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 »

So that's three days of cooking for five person-weeks of food. I'll be on trail for eight to twelve weeks. So sixish days of cooking between now and May 30? Sounds doable. :D Thanks for the recipe link!

Jiimmy
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Jiimmy »

Lots of great advice above!

WRC nailed it on the big cost items. Mostly living it up in town and gear replacements.

To minimize the former, my strategy was to camp less than 10 miles from town so I could arrive in the morning, eat a ton of food, resupply, maybe do laundry, and then get back to the trail early enough to avoid the temptation of a hotel.

For food on the PCT, I went with a low-effort and medium-priced approach. I simply worked with what was available in each trail town, which sometimes meant buying 25,000 calories from a gas station.

I’ve never eaten so much highly processed garbage than I did this summer, but I felt great thanks to all the exercise. Eating healthy seemed much less important than eating enough calories. I did eat fresh foods in town, usually an hour long picnic in front of the grocery store, complete with all the vegetables and fruits I was craving.

I look forward to following along! It’ll be interesting to see how our approaches differ.

OutOfTheBlue
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by OutOfTheBlue »

Food on the trail

You might like the book "A Lipsmackin' Backpackin' - Lightweight, trail-tested recipes for backcountry trips". Some recipes are especially marked with the PCT tag.

One thing that does not get mentioned much is sprouting (lentils or else) on the trail, although I saw it in the vegan/vegetarian cookbook "Another Fork in the Trail". This is nutritious (and protein rich, where most trail-compatible food is generally just heavy on carbs) fresh/living food that you can carry in the dried state, which means it is also very weight-efficient. Can be prepared and stored inside a a bottle, or wet cloth/net hanging on the outside of the backpack. Just requires some watering and is ready to eat after two days. Doesn't require cooking per se and can be eaten raw, combined in a salad (just bring some good sauce material [some oil, vinegar, mustard and salt/pepper, for instance)], or blanched for extra food safety.

Another big one for me is oats. Good calorie to weight ratio. Can be used for cold soaking (especially the instant or quick cooking variety) or fixing a hot meal, and is good both for savory and sweet mixes. Add some flax seeds too, for good measure!

Bulgur and couscous also come to mind as a base. Both work for cold soaking too.

Ultralight

Even if you are not fully ultralight, striving for being light does have advantages. You don't have to walk longer distances, it's just there if you do. Got a lot of value from the "Ultralight Backpackin' Tips" book.

If you are going to buy some new gear, I would suggest also looking at AliExpress. Products ship from China, so they might take more time. There are some good brands making decent UL stuff for less that the usual prices for (UL) gear.

Two examples: 3F UL - https://www.3fultralight.com/ which is respected in the Ultralight community (see Ultralight subreddit), or titanium stuff from Lixada at the price of aluminum stuff from other brands.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by mountainFrugal »

I might also suggest testing many of these meals ahead of time to make sure your gut health is good to go while you have access to your dump station and get the prep dialed in with what gear you will have on hand. Trying food for the first time on trail can be an interesting experience.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Yall are amazing. Thank you for all the information! February is my begin date for serious planning for the walk, so expect more questions on all this then ha.

###
Mooretrees' and her family were here for three nights last week. We dug up and moved the two telephone poles I'm going to use to build a patio structure off the studio, went for a good walk in the mountains, cooked, drank coffee, hung out with my parents, and recorded a conversation for my podcast. It was awesome.

I'm days away from substantial completion of the PV system for our well. I'm really excited to have it installed and running, which will be very gratifying, and also to reduce my obligations and cognitive overhead. After it's done, I'll focus on wrapping up the neighbor's system by end of January. Then I'll have my life mostly back.

I'm not going to drink any alcohol, unless I brew it myself, until the end of April.

2022 is on (in?) the books. Total spending was $10,810. I'll join the four-figure TTM CoL club next month, unless something very odd happens.

Thematically, 2023 is the year of the Solarpunk Polymath. It's when my WoG really begins to noticeably achieve some semblance of dynamic equilibrium, where homeotelicity really starts to become somewhat obvious, and a sense of (dynamic) stability becomes felt. A lot of this has to do with getting my personal shelter, Ft Dirtbag, up and running and more put together the way I like it.

