will at least be a psychological step forward, and arguably will set me up to be less likely to make mistakes with haggle culture in the future.

April also involved travel and hostel expenses getting from Portugal to Morocco. May ought to be much easier to come in on target and get TTM5k pointed in the right direction.

//Investing//
A recap of my financial strategy ('strategy' might be overselling it a bit...):
  • All my $ is allocated per the Permanent Portfolio: VTI, TLT, GLD, SHV.
  • I aim to earn at least 1 CoL annually.
  • 1 CoL is less than a quarter of my cash allocation. I don't have an emergency cash fund separate from what I count in my PP allocation, I just keep some of that cash in a savings account and live off that. I have enough liquid for emergencies such as an unforeseen surgery that short of something very catastrophic I'm in little danger of needed to dip from investment accounts at a loss.
  • I don't intend to begin living off my portfolio anytime soon. I assume I'll generate >=1CoL every year for the next ten to twenty. (I think this means I don't need to be designing for near future SORR?)
  • Any surplus I earn (income in excess of CoL) is split 50/50 between going into my PP allocation and being spent on training, gear, tools, or supplies that are difficult to get without $. Personal-system resiliency investments, so to speak.
Until I read more and can come up with something less dumb, that's my financial plan. I'm somewhat uncomfortable with continuing to sail through these turbulent economic times without a better economics and finance education that might serve me to spot opportunities (or at least avoid pitfalls), but the logistics of executing DIY financial self-study program while dirtbag slowtraveling are unattractive. I realize and accept that this is putting my future financial security at a lower priority than my immediate lifestyle pursuits. If I were being totally rational I might just carve out, idk, three months somewhere cheap and lock myself in a room with all the textbooks, and then get on with my trip?

But nah. I'll probably do something like that when I get back and need a break every once in a while from buildings buried greenhouses and solar hot water heats and stuff.

Social
Learning the ins and outs of hostel life. I spent my birthday with two flashfriends from my hostel, a french portugese permatraveler and an escapee from western PA who dropped out of lawyer school and now works at gas stations until she has enough money to travel for 9-12 months at a time. I didn't catch his name and they didn't know it was my birthday.

I talk with friends via Signal often.

Technical
Finished a solar thermal panel.
While lounging about with a head cold, I got into bingeing on youtube restoration videos. Picked up a variety of techniques to try out when I get back home.
Minimalist coffee making gear: I only brought my manual burr grinder with me. I grind to a fine setting and put grounds in my tall thermos, add nearly boiling water. Wait 4-6minutes to brew and for the grounds to settle. Pour off into a cup. There's mud on the bottom but it's minimal... sort of like Turkish style coffee.

Ecological
?

Gilberto de Piento
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Gilberto de Piento »

I read your blog post and I like the solar project. I like the quick and dirty, use what's on hand nature of it as an experiment to see if it works. I did something similar not too long ago by slapping together a cold frame with scavenged parts and growing plants in it.

Good luck on your journey.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Western Red Cedar »

Nice update @AH! There is a lot here, but I'll just emphasize this:
AxelHeyst wrote:
Fri Apr 29, 2022 6:31 am

Physiological
I'm not exercising or eating according to any regime. When I feel tight I stretch, when I feel antsy I go for a walk, when I get hungry I go find some food that looks tasty, when I feel dirty I take a shower.
So much value in having the time and freedom to approach life in this manner. It seems to reflect how humans have lived for thousands of years and a much healthier way to approach health and physiology. I guess the Bowman is sinking in on me ;)

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

That's insightful stuff with the Plotkin work. I've been doing something similar, and I've found trying to discover subpersonalities to be a really useful method of introspection. This isn't directly Plotkin, but I've noticed that my sub personalities have different cognitive function preferences than me and are also at different (usually lower) Kegan levels than me. For example, one might have a south facet sub with an Se-Fi preference that's stuck at Kegan2 vs the central ego which normally thinks of itself as Kegan4. I've been trying to develop some exercise to develop the lesser used cognitive functions of the subpersonalities in hopes to raise their Kegan levels with the eventual aim to integrate the shadow side of the ego. I'm looking forward to what else you discover using Plotkin's methods because this sort of psychological work is pretty illuminating.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Fri Apr 29, 2022 6:31 am
I realize and accept that this is putting my future financial security at a lower priority than my immediate lifestyle pursuits.
Let me be a little more charitable to myself. It's not fair to imply that I'm neglecting financial stewardship while hedonically YOLOing my way across the globe.

