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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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!