AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

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ertyu
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by ertyu »

AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Wed Feb 22, 2023 12:27 pm
@ertyu - If they are in Seattle and Glasgow, both of those are fairly large cities, which again makes me think part of my problem is I live in a suburban environment where everyone here is just married with kids. There is a low opportunity to meet people who are interested in alternative arrangements when you're in a primarily normative environment, so I do think location may be the number one factor here.
I agree. The guy through which I got to know the Seattle-ites deliberately moved from DC to Seattle for this very reason: he knew he was poly, he was in his mid-30s, he knew he wanted an alternative arrangement of this sort, and he moved to Seattle specifically to get it and because he was into hiking and Seattle has good hiking. The Glaswegians are internet friends only but one of them did move to Glasgow from elsewhere in the UK precisely before they wanted a particular social environment.

NewBlood
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by NewBlood »

AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Sat Feb 18, 2023 11:22 am
I keep thinking an academic or government type setting might be a good change of scenery since I've just worked in finance basically my entire career.
From everything I've read in your journal, this sounds like it could be a good option, especially coupled with a move to a bigger/more liberal city.

Depending on the field you choose, ymmv, but working in public service where most everybody you work with is generally pretty stocked about what they do and about the societal value of their work can make a big difference in your day to day experience.

(Of course people are still gonna be grouching about trivial stuff, and all jobs can get boring once you get more experience, and scientists aren't exactly renowned for their people skills. and obviously, those jobs pay a lot less than finance... which means it's pretty hard to recruit good software people interested in these lower-pay jobs. So probably lots of opportunities).

zbigi
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by zbigi »

NewBlood wrote:
Thu Feb 23, 2023 11:11 am
Depending on the field you choose, ymmv, but working in public service where most everybody you work with is generally pretty stocked about what they do and about the societal value of their work can make a big difference in your day to day experience.
Was that your experience in the US public sector? I ask because I've worked in projects for Polish public sector for about three years and the people working there were the most cynical, bored and burned out bunch I've encountered in my career. It seemed that working in an uber-constraining bureucratic machine just sucked all joy out of them.

NewBlood
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by NewBlood »

Yes it was, but I suspect it really varies according to which part of the public sector you work in. I work for a scientific agency, not the IRS :-) Think way-too-educated people who want to do some good. Still a lot of bureaucratic red-tape joy-sucking going on, but the *mission* makes it "worth" it.

zbigi
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by zbigi »

Hah, I've worked exactly for (Polish equivalent of) IRS.

NewBlood
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by NewBlood »

Ah yes. I'm sure it depends on temperament, but for me, I think I would find that less inspiring :-)

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

It seems pretty difficult to find a job working for someone else that isn't either bogged down in red tape, corporate BS, or an environment where they're going to overwork you. I'm not sure if that's just my own biased experiences or if it is genuinely hard to find something. I also think the more abstract your job is, the worse the red tape situation can be. All my software jobs could have been done with half the team in half the time except for layers of management abstraction and communication between teams that slowed the whole thing down tremendously. Maybe being in a radically different field (elementary education? carpentry?) would be radically different.

But one thing work can do is put you in an environment where you (potentially) learn new skills and work with people who have (potentially) been screened to have better education/stability than street randos, so there is that.

kane
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by kane »

It's also why so many people found (non-corporate) open source to be so liberating (in terms of conditions of work). Here's my recent favorite example. As far as I know, he lives 'frugally' (in standard consumer terminology) but can easily make it on a month-to-month basis. I always wonder how much of this is riding the "programming-is-sexy-i-want-to-program' bubble that might burst in the future.

As for the relationships, I think that we are probably taught about them in the same way as we are taught about personal finance and that really sucks. What constitutes a good friend? Am *I* a good friend to someone? What to do when there's a conflict in a relationship? When to end a relationship (friend/love) and how? I've seen on Netflix that "love=total-agreement-every-time" and "friendship=get-drunk-go-out-to-eat"!! and so on. Basically WL1 :D I also think that's why ERE2 is hard.

