The Education of Axel Heyst

[AxelHeyst]

The discussion tangent is welcome! And your point that a map exists is worth bringing up often.

It seems to me (analysis) that a required condition for a consensus framework to work is that everybody in the process is a stakeholder in the outcome AND that everybody is about equally qualified/informed.

No.

*Bad* consensus process, aka unanimity, requires everyone to be equally informed/competent, because a single contrary opinion can filibuster. *Real* aka well designed consensus process does not, because contrary opinions don't have the power to filibuster. I don't remember the particulars of the mechanisms for this, just that they exist. Some mechanism exists to rapidly deweight the noobs opinion that the soup needs three kilos of salt and move on with the real chefs recommendation.

This is one of the points in Making a Life Together, that if people who don't know what Consensus process actually is try to implement it, they'll almost certainly fall in the unanimity trap and it'll kill their proj.

[jacob]

Sociocracy (as I understand it)

O - Everybody makes an itemized list of their concerns with each concern fitted on a postit note.
O - Postit notes are collated in entries of similarity (in case two people have the same concern, it's no longer split on two entries)
D - Everybody gets N votes to rank distribute over the entries giving a ranked list of what the group thinks are the most important concerns.
A - A small number of tuners are nominated to build a strategy based on these findings. This strategy is then voted on by the entire group, revise and repeat until approved.

Basically what the process does is to split people's individual recipes at the Observation stage into "shopping lists" which were subsequently combined into a master shopping list composed of must have ingredients and what the final dish should look like. This sounds good in theory but if one adds too much uninformed noise to the process it may break the engineering triangle---the top three concerns is that the car be fast, safe, and cheap; with the tuners or engineers screaming that the connection between the requested ingredients and the requested outcome is impossible.

On the pro-side it does make everybody feel like their concerns were heard, except the only concerns that were heard were the concerns that could be easily itemized (three kilos of salt). "Finer cooking" or any kind of trade offs or strategy were eliminated from the concern list by process. Effectively, they're punted to the Action stage leaving it to the tuners to construct a result based on [the] people's wishes.

This still works if those wishes were made within the realm of possibility. It does not if the wishes were based on dreams.

At this point the tuners are back to playing politics trying to sell a strategy to the rest of the group where it looks like people are getting what they want (three kilos of salt) even if they aren't. Indeed, I would say this is not a process that works on the typical science/engineering mentality of being honest to a fault when determining which solutions will work and which won't. It seems like it demands a more cynical approach.

[7Wannabe5]

All ingredients need salt. The noodle or tender pea would be narcissistic to imagine it already contained within its cell walls all the perfection it would ever need. We seem, too, to fear that we are failures at being tender and springy if we need to be seasoned. It's not so: it doesn't reflect badly on pea or person that either needs help to be most itself.

Tamar Adler- "An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace"

The reason why the input of the McDonalds loving noob is not to be entirely discredited is that at any level opinion can tend towards uniformity. So, the naive observation of "Fries Yummy!", which is actually rooted in unknown-to-noob complexities of chemistry, biology, and evolution, could serve to counter the views held by an ascetic-rational-purist majority in the group which might really boil down to "Salt is bad for you, because this study performed in 1997 and often noted in Prevention magazine." or even "Salt makes food taste good, so it MUST be bad for you." or "Fresh is good, and fresh means as close to raw and plain as possible, so no salt."

IOW, because the pattern of growth up the spiral is to reject that which was held just previously, that which was formerly rejected at lower levels is then brought back into play. So, in any group, even one which contains a current expert in a field, the seeds of what was formerly rejected yet will likely be further integrated can still be found in the members of the group who are still currently holding those beliefs.

[jacob]

IOW, because the pattern of growth up the spiral is to reject that which was held just previously, that which was formerly rejected at lower levels is then brought back into play. So, in any group, even one which contains a current expert in a field, the seeds of what was formerly rejected yet will likely be further integrated can still be found in the members of the group who are still currently holding those beliefs.

