Tremendously useful. This is a book about meta-preparation: about what it really means to be prepared when you don't know the future. It teaches readers how to think about skill development, optionality and flexibility--and by virtue of these meta-tools, how to earn true individual self-sovereignty.
Deep Response is a sophisticated strategy-level discussion hidden in a simple story: a thirty-something man goes back in time to offer guidance to his twenty-something younger self. Their discussions are engrossing on many, many levels, as the two characters--with radically different perspectives, despite being the same person--work out various life problems. The older character wants to warn the younger man that all of his strivings will eventually cause him to achieve nearly the exact opposite of what he seeks, and worse, if he doesn't adjust, his life will soon lack enough flexibility to do anything about it. The reader is the lucky beneficiary, getting exposure to a wide-ranging conversation on how to go about structuring a robust, congruent and genuinely meaningful life.
There are even more benefits if you read the book with an eye to second-order thinking. Over the course of the various conversations the reader also gets a useful rendering of what I like to call the Smart Boy problem. Among many other flaws, the Smart Boy thinks he can outwit uncertainty: he "knows" he's a smart guy, so he thinks he can figure out what's probably going to happen, and then take the easy road and just prepare for that future--and that future only. It's a trap! Uncertainty simply does not work that way. We have to be humble enough to know we don't know, and then prepare for an extremely wide range of futures.
It's equally fascinating to see the younger self character arguing with his older self, giving an astonishing amount of pushback to his ideas, despite the fact that everything he could possibly know, by definition, is a subset of the older self's knowledge. Isn't that the ultimate example of the arrogance of youth? It's the Smart Boy problem all over again, as the Smart Boy sits in a place of maximum epistemic arrogance: he already knows everything, he's utterly confident in his knowledge, he even knows what he needs to know before he even knows it! Worst of all, he thinks he will change the world using what he "knows."
Note that a person with proper epistemic humility would be a sponge here, learning as much as possible and quickly grasping what an opportunity it is to meet one's future self. Don't be a Smart Boy.
Of course, we aren't likely to meet our future selves. But perhaps we can expand this idea a bit, and train ourselves to be more sponge-like around our elders, observing, asking questions, learning from their successes and their mistakes, drawing from them as much as we can to shape our own life models. But we don't, do we? Youth really is wasted on the young.
[A quick affiliate link to Amazon for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site Casual Kitchen, I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!]
There are many more insights in this wonderful book and I'm only scratching the surface, but please indulge me as I share just one more thought. It's fascinating how the author ties together a wide range of books (many of which have also heavily influenced me, coincidentally) in unusual ways. You will see Jacob Lund Fisker's Early Retirement Extreme (a foundational work on self-sovereignty) paired with the military strategies of John Boyd for example. There are many more examples of synthesis and syncretism across a wide range of domains and disciplines, and it makes you want to devour the various books mentioned throughout the story. The best and most creative ideas pop up when you transfer ideas from one domain to another and see what happens. I've created a reading list--a long one--at the bottom of this post. Please enjoy it!
[Readers, what follows here are all my notes, quotes and reactions to the text. They are meant to help order my thinking and help me remember--there's no need to read any further! Feel free to skim the bolded parts, or skip it altogether. But do please scroll to the very bottom to look over a wonderful and long list of further reading.]
Notes:
Chapter 1: You Are Walking Into a Trap
1ff The author at age 38 walks into his old apartment and encounters his 25-year-old self. "Hi. We need to talk." [If I ever get the chance to go back and meet my younger self the first thing I tell him is to buy a lot of Bitcoin and Ethereum.] "I am here to discuss the next ten years of your life with you... You are running into a trap... I need to explain the trap to you and tell you how to avoid it."
6ff He and his future self quickly get into specifics: the context here is the environmental collapse and the notion that we've irrevocably passed the earth's peak carrying capacity:
"I'm working on decarbonizing the built environment."
"Yes, but is what you're doing actually decarbonizing the built environment? Or is what you're doing slightly decreasing the life-cycle carbon footprint of expansionary commercial real estate development that is cruising along with the business cycle like it always has? Is your work just another case study of Jevon's Paradox?"
[Note that the reader may or may not agree with the general environmental issues at stake in their conversation, but I encourage you to table any pushback on this issue and instead mine the book for its meta-insights. Think of the environmental problem as just the vehicle for these insights anyway. Another insight worth thinking about here is even if we do uniformly agree on the problem, we still don't know the effects of what our "solutions" will be--they could make everything even worse! Remember: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."]