Some desired outcomes for this year that aren't just jargon-talk:
  • .Publish a book
  • .Hike the PCT for a couple months
  • .Ride my bike around a lot
  • .Hit TTM5k (might happen around April or June).
  • .Get my pantry to 6months with ample nutrition, not merely 6months of calories
  • .Get the studio 'done', meaning windows in, patio built, seismic bracing complete, storage done, interior trim and finish work done, 'heating' system done (which might be just the windows, but could include a solar thermal panel and thermal storage tank)
  • .Stretch goal: build the bathhouse/sunken greenhouse.
  • .Host ERE Fest 2023 (September?)
  • .Related to that, spin up a system/set of rules so I can have an open-door policy for ERE folk here on the land, in a way that's easy for everyone and not disruptive. Something like Boyle's Happy Pig free hostel, or rather an MVP first draft of something in that direction.

###
My writing project (shoutout to the Fiction MMG) is going well, and also twisting under my grasp. The premise of my project is that 40yo me travels back in time to my 25yo self to give him some advice. (I'm 36 now, so I'm doing some light fictive imagining of what I'll be like in another couple years).

(I have no expectations that anyone will, like, read this thing. It's something I've just got to write, and I need to write it now. After it is finished, I've got an idea for a 'real' fiction project that I'd like to make interesting to more than just myself.)

I wrote a rough draft of approximately what I want that conversation between my selves to look like. And then I dug up my journals from 2010, 11, and 12, to make sure my memory of where my head was at when I was 25 was accurate.

:shock:

I was SO. CLOSE. to cracking the basic praxis of ERE then. I want to reach back in time and shake myself, which I suppose is the whole premise of my project. But seriously guys, if someone had just off-handedly mentioned... I don't know, something about compound interest, or something, or actually probably just pointed me at any one of the many people living below $10k, and suggested I run a spreadsheet sim on my own life for kicks, I think I would have basically gotten it and been able to take it pretty far. The fact that the ERE book existed then and I didn't know about it is infuriating. That's one of the reasons I started blogging and podcasting, is so that people like my 25yo self would have a better chance of running across these ideas.

The thing is that 2011 was an opportunity year, a year when ERE activation energy was very low. Because I was single that year. I would have taken ERE praxis and ran with it. Very likely, I would have gained ERE praxis momentum and not gotten off on the tangent I did get off on for the next many years.

The reason I didn't do anything with ERE in 2017 when I first read it is that I was at the bottom of a well of my codependent, dysfunctional relationship (that ended in late 2017. Different person than DGF when I started my forum journal here in 2020). I couldn't see my way out, or rather, I intuited that I couldn't do anything substantial with my life until I 'solved' my relationship issues, which were entirely personal issues (North subpersonality, in Plotkin terms).

Anyways, back in 2011, I was writing in my journal about cutting my CoL super low, leaving the city, quitting my job, doing my own thing. Honestly, what I was dreaming about then is a lot what my life looks like now. I just couldn't connect the dots, AND...

...I was codependently enmeshed with my job. I found an entry where I decided that since my goal was to save the world, which was dysfunctional, and I happened to be working at a company that was also dysfunctional, I might as well 'warm up' with that company.

Yes, I set as a goal for myself as a junior engineer to unfuck the dysfunction of that organization as a sort of preparatory learning exercise for my Life's Work. :shock: I'd forgotten that I had that attitude towards work. Not only did I think the work there might be important, I conceptualized my 'work' *also* as the work of 'fixing' the company.

(In retrospect, this explains why when I was invited to give a technical presentation to the senior leadership of the company at the annual leadership conference in 2012, a room of about 40 directors, managing principals, and the C-suite, I instead gave them a presentation where I said for the love of god you guys please introduce some kind of project management training or fucking something, because this technology I was becoming an expert on couldn't make up for the total lack of management competence we had at every level of the organization. It actually went over well, all things considered.)

I now see this all as a manifestation of the depth and subtlety of my codependence/North Sub Stuff, by which I mean I sought validation and self-worth through fixing and rescuing... anything. I had an internal belief that I was only worthy of love if I helped/fixed other people/things, if I made myself useful. It makes me wonder how much of what I thought/think of as my Life's Work is just codep shit? And how can I accurately discern the difference between healthy, balanced North stuff and unhealthy North Sub stuff?

This uncertainty is one reason (among several) why I'm so internally focused at the household system level these days. I'm distrustful of my own motivations for exerting my will on the external world. I suspect that to the extent I act out of unhealthy North Sub (codep) behavior patterns, whatever actions I do take are at high risk of causing unintentional harm.

