Re: The Education of Axel Heyst
Posted: Sun Sep 05, 2021 11:48 am
Currently in Bend, OR, killing time until my covid test comes in and then I’ll ride up to hang out with @Mooretrees. The smoke is gnar (I can *taste* it). I’m sleeping in a tent in the forest outside town, coming in to cafes for internet, hanging out in the park, reading a lot of books. I’m on my motorcycle, starting point was near Death Valley, end point will be near the Washington border. I did most of the route along the Pacific Coast Highway, which was beautiful. After last weekend, a lot of the campsites along the coast were full up with Calder Fire evacuees from Tahoe. I rode past a few empty lots with signs that said “Free Parking For Fire Refugees”. Last time I came this way was early June, before delta had taken off, and most places were “if you’re vaxxed, no masks required”, half the places didn’t give a shit one way or the other, and the pandemic seemed to be winding down. Now, *every* place I’ve been through is strict about masking up. The difference is obvious.
The Renaissance Report
August was as weird month. I finished my 2-month road trip with DGF, and then rode down to my parent’s place to housesit for them while they RV’d around the US. It was quite hot (105F by 10am typically) and the second half of the month was quite smoky (visibility <1mile).
At the end of the month I went up north to a good friend’s wedding, which was amazing. Dancing, partying till dawn, camping, hanging by the river, it was a much needed relief from the solitude of home and also a much needed emotional re-connection with all of my solid friends, many of whom I hadn’t seen since 2019.
Physiological
I did my exercise routine on cruise control consistently the whole month. The goal was just to cast consistent votes for being the sort of person who exercises every day, including mobility and pre-hab stuff.
My ankle still comes and goes with pain. Being barefoot most of the time is definitely helping, but it's annoying that the pain comes and goes. Docs say "wear a brace", which doesn’t help.
I’m now in a situation where sleeping on lumpy dirt on my z-lite results in a better nights sleep than a mattress on flat bed springs. And I use either a lumped-up shirt, or my dromedary as a pillow. The dromedary is *lux*.
Intellectual
I re-looked in to Zettelkasten, and am going to implement it (using Obsidian probably) in September. It appears to be an excellent complement to GTD, which doesn’t have much to say on *knowledge* collection and organization (GTD is about doing stuff/actions, somewhat obviously).
Emotional
Oh wow. I've been getting some work done on deeper and deeper layers of my codependent tendencies, and thinking through how codep is a way of avoiding owning and acting on who I am as a person, which gets down to a deep belief that I'm not worthy of love, not worthy of being who I actually am.
I'm realizing just how introverted I am, and I'm starting to acknowledge how certain things affect me and what my boundaries are. I'm seeing how certain things effect my mental health, and starting to grapple with the perspective that it's okay for me to do what I have to do to manage that, even if it’s not what other people want to hear.
The introverted thing is pretty easy. I'm just becoming more and more comfortable saying things like "I need to be alone this evening / this weekend", and I'm also finding myself comfortable saying things like "I know I said I would go on this trip, but life threw me some unexpected circumstances and my "people" bucket is overflowing. I'd just go into a coma if I attended, so I'm not going to go."
Another angle is my misophonia. For those new to the idea, certain sounds trigger my fight-or-flight response - my frustration/anger/panic nodes just go off the charts. It's not like nails on chalkboard. It's like sound-induced road rage. You know when something happens, and you get stuck in a loop fantasizing about mortal danger, and how you'll react? And your body gets pumped full of chemicals, your blood pounds, you grit your teeth, your fists ball up, and you can't concentrate on anything besides flight, violence, or both? It's similar to when I get stuck in a rumination about how I would act if DGF and I were ever in a situation where she was threatened with fatal sexual violence (and me, by extension, collateral or incidental fatal violence). That's *sort of* what I experience when I hear a trigger sound. And it takes a while to come down, maybe 30 minutes, because my mind plays the trigger sound in a loop, what I call trigger echos. And if I'm exposed to the same trigger sound from the same source enough times, I set up an aversion pattern to the source. For example, I'm uncomfortable in my parent's living room because my dad frequently and unpredictably snacks there. I also am uncomfortable generally around people I know to randomly chew gum, snack, chew their nails, or sniffle when they have allergies instead of blowing their noses. It's the random reward motivation thing, except in reverse.
