How is the FIRE movement doing?

[Jin+Guice]

Ah, ok. You are making me thankful for my job where I actually do nothing and it is impossible to learn or get promoted.

ETA: I think (2) is the one that is most in your head. I think of society as mostly a scam and accept my assigned role of scamming society back. I don't think of this as how I create value or purpose or interact with the world at all really. I can't comment on (1) or (3) for the reasons above.

[AnalyticalEngine]

We actually had a discussion related to this in our last MMG. The summary was that when you are a salaryman, the expectation that you will learn and network and be "passionate" is built into the job expectations, whereas when you are a working man, no one cares if you show up, do the work, leave, and don't make it your entire life. I think it's much easier to have a low-hour working man job because there's less cultural expectation to "be professional" or "further your career." Operating in a space where the paradigm and expectations vastly differ from your internal map is frustrating and difficult because you either end up perpetually alienated from either yourself or other people because you aren't having the same experience as everyone else or what's culturally sanctioned. It's psychologically taxing, which is part of the reason I believe the software industry has a high disengagement rate despite being well paid and socially "cool."

ETA: I agree number 2 is mostly in my head, which is why I've been trying to focus on either living in the present moment or trying new hobbies, although it's still there because the social expectations inside a salaryman job are much higher.

[7Wannabe5]

this "accept the moment" paradigm is the paradigm of last resort for emotions you can't control (depression, anxiety, trapped in prison in solitary, whatever).

Hmmm...kind of interesting then that not very long (maybe 3 months) after starting my "just do work in front of me" mantra, I wound up in an Islamic marriage contract with a very overbearing man. IOW, it works both ways, because the alternative of "directed action" is much more akin to Dominance.

Well, I love scuba diving and listening to black metal, but both aren’t going to take me very far in life*

True-ish. It depends on where you want to go. My second sister was the keyboardist for "one of the most important bands in the U.S. Black metal scene" according to MetalStorm.net. For various reasons, I doubt she netted more than $1000 from this experience, but it remains a form of Cultural Capital for her, and she would never have arrived at the point of being in that band, if she hadn't already become a highly skilled classical pianist in her teens. And her inherent musical talent is also well-correlated with her mathematical ability. Intellectual Capital, which is maybe half a level higher than my mathematical ability, which is good enough that I hit 97th percentile in math portion of old-school GRE. She was in engineering school for a while because she was ecologically interested in fuel cells, but she couldn't stand to be around the other, mostly male engineering students, because she has that INFP sensitivity thing. She is also a classically beautiful ("Are you a model?") woman (as opposed to my cute-for-a-nerd maximum level of appeal ), with good deal of Erotic Capital, so has had other unique experiences, forms of access, due to the combination of her various Capitals, which have rarely even reached the median in terms of Financial Capital (although she is actually doing pretty well financially right now with her WFH job based on grad degree she achieved in her 50s.)

ETA: I think (2) is the one that is most in your head. I think of society as mostly a scam and accept my assigned role of scamming society back. I don't think of this as how I create value or purpose or interact with the world at all really.

Yeah, but also why our shared personality type is AKA The Con-Artist on the Enneagram Unfortunately, our real problem is that often we truly believe "the con" ourselves.

[AnalyticalEngine]

@7W5 - It's definitely happened to me too that I've tolerated things I should not have tolerated when I was misapplying the "live in the moment" paradigm. I believe this is why philosophies that follow this, like Buddhism for example, are so focused on paradox. Life requires that you live in the moment but also follow some sort of story. It's a paradox of the human condition that reality only unfolds moment by moment but, in order to navigate that, we have to simplify it into a map. You want the right map but you don't want to mistake the map for the territory. This, incidentally, is also why I've slowly started thinking that it's impossible to escape Plato's Cave. The best you can do is trade one map for a better map or get used to switching maps or, if you are willing to let it all go, give up the map entirely and become a monk in a cave.

@J+G - Another problem I forgot to mention is that when I get used to this attitude of "everything is a scam and I need to scam them back," I find I get stuck there and I start seeing that pattern everywhere, even when it's not useful. It's personally lead to alienation for me because I end up getting stuck in this trap of saying one thing but doing another constantly because I've come to the conclusion everything is untrustworthy. I started missing out on win-win relationships this way and then tolerated lose-win too much because I was stuck thinking that's how the world ALWAYS worked.