(And let us not forget the codep pattern of keeping the addict/broken person in a state of needing help, because if the addict/broken person becomes whole, then the codep's source of validation and proof of worth dries up. The classic pattern is the codep person both sacrifices the majority of their life-force into rescuing the addict/broken person, while at the same time arranging things such that the addict/broken person never recovers/heals/becomes whole. How might this manifest at the level of working on 'fixing' world-system dysfunctional? Whoa. I'm getting vibes for a character arc in a dystopian cli-fi project...)

Because of all this internal shit I'm still working through, I don't trust myself to work on/exert my will upon the world outside the bounds of my household system. In a similar way to how I don't trust myself to enter into another relationship (aka get a gf). I'm not willing to risk losing myself yet again.

It's hard to read about the ambitions I had when I was 25, with the knowledge of how my internal stuff caused me to just repeatedly smash my forehead into the brick wall of 'the world' for a solid decade while spiraling into a recursive hole of codep dysfunction. Poor fucker didn't really even have a chance.

Anyways, all that ^ is causing me to go back and give a second hard think about what my writing project is really about. Yes, on the surface it's about my 40yo self trying to save my 25yo self a solid decade by giving him the 'cheat code' of ERE praxis. But how to save my youngSelf from the sucking wormhole of codep shit? Is it just that I need to essentially hand myself the ERE book and the Plotkin book? Make him see his ambitions through the framework of seeking validation and self-worth in the wrong places?

And, further, how common is this issue? How many other people out there are hauling ass trying to save the world mostly because it's the only way they intuitively know how keep the actual barrel out of their actual mouths?

Because... because if there are a ton of people trying to save the world who are codependently motivated... how does the codependent's tendency to sabotage real positive change play out at the macro scale? What if a big slice of the people working on saving the world have a deep psychological need to keep the world in a state of needing to be saved? Does this partially explain why so many sustainability professionals get precisely fucking nowhere? And why so many people seem to have a raging hardon for how fucked the world is?

Just wondering out loud here.

Ahem. Well. There's my ray of sunshine contribution to getting 2023 kicked off right. Happy new year!

ertyu
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by ertyu »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Wed Jan 04, 2023 10:50 am
Because... because if there are a ton of people trying to save the world who are codependently motivated... how does the codependent's tendency to sabotage real positive change play out at the macro scale? What if a big slice of the people working on saving the world have a deep psychological need to keep the world in a state of needing to be saved? Does this partially explain why so many sustainability professionals get precisely fucking nowhere? And why so many people seem to have a raging hardon for how fucked the world is?
It's probably half this and half how sociopaths' intentions are undivided and unriddled with contradiction and thus probably incredibly powerful -- when you undividedly and monolithically want to win, come out on top, and benefit yourself, you probably do end up manifesting exactly that -- especially when adverse outcomes for the world/others are evidence that you won and you were righteous to win because if your adversaries accept this outcome, they deserve it(*)

(*) sourse: convo w an actual sociopath. dude's family owned a factory in china. dude was fully aware of exactly how bleak the lives of his workers were. his take? if they accept it, they deserve it (and i deserve to profit off of them). the fact that he could exploit and oppress was part of the win, not in a joyful glee way but in a calm "this mirrors my inherent superiority" way.

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Slevin
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Slevin »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Wed Jan 04, 2023 10:50 am

Because of all this internal shit I'm still working through, I don't trust myself to work on/exert my will upon the world outside the bounds of my household system. In a similar way to how I don't trust myself to enter into another relationship (aka get a gf). I'm not willing to risk losing myself yet again.
Can you start trying to help other people out, but also create a task of writing something like "check in on if I've had any codependent behaviors" in your GTD dailies / tasks or whatever and make it part of your weekly review to double check in whether you've acted that way? And I don't want to pretend to be an expert on you from just our interactions or anything, but from reading your journal / blog and interacting with you in the MMG's and such, you don't really seem like the kind of guy who would make the same mistake over and over again once you realize what the issue / problematic pattern is.

ertyu
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by ertyu »

i am someone who has a tendency to withdraw so my issues don't get triggered and i find im fine when withdrawn, but then the fact that i've stayed withdrawn hasn't by itself sorted out anything. the moment i return to whatever it was, im triggered in the same way again. what fixes it is, you return to the thing that triggers you, you get triggered, you NOTICE it instead of sleepwalking through it this time, and you say, "ah, there it is, that thing" and you breathe in and out and let go. and you move on.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Co-Dependence is a thing. The worst example I ever read about was a woman who for some psychological reason literally couldn't get off the toilet, and her boyfriend who kept bringing her food, so her butt grew into the toilet seat. That said, I think, along with Narcissistic, it is likely the most over-used term in the realm of self-help pop psychology. Compassion and Interdependence are positive aspects of reality that shouldn't be thrown out with the bathwater.