I agree that changing environment can be helpful and I always remember Jacob's post about controlling the environment (if you don't want to eat ice creams, first thing to do is to not have ice cream in the fridge) (I cannot find the link ATM). But there's also a dark side to that, in that you can chase a "better environment" because "I cannot find a friend here!". DW once said to me "of course we can move... but only after we will start feeling fine HERE". I found that extremely insightful.

zbigi
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by zbigi »

kane wrote:
Fri Feb 24, 2023 2:16 am
It's also why so many people found (non-corporate) open source to be so liberating (in terms of conditions of work). Here's my recent favorite example. As far as I know, he lives 'frugally' (in standard consumer terminology) but can easily make it on a month-to-month basis. I always wonder how much of this is riding the "programming-is-sexy-i-want-to-program' bubble that might burst in the future.
For practical purposes, this guy is in entertainment, not in programming. That is because, his main product is people watching him code, being excited about it etc., and the SerenityOS itself (which ~nobody is going to use). Nothing wrong with being an entertainer per se, but it's a market with extreme power laws and thus super high chance of failure.

mathiverse
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by mathiverse »

kane wrote:
Fri Feb 24, 2023 2:16 am
I agree that changing environment can be helpful and I always remember Jacob's post about controlling the environment (if you don't want to eat ice creams, first thing to do is to not have ice cream in the fridge) (I cannot find the link ATM). But there's also a dark side to that, in that you can chase a "better environment" because "I cannot find a friend here!". DW once said to me "of course we can move... but only after we will start feeling fine HERE". I found that extremely insightful.
I think you mean this post: https://earlyretirementextreme.com/do-i ... o-you.html.

---

Also, to add, there is that dark side, but I think that potential risk is overstated. Yes, "Wherever you go, there you are." However, sometimes you are better off some other place even with you still being you. I am biased on my thoughts here, since this has happened to me several times in my life already.

Of course, there are dynamics that you may cause everywhere you go unless you fix yourself. So, ultimately, do both.

I do wonder if corporate environments are similar enough that I wouldn't like to be a salary man in one ever again due to the dynamics that come with having a job like that. On the other hand, I've mostly worked at huge tech companies and similar. There is a whole slew of corporate and non-corporate salaryman positions I don't have much insight into.

guitarplayer
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by guitarplayer »

zbigi wrote:
Thu Feb 23, 2023 11:24 am
Was that your experience in the US public sector? I ask because I've worked in projects for Polish public sector for about three years and the people working there were the most cynical, bored and burned out bunch I've encountered in my career. It seemed that working in an uber-constraining bureucratic machine just sucked all joy out of them.
@zbigi, I think the bureaucratic machine of the Polish public sector might be in large part legacy of the past. Your comment made me think of the essay "A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe" by Milan Kundera which I enjoyed reading years back so thank you for that! A good read in itself, the main plot being of how the essentially Western European countries (by culture) got derailed via having the non-Western (political) system imposed on them after the Yalta conference. Have that for over four decades, probably enough time for an organisational change.

This makes me think, in 10 years the Third Republic of Poland will be roughly as old as the People's Republic of Poland had been before it was dissolved. I wonder if I will notice a change towards a more 'Western' culture after being away for a number of years (it has been more or less a decade so far, depending how I count).

@AE, sorry for the derail!

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

@guitarplayer - No worries on the derail. Actually this is interesting to me because I am writing a Soviet character from Poland in my book, so hearing about Polish culture is always good. Tell me, do Poles see themselves as Western European culturally?

@mathiverse - I do agree that "wherever you go, there you are," and I'm not sure if changing environment would have helped me much in the past. I had to do some internal work to overcome some issues that would hold me back in any setting. In particular, I had lost the ability to participate in my own life, which means no ability to participate in my social life either. Psychiatry likes to call this "depression," although I think that's a bad word for it.

Ultimately, what I had to do is learn to radically accept myself and the world, but getting there was something I had to work out myself. I have always struggled with meeting social expectations because my natural behavior or personal preferences are too far out on the bell curve of "normal." It makes it difficult to follow LifeScript when aspects of it fundamentally conflict with your temperament. This left me with a pervasive feeling of always being a social outcast, which caused me to quit without trying or to settle for friends who were not good for me.

Part of how I got past this was realizing LifeScript is just not designed for people like me, and therefore, I am just never going to live up to it so I might as well stop trying and do things I do enjoy. There are social consequences for not living up to LifeScript, but it's better for me to just accept that and move on rather than perpetually hate myself for not living up to a Platonic ideal.

One of the difficult parts of this is continually living in a world that likes to gaslight you out of your subjective experience in favor of the dominant narrative, but I was able to move past that by realizing the dominant narrative consists of people merely externalizing the parts of humanity they don't like onto other people and pretending the parts they do like exist in their in-group. The fact is, good and evil exist in everyone, and when you really, truly accept this, you realize there is no us vs them, there is just where people have tried to draw a collective boundary upon the utter chaotic hell that humanity actually is. In other words, cultural values tend to exclusively consist of how people like to imagine they are, not how they actually are. And when you realize that, you realize things like politics, living up to LifeScript, other people's opinions, etc are all, basically, bullshit.