8 "Your highest level criticism of the way society currently runs is that it's using too many resources, right? And how much debt are you carrying right now?" [Heavy! It's the same problem.] The younger self confesses the number, and his future self says "You don't pay it off... You don't know how to live below your means as an individual, and you think you're qualified to help the world bring its consumption within planetary limits? You talk ecology and thermodynamics but you live in debt and overshoot... What's weird about you is that your values are in stark contrast to your actions, so you live with a heavy load of cognitive dissonance... You think the first thing you need to do is change the world, and then your personal life will fall in line. You've got it precisely backwards. You're trying to change the world from system A to system B while running system A software in your head. That's impossible."
9 Comments here on getting your house in order, getting your circle of control in order: "Develop resilient systems at the household scale."
10 Discussion here of already being in "overshoot" globally; the problem could have been solved in the 1970s, but now it's a predicament. "You cannot solve a predicament, you can only respond to it." His younger self calls him a defeatist, the older self says, "You're trying to hold up something that you should let fall. You don't see that new systems will emerge from the dissolution of the old system, and those are the systems that deserve your attention and effort." On supporting "successor cultures" that are growing in the cracks of the old system.
Chapter 2: The Man Who Connected the Dots
13ff "Look up Jacob Lund Fisker." [This was a bit of a shock to me since I did not know this book talked about this Jacob, now it really has my attention.] The younger self can't find anything about him on the internet, then the future self learns that he died in a yacht race accident in 2010. He tries to explain who he is: "I didn't figure this all out for myself. I wasn't clever enough... He figured it out. Jacob wrote a book and started an online community way back in 2010... I found his stuff in 2020, and that's what finally got me pointed in the right direction... I was going to come here, tell you to get his book and join the community, and then I was going to walk you through some of the common misconceptions have people have when they find his stuff for the first time... He connected the dots. There's nothing else like it. I've read hundreds of books... and I haven't found anything else like it." [Yep, that's pretty much it.]
Chapter 3: To Cope With Unfolding Environment
17 Interesting frontispiece quote here from John Boyd: "The most important thing in life is to be free to do things."
17ff On humans being generalist animals: very good at a lot of things but not really good at anything; thus humans have high adaptiveness to whatever environment they happen to be in. On humans as "adaptation machines" that adapt cultural and behavior patterns to an environment far faster than genetic adaptation could, but using the same biological hardware.
19 Discussion of John Boyd: "winning is successfully coping with unfolding environment. Losing is failing to cope with unfolding environment. The entire spectrum of Boydian strategic thought unfolds from this core insight."
19 "'And what do you need in order to adapt, according to Boyd?' I ask. 'Freedom of action. Autonomy.'
'And how much freedom of action do you have?' I ask." The discussion then migrates to asking would you have done the protests that you did if it meant risking your job? and then the younger self realizes he doesn't have the freedom he thought he had: if you have a job and need it, you do not have autonomy. [One can't help thinking about the pandemic vax mandates: how many governments were easily able to apply pressure on exactly that point to induce tens of millions of employees to comply with deeply unethical experimental mRNA injections?]
21 "The environment is most definitely going to be goddamn unfolding, in wild and totally unpredictable ways, and so not possessing strategic personal freedom of action is irresponsible."
23 "The essence of good strategy is not to accurately predict the future and execute a plan for it, but to increase your capacity to respond and thrive under a variety of different conditions, so that you can adapt to whatever happens as it unfolds in order to bring your gifts to the world." [On possessing autonomy; on arranging your life such that you are not locked into a single course of action, so you are not path-dependent.]
24ff "'How do you possibly decide what to do if we're living in a time when the future is so up in the air? he says.'
'The first step isn't to decide what to do. It's to strategically arrange your life such that you preserve as much optionality as possible, so that you can change and adapt quickly as events unfold. That's the missing piece here, that's what I didn't understand. I spent so much time over the next eight years of my life trying to figure out specifically what to do, what plan to follow, but I should have been working on increasing my freedom of action, and expanding my sense of what was possible... The solution isn't to figure it all out, it's to realize that it's not possible to figure it all out and that you've got to develop an approach to life that accepts that reality.'" [The author/older self is right here, 100% right on optionality: it is a superpower. If you are stuck in path-dependent hell you are NGMI.]
Chapter 4: Stoke Is a Strategic Imperative
27ff On having an intrinsic drive to do a challenging activity that feels like play; also on having the feeling of autonomy in your decision to pursue stoke. "... the easiest way to kill it is to try to force it. In fact, you can kill stoke by introducing external rewards for doing it."
