The skills-forward failure mode of ERE
A half baked idea I'm working on. Mostly just new framing for the same themes I ramble about here in my journal. It's kind of a mess, I'll be hammering it into shape in the near future.
I read JMG's Wealth of Nature. He talks about the three economies:
- The Primary economy is non-Human nature. The wealth of nature is the 'services' and products of nature, which includes forest air filtration, fossil fuels (in the ground), biomass, minerals, trees, etc. The input to the Primary economy is basically just sunlight.
- The Secondary economy is the product of human labor, with the wealth of nature as the input. This includes things like food, cars, buildings, clothes, eyeglasses, fossil fuels (at the gas station), solar panels, etc.
- The Tertiary economy is the financial world of symbols and social constructs. Fiat currency exists here (I'm pretty sure), as well as debt, mortgages, bonds, etc. You can't eat anything in the Tertiary economy, although we use the tertiary economy to buy things in the secondary economy.
And then this:
Greer, wealth of nations, epilogue, paraphrasing probably wrote: The secret of monastic traditions success was poverty. The amount of effort you don't put in to maintaining some standard of living can be put in to other things.
And then this:
One way to understand ERE (elephant and the blind men) is that it's a three legged stool of FI stash, practical skills, and social capital, with all three being equal redundant backups to each other. In practice, the most common failure mode is that people focus on the FI stash, and skills and social capital are backups that get the attentional leftovers. You could call this 'financial-forward' ERE. It's also 'tertiary-economy-forward' ERE.
So, one way to frame what I've been driving at with axelERE is that it is Skill-forward ERE, with the FI/financial stash as backup that gets the attentional leftovers. This is a description of a failure-mode of ERE, not some ideal recommendation or new idea. It's just thinking through an emphasis on a different leg of the stool. I think a number of folks around here are skill-forward ERErs, and also maybe a good number of early days folks were as well.
One thing about skillforward ERE is that it really drops emphasis on RE. In fact, it rather explicitly embraces a lifestyle of fruitful labor, with no end in sight. I think it's easy to get into the headspace that if you are FI/RE, you are magically isolated from having to engage in the Secondary economy because you've purchased access to it with your Tertiary wealth. skillforwardERE keeps at least one foot firmly planted in the Secondary economy.
The main thing about skillforwardERE, though, is that it vehemently rejects bullshit jobs, or useless toil (William Morriss). Ongoing bullshit work has no place in it, after the initial FU stash has been built up. To outline the hypersophisticated strategy:
.Get an FU stash by whatever means necessary. 5-10 years CoL bare minimum.
.Stop doing anything that is bullshit, and devote all attention to skills and social capital in the Secondary economy, skills that ideally don't dead end inside industrial consumer society. That is, things that are useful. Gardening, making stuff (that ought to exist), fixing stuff, etc.
.Earn >=1 CoL, incidentally if possible, with as little distraction from skill development as possible if not.
It's easy to write it out, but doing it at the level that I'm thinking about is the rare thing. This is where Greer's point about monasticism resonated with me. When you cut out the stuff you don't need, to a level that most people think is radical, you have an enormous amount of personal resources available to do anything else with.
Most of us develop skills in between jobs, family, non-skill focused hobbies, and doomscrolling. We observe our skill acquisition progress, see it going basically nowhere, and double down on the FI stash because that's realistically the only thing that's going to win us our freedom.
But this is like saving 10% of your income and concluding that retirement is for lucky crypto bros, isn't it? What if we flipped it and put in 4, 6, 12 hours of enjoyable effort into activities that actually build practical skills? And what if we approached with with the thought that it's the only thing that's going to save us?
FIRE is about achieving the freedom from having to w*rk.
The way I'm thinking about it, skillforwardERE is about achieving the freedom from having to participate directly in industrial consumer society. (Yes, complete freedom from industrial consumer society is basically impossible. I'm talking about achieving as much independence from it as possible. I appreciate the nuances here, but let's not get too distracted by that for the moment.)
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This notion of being a super competent badass isn't the point in and of itself, it's a side effect of the strategy of axelERE. The practice... And the principles, are to try to decouple self from ICS (industrial consumer society) a much as possible.
If decoupling is the aim, massive upskilling is required. This gives a more credible Why to skillwork than #renaissanceskillzbro. This is a common trope on theforums - you can find it in my own journal - a sort of vague, unguided hand wavey intention to work on skills of some sort, but it's unfocused.
But make the aim 'decouple my life as much as possible from ICS', which breaks down to 'how to secure the flows necessary to my life without involving ICS', and this gives a more clear direction to it. And 'get hyperskilled' is an emergent attribute.
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TradERE (the FIRE failure mode of ERE) is strategic collapse prep in middle class FIRE drag. It makes sense even to people who don't think everything is going to (or ought to) collapse.
axelERE chucks the drag. It only makes sense to people who think everything is going to, or ought to, collapse, but are unsure as to the specific timing.
TradERE as it is commonly practiced assumes things are going to mostly hold together, but has #skillz as a backup in case the tertiary economy evaporates.
axelERE assumes the tertiary economy is going to evaporate, but maintains a financial wealth portfolio a) in case the economy doesn't evaporate and b) in order to fund the primary focus of postindustrial skill building and system construction (including social support networks). *The primary purpose of the axelERE portfolio is to fund the runway out of industrial civilization; to fund the lifeboat flotilla construction efforts; to fuel the journey all the way to the end of the offramp. To achieve escape velocity, with the knowledge that it might not be possible or likely to achieve escape velocity in one generation.
The portfolio serves to keep the process afloat, the momentum going, through the learning curve and through the inevitable failures. The back to the land and degrowthers and permaculturalist movements are full of stories of people who set off with big dreams bit very thin margins, made inevitable mistakes, and didn't have enough buffer to survive (on their terms; they burnt out and had to go back to industrial consumer society in some way).