Western Red Cedar
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Western Red Cedar »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Wed Jan 04, 2023 10:50 am
###
My writing project (shoutout to the Fiction MMG) is going well, and also twisting under my grasp. The premise of my project is that 40yo me travels back in time to my 25yo self to give him some advice. (I'm 36 now, so I'm doing some light fictive imagining of what I'll be like in another couple years).

(I have no expectations that anyone will, like, read this thing. It's something I've just got to write, and I need to write it now. After it is finished, I've got an idea for a 'real' fiction project that I'd like to make interesting to more than just myself.)

I wrote a rough draft of approximately what I want that conversation between my selves to look like. And then I dug up my journals from 2010, 11, and 12, to make sure my memory of where my head was at when I was 25 was accurate.

:shock:

I was SO. CLOSE. to cracking the basic praxis of ERE then. I want to reach back in time and shake myself, which I suppose is the whole premise of my project. But seriously guys, if someone had just off-handedly mentioned... I don't know, something about compound interest, or something, or actually probably just pointed me at any one of the many people living below $10k, and suggested I run a spreadsheet sim on my own life for kicks, I think I would have basically gotten it and been able to take it pretty far. The fact that the ERE book existed then and I didn't know about it is infuriating. That's one of the reasons I started blogging and podcasting, is so that people like my 25yo self would have a better chance of running across these ideas.

The thing is that 2011 was an opportunity year, a year when ERE activation energy was very low. Because I was single that year. I would have taken ERE praxis and ran with it. Very likely, I would have gained ERE praxis momentum and not gotten off on the tangent I did get off on for the next many years.

The reason I didn't do anything with ERE in 2017 when I first read it is that I was at the bottom of a well of my codependent, dysfunctional relationship (that ended in late 2017. Different person than DGF when I started my forum journal here in 2020). I couldn't see my way out, or rather, I intuited that I couldn't do anything substantial with my life until I 'solved' my relationship issues, which were entirely personal issues (North subpersonality, in Plotkin terms).

Anyways, back in 2011, I was writing in my journal about cutting my CoL super low, leaving the city, quitting my job, doing my own thing. Honestly, what I was dreaming about then is a lot what my life looks like now. I just couldn't connect the dots, AND...
Interesting premise for a writing project! One question you might want to mull over is whether much of the professional and personal adversity was, in fact, necessary to lead to a more enriching life? Even if 25 year old Axel had all of the intellectual pieces of the puzzle, would he be able to put them all together in practical fashion?

I learned about Roth IRAs and compound interest when I was 17, but didn't start investing until my early 30's - and it wasn't because I lacked funds in my teens and twenties.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Wed Jan 04, 2023 10:50 am
Anyways, all that ^ is causing me to go back and give a second hard think about what my writing project is really about. Yes, on the surface it's about my 40yo self trying to save my 25yo self a solid decade by giving him the 'cheat code' of ERE praxis. But how to save my youngSelf from the sucking wormhole of codep shit? Is it just that I need to essentially hand myself the ERE book and the Plotkin book? Make him see his ambitions through the framework of seeking validation and self-worth in the wrong places?

And, further, how common is this issue? How many other people out there are hauling ass trying to save the world mostly because it's the only way they intuitively know how keep the actual barrel out of their actual mouths?

Because... because if there are a ton of people trying to save the world who are codependently motivated... how does the codependent's tendency to sabotage real positive change play out at the macro scale? What if a big slice of the people working on saving the world have a deep psychological need to keep the world in a state of needing to be saved? Does this partially explain why so many sustainability professionals get precisely fucking nowhere? And why so many people seem to have a raging hardon for how fucked the world is?
From a purely writing and characterization perspective, I would focus on the problem in a character's life that codependency solves and where that problem came from. Is the character afraid of being alone? Does the character have an unhealthy attachment pattern? Is the character trying to take on the weight of the world themselves? Are they trying to lose themselves in a relationship to escape themselves? Why are they doing that? What type of internal emotional landscape might cause someone to behave in that way? What factors in their personal history lead up to this moment? How can a character learn to fulfill that emotional need in a healthier way through the course of the story?

Of course, for something that is a purely autobiographical memoir, these questions may be redundant. A principle of fiction is to exaggerate the features about a character you want to come across to a reader in your theme, which is something you may not want to do for autobiography. But if you were to use this character flaw in your novel project, this may be one way to approach it.