At any rate, I've only recently come to grips with the fact that as much as I wish misophonia weren't part of who I am, it is, and I might as well stop pretending it isn't. So I have earplugs in a cylinder on my keychain, I'll use fans for white noise as necessary, and I'm comfortable simply explaining to people what's up and that if I suddenly get up and walk away, that's what's going on. I no longer try to force myself to whiteknuckle through it, because it's bad for me as well as the people around me.
--
I'm reading Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, and it’s extremely resonant. I need to finish it before writing more, but it’s definitely relevant to my ideas about motivation, purpose, belief, values, etc.
Economic
//Investing//
I realized that in a lot of investing writing, I'll come across statements like "don't do X, you'll get clobbered! you'll lose your shirt" and what I thought they meant was "you'll end up with less money than you put in". Often, what they actually mean is "your portfolio will perform y% worse than if you did this other thing instead." The trick of course is that sometimes what they mean is, indeed, you'll lose a lot of money. But it took me a while to know that I had to look to distinguish between losing money = making less than your neighbor and when losing money = having less than you started with at the end. Basically, I learned that a lot of investment writing assumes that your goal is to maximize returns. But my goal is to avoid portfolio failure. Reading in between the lines is important.
I've also started to read things like "if you can't handle being at a cocktail party and hear about your friends who are at the moment doing better than you with sexy stocks..." -- the peer pressure / social element of investing. I always thought investing was a very solitary endeavor where everyone is in some form of competition with themselves, and their metrics are based on somewhat reasonably calculated financial targets. E.g. I might set as a long-goal real portfolio returns as 3% and anything over that is gravy, and Ed Bob III might set 5% as his goal. I'm getting the sense that this is not how a lot of investors operate. Their goal seems to be "as much as possible, and if I can find any tricks to get more than is possible, I'll do that."
Maybe a more succinct way to put it is, if the gist I'm getting of the average investor attitude is right, most investors fundamentally don't understand the relationship between risk and reward. If someone is getting higher returns than me over some time period, it's likely that they're just running at a higher risk tolerance than I am. It also occurred to me that a method for avoiding social pressure is to not discuss my allocation/strategy at all, so as to avoid pollution of commentary on my strategy. [Note: I’m still a super noob here, folks, just working through some probably really basic notions wrt this stuff.]
I read The Permanent Portfolio and it sounds like the least bad idea I’ve heard so far, so I’m planning on implementing it by the end of September.
--
//Income Generation//
My situation is resolving around two poles:
1) Visualization studio startup. My old employee and I (and a couple others) are founding a viz studio. We’ve got a couple potential promising contracts we’re working on, while also working on the infrastructure of it. All of us either have jobs or don’t need one (that’s me), so there’s no rush/urgency. I’m heavily inspired by Friedman’s “It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work”, basically the story of Basecamp, and “calm” is one of the operative words for the studio. I’m really enjoying working on the studio, I like the other founders, and there’s great potential for the kind of work we do to be highly aligned with my purpose/values/etc.
2) Dirtbag design/build construction. Mooretrees is hiring me to come up and help with their skoolie build. My dad wants to hire me to help with some projects around the property (a rear deck, a portico, etc). Being able to balance mostly “knowledge work” (@Hristo ) of the viz studio with mostly skilled labor work of construction projects is something I’m super into. And both of these kinds of activities are highly aligned with my WoG. I want to do digital-art visualization of world changing systems and solutions. And I want to build with my hands cool New Alchemy Institute /dirtbag stuff like tiny/natural shelter, greenhouses and walipinis, greywater treatment systems, aquaculture, etc. It feels like what’s happening right now is that the doors to doing both of these things has opened, and I’m walking through, and all I have to do is keep an eye generally on the direction I want to go (e.g. true NAI stuff) and follow the opportunities as they crop up, and I’ll be there.
I had the realization yesterday that I’m actually *currently* doing something I started fantasizing about over a decade ago. I’m traveling solo through an apocalyptic landscape (pandemic and smoke/fire), en route to an informal gig helping some friends out with a cool punk build of some sort, while continuing to work on a variety of projects I’m just interested in (writing, personal art, etc).
Social
August was a month of extremes: the solitude of housesitting for my parents in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and the intense embrace of a wedding weekend spent with 100 of my friends where we all just love-fested each other. Some interesting clarities came out of these experiences:
1) I am indeed an introvert, and the more I own that, the better my life is.
