I want you to be free to do stuff.
I want you to internalize a sufficiency and abundance mindset, realize that consumer ideology is a deeply ingrained satchel of nonsense, develop broad and stoke-directed skills, apply systems thinking to your life, and I want you to spend the rest of your life doing stuff you want to do.
I want this because I believe strongly in the capacity of humans to flourish when certain conditions are met. I think the current conditions are not great. But you can create your own micro-conditions amenable to a beautiful life. You can build a seedpod for the future in your own household and breathe life into that seedpod and perhaps grow it from there.
The journey of internalizing post-consumer praxis and building a life rugged enough for dream-chasing isn’t just long, it’s endless. It is the rest of your life. It is an infinite game. So there’s no need to rush because there’s no actual destination to arrive at.
That said, if you’re anything like I was, you are sick unto death of the way your old life functions and you are ready to make big changes quickly. If you aren’t, that’s fine. You can read these manuals and just go slower. But know that I’m not writing for you precisely and you will need to take this volume with a grain of salt. I’m writing for those who are ready to go. I’m going to assume that you want to go as fast as possible. I’m writing for the speedrunners.
You should know that speedrunning is dangerous and not an appropriate strategy for everyone. You will make mistakes and your velocity and sense of urgency will magnify the consequences of those mistakes, because KE = mv^2/2. But the rewards are profound and will justify the risks. I’m writing for the speedrunners because:
- I did a speedrun, as much as I could, and so it’s something I feel competent to speak to, and I understand the frustration of receiving toe-dipping advice and milquetoast reformism when there’s a fire burning inside you, and
- I want to help you avoid the traps that your sense of urgency and desire to rush might cause you to stumble into. I want to help you go quickly, and I want to help you make only easily recoverable mistakes, and I want to help you not be overcome by your sense of anxiety.
The speedrunner’s tool is the crowbar. You don’t use a crowbar for fine detail work. You use a crowbar for fast and rough work. You can get a lot done in a short amount of time with a crowbar, which is the whole point. After you’ve made those big rough changes, you can come back for another pass and smooth out the rough edges.
If the use of a crowbar seems brutish to you, consider that a sculptor does not approach a chunk of rock with the tiniest chisel and the finest grit sandpaper. They start with the biggest chisel they have paired with the biggest mallet they have and they whack off all the big chunks of stuff they know they don’t need. Once they get close to the rough shape they have in mind, they switch over to finer tools. The same approach applies to major lifestyle overhauls.
Besides just wanting to go fast, is there a strategic reason to go quickly?
Yes, absolutely. If you are constituted for it, if your life can take the hit, then going fast is better than going slow for a couple of reasons.
One reason is purely financial. It applies most to people with medium to high incomes. Let’s say you currently spend $75,000/yr and you think you can be spending only $15,000/yr.
The conventional approach is to make small lifestyle adjustments, one after the other, never rocking the boat too much, and gradually decreasing your cost of living over time. Let’s say you reduce your cost of living by 5% every month. You’ll get to a COL of $15,000 in 33 months.
Now let’s say you crowbar it and reduce your cost of living by 40% every month. You’ll get to a COL of $15,000/yr by month 5.
The difference is $52,186. That’s how much going slower will cost you.
But there is another reason why going fast is strategic when it comes to alternative lifestyle changes.
Making lifestyle changes of this sort requires a large reservoir of personal conviction. You have to believe in your vision and in the efficacy of your path, because no one else in your life will. Everyone else will urge caution, tell you you’re being impulsive and rash, stage an intervention, and otherwise do their best to crab-bucket you. This will be especially difficult as you make inevitable beginner mistakes and struggle to learn a different way of living and thinking.
People will demand that you have flawlessly thought through intellectual justifications for every thing you do and you will not have those, not all of them. Much of what you will do will be experimental – you’ll test techniques, try different approaches, adopt what works and discard what doesn’t. This will not make sense to most people, who will ruthlessly criticize your mistakes and how you appear to be inconsistent, and you will not be able to explain it to them in a way that satisfies either of you.
In other words, your life may look like a dumpster fire from the outside. It might in fact be a bit of a dumpster fire. People will not get it. They will not understand where you are trying to go, why you would want to get there in the first place, what you intend to do with yourself once you get there, and why you’re willing to set your life on fire to get there.
This is the hardest part, and it’s often why people fail. Things get hard and the negative voices of family and friends and the implicit messaging of mainstream consumer culture chip away at your resolve, your belief, your vision.
Be as kind as you can to these people. Their criticism has less to do with you than it does them and their own fears. Don’t try to fight them or convince them that you’re right. What you’re doing does look insane. Have some compassion for what a weirdo you look like to them. Keep going and let your eventual results speak for themselves. Play the long game. The people criticizing you today may be asking for your advice tomorrow. The best revenge isn’t revenge at all.
The faster you move through beginning stages when you’re trying to get your bearings, making mistakes, and generally crowbar-ing everything in your life, the quicker you get to a phase where your life no longer looks or feels like a dumpster fire. The sooner you get to a level of operations where you aren’t exerting personal energy for every new thing in your life, you’ve gained unconscious competence at many of your new ways of life, and you are starting to reap the benefits of your practices, the better. The doubting and critical voices will quiet once you hit this phase, and your own convictions will gather strength, bolstered by the experience and evidence of your successes.
In other words, you want to establish a win spiral as quickly as possible and firmly root yourself into your new practices.
“In human affairs of danger and delicacy successful conclusion is sharply limited by hurry. So often men trip by being in a rush. If one were properly to perform a difficult and subtle act, he should first inspect the end to be achieved and then, once he had accepted the end as desirable, he should forget it completely and concentrate solely on the means. By this method he would not be moved to false action by anxiety or hurry or fear.”-Steinbeck, East of Eden
Think carefully. Decide on an approach – to crowbar, or not to crowbar. Having made up your mind, try not to worry about the destination and instead focus on the next step in front of you and execute it as cleanly and solidly as possible.
Okay. That’s enough non-actionable philosophizing and contextualizing. Grab your crowbar. Lets go.
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