The problem with sociocracy, for example, is that the OOD part of the process is kept at the first three CCC levels. Higher CCC concerns are intentionally destroyed. This is admittedly a big step up from first-past-the-post democracy, but it's still deficient.

An improved process would include the fourth C ... perhaps via a cost-function. [I am quickly reinventing decentralized capitalism here.]

[AxelHeyst]

Ah. I think you are talking about forms of self-governance springing from a somewhat formalized system, aka sociocracy, and the problems inherent with that system. And I was referring to consensus decision making just as one tool among many that might be deployed by a group of people in an ad-hoc manner, without a formal or semiformal system but rather an emphasis on the group's goals (e.g. "let's all work together to get this permaculture project to a point where it is financially self-sustaining"). Sociocracy as you've described it sounds terrible. I'll keep my eye out for it.

[AxelHeyst]

The Renaissance Report, August

Technical
I finished assembling the aquaponics system.


I also did a bit of derusting. I soaked some rusty drill bits in vinegar, rinsed and dried them off, soaked them with wd40 overnight, wiped off the excess.

Physiological
I fell off the bandwagon here on daily exercises. Since I'm active every day and spend so little time sitting, I feel pretty limber despite not being consistent. I do some yoga poses if I feel stiff, but overall I feel all right.

I'm weaker than I'd like, and I've been eating too much bread and pasta on this whole trip, so at some point I'm going to tighten my PT game back up. For now I consider myself to be inside a relaxed "travel life" spec range of acceptable physical shape, particularly since I have less control over my diet than I do at home.

My technical and ecological categories are simply a much higher priority at the moment, since they are what I have unique and time-limited access to. Physiological is in a "don't fall below this minimum acceptable threshold" mode, as opposed to a "aim for this aspirational level" stance that requires more attention and effort.

Economic
Another good month for Project TTM5K. I spent $82 in total. September will be a big spend month for me since I'm moving on and will have travel expenses.

Ecological
My sit spot, bird language, and tracking practices continue to mature. I saw a dolphin from my sit spot! I'm firmly convinced that nature connection and nature literacy is not just fun and interesting but actually important in a way that I'm still working on articulating. I've no idea how we humans will be able to arrange our society in such a way as to be in alignment with the realities of the more than human world if we don't even know how to read it, to understand it. So I see my time spent sitting around, trying to read the stories of the birds and the animals and the weather, as not just intensely intrinsically satisfying, but also fundamental to the rest of what I'm trying to do with my life. But... I can't explain it very well right now.

Social
Since I'm traveling, I maintain most of my close relationships via Signal chats. I have a couple mastermind groups that I have calls with fortnightly. In meatspace, for the past few months I only interact with Rubha Phoil people. This if fine with me: these people are lovely. We spend at least an hour together at lunch and another hour, typically an hour and a half, at dinner. We mostly talk about birds and animals we saw during our sit spots. We give detailed descriptions of what we saw, then we come up with hypotheses, stories about why they were doing what we observed them doing, working out as we eat our own understanding of how the natural world works.

Emotional and Intellectual
I've had a few conversations this past month that challenged me to dig into both my emotional landscape as well as attempt to discern the nuanced emotional landscape of others, in order to make sense of certain topics where one or all of us involved were making intellectual fallacies -- or, if not outright fallacies, were contributing to intellectual blind spots.

I've been thinking about how innate preference leads us to commit confirmation bias when we seek out information, which we then use to construct rationalizations for our choices when the actual honest reason might be "because I like it".

For example, for whatever reason, I've never really liked the way human society is arranged. I've been grouchy about the world since I was a kid, before I knew a single thing about climate change or the metacrisis, and my dreams for my life were always eccentric. As I became exposed to information about all the ways human society is screwing things up in the world, I hoovered it up because it provided solid justification for my emotional distaste for The Current Arrangement.

After consuming that sort of information for long enough, it became easy to think that my lifestyle choices came as a result of my perspective on the world. I'm now having second thoughts about that. Insofar as I haven't consciously recognized my emotional drive to seek out this kind of information, it's a blind spot of mine.