2) I do indeed need meaningful relationships with good people. Humans are social creatures, and I’m no exception. Being alone forever would suck. My friends, those 100 people at the wedding, are scattered across the West Coast and doing mostly their own thing. There’s no one place for me to go to be near them all, and most of those places are a) expensive and b) on fire. I’ve started turning my mind towards intentionally cultivating relationships/community that is geographically clustered and not on fire. More on this later.
3) The last couple years has mostly been a pendulum swinging between Too Much and Too Little social contact. Either crammed in the closet-sized space of Serenity with DGF in winter (Too Much), or completely by myself (fine for a week or two if I’m coming off a Too Much spell, but then unhealthy thereafter).
4) I might be somewhat eccentric in terms of my personal living space requirements. It’s hard for me to share “my” kitchen with other people, for example, unless they are fastidious AF. (If it’s “my” space, I take people leaving dirty dishes lying around as a sign of either disrespect towards me personally, or a lack of concern for me as a human being, for example. This isn’t a problem in truly shared spaces or spaces that belong to other people - I roll with their habits). It’s difficult for me to share living space with extroverts - DGF is about all I can handle well. My misophonia exacerbates this. Point 4 is maybe nothing I need to change, it’s just something I need to Accept and design for, and learn to communicate effectively and with compassion. I have a long history of living really well with roommates, so this point is a new-ish revelation I was a little surprised by and am still working on incorporating into my self-sense.)
Technical
I'm studying load-bearing strawbale construction methods. It was recently incorporated into the IBC (international building code), and is specifically authorized in Michigan among other states. It seems an ideal construction method for cold climates (DGF's dad, who was a builder in MI: "You could probably heat those things with a fukin’ candle."), as long as you do a good job keeping water off the bales. There are >100yo strawbale structures still standing in Nebraska, where the method was first used in the US.
The key, it seems, is to have all your ducks in a row and be able to just jam when the bales get dropped off, so you can minimize the amount of time the bales are at risk of being rained on. The advantage of going post-and-beam is you can put the roof on, and then build up the bales. But that's more expense and materials, and I'm not convinced that the wood structure is at all necessary for a single story building. It seems a very expensive way of not having to worry about getting your bales wet (and not having to worry about weight compression). Load-bearing seems like a no-brainer to me, with the caveat of being on the ball with keeping the bales dry.
I attempted to rebuild the rear shock on my mountain bike so I could sell it. TL;DR: I broke it. Either my torque wrench was lying to me or I cross threaded the nut, but I stripped the threads on the damper shaft. Disappointing. I attempted to sell the bike as is but was unsuccessful before I had to leave. So still have a ~$2k broken mtb sitting in my parents garage. Silver lining: I now know what the inside of a mtb shock looks like. Shit lining: I don’t think this matters, because I don’t intend on ever owning a bike with a rear shock again.
Ecological
I mostly finished Peter Bane's Permaculture Handbook.
The Renaissance Report
August was as weird month. I finished my 2-month road trip with DGF, and then rode down to my parent’s place to housesit for them while they RV’d around the US. It was quite hot (105F by 10am typically) and the second half of the month was quite smoky (visibility <1mile).
At the end of the month I went up north to a good friend’s wedding, which was amazing. Dancing, partying till dawn, camping, hanging by the river, it was a much needed relief from the solitude of home and also a much needed emotional re-connection with all of my solid friends, many of whom I hadn’t seen since 2019.
Physiological
I did my exercise routine on cruise control consistently the whole month. The goal was just to cast consistent votes for being the sort of person who exercises every day, including mobility and pre-hab stuff.
My ankle still comes and goes with pain. Being barefoot most of the time is definitely helping, but it's annoying that the pain comes and goes. Docs say "wear a brace", which doesn’t help.
I’m now in a situation where sleeping on lumpy dirt on my z-lite results in a better nights sleep than a mattress on flat bed springs. And I use either a lumped-up shirt, or my dromedary as a pillow. The dromedary is *lux*.
Intellectual
I re-looked in to Zettelkasten, and am going to implement it (using Obsidian probably) in September. It appears to be an excellent complement to GTD, which doesn’t have much to say on *knowledge* collection and organization (GTD is about doing stuff/actions, somewhat obviously).
Emotional
Oh wow. I've been getting some work done on deeper and deeper layers of my codependent tendencies, and thinking through how codep is a way of avoiding owning and acting on who I am as a person, which gets down to a deep belief that I'm not worthy of love, not worthy of being who I actually am.
I'm realizing just how introverted I am, and I'm starting to acknowledge how certain things affect me and what my boundaries are. I'm seeing how certain things effect my mental health, and starting to grapple with the perspective that it's okay for me to do what I have to do to manage that, even if it’s not what other people want to hear.