In other words, getting caught up in what life is "supposed" to be just turns into play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

At this point, I've just accepted I don't control 99.9% of anything, and this includes social expectations, other people's behavior/opinions, and the general state of the world. All I really control is my attitude and the environment I put myself in. So I've stopped wasting energy on anything but that while just being open to whatever I might learn from my current experience. And at this point, because I've done a lot of internal work in the past year, I feel like the environment is a bigger limiter on my experience right now than I am because I've essentially outgrown it.

zbigi
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by zbigi »

AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Sat Feb 25, 2023 10:07 am
@guitarplayer - No worries on the derail. Actually this is interesting to me because I am writing a Soviet character from Poland in my book, so hearing about Polish culture is always good. Tell me, do Poles see themselves as Western European culturally?
IMO (I'm a Pole who has spend almost all my life living in Poland), they definitely do. The underlying reason behind it is that Poland, back when it was a pagan country in X century, decided to take Christianity from the Roman leg of the Church. This has oriented us westwards for the centuries to come (as church was the biggest carrier of culture back then). The fact that the East gaves us mostly hordes wanting to conquer and murder us (in historic order: Mongol, Turkish, Russian) further solidified that. On the other hand, Poland was always sort of a bridge between East and West, having borders with Moscow and Turks for many centuries, so we got a lot of their influences as well - but that is mostly limited to cuisine, art, clothing etc., and not to more important matters, such as political philosophy. On that front, Poland was, through the ages, always one of the biggest lovers of democratic freedoms (with nobility quoting the Roman an Greek classics ad nauseam), even in times when the majority of the continent was mired with fairly grim autocracies.
One more twist to this was WWII - I think it was a major shock for many people that Germans, seen as an advanced nation of philosophers etc., created something as unspeakably horrifying as Nazi Germany (which people of Poland saw in its full form - the German occupation of Western Europe countries was very polite in comparison, as they saw them as humans - while the Eastern Europeans were by design destined for quick extinction, to make room for German expansion). It created a lot of doubt in superiority of the Western culture, which lingers to this day

guitarplayer
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by guitarplayer »

I recon that countries that lie roughly, and possibly in part, on the land once occupied by the Habsburg Empire and that down the line found themselves east side of the Iron curtain generally consider themselves Western European. Those same countries are considered by the countries eastwards as somewhat Western with an Eastern 'soul' (or whatever you put in its place), and by countries from the West as Eastern or at best Central European. Though the last statement is not that strong of a view anymore and changing now that countries have been in the EU for a while.

So these countries would be roughly: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Poland, Romania, (part of) Ukraine, Croatia (maybe further south, not sure, for sure Vojvodina part of Serbia has a Western European hint).

This I base on lots of experiences in the region and speaking to people from the region + studying PolSci there, attending summer schools etc.

chenda
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by chenda »

I suspect the term Eastern Europe will become increasingly anachronistic, or at least pushed back ever further east.

From China's perspective, the western world probably begins in Vladivostok.

guitarplayer
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by guitarplayer »

A good lecture on Polish history by a leading British-Polish historian Norman Davies.

Coincidentally, I once asked Davies what he makes of sociological theories and sociology in all as a historian. He seemed to be much more in favour of (historical) facts than sociological theories. 'Whatever sociological theory, history eventually disproves it'.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Thanks everyone, those are helpful resources. I should clarify that the book takes place in the 1950s, so the attitude in the 1950s is more important than contemporary or future Polish attitudes. The character in question is Polish but pro-Soviet and acts as a traitor to their own country for political reasons. The political climate in post-war Poland is pretty dynamic, so I figure it would be interesting to have a character with that background.

ertyu
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by ertyu »

one relevant thought i had on "socializing for weird people" (where weird = in some way non-standard) is that the most successful cases actively *create* their own community. see jacob w this forum and ah w the fort dirtbag meetup. They present their ideas, thinking, and way of life, and actively recruit others to join as opposed to simply thinking where to locate so that they're most likely to "find" what they seek.

OutOfTheBlue
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by OutOfTheBlue »

Sharing a quote from Eligio Stephen Gallegos that striked me as particularly relevant:

"People are naturally social, especially once they have come into their wholeness, so there is no need to train them to be social. What we can do is to nurture and support their coming into their wholeness so their own natural social nature can be fully present."

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grundomatic
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by grundomatic »

@ertyu

Building one's own lifestyle can be a challenge. I don't discount the immediate environment's impact on the effort. If yuppie Denver suburb proved better for AE than traditionalist Utah, then Hipsterville, USA might be even better.

AE and dustBowl could always move to my neighborhood as a first take on ERE city. Just an idea.

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