Doing this work on myself has primed me to begin noticing other people's blind spots. And - actually, connecting to the ecological category, uncovering blind spots is a key part of tracking. There's the physiological blind spot of scanning the forest and seeing a bit of foliage instead of a very still bird, but there's also the psychological blind spot of desiring a certain explanation for an animal's behavior, and not considering unattractive or boring explanations.

For example, there are several 1"dia, 3-5" deep holes in the rocks by the shore on Rubha Phoil. Very clean sides. Ludwig asked us what we thought they were. Goose came up with several hypotheses involving mussels or other marine life, an action over time involving small hard stones, and a few other ideas. He rejected any hypotheses that involved humans. Turns out the local university has students go out and collect rock samples for analysis, purely as an educational exercise. Goose really didn't like that explanation - he wanted the holes to be something natural. That was his blind spot.

I found myself feeling unfairly misunderstood on several occasions in the past couple months. I sat with it a bit, and I think the feeling came from falling into the overlap between my blind spot and the blind spot of whoever I was conversing with. It's impossible to be understood if I'm talking from a place of a certain kind of blindness, and I'm talking TO someone who has an inverse blind spot on the same topic. Or if only one of us has a blind spot even.

Part of the frustration comes from the sense that I spend a lot of time going deep into the nuances of topics. When I talk about them, sometimes people will criticize my views but they're not actually engaging with MY nuanced perspective, they're engaging with the stereotypicial and simplistic version of the topic. An example might be if I were to express admiration for the tracking abilities of hunter gatherer peoples, and someone criticizes me for exhibiting the Noble Savage perspective. Even though I didn't say anything related to that, actually, and in fact have a really nuanced perspective on the error of the Noble Savage idea, and also have a perspective on the see-saw weaponization and procuration of ideation vis a vie the relationship between colonizer populations and indigenous populations through time...

But few people are going to give anyone the benefit of the doubt of having thought through something like that to such a degree. It's much more gratifying to think you've spotted someone Being Wrong on the Internet and dunk on them. It's just annoying to be called out for a level of thought that I left behind decades ago, and assumed I didn't have to caveat my statements with. I'm finding myself wanting to engage in these kinds of conversations less, because it often turns into an intricate process of untangling threads of assumptions and blind spots, and at the end I'm not sure if anything has been accomplished.

I also found myself getting into these situations because I WANTED to exert my perspective on the conversation, and letting that desire drive how I interacted with it. Everyone wants to be seen, heard, and valued, and one way for people who like to think about stuff can get heard is to attempt to contribute to conversations about ideas. I sensed myself engaging in conversations at least partly from this motivation... which I think indicates some sense of lack that I was trying to fulfill.

But whatever the motivations, it can become a trap if you sense you're being misunderstood. How terrible would it be if a group of people you respect think you carry around the Noble Savage fallacy? So, having entered into such a situation, you have to expend an enormous amount of effort to extricate yourself with intellectual integrity and reputation intact.

Having pondered this dynamic a bit, I'm resolved to restrain myself from attempting to get my viewpoint across in conversations, and rather to put my energy into understanding other's perspectives. AKA - I want to set up the object of these kinds of conversations to be understanding other people really well, as opposed to getting other people to understand my perspective really well. Put another way: I'm interested in tracking other people. I'm not so interested in being tracked by other people.

To put it even simpler: I'm going to try being quieter for a bit.

[jacob]

Ah. I think you are talking about forms of self-governance springing from a somewhat formalized system, aka sociocracy, and the problems inherent with that system. [...]

From any system, really, whether it's formal or informal. Informal systems tend to hide the power politics, but it's still there e.g. "queen bee". Various systems can favor certain outcomes. For example, plurality voting (default in US politics) + first-past-post boosts radical positions, as the optimal strategy is to collect all the votes starting from the wing and moving towards the center without losing the most radical. Ranked voting + first-past-post boosts compromise positions since one also has to appeal to voters who ranks one second in line. As such the optimal strategy is to start from the center and move outwards.