The introverted thing is pretty easy. I'm just becoming more and more comfortable saying things like "I need to be alone this evening / this weekend", and I'm also finding myself comfortable saying things like "I know I said I would go on this trip, but life threw me some unexpected circumstances and my "people" bucket is overflowing. I'd just go into a coma if I attended, so I'm not going to go."
Another angle is my misophonia. For those new to the idea, certain sounds trigger my fight-or-flight response - my frustration/anger/panic nodes just go off the charts. It's not like nails on chalkboard. It's like sound-induced road rage. You know when something happens, and you get stuck in a loop fantasizing about mortal danger, and how you'll react? And your body gets pumped full of chemicals, your blood pounds, you grit your teeth, your fists ball up, and you can't concentrate on anything besides flight, violence, or both? It's similar to when I get stuck in a rumination about how I would act if DGF and I were ever in a situation where she was threatened with fatal sexual violence (and me, by extension, collateral or incidental fatal violence). That's *sort of* what I experience when I hear a trigger sound. And it takes a while to come down, maybe 30 minutes, because my mind plays the trigger sound in a loop, what I call trigger echos. And if I'm exposed to the same trigger sound from the same source enough times, I set up an aversion pattern to the source. For example, I'm uncomfortable in my parent's living room because my dad frequently and unpredictably snacks there. I also am uncomfortable generally around people I know to randomly chew gum, snack, chew their nails, or sniffle when they have allergies instead of blowing their noses. It's the random reward motivation thing, except in reverse.
At any rate, I've only recently come to grips with the fact that as much as I wish misophonia weren't part of who I am, it is, and I might as well stop pretending it isn't. So I have earplugs in a cylinder on my keychain, I'll use fans for white noise as necessary, and I'm comfortable simply explaining to people what's up and that if I suddenly get up and walk away, that's what's going on. I no longer try to force myself to whiteknuckle through it, because it's bad for me as well as the people around me.
--
I'm reading Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, and it’s extremely resonant. I need to finish it before writing more, but it’s definitely relevant to my ideas about motivation, purpose, belief, values, etc.
Economic
//Investing//
I realized that in a lot of investing writing, I'll come across statements like "don't do X, you'll get clobbered! you'll lose your shirt" and what I thought they meant was "you'll end up with less money than you put in". Often, what they actually mean is "your portfolio will perform y% worse than if you did this other thing instead." The trick of course is that sometimes what they mean is, indeed, you'll lose a lot of money. But it took me a while to know that I had to look to distinguish between losing money = making less than your neighbor and when losing money = having less than you started with at the end. Basically, I learned that a lot of investment writing assumes that your goal is to maximize returns. But my goal is to avoid portfolio failure. Reading in between the lines is important.
I've also started to read things like "if you can't handle being at a cocktail party and hear about your friends who are at the moment doing better than you with sexy stocks..." -- the peer pressure / social element of investing. I always thought investing was a very solitary endeavor where everyone is in some form of competition with themselves, and their metrics are based on somewhat reasonably calculated financial targets. E.g. I might set as a long-goal real portfolio returns as 3% and anything over that is gravy, and Ed Bob III might set 5% as his goal. I'm getting the sense that this is not how a lot of investors operate. Their goal seems to be "as much as possible, and if I can find any tricks to get more than is possible, I'll do that."
Maybe a more succinct way to put it is, if the gist I'm getting of the average investor attitude is right, most investors fundamentally don't understand the relationship between risk and reward. If someone is getting higher returns than me over some time period, it's likely that they're just running at a higher risk tolerance than I am. It also occurred to me that a method for avoiding social pressure is to not discuss my allocation/strategy at all, so as to avoid pollution of commentary on my strategy. [Note: I’m still a super noob here, folks, just working through some probably really basic notions wrt this stuff.]
I read The Permanent Portfolio and it sounds like the least bad idea I’ve heard so far, so I’m planning on implementing it by the end of September.
--
//Income Generation//
My situation is resolving around two poles:
1) Visualization studio startup. My old employee and I (and a couple others) are founding a viz studio. We’ve got a couple potential promising contracts we’re working on, while also working on the infrastructure of it. All of us either have jobs or don’t need one (that’s me), so there’s no rush/urgency. I’m heavily inspired by Friedman’s “It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work”, basically the story of Basecamp, and “calm” is one of the operative words for the studio. I’m really enjoying working on the studio, I like the other founders, and there’s great potential for the kind of work we do to be highly aligned with my purpose/values/etc.