[7Wannabe5]

This, incidentally, is also why I've slowly started thinking that it's impossible to escape Plato's Cave. The best you can do is trade one map for a better map or get used to switching maps or, if you are willing to let it all go, give up the map entirely and become a monk in a cave.

Yeah, I grok this. I think "Dominant Paradigm" more than I think "Plato's Cave." As in, the Dominant Paradigm will always be there to suck you back in if you so desire. I also wonder about how arbitrary or contingent some of the levels beyond the "Cave" might be. The fact that I have found myself reading in circles back round to the Current Accepted Model makes me feel more rather than less suspicious. Like maybe there's an alternate Borges universe in which those of us who read are all reading a different collection of the same books?

[AnalyticalEngine]

@7W5 - The issue I've started to run into with these levels beyond the "Cave," be it spiral dynamics or whatever else, is they all suffer from the WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) bias, and then start to fall apart when compared to historical or other cultural examples, to the degree I'm even starting to question if it's even possible to actually "escape" anything or if in thinking you've "escaped," you've just become blind to some other bias/cultural milieu. An example here being how Buddhist-type nondual "enlightenment" is always the highest level, when that might just be because WEIRD culture traditionally undervalued that mental state compared to other societies, so now it's rare/"the highest level" instead of just another paradigm.

[daylen]

Let's become some fucking wizards and witches again.

[7Wannabe5]

An example here being how Buddhist-type nondual "enlightenment" is always the highest level, when that might just be because WEIRD culture traditionally undervalued that mental state compared to other societies, so now it's rare/"the highest level" instead of just another paradigm.

Yes! Almost analogous to how the new cool place to travel becomes just those which are most difficult to reach for somebody starting out from Akron, Ohio. These models don't apply as well even if I consider the outlook of somebody like my second "husband" who was born into a fairly wealthy family in Tehran during the "modernization" era of the last Shah. For instance, the quite different manner in which gender roles are assigned in that culture does not attach to Spiral Dynamics the same way as in our more John Wayne/Stiff-Upper-Lip Western cultural gender dichotomies. And a human from a Level Blue culture, which is also one of the oldest still-existing cultures in the world, who designed part of the Space Shuttle, but also paints china and does sword arts, and thinks it's unmanly to not openly express bold emotions, can't really be pegged to the model all that easily.

Let's become some fucking wizards and witches again.

Again?

[Jin+Guice]

Let's become some fucking wizards and witches again.

Deal.

[daylen]

One possible story arc of humanity being from distributed cause to formal/abstract cause and back to distributed causes again with an embedding of highly advanced technology into the fabric of our society. No one human can understand the entire stack anymore like they could a couple hundred years ago which diffuses the causal web of agency. The tech and money that have enabled people in modernized societies to be maximally "independent" and "autonomous" seem to be slowly latching on to and enforcing the constraints of our situation, one way or another (e.g. ecological, economical, etc.). Magic occurs when something unexpected happens. Like a member of your tribe doing a dance to see what the weather gods have to say. With the rise of formal explanations, we convinced ourselves that the world wasn't all that magical. Right or wrong, the world is becoming a bit more magical every day with apparently inexhaustible black box algorithms turning in the background to help us make unexpected decisions in the foreground.

[7Wannabe5]

No one human can understand the entire stack anymore

Not even Ken Wilber?

Right or wrong, the world is becoming a bit more magical every day with apparently inexhaustible black box algorithms turning in the background to help us make unexpected decisions in the foreground.

It does seem like you kids are bound, one way or another, to live in interesting times.

[daylen]

The tech stack that is, which is more do, point, and see. The culture stack has always been inexhaustible finger pointing.

[Seppia]

@7w5: Agalloch or Wolves in the Throne Room? I’ve seen both live lol

Of course all paths can lead to great success and support a family.
I’m just a boring guy who, already at age 16, was looking at the statistics.
Don’t have the numbers now but would think that you would have to be in the 99th percentile of musicians just to live off of music, while almost every single salesperson who can add and subtract makes the median wage of their age cohort.

[7Wannabe5]

@Seppia:

Neither, but Aaron Weaver of "Wolves in the Throne Room" mentions my sister's band as one of his top ten influences. And Aesop Dekker of Agalloch mentions her band as one of the first-to-be-taken-seriously in American metal.