Favoring the group's goals, especially if harmony is also required, disfavors individual contributions, insofar they don't harmoniously agree with what the group has already "decided" and may even cause individuals to leave. This dispreference of outliers can be installed in the system (official or unofficial) by simple process, e.g. adding a ritual that the outliers disapprove of. Something as simple as making all the real decisions around the fire pit rather than the official meeting will work. For any system, it's seem intuitively possible to find someone who will positive hate it due to compatibility reasons; and vice versa.

"For the good of the service" presents the same problem at the meta-level. People need to be homeotelic towards what "the service" is ... whether it's people, a project, the process, ...

At all points, one is herding vectors in some direction.

[theanimal]

Are you familiar with Boyd Varty? I think you'd enjoy his book. He is a full time tracker on a large preserve in South Africa, tracking large mammals every morning with a few others. There are also some podcasts with him that I found to be of high quality. Think bird tracking and movement observation on a larger scale.

Podcast with Tim Ferriss

The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life
-------
Also in the same vein, I also shared this documentary a while ago, not sure if you watched it. You may appreciate it more now.

The Great Dance: A Hunter's Story

A documentary in the 90s (?) on the Kalahari people showing them persistence hunting. It is a phenomenal documentary. Not only for being perhaps the only documentary to show persistence hunting (successfully!) but it also displays a life focused on tracking. It portrays a group of people that have a complete understanding their environment and an integration with it. They are the opposite of western society at large, which goes extreme in the other spectrum as you alluded to in your post.

[ertyu]

It's much more gratifying to think you've spotted someone Being Wrong on the Internet and dunk on them.

You've been digging into "shadows"; i am of the opinion that one savage desire people often shove down into their shadow as opposed to deal with and outgrow is the pleasure of looking down on someone and finding them inferior. There are cultures where this is very much explicit, for instance face-saving cultures like China: you know others will delight in finding an opportunity to find you somehow lesser so you conform to the maximum extent and wear the most expensive brands you possibly can, with the logo proudly displayed. In the West, it's not the done thing to delight in subjugating others or enjoying their inferiority, intellectual or otherwise, so it's often one of the things that gets shoved down into the shadow and then acted out as you describe -- and in a myriad of other small ways.

(*) an interesting sub-case I discovered during my own navel-gazing is how I often hold onto my own inferiority as a means of pleasing others. It's one of the ways in which I express my love for my parents, you see. They always so delighted in finding me dissatisfactory. (The point I want to make by pointing this out is that this dynamic exists in both its sadistic and its masochistic permutation, often within the same person's "shadow.")

[guitarplayer]

A documentary in the 90s (?) on the Kalahari people showing them persistence hunting. It is a phenomenal documentary. Not only for being perhaps the only documentary to show persistence hunting (successfully!) but it also displays a life focused on tracking.

'Born to run' by Christopher McDougal features the Tarahumara tribe in Mexico who seemingly apply the technique as well. It is one of the axis of the book's story, although not covered in great detail. Anyway, the book is a great read, especially for running enthusiasts! I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the tribe was mentioned in the documentary. Another axis of the book's story is barefoot running.

[AnalyticalEngine]

@AH & @ertyu

Interesting discussion on the shadow. This mirrors a lot of my experiences too. I think the combination of feeling outside the Overton window in your preferences + the human tendency to want to feel better than other people can cause interpersonal problems and lead to alienation.

An example might be if someone prefers to not have any children. They feel their life would be better without kids. But having children is a major social norm, so if you choose the childfree route, you may feel the need to constantly defend that choice. You might even spend a lot of time reading about overpopulation or antinatal philosophy just to prove how important not having kids really is. And you might even go as far as to start quoting Schopenhauer when someone pesters you about "settling down."

Overpopulation may very well be a major problem, but is one's motivation for caring about it really driven by genuine caring? Or is this a way to justify something people look down on you about by reversing the value so you can look down on them for having kids?

(The inverse is, of course, also true. Someone might want kids and then go pick a philosophy that says more people leads to more innovation and is therefore better for the planet.)