29ff "Broadly speaking, we ought to chase stoke for the adaptation advantages and not just because it feels good." On stoke requiring a sense of agency, on how modern work is a perfect stoke-killing machine; on how stoke "withers with too much imposed direction": you can't force it, you're not going to know for sure what to do, what to be stoked on, etc.
32 "So much of the waste of modern society has to do with the coping mechanisms for living meaningless unfulfilled lives. We're programmed to buy stuff and experiences to try to fill the void in our hearts... We buy big houses, fast cars, flights to the other side of the world for a long weekend, and cheap entertainment is a way of coping with the unsatisfying, meaningless role we all play in modern society."
32 "The less money you need to live your ideal lifestyle, the less time you need to spend getting it."
35 "If you remember nothing else from what I say tonight, remember this: learning to live well at a very low cost of living is magic." [Learning to live well at a low cost is a metaskill, it's a skillset that's somewhat difficult to develop, but worst of all, the entire system of reinforcement we live in today doesn't want you to "waste your valuable time" learning how to do things for yourself so that you have this skill! It wants you hyperspecialized in your narrow work domain and incompetent in all other domains--and therefore in need of people to pay to do these things for you.]
Chapter 5: Frugality Is for Losers
36 "I'm telling you to internalize post-consumer praxis. Frugal consumerism sucks. Post-consumerism is awesome."
36ff "Right now you're only a little in debt. But starting next year you spend every dollar that goes into your checking account, and then even more. You start accumulating consumer debt. You think you're part of the solution because you design energy efficient buildings and join street protests but you're just as programmed by the construct of consumer ideology as anyone else. You talk good theory about how we need a different paradigm, an ecological civilization, but you don't see your own total obedience to the system you yourself claim is wrecking the planet and infantilizing the population."
38 "You are trying to change the world without first changing yourself. You can only cause pain if you continue in this way."
39 On the term "post-consumer praxis" borrowed from Jacob Lund Fisker; "The paradigm of consumption is the water we swim in. We're not taught to see consumerism as a choice. ...the only thing we can imagine is a greener, more eco version of the consumer paradigm."
40-1 "Citizens have been infantilized into consumers who are in service to the economy... And now we as consumers exist for the good of the economy, the Machine, the Superorganism, the construct."
41 What is consumerism on an individual level? "Consumer ideology says that you solve problems by spending money. Money is a hammer, and there are no other tools, so all problems are nails."
42 [A good summary of the philosophy here, as well as a good summary of what it is not] "Okay, what are other methods of solving problems besides money?"
"Being competent, broadly speaking. In-sourcing competence rather than outsourcing, at the household level. Developing a wide range of skills. Internalizing a producer mindset rather than a consumer mindset. Developing a rich social world, being part of the community. Also becoming a better strategic thinker, learning to think in systems rather than in linear disconnected silos. It's very important to understand that post-consumerism is not merely being frugal or cheap. Learning how to get stuff without paying much for it is clever and highly optimized consumerism, but it's still consumerism. Finding killer sales and clipping coupons is not post-consumerism."
45 "The point is to develop your other problem-solving methods. Consumerism isn't the practice of spending a lot of money, it's the practice of only spending money to solve your problems. This is what must be unlearned.
Chapter 6: The Crowbar of Freedom
47 [This is the "ratchet" right here of escaping the system] "First, drop your cost of living as far below your income as you can. While you're saving money you develop your practical skills as much as you can. You use your skills and surplus of money to acquire more freedom, which gives you even more time to develop skills. This works as a ratchet. The more skills you have, the less money you need. The less money you need, the easier it is to attain freedom."
48-49 The two "selves" go through a textbook exercise of "How many years of freedom do you save a year?" which sounds a bit like a post I wrote on Casual Kitchen some thirteen years ago.
49-50 "But how do you spend so little and not have a shit life? I don't understand."
"That's because you're thinking like a frugal consumer, which sucks. Your strategy is consumerism and you are reaching the end of what streamlined consumers tactics can do for you. You need better strategy, a different mindset... There isn't a way to cut your expenses by a third or more as a consumer." [The system's design contains constraints that keep you trapped inside the system.]
50 On a permaculture design for your lifestyle: the idea that arranging the components of a system such that the outputs from one become inputs for the other, so that all components function harmoniously and the resource requirements from outside the system are very low; this type of thinking is what you apply to your own life to become post-consumer.
