"How to Want What You Have" Book Review

[Jin+Guice]

@jacob: I get your point about why this book and a lot of these concepts are not personally useful to you right now and haven't been for a long time. But you want what you have and have what you want, no?


For others: In the case of lifestyle design one has nothing left to prove once one is confident their system meets their needs. This isn't really the end as much as it is the beginning.

How many here, on paper, have their needs met, yet in practice act as if they do not?

It's at this level that maybe the book is helpful, or at least just the idea of wanting what you have.

I think ERE and FIRE have a way of invoking a lot of anxiety about having enough.When seeking to build a system in a short time that ends up working for a long time, one incurs such high risk that one must build a system that almost always ends up with too much. But so many get caught up in reducing the risk of a far off future by a tenth of a percentage point, they miss the fact that their system is already in place.

Anxiety eventually weakens the system as one puts too much into one type of capital when they should be investing in others. Or just relaxing into postconsumer paradise.

How to Want the Life that You Have.


I don't know how much of this book is about that or not bc I didn't read it, but I think the idea of wanting what you have is useful.

[Smashter]

One way out of middle class striving that often takes an arms-length win-lose modernist form, which sees others as means to a personal end, is C/A/G, which not surprisingly happens to be a combination of traditional (sd:blue) and postmodern (sd:green) values.

Why do you see compassion, attention and gratitude practices as part of seeing "others as means to a personal end"? My take away was the opposite -- C/A/G takes others out of the equation. It's on you to develop the ability to discover what's great about your life, regardless of circumstances or how other people are acting.

[jacob]

@Smashter - I think you misunderstood me/that quote. Add: I see how it could be misunderstood: In the quote, the "which"-subordinate clause ties to the "middle class striving", not the "one way out".

Middle class striving = arms-length win-lose modernist others-are-means-to-an-end.

CAG is an alternative to that = people (including oneself) are an end in or to themselves.

[Smashter]

Got it! Thanks for clarifying.