I've found myself sitting out of most intellectual conversations these days for exactly the same reason. The median human tends to have median beliefs, and median beliefs usually lack depth. I started to wonder why exactly I felt the need to point out the massive contradictions in most belief systems when winning the argument never actually lead to me feeling better. Nine times out of ten, you just end up feeling frustrated at best or coming across NOT how you want to come across at worst. I think people have a tendency to lump any criticisms of their frameworks in with "the other side" political opponent because most people operate on tribalism logic and not INTJ-extensive-inner-framework logic.

[ertyu]

You might even spend a lot of time reading about overpopulation or antinatal philosophy just to prove how important not having kids really is.

This isn't to argue your main point, just to pick on this particular example: I've personally known actual anti-natalists, some quite militant. I'm not sure what the "forum variety" anti-natalist is, but those anti-natalists kept their beliefs quite close to their chests as opposed to being public edgelords about it. They did not arrive at anti-natalism in order to justify their choice to live a happier life by not having children. Instead, they had mental illness which caused them deep personal suffering. This experience caused them to conclude it is unethical to inflict the experience of living on another unconsensually. They are simply wishing they wouldn't have been born and they'd have been spared.

Of course, your main point is valid and still stands.

[AnalyticalEngine]

@ertyu - I'm not picking on anti-natalists in particular, since I have anti-natalist leanings myself. I should have been more precise that I was musing if my own anti-natalist leanings were motivated by feeling like I need to have kids I don't want to have. (While trying not to derail AH's thread with my own navel gazing) I can see how that was unclear with how I worded it.

[jacob]

At all points, one is herding vectors in some direction.

Actually, this was an incomplete perspective in my ongoing series of taking shots at sociocracy. Now one booster and one flu shot later ...

See everything as a decision process and see all decision-processes as a game. Certain players favor certain games. https://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm is a useful heuristic because it's simple. In Bartle's model, there are Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers. Every game can be tailored to favor or disfavor certain player types. Games can be biased on two sliders: acting vs interacting and world vs players. This creates four types of games: acting+world, acting+players, interacting+world, interacting+players. Player populations are favored by changing the slider of the game towards conditions that favor them. For example, if you want more Socializers, introduce more features that favor interacting with players while simplifying the world and how much you can do in it. Facebook is a good example.

Also certain player types don't like certain other types. For example, Socializers hate Killers. Over on facebook, the existence of Killers is considered a bug, not a feature. Socializers mostly ignore Explorers---they find them sad---because Explorers are interested in ideas, not other people. They like Achievers because it gives them someone (not something) to talk about. Facebook as such is a place to post achievements, like losing 10 pounds on a diet or taking a selfie in front of a famous building. Facebook algos love anything with "eyes" in it.

And so too will various political systems favor certain players.

But this is where I think it's a liability if the game, which ultimately is a decision process, becomes unbalanced. Because whatever the decision-game is, it will favor certain players. This in turn will make it impossible to reach certain decisions. For example, a game that is fully optimized for Socializers will barely explore, it will barely achieve, and it will barely kill (to avoid being killed). The decision process is optimized for player-interaction. It's difficult to do anything else. To be precise, the limit here or induced blindness is on the orientation-phase of the OODA-loop.

Creating a fully balanced game is hard. It's likely only doable as an ongoing process. The ERE forum is optimized for Explorers but has a sizeable population of Achievers as evident from the networth graphs, etc. Killers used to be tolerated but are no longer. Socializing doesn't work very well in the forum-format; when done anyway, the result looks like spam. However, the popularity of the MMG groups has filled an otherwise unfilled need for socializing.

What is the game here [for ERE]? It is, of course, to figure out how to live well in the 21st century. I don't think the outcome would have been nearly as good if the process had run in a different way, like in a facebook group, or with different player-types, like a consensus group. I say this with some confidence because such groups also exist and I can see what they've done: small variations on known themes that everybody already agrees on.

The problem is how the world is fracturing into many optimized and unbalanced games while not creating a balanced game to decide on the ultimate game of NATURE. I don't have the answer, because as I said, I think it's a process ...

[7Wannabe5]

Maybe the problem with socio-cracy is not the socializers, but rather the “killers” manifested in this context as the “cracy” who kill all participants joy in the process. How about “radical collaboration” instead?