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Ego
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Ego »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Wed Jan 04, 2023 10:50 am
And, further, how common is this issue? How many other people out there are hauling ass trying to save the world mostly because it's the only way they intuitively know how keep the actual barrel out of their actual mouths?
This is a metaphor rather than where you truly find yourself, right? It goes without saying, but if not, then every other project should be pushed aside until this one is resolved.
AxelHeyst wrote:
Wed Jan 04, 2023 10:50 am
Because... because if there are a ton of people trying to save the world who are codependently motivated... how does the codependent's tendency to sabotage real positive change play out at the macro scale? What if a big slice of the people working on saving the world have a deep psychological need to keep the world in a state of needing to be saved?
The first step in medicalizing a human condition is to give it a name. There are psychological conditions that are common in individuals and can sometimes present in society as a whole. Alternatively there are sociological dysfunctions that are common in societies but rarely present in individuals.

There is a profit in treating individual so we tend to name extremely rare psychological conditions but leave the extremely common sociological condition unnamed.

Munchausen syndrome by proxy is an excellent example. When applied to society it is exactly what you describe. And it is everywhere.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Slevin wrote:
Fri Jan 06, 2023 12:30 am
Can you start trying to help other people out, but also create a task of writing something like "check in on if I've had any codependent behaviors" in your GTD dailies / tasks or whatever and make it part of your weekly review to double check in whether you've acted that way? And I don't want to pretend to be an expert on you from just our interactions or anything, but from reading your journal / blog and interacting with you in the MMG's and such, you don't really seem like the kind of guy who would make the same mistake over and over again once you realize what the issue / problematic pattern is.
Recognizing/being aware of codependent behavior is a real-time check. Every single micro-event I'm engaged in gets examined with a "is this codep behavior?" question.

I don't make the same mistakes over and over again... I make new mistakes that are on-theme as I go deeper and deeper into (or out of?) the rabbit hole. Out of. I'm crawling OUT of the rabbit hole. So the landscape is different, and I'm having to learn it as I go.
7Wannabe5 wrote:
Fri Jan 06, 2023 10:31 am
Compassion and Interdependence are positive aspects of reality that shouldn't be thrown out with the bathwater.
Bingo! Except, if this were as simple as having a volume of water that there happened to be a baby in, and needing to do one thing with the water and another thing with the baby, I wouldn't still be yammering to myself about it. It's more like... a triple-braided cord, one line is codep, one is interdependence, and another is compassion. They're all braided together, and they look really similar. My task is to unbraid the cord, take out the codep line, and rebraid the cord. Solve and coagula. I've done this to a LOT of length of cord. There's just... more, is all.
Western Red Cedar wrote:
Fri Jan 06, 2023 11:41 am
Interesting premise for a writing project! One question you might want to mull over is whether much of the professional and personal adversity was, in fact, necessary to lead to a more enriching life? Even if 25 year old Axel had all of the intellectual pieces of the puzzle, would he be able to put them all together in practical fashion?


Yeah, that's one of the themes / issues I'm trying to wrestle with here. I always seem to learn lessons the hard and long way, and I fantasize about being able to learn lessons a little more efficiently. But I really don't know. I don't actually super regret that decade of my life, lots of great and rich things happened, and if a real genie gave me the chance at a do-over I doubt I'd take him up on it.
AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Fri Jan 06, 2023 11:50 am
From a purely writing and characterization perspective, I would focus on the problem in a character's life that codependency solves and where that problem came from. Is the character afraid of being alone? Does the character have an unhealthy attachment pattern? Is the character trying to take on the weight of the world themselves? Are they trying to lose themselves in a relationship to escape themselves? Why are they doing that? What type of internal emotional landscape might cause someone to behave in that way? What factors in their personal history lead up to this moment? How can a character learn to fulfill that emotional need in a healthier way through the course of the story?

Of course, for something that is a purely autobiographical memoir, these questions may be redundant. A principle of fiction is to exaggerate the features about a character you want to come across to a reader in your theme, which is something you may not want to do for autobiography. But if you were to use this character flaw in your novel project, this may be one way to approach it.
Yeah, great questions. I guess I haven't decided yet if I'm going to take this project in the direction of a memoir that's got a novel-suit on, or a novel that's got some autobiographical elements to it. For now I'm just writing as 'True' as I can, and I'll revise/modify to suit. But, either way, I'm finding all of the 'character exploration' tools of the writers trade to be super fascinating. And helpful for me in the process of thinking through my life.
Ego wrote:
Fri Jan 06, 2023 2:32 pm
This is a metaphor rather than where you truly find yourself, right? It goes without saying, but if not, then every other project should be pushed aside until this one is resolved.
It's a description of a place I was in many years ago, that scared the bejesus out of me, that I hauled myself out of, and learned how to keep myself out of. So it's a behavior that was adopted to avoid some unattractive outcome, that became habitual, and I'm so far removed from whatever that problem was that it's hard to remember why I started doing the behavior in the first place.

