Tyler J. Disney

About

I was obsessed with solving the world’s problems.

Solving climate change, pollution, and resource over-extraction in the built environment was my profession. I poured myself into this work.

But atmospheric CO2 levels kept going up. Resource extraction kept increasing. Housing got less affordable. Our infrastructure consumed more energy, not less.

And my own life didn’t reflect my values. I carried debt and spent more than a third of my income on housing. I was too busy and overworked to enjoy relationships, nature, leisure, art, anything. I used alcohol and the internet to cope with my emotional issues that I didn’t have time or energy to work on.

I was too busy to cook so I ate out often. I lived in conventional housing in a high cost of living area so I paid a lot in rent. I didn’t own a car but I flew long distance on vacations to “recharge” several times a year - vacations so short that I’d only just begun to unwind by the time they were over.

There was a veneer of sustainability and eco choices to my life, but the final accounting had my resource consumption numbers just as high as any other North American. In 2019 I earned about $70,000 after taxes, and I spent about $70,000. I had carried consumer debt for much of my career up to that point. I was an echo of the very system I sought to change.

Even worse, I wasn’t actually sure my work was doing any good. The fear of unintended consequences kept me up at night. The uncertainty that anything I was doing was making a difference in the face of unfolding catastrophe was hard to live with.

Was I burning my life out for an illusion of impact? Was I sacrificing joy and engagement in the experience of being alive for a story about obligation and sacrifice rooted in shame?

By 2020 I realized that I couldn’t keep playing by the rules I’d been adhering to for 15 years and expect to get different results. I needed to play a different game. And I needed to start with myself. I needed to get my own house in order before I could have any hope of contributing to anything else.

So I disassembled my life and then rebuilt it.

I radically cut my spending. I stopped assuming that the solution to all of my problems or desires involved spending money. I began applying skills, knowledge, and strategic thinking to my life.

I examined every single existing thing in my life and I asked “What does this cost? And of what value is it? And what effects does it have on my life?” Much of it went.

I got laid off in early 2021 but was able to easily cover my now-greatly-reduced living expenses with savings and picking up interesting work for neighbors, like upgrading their PV systems or helping with their off-grid properties.

My surplus time expanded into a spaciousness that allowed me time to heal, pursue different therapeutic modalities, and explore parts of myself I’d left on a shelf a long time ago.

An opportunity to co-found a business came along in 2024 and with my surplus of time and attention I was able to dive in without anything else in my life breaking. That venture has been a tremendous experience with new opportunities to learn skills and provide value every week.

My cost of living is around $15,000/yr, and that’s with what I consider to be a fairly loose margin. I’m not hyper strict with my spending and could easily tighten it up – about $5k of that total is on experiments and exploratory personal development.

About that number: I am an unmarried guy with no children and a privilege stack that I take advantage of. I am not claiming that anyone can pull my exact life and expenses off. I applied a certain set of strategies and techniques to the facts of my life, and this is my result. You can apply similar kinds of strategies and techniques to your life and you will get results unique to your life.

Free, Rugged, and Aligned

I’ve unlocked an uncommon level of freedom primarily through rejecting the norms of consumer spending, building up a buffer of savings, and not needing a traditional full time equivalent job. This freedom allows me to say yes to serendipitous opportunities, like bootstrapping a company or going on romantic quests.

My life is more rugged. As part of learning how to live well while spending less, I’ve developed practical skills like cooking, DIY, backcountry travel, construction, off-grid living, sewing, and gear and tool repair. I am less tightly coupled to the flows of industrial consumer society than I ever have been, buffering me from short term supply shocks and shortages.

I feel more aligned with my values. I’m not chronically overworked, stressed, and numbing. I have time for my relationships and for creative endeavors. I don’t feel like I’m pouring the best of myself into a black hole.

Seven years into this journey, I find myself returning to my original question in a different way. My old question was “How do we fix the problem of climate change and overshoot and everything else?”

For me, those questions spawned secondary questions like “How hard is it physically possible to work?” and “Is it even ethical to have a home life while such problems exist in the world?” and “How much of life can I outsource on my salary so that I can grind more?”

The only answers to those questions are bad answers, answers that lead to a mess of a life and probably a mess of impact on the world.

I now believe that what I really wanted to know was, “How can my life have meaning in the context of a world coming apart at the seams?”

By taking a step back and getting my own house in order I discovered the beginning of an answer to these better questions. What I now think is that

  1. The world is in crisis in large part due to runaway cultural programming that equates the good life with boundless material consumption, but I’ve discovered that

  2. It’s possible to build rich, free, rugged, vibrant lives by playing by a different game, a game that recognizes a realistic level of material sufficiency as “enough”, and that beyond that level there are whole worlds of human flourishing to explore that don’t require ever-more inputs of resources, and that

  3. This different game, this understanding of the world that rejects boundless material affluence, is a prerequisite for any long-term viable society on this planet of ours, so along with whatever else we have to do to navigate our unfolding crises, learning to live and think and build with this new understanding is a necessary component.

More and more people are recognizing that the dominant way of arranging our societies is a dead end, and we’re exploring the alternative landscape. This leads me to the fourth thing I think, which is that

  1. As individuals free themselves they tend to find each other, encourage and support each other… and then they begin to build together. They begin to build the seedpods of a viable society in the nooks and crannies of the present moment. At least, the people interested in that sort of thing do. I happen to be one of those people.

This movement is not a solution to our crises in the sense of making climage change and overshoot “go away”. This movement is a response to the reality we’re living through, and a re-alignment and harmonization with how our future is unfolding in front of us. This what I call a Deep Response.

I wish I could go explain everything I’ve learned to my younger self. I wish this so strongly that I wrote that conversation down and turned it into a book.

Deep Response is a conversation between 38yo Tyler and 25yo Tyler. Old me explains where young me is going off the rails, and what he can do to get on a better path immediately instead of spending years banging his head against a wall.

If you want to dive directly into the details of life overhaul, I’m working on The Deep Response Manual v1: Get Free now and publishing it online.