2) Dirtbag design/build construction. Mooretrees is hiring me to come up and help with their skoolie build. My dad wants to hire me to help with some projects around the property (a rear deck, a portico, etc). Being able to balance mostly “knowledge work” (@Hristo ) of the viz studio with mostly skilled labor work of construction projects is something I’m super into. And both of these kinds of activities are highly aligned with my WoG. I want to do digital-art visualization of world changing systems and solutions. And I want to build with my hands cool New Alchemy Institute /dirtbag stuff like tiny/natural shelter, greenhouses and walipinis, greywater treatment systems, aquaculture, etc. It feels like what’s happening right now is that the doors to doing both of these things has opened, and I’m walking through, and all I have to do is keep an eye generally on the direction I want to go (e.g. true NAI stuff) and follow the opportunities as they crop up, and I’ll be there.
I had the realization yesterday that I’m actually *currently* doing something I started fantasizing about over a decade ago. I’m traveling solo through an apocalyptic landscape (pandemic and smoke/fire), en route to an informal gig helping some friends out with a cool punk build of some sort, while continuing to work on a variety of projects I’m just interested in (writing, personal art, etc).
Social
August was a month of extremes: the solitude of housesitting for my parents in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and the intense embrace of a wedding weekend spent with 100 of my friends where we all just love-fested each other. Some interesting clarities came out of these experiences:
1) I am indeed an introvert, and the more I own that, the better my life is.
2) I do indeed need meaningful relationships with good people. Humans are social creatures, and I’m no exception. Being alone forever would suck. My friends, those 100 people at the wedding, are scattered across the West Coast and doing mostly their own thing. There’s no one place for me to go to be near them all, and most of those places are a) expensive and b) on fire. I’ve started turning my mind towards intentionally cultivating relationships/community that is geographically clustered and not on fire. More on this later.
3) The last couple years has mostly been a pendulum swinging between Too Much and Too Little social contact. Either crammed in the closet-sized space of Serenity with DGF in winter (Too Much), or completely by myself (fine for a week or two if I’m coming off a Too Much spell, but then unhealthy thereafter).
4) I might be somewhat eccentric in terms of my personal living space requirements. It’s hard for me to share “my” kitchen with other people, for example, unless they are fastidious AF. (If it’s “my” space, I take people leaving dirty dishes lying around as a sign of either disrespect towards me personally, or a lack of concern for me as a human being, for example. This isn’t a problem in truly shared spaces or spaces that belong to other people - I roll with their habits). It’s difficult for me to share living space with extroverts - DGF is about all I can handle well. My misophonia exacerbates this. Point 4 is maybe nothing I need to change, it’s just something I need to Accept and design for, and learn to communicate effectively and with compassion. I have a long history of living really well with roommates, so this point is a new-ish revelation I was a little surprised by and am still working on incorporating into my self-sense.)
Technical
I'm studying load-bearing strawbale construction methods. It was recently incorporated into the IBC (international building code), and is specifically authorized in Michigan among other states. It seems an ideal construction method for cold climates (DGF's dad, who was a builder in MI: "You could probably heat those things with a fukin’ candle."), as long as you do a good job keeping water off the bales. There are >100yo strawbale structures still standing in Nebraska, where the method was first used in the US.
The key, it seems, is to have all your ducks in a row and be able to just jam when the bales get dropped off, so you can minimize the amount of time the bales are at risk of being rained on. The advantage of going post-and-beam is you can put the roof on, and then build up the bales. But that's more expense and materials, and I'm not convinced that the wood structure is at all necessary for a single story building. It seems a very expensive way of not having to worry about getting your bales wet (and not having to worry about weight compression). Load-bearing seems like a no-brainer to me, with the caveat of being on the ball with keeping the bales dry.
I attempted to rebuild the rear shock on my mountain bike so I could sell it. TL;DR: I broke it. Either my torque wrench was lying to me or I cross threaded the nut, but I stripped the threads on the damper shaft. Disappointing. I attempted to sell the bike as is but was unsuccessful before I had to leave. So still have a ~$2k broken mtb sitting in my parents garage. Silver lining: I now know what the inside of a mtb shock looks like. Shit lining: I don’t think this matters, because I don’t intend on ever owning a bike with a rear shock again.
Ecological
I mostly finished Peter Bane's Permaculture Handbook.