There are two actions one can take: addressing the root issue, and learning new behaviors to help interrupt old patterns of behavior that no longer serve.

If I address the root issue of misplaced locus of self-worth, great, but I might still manifest habituated behavior patterns that made sense for the old version of myself. I've got to do both, I think.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

(switching to Sunday as my update day)
Vicki Robin wrote:Don't throw money at it. Throw competence at it.
Vicki Robin interview on Nate Hagens podcast.

Current habits/experiment: #nobooze till late April

Last Week's ERE Thing:
I finished up my annual personal report.

This Week's ERE Thing:
I scraped all the various manifestos I wrote going back to 2014. I'm going to read all of them and draft 2023's Manifesto, finish it, post it, make it the appendix to my annual report, and archive the thing. I'm going to tidy up the semiERE definition I posted in JnG's journal and put it in my report too.

##Moneystuff / semiERE stats
ttmCoL: $10,810
coreCOL: $5,000
NW: 11.3*ttmCoL | 24.4*coreCoL
FU (aka Total Current Assets aka Tiers 1-3): 3.29*ttmCoL | 7.1*coreCoL
Income: 1.5*coreCoL ish.
ttmNetProfit: -$3,000.
Time spent last week on remunerative activities: 8+12=20 (guesstimate. Planning on tracking this a little better in the future).
Time spent last week on remunerative activities that wasn't meaningful to me, or was otherwise objectionable, or I was purely doing for the money: 0hrs. Or maybe 4, if I'm being anal about it. But it was a pretty nice week on this front.


##Bodystuff
Fed up with not consistently working out. I'm rebooting the r/BWF recommended routine this week.
I'm active enough to not feel the need to do any single-purpose activity in the direction of cardio. I walk a lot and will be on the bike a lot soon too. It's the mobility and strength stuff I'm sucking at rn. My excuse is it's cold... but the studio is so tiny I just need to do like seven burpees in it and I'm warm enough to take my shirt off.

##Peoplestuff
Had DBFF and fam up yesterday. Went for a walk in the mountains and channeled some Jon Young coyote guide stuff with the kids. Made plans to do a trip out to death valley in a few weeks, since I learned the kids had never been. wtf!

Made an apple crisp and cooked the main meal for 8 with mom. Told her I had fun, and let's plan on cooking together at least once a week. I've been trying to think how to spend more quality time with mom, as dad and I get adequate time in because we're both in the shop often. We're all 'doing'-oriented quality time people, so spending time in the kitchen with her makes a lot of sense. Multiple pos first and second order effects, no neg effects since time = time with mom which is the largest pos first order yield.

##Buildstuff
Well PV system is at 98%. Just waiting on a couple lugs to come in, then I can fire it up and see if the thing works.
Turning my attention to the neighbors PV system. It's close to done as well. I'm aiming to have both of these projects done by end of Jan.
Shelving my own projects until these are done. Single-projecting is way better for my mental health, I think.

##Logisticsstuff
Rebooting weekly planning and timeblock planning practices. Several projects and habits have languished in part I think because of my recent lack of a consistent daily/weekly scale planning system. Some paperwork stuff, plus the physical training. We'll see how it goes.

##Brainstuff
I re-signed up for Readwise, in part because they just launched the Reader app. Getting better at dropping into world-events-information-flows is part of my initiatives for this year. I dumped a bunch of feeds into it and am still getting oriented.
I haven't zettelkasten'd a damn thing in over a month... bah. Again, I blame the cold, lack of daily/weekly planning, and my electrical system being crippled while it's cloudy and sun goes down early. Lame excuses, but also, a lot of this stuff is going to be easier once Ft Dirtbag is a bit more set up.