I agree that it's next to impossible to support a family as a musician. My sister's husband is from a family in which three of the brothers are semi-famous musicians, early influencers in the proto-punk scene, and only one of them made a very good family-support-income with his work, although the other two did have families, and scraped by with addition of very small trust fund inheritance and some other odd jobs in the mix. They're all well up in their 60s and still making some money from their music. One of them just moved into a semi-subsidized senior complex which I am also considering. My 4th sister went to her high school prom with a man who became quite wealthy from his alternative rock band. which is quite well known, and they stayed friends, so she attended his wedding at his mansion a few years ago. I had a boyfriend who made his living as a Motown studio artist for a while in the 70s and is still making some money playing bass in a jazz-rock band at age 70, and I dated another man who made okay money as a semi-famous garage rock band drummer/photographer. So, possible, but not likely. You pretty much have to be as talented at music as Jacob is at physics and also find yourself in the right place at the right time.

[Jin+Guice]

and also find yourself in the right place at the right time.

It's more this. There is also some strategy involved. If you live somewhere with an active live music scene and you figure out how that scene works, it's possible. Or if you move to one of the three American cities connected to the music industry and have a go at it. Success rates are not high, but it's a bit better than 1%.

I'm also not sure if working as a tech support person (like lighting or sound design) counts? DJing? All of these are more viable and DJing is one of the reasons being a paid musician is now harder.

OTOH, if you are trying to start a band out of your garage with your friends playing music all or some of you wrote and making all of your own connections from smalltown, whereever, that is very difficult.

[7Wannabe5]

@Jin+Guice:

And it is also the case that sometimes the more talented you are, the more complex your art becomes, the smaller your potential audience becomes. For example, I know my sister has taste in music that is quantum levels more informed than my taste, but I sometimes have to veto her road-trip selections, because like unto the dissonant wailing of arctic creatures as they die alone on the ice beneath a blackening sky.

[Smashter]

Making it in music sounds very similar to my experience trying to make a living as a professional basketball player. There is only an infinitesimal chance anyone makes the NBA, but you can eek out a middle class lifestyle with a lot of hard work, luck, and a willingness to live in places like Bulgaria or Abu Dhabi.

but I sometimes have to veto her road-trip selections, because like unto the dissonant wailing of arctic creatures as they die alone on the ice beneath a blackening sky.

I recently heard one of the co-founders of the large effective altruist charity GiveWell talk about why he's been obsessed with investing in "longtermist" causes. Longermist being the idea that it's better to invest in interventions with a .01% chance of saving 100 billion lives 500 years from now as opposed putting money toward things with a 100% chance of saving 100,000 lives in next year. He used the analogy of people he knows who like listening to jazz. They always seem to start off enjoying the popular stuff, but after a while they start craving the weird, experimental, 'wailing arctic creature' type stuff. He thinks that happened to him and charitable giving.

[7Wannabe5]

He thinks that happened to him and charitable giving.

Very interesting. I totally grok this. Pretty much what happened to me with reading, gardening, and dating.

[Western Red Cedar]

Plus ca change. "Just find your passion so it no longer feels like work" remains the proverbial slogan of the 20something. It's possible that reality is coming around to actually deliver on those promises (see cozy WFH). Otherwise, it's but sneaky way to extract effort from recently graduated naive noobs.

And just as "follow your passion" wasn't very good advice, I place very little trust in content creators providing thoughts/advice on work-life balance through entrepreneurship, side hustles, or freelancing. I'd like to believe there is some level of sincerity in some of their thoughts, but optimizing views and clicks can have a pervasive influence on messaging. Living through YouTube or a podcast can distort reality.

[zbigi]

And just as "follow your passion" wasn't very good advice, I place very little trust in content creators providing thoughts/advice on work-life balance through entrepreneurship, side hustles, or freelancing. I'd like to believe there is some level of sincerity in some of their thoughts, but optimizing views and clicks can have a pervasive influence on messaging. Living through YouTube or a podcast can distort reality.

Also, it's a million monkeys on typewriters. Whatever view, even most obscure or currently unpopular, you can find YouTube channels or podcasts promoting it. These content creators are just filling in market niches. A lot of them believe in their messages, but that doesn't make them true or valueable.