51 The younger self grapples with the idea of being free in a small number of years, but the idea of living on less than a certain amount (in this case $10,000 a year) seems impossible to him. [Everybody goes through this series of thoughts: usually people then (falsely) assume that they have to live on a poverty wage for the rest of their lives, and this then stops them dead in their tracks. The entire domain, the entire body of work here then becomes dead to them, permanently, and they go back to the hamster wheel.]
52ff On the idea of a no-buy year; also on the "Crowbar Method" of massive change right away, versus a more incremental method of making small incremental changes, see the photo below:
54ff Various discussions here on designing your lifestyle around cooking at home and developing confidence in that domain; on creatively solving your rent costs--and with genuine creativity getting your housing costs close to zero [including an interesting idea here of building and living in a tiny house in a yard of a homeowner who was willing to let you stay there for free in return for planning a garden or helping with chores]. After rent and food "the rest is mostly a mop up operation."
56 On avoiding traveling like a tourist; avoiding fast travel.
57 "It is honestly embarrassing how straightforward it is to spend very little if you just, like, try."
58ff On the global equitable burn rate of $7,000 a year as a benchmark to shoot for. "The point is that learning how to build a good life that doesn't cost so much money is a prerequisite for becoming post-consumer and blazing the path to the successor cultures that will, one way or another, consume no more than the carrying capacity of the earth... It's a way to deprogram consumer ideology in your own mind. It's a way to crowbar your way to economic freedom as quickly as possible. And, as someone who claims to be bothered by the fact that global civilization is in overshoot, it's a way of putting your money where your mouth is." [This is a lot more admirable and ethical than, say, the Al Gore style of environmentalism where you fly your private jet around the world lecturing everyone else on how to live, then retire to your air-conditioned Tennessee mansion with $30,000 in annual utility bills.]
59ff On options after getting your cost structure down massively, including quickly saving 30 years' worth of expenses and never having to work ever again; or saving several years worth of expenses and then going back to work if you want, as it would be easy to earn $7,000-$10,000 a year, this could be done with seasonal or part-time work.
61 After a discussion on healthcare expenses, as well as learning that these ultra-low expense and income levels mean subsidized or free healthcare, the younger self asks "What if the rules of the system change?" [This is a standard pushback response right there: the fallacy is of the form of imagining something, anything, that will obviate me needing to do whatever it is we are talking about. It's analogous to "what if 401k rules change?" as a delaying/avoidance tactic for using your 401k plan.] The response: "Then I'll adapt. Obviously." [The notion here is that you are developing the metaskill of adaptation and flexibility so you can adapt to any ruleset or any change.]
61ff On learning the skill of managing your savings.
63-4 "Why aren't more people doing it?" "Because it is difficult. At first. It takes a big initial effort of will and self education to write a new script for yourself when there is a lot of social pressure to just go with the flow. You have to be very dissatisfied with the standard scripts and some people just aren't... Some people are unwilling to be a weirdo even if they understand that normal behavior is insane."
64 "I wanted to think outside of the paradigm and I didn't know this was an option until I found Jacob's work."
Chapter 7: Throw Competence At It, Not Money
67 Examples here of being able to cook healthy food from simple ingredients; learning how to stock up on staples so you can eat more healthily, while (as a bonus) having months' worth of food in case of any food supply chain disruptions; thus allowing you to live for less while also having a far more resilient household.
69-70 "The system wants everyone to specialize and to have to pay other specialists to do everything else for them... Consumerism wants all work to be in the formal economy, and no work to be in the informal economy."
70 On the fallacy of comparative advantage, which only has merit if time and money are the only things being optimized. The trade-off is dependency: it makes you dependent on other people, on money, it makes you less resilient and less self-sufficient, it turns you into a cog in the system.
71ff On a Venn diagram of fundamentals, vocation and stoke, and strategically finding skills that fill all three circles as much as possible; look to acquire skills that fit the Venn diagram, that serve multiple purposes. Various examples of fundamental skill domains here: food/cooking, writing, investing, household repairs, etc.
74ff Further discussion of a vocation: it's not a job, it's your life's work, but also something that you can usually use to earn income; on thinking of it as more like a calling, you may not know what your "vocation" is yet, and you may discover it via trial and error as you work on fundamental skill development. Also mention here of other fundamental skills like writing, public speaking, investing, even the meta-skill of having the ability to focus and concentrate [this is very much worth thinking about]: in modernity "most people are distracted to the point of effective stupidity." Also comments on teaching what you know because that's how you really master a subject domain.