##Writingstuff
Changing blogging frequency to once a month.
Writing project is going well. Someone in the writing MMG commented that there was a character arc story for young axel, old axel, and writer axel (the process of writing this thing about two versions of myself changing each other, is changing me). Nailed it.

sodatrain
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by sodatrain »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Thu Dec 29, 2022 1:31 am

These are my personal insights.
1. At the moment I don’t believe in the possibility of long term financial security over my lifetime. Medium term is about the longest planning horizon that makes sense to me, three to ten years. Beyond that, my confidence that just because I have some multiple of CoL saved means I’ve got financial security out beyond 10, 15, 40 years, doesn't add up to me. Hence, I don't believe in making a life-energy opportunity cost sacrifice now to reach some number that I think will mean I won't ever run out of money... because I don't believe such a number exists. Therefore, FI as traditionally understood is not a goal of my WoG, although it's possible it will be an effect.
*sorry if this is too much of a thread hijack*

Is this to say that you don't have confidence in a traditional tax-deferred retirement accounts (401k, 403b, IRA etc)?

I'm new to this but I can't help but feel moderate concern about the bulk of my NW in my IRA given the climate, economic, and political situation in the the US and around the world. Do I withdraw it and use it to build* some passive/rental income? Do I contribute to the system to at least get my employers match? Do I max out the deposits while I'm still riding my "career' job? (I"m 45 and just starting ERE, IRA's are $150K).

*build a small rental casita or two in Central America. Maybe $45K to build, and get $500-$1000 / month per. Real Estate can take a looong time to sell in my area. But there is demand for long and short term rentals.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

sodatrain wrote:
Sun Jan 15, 2023 12:10 am
Is this to say that you don't have confidence in a traditional tax-deferred retirement accounts (401k, 403b, IRA etc)?
I'm not confident that traditional retirement accounts *will* fail. I lack confidence that they *won't* fail sometime in the next 40-60 years (I'm 36). My uncertainty is high. Who knows what Events will happen between 2023 and 2061, or 2081 even, if I make it to 95yo? I'm not comfortable going all-in on "nothing bad enough to nuke trad retirement accounts is going to happen between now and 2081."

That doesn't mean that I'm going to do something weird with all of my money. Maybe nothing that bad will happen. Who knows? Not I. So, I'm going to leave enough in conventional-ish financial vehicles that if nothing bad happens, I'll have a sweet pile of money. I'm hedged against collapse not happening.

My primary goals at the moment are to
1) Invest in skills, relationships, physical infrastructure, etc, such that if some retirement-account-nuking Event does happen (but the world didn't go totally Cormac McCarthy on me) then I'll be as well off as can be expected, and
2) Avoid 'wasting' my time pursuing the illusion of financial security when that's all it is. This is the big thing keeping me from even thinking more than five minutes about going back to FTE. I see the risk of the result ("financial security for life because 2.7%SWR!!") getting flushed down the toilet as too high, and the benefit too low. My life is pretty dope without a 2xbigger pile of cash than I already have, so, nah.

That said, if I were in a W-2 FTE at this moment, I'd be 401k matched and HSA'd to the max. It's too good to pass up, and you can get at that money soon enough with Roth rollovers and such if you decide to do something else with it. Put another way, if I hadn't gotten laid off in 2021, my current strategy would be "work FTE until 3% SWR (or whatever) then quit". For me, that quit date milestone would be sometime this year, maybe even last year.

When thinking about security, I think there are two poles that people get attracted to.

Pole #1: If I make enough money and invest it, I'll always have enough money to buy toilet paper.

Pole #2: If I cancel my 401k match, I can use that surplus to build a shipping container bunker in the Upper Peninsula and fill it with several tons of mylar-sealed, insect and rodent-proof toilet paper and never run out for the next three hundred years.

The trouble with these poles is that if their predictions are wrong, they're hosed. If the world gets into a real "...only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten" scenario, the pole #1 people will die first, with soiled bums, presumably. But if nothing too terrible happens, the pole #2 people will have spent their whole lives in a hole in the ground typing paranoid stuff onto fringe forums on the internet, and missed out on a bunch of the best parts of being human. (Weirdly, they will die disappointed that nothing Terrible ever happened.)

ERE is about not having to be right for things to be all right. It's about building a life system where if the world goes to hell, well, you're less worse off than others (and are in a position to lend a hand rather than need a hand, potentially). If the world doesn't go to hell, cool, you'll die rich by reasonable global-perspective standards, having lived a rich and interesting life doing meaningful stuff.

That statement you quoted is just part of my meandering path to figuring out how precisely I want to build my own impossible-to-lose system. I'm sure this was way more response than necessary, but... it's my journal so I get to word vomit here. :D

PS I welcome, nay, I encourage, all hijacks in my journal, with the exception of sportsball hijacks. IDGAF about sportsball.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Last Week's ERE Thing:
Draft 2023 Manifesto and put it up. Here it is. Goal was: brevity!
Finish and archive my 2022 annual report. Done.