[jacob]

Maybe the problem with socio-cracy is not the socializers, but rather the “killers” manifested in this context as the “cracy” who kill all participants joy in the process.

I don't think so. Sociocracy was invented during the Green era to solve the problem with the usual "meeting-style" consensus process wherein killers will take pleasure in debating and shooting down arguments to score victories, achievers will make points to been seen by their bosses and eventually promoted, and explorers will talk endlessly about nerdy ideas that are either too big or too small for others to care, all of which makes some people and socializers in particular feel unseen. The sociocracy process---it's a step by step process---therefore eliminates all this.

Killers don't get to debate because there is no debate during the process; just a vote on collated concerns.
Explorers don't get to monologue because everybody gets equal time.
Achievers don't get recognized because their individual input is drowned in the collating process.

The result is, as intended, that everybody has "been part of the process" to a much greater extent than the standard "meeting" that may have been dominated by the few who spoke the longest, loudest, or proudest. So from this perspective it's a great idea in theory because it recognizes and values everybody equally.

However, emphasis "every body". Because by setting up the game this way, you get no "exploration" of new ideas or the bigger picture, you get no debate "killing off" weak arguments, and you get no stakeholders because "achievers" don't get to take a risk for a reward. Basically it's the warm bodies that matter, not their ideas or their commitment as these aspects get filtered out and dropped. So the result is a bit like trying to make government policy exclusively based on one of those surveys that ask voters what the top three concerns are this month? "Inflation, terrorism, abortion." The act of making policy then falls on a couple (2-3 max) of so-called tuners who are supposed to turn a spur-of-the-momemt/likely-selfcontradictory ranked list like that into a proposal for a plan. Actually a better example might be asking consumers what they want in a car, and the designers getting handed a list specifying the desire for a car that is "sporty, mpg>40, seats up to 8, easy to park, and has good acceleration". Actually come to think of it, the F35 was probably designed by sociocracy

Overall, the design is optimized for people to fell part of the decision (more so than democracy) which it succeeds in very well ... but in terms of the OODA loop, the cost of the process is that [the automated Decision step and the inclusiveness of the Orientation step] drives away the people who are best qualified for the Observation and Action steps. The design is not optimized for all ideas to be considered, for quick action, or for anyone to be personally invested in the outcome.

It is essentially an unbalanced game. (More unbalanced than the standard "meeting")

How about “radical collaboration” instead?

What kind of game would this be in the context of Bartle?

[7Wannabe5]

I think radical collaboration starts out by favoring explorers and socializers. Instead of starting by narrowing down and combining options towards consensus or compromise, radical collaboration starts out by generating as many outlandish options as can be found within the realm of associated ideations of the entire group.

For instance, for ERE each member of a group might create 2 mind-maps on a 5 minute timer spinning off from central concepts of Living Well and 21st Century. Then more complex ideas would be constructed by putting together trios of related concepts that are 3 degrees out from center of mind-maps, because the 1st and second degree out associations are probably too close to what has already been tried unsuccessfully or to end of usefulness or considered and rejected.

I co-opted and revised this process from “Designing Your Life” by Burnett and Evans.

ETA: Beginning of “game” also favors P over J, because judgment function suppressed until later in process.

[AxelHeyst]

I'm glad you fleshed out your thinking on this Jacob - I think I'm starting to get what you're talking about/where you're coming from now.

While I wouldn't point to any of my experiences as a shining example of effective OODA looping, I think the fact that I spent 12 years working at a green-influenced, sustainability focused company that did engineering design work, means that I've been highly exposed to a culture that was both exploring green ways of valuing everyone's input but also had to actually, like, get things done. In other words, everything we did was an orange-green smoothie, with varying degrees of effectiveness, but the point is that I don't think I ever experienced pure (or even dominant) sociocracy. I also never experienced an environment where it was okay to be a killer. It was mostly explorer and achiever dominant, but with some heavier-than-you'd-expect socializer influence. Something like that, I haven't spent much time on analysis because at the time it was just the water I breathed.