76ff On stoke-directed skills and domains: things that you are intrinsically motivated to do, that you would do for their own sake. "The main skill here is the meta-skill of relearning how to play and approach things with authentic curiosity." "Incidentally, this process will make your cost of living very low, it will make your household very resilient, and it will almost certainly make you a valuable contributing member of the unfolding future society that is rising out of the mess of the current arrangement." [Well put.]
78 Final comments here on avoiding a scarcity mindset: don't get obsessed with just reducing spending per se. [The author doesn't phrase it this way but this is just reactance to the existing paradigm, it is not truly going outside of the existing paradigm.] On crafting a lifestyle that you "love to inhabit." On the idea of engaging in enjoyable activity because it's intrinsically motivating; "The world doesn't need more martyrs."
Chapter 8: How to Think About Everything at Once
81ff On going from thinking about the components of your life to thinking about the relationship between components of your life; on "whole systems" thinking: of thinking of everything all at once; On thinking of your life as a system. Thinking about the emerging effects, the consequences of your actions; on constructing a system that works the way you want.
82 "Most people's lives require an enormous amount of resources to run and they're not actually doing the things they really want to do. The amount of friction and waste in their lives is insane. And I wonder why they are stressed. On top of that, their lives are fragile."
83 Interesting discussion here on disassembly and then reassembly of your life: looking at the inputs and outputs of each component, looking at the different side effects, both positive and negative; then looking at groups of components after that, seeing how they interact; seeing how outputs from some components might connect to inputs of others; seeing where there might be friction and conflict between your actions, or where there might be cohesion/coherence [or even synergy] among groups of actions; On trying to increase coherence and reduce friction in your system. Permaculture as a metaphor for this activity.
84ff Helpful practical example here where they go through one of his hobbies, downhill mountain biking, and they work out the positive benefits, the drawbacks, and then what the intrinsic reasons might be for why he does this activity to understand what it is that he actually wants. Ultimately mountain biking is for him a delivery mechanism for a flow state, a fitness activity; the purpose of this exercise here is to understand exactly what it is that you want, whether you're getting it or not, and at what cost or at what benefit. [One interesting element of the Socratic structure of the book is how the younger self, after arriving at any given step in a discussion, then constantly takes that step and does an extreme reach fallacy: "Oh so you're saying I should stop mountain biking??? No, the point is to actually see what role this plays exactly as part of a coherent life, don't leap immediately to a worst-case scenario just yet! All we are trying to do here is identify if there's any frictions or tensions or coherence in your various activities. The category decisions will come later. Nobody is trying to take away your mountain biking. This is an extremely helpful dialog--and it even includes the standard pushback our own egos might give it as we explore these ideas.]
88ff Analyzing nodes around the theme, then thinking about the requirements of these activities, and then looking at different ways of solving the requirements or the problems that emerge. Also on the central idea of taking actions [or not taking actions] that maximize your autonomy and your self-sovereignty. And then on practicing these examples by sketching them out [see photo below] to train yourself to see connections between and consequences of your actions, your behaviors and your goals. Or metaphorically speaking: instead of just ordering from the [consumerism] menu or letting someone else order for you, we're actually choosing recipes and ingredients and combining them in the ways we wish to.
90 [Helpful discussion here of the pure contra example] "The simplest approach to thinking about your life is to not think about it at all. Some people do things without any kind of conscious reasoning and they don't understand the relationship between actions and outcomes, cause and effect. They're thirsty, they drink a Coke, they're surprised when they get diabetes. They're bored, they scroll TikTok, they're surprised when they find themselves incapable of following a conversation that involves complete sentences. It's a very unconscious and unintentional approach to life."
91 On "effect node" thinking. "Very few people think clearly about the positive and negative effects of their actions beyond their stated goal... Thinking about these effects ahead of time is rare.
92ff Node cluster thinking [see photo], where you think about multiple goals, multiple behaviors or multiple activities at a time and try and organize coherence among them; on noticing patterns, perhaps not seeing much relationship at first, but then ultimately seeing if you can drive an overall direction of your activity-goal-effect nodes with less and less friction. "It's at this stage that you realize how many of your actions are working against each other. It's a big step in terms of your thinking, because you've gone from thinking about actions and goals in isolation to thinking about--or at least noticing--the relationship between your sets of actions and goals. Once you can see this disorganization you can start organizing and aligning your goals so that they at least aren't pointing in opposite directions and working against each other." At this point you start to trim actions that go against your overall direction and adopting behaviors that go in the direction you want. "Your life as a system will start to look a lot more aligned. This isn't an overnight process. It's a lot like gardening."