This Week's ERE Thing:
Get my FU stash more sorted. Close down old garbage savings accounts, move into HYSA and CDs, and define what my next action-trigger is (I'll have some holes in my maturation ladder, so some specific events will trigger plugging those holes).

Lifestyle Experiment: #nobooze is easy. I'm considering making this the first full year I don't drink anything. The most I've done in the past is 6 months.

#moneystuff
90% probability of getting a freelance gig doing 3d design drawing stuff I'm actually qualified to do. Would be a month's worth of work spread over two months and I'd make 3xCoL. I'm cautiously psyched about it. Would put me way up in the "Yeah don't even think about money till 2025" zone. And in short intense bursts, I enjoy that kind of work.

#Bodystuff
Did 3xBWF workout's, 1xYoga.
I had the epiphany that I don't want to work out to be healthy or strong enough to actually work out consistently.

I want to work out to be jacked. That's my activation-energy motivation. That gets me to work out, and then I get stronger and feel stronger and more energetic and etc and it's like damn this is great I'll keep doing this. But it's the hardbod thing that gets me to show up in the first place. I think I was resisting this as shallow etc... which it is... but whatever, it works, and trying to want to work out for the 'right' reasons wasn't. So, whatever, fuck it, I'm vain.

#Peoplestuff
Pretty solo this week. Made plans to go see Umphreys McGee end of Feb and hang out with friends up north a bit. Going to the Sac show then maybe up into the mountains. Anyone else going?

#Buildstuff
Researched bifacial PV Panel ground mount design, did first pass design model for neighbor's system.
Image
Oiled my gusset plates (heh).

#Logistics
I made a timeblock plan for last week and stuck to it. It went really well. Got a lot done, including several tasks that'd just been sitting in my todo list.

I made a WoG that actually kind of works I think! The missing piece was Prezi because you can 'stick' line handles to text boxes. So when you move the text box, the line handle sticks with it. Brilliant. That's all I need.

#CreativeProduction and Advanced Retroadaptics Media Empire Building
I randomly decided to make a podcast/video just reading out my monthly blog post. It was actually fun... and I got psyched to make the next one suck less. Making video that doesn't suck is arguably a basic form of literacy today, so I'm going to stick with it this year to get my competence up.

#ADVstuff
Found a UGQ 20F UL quilt for 200$ to my door on ebay and snagged it. MSRP is 365, so about 400$ to my door. Nice.
I think I'm going to sew my own bivvy, and possibly DIY a tarptent as well. That'll be my shelter node for the PCT as well as bikepacking sorted.
Planning on making my own pack now as well... I was reading these UL nerds are walking around with 7lb baseweights. :shock: I think my empty pack weighs at least 7lbs, so, all right, let's do this.

sodatrain
Posts: 133
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by sodatrain »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Sun Jan 15, 2023 6:22 pm

Draft 2023 Manifesto and put it up. Here it is. Goal was: brevity!

Wow. This is amazing. 8-) I absolutely love it. I need to review it a bit more carefully, but you said a lot of what I am thinking and you did a much better job at saying it than I could have.

theanimal
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by theanimal »

Curious why you chose the bifacial panels for your neighbor's PV array. I have bifacial for my system and they work excellent, but really only when the roof has snow (they are roof mounted). Is there something similar there? Are you using/making anything to get more reflection on the back side?

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

@soda, thank you. To be fair, I have been revising that document since 2012, so, I'm a few iterations deep. :lol:

@animal, to be honest, they were the best deal in terms of nominal watts/$ from the source I was looking at. And by nominal I mean, without any backfacing production. So I said, heck, fine, let's do it, whatever I get from backfacing is bonus production. They will be ground mounted over sand, which isn't as good as snow but pretty good reflectance, and I'm thinking of spreading a layer of light colored gravel.

My reading indicated that bifacial does best on ground mounts where they're off away from the ground a bit. Typical roof mounts have only a few inches between the panel and roof, so they'd get very little or no backfacing production. Your panels, however...

Image

Have a different radiant geometry, since they're not tight and parallel to the roof. Without snow, most of their radiant exposure is to the trees with a little bit of exposure to the top of your roof line. So it seems to make sense that they're not producing much from behind without snow. I'll be interested to see how my neighbors panels do over the sand. I'll report back.

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