I'm just thinking about it now, because my perspective on sociocracy is something like an nearly-unconscious "well, yeah, duh that doesn't work, but so you just modify the hell out of it and adhoc a process that's balanced and effective and works for your organization's idiosyncracies", which is what we did at work with varying degrees of success for very, very complicated reasons.

[AxelHeyst]

I've found myself sitting out of most intellectual conversations these days for exactly the same reason. The median human tends to have median beliefs, and median beliefs usually lack depth. I started to wonder why exactly I felt the need to point out the massive contradictions in most belief systems when winning the argument never actually lead to me feeling better. Nine times out of ten, you just end up feeling frustrated at best or coming across NOT how you want to come across at worst. I think people have a tendency to lump any criticisms of their frameworks in with "the other side" political opponent because most people operate on tribalism logic and not INTJ-extensive-inner-framework logic.

Ha, yes! Exactly!

@ertyu - really interesting point, I think you're right. It makes me think of the EK axiom 'having is evidence of wanting'. What is it that I'm wanting that's causing me to call in these situations? There's something to that. And... recognizing that desire and being fine with it is helpful in just letting it go.

@animal, thanks for those links, I'll check them out.

[AxelHeyst]

I'm back in the states now. I didn't say anything about it here because I was surprising a couple people, and they read my journal sometimes so I didn't want to spoil it. Here's the story:

Over the past two months, I'd been feeling a greater sense of what I at first called homesickness. I was yearning to get back to Ft Dirtbag, to my desert. The sensation grew in intensity slowly.

My plan, since shortly after breaking up with my GF in Portugal in March, had been to sail back across the Atlantic when I was done traveling.

You can't just sail any old time you like from any old place. To cross the Atlantic westwards, typically people make their way to the Canary Islands in the Fall and then make the crossing to the Caribbean as early as November but more typically in December or January. This is to take advantage of the winds, and to avoid the worst of the storms.

So, in August, I was looking at being at least four months from making it to the Caribbean, and then of course having to find passage to one of the mainlands (N or S America) and then overlanding from there home. A likely arrival back home was February ish.

I realized I wasn't actually looking forward to this. I realized that while I liked the idea of sailing back home, I'm not so sure I was actually into the idea of, y'know, sailing. And it wasn't as simple as just hopping on a boat: I had to travel from Scotland all the way back down to Portugal or Spain, I had to find a boat that didn't suck (and competition for crew positions is stiff) to get me to the Canarys and then across, and then to the mainland, I had to find accommodations in Portugal, the Canarys, the Caribbean, and wherever else, I maybe had to gear up for the passage... there was a lot of logistics involved that I was just not looking forward to. And I really just wanted to get back home and begin work on my own projects.

But I had committed to sailing, primarily because of the carbon footprint of flying, which was massively higher than sailing... right?

So I did a calc. I found a flight from London to Montreal to SFO for about 550 kgco2e.

Then I began assembling the footprint of four months (to be conservative) of what it'd take to get me home sailing.
*I had to travel over 3,000 miles to Portugal or Spain to get connected to a boat (most boats had already gone South from the UK or Northern Europe, to get south of the Bay of Biscay before it got hairy). I used 0.035kgco2e/km for that distance, as well as the distance to overland from the US East Coast to West Coast.
*I had to eat food for four months. I used 1kgco2e/1,000kcals, which is the footprint for a vegan diet. It's likely I'd just eat whatever kind of food the skipper wanted, but again, I was trying to be conservative and not overtip the scales of the calc. I realized that I had a bias, and I wanted this number to be high.
*Obviously when you're sailing under canvas, you aren't burning any fuel. But sometimes the wind dies, and it's the skipper's call to sit and wait or to motor through. I assumed some amount of motoring, based on an average fuel consumption I gleaned from reading cruiser forums. Diesel emits about 10kgco2e/gallon.

I added all the numbers up and I got a grand total of.... about 550kgco2e. It was a wash between flying back and sailing back.