94ff On a "web of goals" versus a "list of goals." A list of goals can have contradictory effects that are hard to see; also on the resiliency of a web, a list of goals is a chain but a web of goals can survive one or several strands breaking or even the destruction of entire nodes. Essentially this allows you to reduce single points of failure in your life, eliminating fragilities like "if you lose your job and 100% of your income everything falls apart."
95 "The point isn't to accurately predict specific disasters and avoid them. The point is to build a lifestyle that is generally robust to a wide variety of possible disasters, including ones you don't know about. The standard North American lifestyle is not very resilient because it's linear. For most people, if one component in their system breaks their life falls apart. If they lose their job, they're hosed because everything depends on their paycheck. If their car breaks down, they can't get to work. If the grocery store doesn't have food in it, they're going to be hungry inside of three days."
96 "You can't eat money if there are no groceries on the shelves to buy." Also useful comments here on the idea that because people's "life systems are fragile they frequently experience little emergencies they have to scramble to fix. They don't have any time or resources available to purposefully direct the trajectory of their lives because they spend all their time scrambling to put out fires. This is stressful, and most people cope with the stress of this with numbing agents like alcohol, weed, driving fast, scrolling around on the internet, watching facile entertainments, whatever, which makes it even harder to get in control of their lives." [One way I deal with this problem is I try to eliminate "numbing agents" from my life a priori, so I can better perceive fragilities in my life before they can harm my household.]
97 "When you internalize systems thinking you decrease the amount of resources required to run your life, and you reduce the friction."
98 More on "web of goals" thinking: sifting through your goals and activities, looking for relationships and connections, connecting at first individual nodes but eventually finding whole chunks of nodes and working on building a full web that has more and more coherence.
99ff Techniques for working on your web of goals: one is to start with basic needs like food, shelter, etc, and then work out how fragile or robust or resilient is; on linear or chain-like systems being fragile to any break in the chain, whereas web-like systems are far more robust; also on looking for what activities or desires connect up so you can have more interconnected nodes; also on identifying nodes that, if they fail, would cause the whole system to fall apart; thus it helps you put in place multiple ways of meeting your needs.
102ff What this starts to look like is a mindmap of your various activities, goals, outputs, etc. "...the value isn't in the sketch, the value is in the activity of sketching. It helps you to think in a particular way, to notice connections between things and to start to get an overall sense for the operation of your life system. It helps you start to intuitively notice things like single points of failures, frictions, misaligned goals, unmet needs, needs you are meeting that you don't actually care about, and an alignment of values... the utility is in training yourself to think this way intuitively. The sketching exercises are just exercises, they are an activity that generate insight."
104 "These sketches help you notice and identify single points of failure, friction, and misalignment in your life, and they help you think ahead so that you don't build these structures into your life."
104-5 "If you organize your life in a web-like structure, with multiple flows of resources, and build buffers of critical resources like money and food, your life is going to be pretty resilient. And a resilient life system is about more than just not dying, it's about being able to take advantage of opportunities, being able to adapt to new circumstances." [This is incredibly true in investing: if you don't have plenty of cash, plenty of buffer, you can't take advantage of gigantic opportunities when they really present themselves: like say in the aftermath of a crash. But the author here is getting at a form of robustness that is way more important and applies to way more life domains.] "If your life system can take a hit, it also means your life system can perform a pivot. You have a lot more freedom to try new things and experiment. Live somewhere else. Try a new venture. Pursue a new creative activity or relationship. You don't have to keep hammering away at one thing because there is no one critical activity that keeps your system going."
105 "When I think about my life... I'm thinking about the relationships between things... I'm looking for sources of friction, and I'm looking for waste--outputs of nodes that leave my system."
105 "A lot of my decisions now are based on an intuitive sense of my web of goals. Something will feel off and so I'll clip it. Or vice versa, I'll sense a leanness somewhere and I'll add an activity that strengthens that area of my web. From the outside my actions can look erratic or nonsensical but internally it all checks out." [The people "outside" can't see your web, they can't see what you are doing to curate it, or make it more robust; also most people simply default to consumerism so it is confusing that you actively do not use the default that they use.]