I am focused on a) hitting a 5k/yr burn rate, which was kinda nuts when Jim Merkel did it back in 2002 twenty years ago, and b) I'm focused on learning and developing #skillz as part of a deep Renaissance man strategy of personal resilience.

It's maybe more common for people to be stronger on the financial dimension of their ERE strategy, which is why I sometimes feel like a wierdo/slacker around here because I see so many people having more sophisticated financial conversations than I'm currently capable of. But if it all goes to shit, the dirtbags are gonna inherit the earth y'all (lol).

There's a couple traps I see here. I'm worried that if I put in a bunch of effort to learn finance / economics / etc, I'm going to be looking for justification for the answer I want to find, which is that there is some strategy that I can use to have a reasonable expectation of preserving my financial wealth for the next sixty years.

But maybe there isn't! Maybe the most rational conclusion, if I put in enough effort, is that there *is* no strategy that I can have a reasonable expectation of preserving my wealth. It's just gonna be a crap shoot because this century is going to be totally bonkers. Am I really going to be able to come to that conclusion after dumping thousands of hours into learning about this stuff?

On the other hand, it's entirely fair to accuse me of wanting there to be no reasonable strategy. The actual answer I maybe WANT to be true is that the system is so fucked that the smart move is to learn skills and social networks in anticipation of the a post-financialized, unevenly collapsed civilization lurching through a cluster-bombing of climactic and sociopolitical catastrophes. And since that's the answer I want to 'discover' or work out as a result of my efforts, my motivation for figuring out what in hells name a put option is or how in seven hells you even begin to independently calculate what a companies book value is, is very low. Because some part of me wants all that stuff to be a waste of time at the scale of sixty years.

Stuffing my head in the sand isn't an answer, I realize, but getting clear on what biases I have going in to any self educational effort is probably pretty important, so I don't just arrive at the answers I want to arrive at. If I'm going to go with 'it won't make a difference anyways', I'd rather spare myself the effort of attempting to rationalize it with a big stack of books and just admit that's my bias.

Ideally I work out my biases and get to a rational analysis and build a solid set of models for all this, based on a system/lifestyle of consuming and working with high quality sources of information. That's just not going to happen overnight, so for now it's PP on cruise control and skill-focused Slowtravel and postconsumer praxis.

Eta: until I sort this stuff out and get clear on my motivational and bias issues, investing time in learning about investing is frought.
Last edited by AxelHeyst on Sat Apr 30, 2022 2:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Qazwer
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Qazwer »

Every century is bonkers. Try 1930 to 1990 - you try telling me experts would predict the US as being the only great power post war that retained money. Then the rapid rise of Germany and Japan post fall etc etc
How about 1870-1930? US succeeds - Argentina and Russia goes to nothing in between
1810-1870? Canals and then railroads having boom over expansion then bust cycles then dominance.

The recent Berkshire Hathaway meeting today had a great line in that in times of inflation invest in yourself. If you want 60 years of financial stability, no magic - fool proof recipe can be found no matter how smart and how well read you are. You are doing fine.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Touche. Thanks Qazwer.

candide
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by candide »

I'm new here and doing a lot of catch up reading, but I've read enough to know you've written so well about the frugality and skill side that I am surprised that you are still expressing what reads as guilt about not becoming a full investment nerd. I'll speak for myself and say you've inspired me to see Howlies as better role models than any fat-FIRE fat-cat bloggy McBloggerson. Hell, you coined Howlie in the first place!

I am going to do a dangerous thing and give investment -- let's not say advice -- food for thought.