[Of course, my calc involves a lot of assumptions and pure judgement calls about what to include and not include, what numbers to use, etc. There's nothing precise about it, and the person doing the calc (me) carries certain known and unknown biases about what he wants the answer to be, and while he made certain calls in an attempt to balance the impact of these biases, it's impossible for me to say how accurate the number actually is. The point is that I did as good a faith attempt at a calc as I could, and it was in the same ballpark as the footprint for flying. Another point here is that if I were truly dedicated, I could reduce the numbers by hitching transport instead of taking buses and trains, and I could dumpster my food. That's true. But I'm not at that level, honestly, it's not part of my wog, and I didn't possess the stoke to get there in a short amount of time.]

The interesting thing is that as soon as I saw that the footprint for the two options was at least in the same neighborhood and not 10x different like I thought, I got washed in a sense of relief. Oh thank Christ! I don't have to spend the next six months snarling my way back home! I can just get on with my life!

I had that emotional response, and the part of me that observes myself went oh... well that's interesting. I'd been operating under the assumption that I wanted to sail because of the adventure, and the ethics of it, and everthing else. Turns out, I wanted to want to sail... but there's a whole long list of other stuff I want to do more. Spending six months of my time dedicated to spending what would be only something like 5 weeks actually under sail to get home is not a good trade for my intrinsic desires. I wanted to be home, in the desert, building weird stuff and trying to track coyotes or whatever.

I basically just felt done. I had a really good experience at Rubha Phoil in Scotland, and I wanted to take that experience with me directly home and begin applying what I'd learned there. I was worried that six months of stressful travel that I actually wasn't that into would be too great of a dissonance with my time on Rubha Phoil, I'd lose the thread of it.

The thing that clinched it for me was hearing that my parents were having a gathering for Labor Day. My brother and his husband were going to be there and some other family as well, and I thought about this post from waitbutwhy, how there were not that many more gatherings like that I'd have the opportunity to spend with my parents. And especially to know that I was missing it because I was forcing myself to stick to a plan just because I'd Made a Plan, even though I didn't really want to do it and there was no strong ethical case for it anymore... well, to hell with purity.

So, I caught a flight home from London to SFO, hitched a ride with my brothers, and surprised the hell out of my folks. I got out at the gate and let my brothers drive up (the driveway is a quarter mile long. No, it's not like a richie rich estate, it's just a big chunk of desert and the house is behind a hill on the far side from the highway). I snuck through the desert and then knocked on the front door. That far out in the desert, it's not a door that receives very many unanticipated knocks. My dad answered and saw me standing there, having no clue that I'd be home anytime before January. It was awesome.

I'm probably done with traveling overseas. I'm really glad I went, there's no part of my travels that I regret... and I think I'm done with it, probably forever. Being a world traveler is just not that important to me. I liked the way I did it - I learned a lot workawaying at different places, I met a ton of different kinds of people... and I don't want to do it again.

Partly because I just feel done - I learned what I wanted to learn, I explored that path, I won't wonder what it's like anymore because I did it - and partly because you give up a lot of day to day agency to live that way. You cook with what ingredients someone else decided to get, you work on projects someone else decided would be good for you to work on, you live with people someone else decided would be good to let join the group, you sleep in a place someone else decided was fit for a person to sleep in... it's fine for a time, but going along with other people's flow gets old.

If I ever did get the bug to travel again, I think the only way I'd want to do it is some form of self-powered adventure travel. e.g. ride a bicycle from here to Patagonia, or row across the Atlantic. I could see crewhitching as well, but only if that's the point of the trip, e.g. to crewhitch down the Pacific coast and then overland back up, or circumnavigate, or etc. My issue with this trip was that sailing home was merely instrumental, it was a hacked on solution, not an intrinsic part of what I was doing.

For now, the only kind of travel that I'm stoked on is local to the Western US. To walk or bikepack up to Bishop to climb for the fall season, or to hitch to Yosemite, or maybe even to do the PCT, that sort of thing. Otherwise, I'm fully stoked to be home and to cease the wanderings that I've been on since arguably 2016, and establish my home base here on this land, and start to spin up my Project. More on that later.