Chapter 9: A Predicament to Respond To
107ff On the "overshoot" phenomenon; on the relationship between overshoot and carrying capacity; on the idea of "eating the factory itself" not just what the factory is producing; on the idea that a collapse doesn't happen instantly, it happens over decades or centuries; usually the people in the collapse don't even realize that they're living in an actively collapsing society. [Holy cow if you even take a cursory look at Rome in the centuries leading up to and following the Western Empire's collapse you'll see a great example of this.] The discussion again talks about collapse being "a predicament to respond to" not "a problem to solve," and so the idea is to practice the collection of post-consumerism behaviors as a response, this will make you robust to civilizational decline.
111ff On not knowing precisely what the future is going to look like, but having a sense that it will be based on ecological principles, it will involve being closer to nature, it will involve the use of a robust and broad range of skills, etc.
112 A helpful discussion here of the semantics of the word collapse: people envision death or the flip of a switch, as if everything goes into a black hole right away, and then afterwards everyone's going to live in unimaginable squalor like a Mad Max movie. [In a civilizational context "collapse" is not the right word really. Phrases like "Fourth Turning" or "civilizational decline" are perhaps better mental models and linguistic labels to use.] Also on the idea that collapse is a normal thing that all civilizations go through: "It's like devoting your life to never dying, instead of having a good life while you have one."
112-3 "And the process of collapse isn't totally out of our control. We can make our own personal lives more collapse resilient....And that means that there is meaningful and fulfilling work to do right now."
113 "Put your own oxygen mask on first." The process starts with you and then spreads from the personal level to the group level, and then to the community level: "Reciprocal social bonds used to be the norm but the logic of consumer society weakened and broke them. We don't need our neighbors anymore. Work to reverse this. It's part of the post-consumer education."
113 On growing more and more decoupled from the flows of industrial civilization.
115 On how the myth of progress sits as a central paradigm for modern society (to such an extent that people can't even see that they think this way, they can't see the water), when in reality the process is cyclicality.
117 On simplifying your life deliberately before being forced to by societal collapse [or before being forced to by even narrow/local reasons, like adverse things that happen in your own household! Building extra robustness (or even anti-fragility) in your "system" is always a good thing to do.] On playing the role of an advance scout, a pioneer (or even a guinea pig) to show what's possible to other people so they can follow more easily.
118 "It's one thing to say consumerism has to go. It's another thing to walk your talk and pull it off in your own life."
118 [Interesting discussion here of the dialectic of the entire book:] "But when you're in a paradigm, it is difficult to see outside of it. And one of the things the paradigm does is convince everyone that there are only two options: the current paradigm, or brutal chaos and death. It implies that anyone who criticizes the current paradigm is an agent of death and chaos, is someone who is defeatist and wants to see the world burn and for people to go back to living in a state of disease and violence and early death and ignorance and all the rest." [Yes, exactly: this is how our brains marginalize and insta-reject these actions; it's also how the establishment media can marginalize the entire movement.]
120 [Money quote here]: "I have a problem with you being really specialized. You don't know the first thing about growing a garden, brewing beer, first aid, decent cooking, or how to sew. You knew more about bike maintenance when you were nine. You wouldn't be able to install any of the stuff you spend all day designing on a computer. That is all a problem. It makes you reliant on being able to spend money to solve your problems, which is the definition of consumerism. It undoubtedly makes you a less effective designer of the kind of built environment we need, if you accept the idea that we've got to move past consumerism as a culture."
Chapter 10: Don't Be a Stooge
123ff [An interesting irony here about how we rationalize and also meta-rationalize here]: As they debate whether or not it is somehow self-indulgent to focus on "getting your own house in order" rather than working on the world's problems, the older self responds saying that "working on the world's problems" is actually self-indulgent because of the egoic satisfaction you get from being seen as saving the world; that the idea you're a hero somehow: this is what is really self-indulgent! [Genuine virtue is practiced in private; also virtue-signaling is anti-virtuous.] The younger self uses a strawman argument here, basically, "I'm working on important net-zero projects, I can't just drop out into the woods and darn my socks!" and then the older self tells him that his company will lay him off. That the important project wasn't what he thought it was, that he ended up being a sucker for the system: naive, idealistic and worst of all, fragile to that system too.
Chapter 11: The Children of an Ancient Catastrophe
129 The younger self character responds, this time with an extreme reach fallacy: "I mean, what, are you saying I should just learn how to live off very little, reduce my footprint to something tiny, and then putter around?" [To break down the fallacy here: no one ever said anything about "puttering around," in fact there have been multiple chapters here about how to go about building a fulfilling life that also happens to not be fragile to loss of W-2 income. This is exact opposite of "puttering around." Note also that is the kind of defensive, reactive and egoic-centered answer that people will give if they're still in pushback mode; if they are still existentially threatened by a new way of thinking or a new way of looking at a problem. It's really good the way this book works out these issues in Socratic style.] "What I'm describing--a low burn rate, acquiring broad skills, internalized systems thinking--it's all groundwork." [Basically this is the prerequisite so that you can break out of your cage. The groundwork he describes is the rock hammer that you use to break out of Shawshank.]