It looks like you're getting locked up on two issues -- 1) the 60 year mark 2) getting through the investment curriculum.

Issue #1: 60 years.
Let's say I'm only slightly more optimistic than you are about the 60 year time-frame.

Fun fact: I was such a JMG fanboy that when he retried The Archdruid Report, I am the one who made the mirror that ended up linking to at his new digs.

http://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/

(I don't think it is the best mirror, but whatever. At least I linked to others).

But I think you need to question your conclusion a bit here. The difference between your portfolio failing -- regardless of the cause, or regardless of if the events are realistically in your control -- in year 60, 40, 30, or 20 will be important to the future you at 59, 39, or 19 years out, even if it then leads to your story having a "bad end." Each additional bit of time you keep your portfolio alive is added is extra optionality.

Issue #2: the curriculum

It looks to me that the curriculum is mostly there to help you select individual stocks. But if you want to broadly diversify, especially across asset classes, then that is just less important.

I have seen you like Browne's permanent portfolio. Let's just start there. I'll go over the categories and give food for thought under each.

Gold
====

In a world where we could expect all paper assets to trade fairly into the future, then I would say the 25% here is a bit aggressive. When Ray Dalilo built his All Weather Portfolio,

https://www.optimizedportfolio.com/all- ... portfolio/

he started with something like the Permanent Portfolio and then adjusted the percentages based on volatility of the asset, coming up with
7.5% gold
7.5% commodities

But for those of us who fear the Long Crisis I dig 25% in precious metal -- provided we hang on to all of that precious metal after, say, 10% in physical form.

I'm more of a silver bug as I don't really want to rely on people being able to "make change" in scenarios where the abstractions are stripped back to hard assets. (Storing a bunch of whisky and ammo also makes sense for this part of portfolio. I can't do the whisky because. . . I'll drink it. And I just never got into ammo).

Cash
====

Browne's description of the cash portion is to deal with recession or "tight money." (Here we are with the Fed trying for tight money, at least for now) The thing is all cash does is dampen your losses during these times and then when you re-balance you have the opportunity to buy low.

I am trying to juice this part of the portfolio with things that should spike as other shit crashes. TAIL, VXZ are longer term what I'm building and require less due diligence to justify the same x% percentage bet done for tactical reasons. I have do have some tactical bets discussed in my journal, but my exit points are pulled out of my ass, so I can't really recommend them to anyone else.

Stock
====
One way to look at VXZ, TAIL or some other hedge strategy using long puts is that it pulls out (at a price) some of the volatility of owning stocks. At that point, you can rest easier with indexing.

I prefer to try to value invest, but whatever.


Bonds
=====

I have no particular insight. I'm currently out of bonds. I am not a financial advisor. Don't copy me or listen to me.
Last edited by candide on Sun May 01, 2022 10:03 am, edited 2 times in total.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

:shock: Well thank you for the delightful Sunday morning rooting around your adr mirror. Thanks for having done that.

And thank you for the investing food for thought. I think an aspect of it for me is that I feel unprepared to defend my ideas about the Long Descent from a practical standpoint. Most people I talk to snort in derision when I mention anything like the suggestions for wealth preservation given in Dmitry Orlov's The Five Stages of Collapse, for example, or Pugsley's The Alpha Strategy. Mention Selco and relatives are ready to trundle you off to the psych ward.

Mainstream personal finance common sense seems to be completely walled off from any future reality that is significantly different than the one we ("we") currently live in. People snort at the idea of preserving wealth in art, for example, but Orlov wasn't talking about theoretical people, he was talking about actual people who actually preserved (at least some) wealth with actual bits of art. Selco now has thousands of Bic lighters in his basement based on his actual experience. So the derision comes from the inability to imagine or accept the possibility of collapse happening Here (It Can't Happen Here-ism), which seems pretty dangerous to me.

I'm not really sure if I have a point here. Still trying to think around the whole cognitive heap and get a sense for at least what the outside of it looks like before diving in, I guess.

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