131ff They return to the topic of how the older self got into consumer debt; the younger self asks "What happened to you?" They then begin discussing the concept of guilt; also a discussion of fear and that isolation/atomization that comes from being a part of the screwed-up modern world. On how this causes people to get on the numbing hedonic treadmill; on how it conditions people to get validation extrinsically rather than developing a robust sense of your own internal validation.
134ff Further discussion here, very interesting, about a type of codependency that exists between environmentalists and a world in need of rescuing. [Quite intriguing thoughts here, psychologically speaking.] They need each other! The implications here are disturbing: that the world needs to remain broken so that there are always things to fix. Not unlike a codependent relationship where one person is broken and needs to be fixed by the other; it is a paradox: he needs her to be fixed and she needs him to continually validate her by fixing her; thus she can never be fixed, she must remain broken.
135 Thus the post-consumer praxis gives him time and space to work on himself. "This is another reason why autonomy is so important."
135ff Note also the fixer-fixee relationship happens not just in relationships but also with work in the case of the younger self character. "So much juicy validation... Your relationship with women and your relationship with work is the same. They're both validation delivery mechanisms. This is how you sabotage your own life." [One thought here: if you want to live such that you do not seek extrinsic or outer-generated validation, if you want to make sure all of your validation comes intrinsically, it implies that everything you do should be done in private, in secret.]
139 The older self takes a different position at his job that didn't provide the kind of validation his previous "I can step in and fix this dumpster fire for us all" job before, and so he cuts off his supply of validation before he was mature enough to handle it.
140 Now we circle back to the original, central idea: that the climate crisis and "the predicament" is a constantly broken thing that requires a fixer all the time, and the younger self is a fixer who needs broken things to stay broken. In other words none of the things that he will ever do "to fix the problem" will ever work. [Once again this is a very interesting example of codependency between an unsolvable problem and the people who think that they're the fixers, the whole thing just flops, it has brokenness designed into it.]
Chapter 12: The Door of Your Cage Hangs Open
145ff "What is the most efficient design for a prison?" Make it seem like there's scary monsters outside of it; make it seem like escaping it is a doomed mission (thus you shouldn't even try); and make the prison itself really nice, with good food, entertainment, make it seem like it's not a prison at all so the prisoners forget that they're in a prison.
147 Another compelling discussion here about seeing the future as something interesting; note here that the younger self regresses again here and uses yet another fallacy: "People are dying and suffering, and it's going to get way worse, and you're gloating about it being interesting? The older self responds: "Are you offended that I am not performatively affecting the proper tone of grief and outrage?... I am under no obligation to curl into a morose ball of grief for the rest of my life about it." A discussion here about death, on not living in a mental state where you're afraid to die, and not "living by trying not to die" but instead actually living, even living with the possibility of dying violently. "I want to participate in this beautiful mess, not sit on the sidelines... I can't do that if I let myself get trapped by the hedonic treadmill, consumer ideology, hyperspecialization, linear thinking, and my own psychological dysfunctions."
To Read: [what a tremendous reading list! Lots of good stuff here.]
Peter Kalmus: Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution
Jacob Lund Fisker: Early Retirement Extreme [it's about time I re-reread this book]
Frans Osinga: Science, Strategy, and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd
Nate Hagens: The Great Simplification
Steven Kotler: The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance
Steven Kotler: The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer
Ozzie Zehner: Green Illusion: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism
Samuel Alexander: Art Against Empire: Towards an Aesthetics of Degrowth
Mark Sundeen: The Man Who Quit Money
Mark Boyle: The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living
Shannon Hayes: Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture
Wendy Jehanara Tremaine: The Good Life Lab: Radical Experiments in Hands-On Living
Thomas M. Sterner: The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life
Gerald M. Weinberg: An Introduction to General Systems Thinking
David Fleming: Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It
Donella H. Meadows: Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
Joseph Tainter: The Collapse of Complex Societies
Ernest Callenbach: Ecotopia
Jeff Schmidt: Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives
Bill Plotkin: Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World
Bill Plotkin: Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche