In this episode I talk about how skill acquisition and anti-consumerism can lead to increasing levels of personal freedom in your life. But what if you don't stop once you've got your freedom? What if you just... kept developing skills? What if you use an ability to drop into stoke-fueled flow to spin up a positive feedback loop, spiraling your personal system into an advanced stage of hypercompetence? What could this mean for your life, your community, the lifeboat flotilla?
This episode very much builds on episode 3, The Skill Ratchet.
Listen: Spotify | Apple | Spreaker | Youtube | Podcast Addict |
References
Nate Hagens’ podcast: The Great Simplification
van der Linden D, Tops M and Bakker AB (2021) The Neuroscience of the Flow State: Involvement of the Locus Coeruleus Norepinephrine System. _Front. Psychol._ 12:645498. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.645498
Di Domenico SI, Ryan RM. The Emerging Neuroscience of Intrinsic Motivation: A New Frontier in Self-Determination Research. _Front Hum Neurosci_. 2017;11:145. Published 2017 Mar 24. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2017.00145
Transcript
"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."-John Steinbeck, East of Eden
### Let's talk about skills.
Specifically, let's talk about skill acquisition. Back in episode three I described the skill ratchet, which is where increasing skills lead to lower cost of living which leads to more time to devote to learning new skills, leading to a place where you just don't have to spend much time earning money. You ratchet your way to increased personal autonomy via the appropriate application of skilled activity. Not only are you increasing your autonomy, you're having fun as you go and you're making yourself a more useful potential member of the lifeboat flotilla.
Let's unpack this a bit, because I left it rather simplistic. There's actually a few things going on here that we need to integrate. Let's walk through them one at a time.
**First, we need to understand how fundamentally incompetent we all are.**
By 'we' I mean 99% of people listening to this podcast, myself included. By incompetent I mean that we're unable to provide for almost all our own material needs without using money. We don't know how to provide for our own shelter, our own clothes, our own food. We don't know how to get clean water, and we don't know how to not poop all over our clean water even if we did get some. We don't know how to use plants to cure a tummyache or help a wound heal, we don't know how to set a bone. Some of us, if instructed to walk South, wouldn't be able to do it without instrumentation.
Most of us know how to do one really specific thing really well, and then like two or three other things tolerably well that we call hobbies, and then everything else we don't know how to do. So we pay other people who do know how to do those things to do those things for us.
We pay grocers to hold onto some food for us, and those grocers pay farmers to grow the food we eat. We pay plumbers to fix our toilets. We pay contractors to build our houses and fix our leaky roofs. We pay taxes to government to pay contractors to build the infrastructure that brings drinking water and electricity into our homes. If an emergency happens and the drinking water and electricity goes out, we get in our cars and pay a hotelier to sleep in one of their rooms that still has water and electricity.
Go back a few generations, and most of our ancestors were more competent than we are. They almost certainly could cook well, grew at least some veggies and how to preserve them and kept some animals that they knew how to slaughter and process, they knew how to walk in the woods and fell a tree, they knew how to keep an axe sharp and a pair of boots in good condition. They could make and fix furniture, sew, mend, fish, and make moonshine. They could take a tree and turn it into a chair or a boat or a barn. They could fix a plow with random bits of whatever they had at hand. They just weren't as narrowly specialized as we are.
Go back even further, like way further, or over to the still existing so called primitive cultures, and there is no aspect of their lives that they weren't competent at. They could walk across a continent, sail across an ocean in a canoe, find food and water and shelter, and maintain their culture and way of life. They knew how to take care of every single thing in their lives, and they were equal to just about any circumstance that the world could throw at them (except, arguably, civilization). Cite observations of aborigonal australians who appeared to europeans to be supremely at ease in their environment.
This isn't an argument to go back to the 1870s or 10,000BCE. It's just to state a fact that we moderns are, objectively speaking as measured by how many things we're capable of doing ourselves, almost entirely incompetent. If you took one or two skills away from us, we'd be entirely reliant on the state or family and friends to see to our needs. Take away one or two skills, and we're helpless.
There are advantages to this setup at the group level, of course. A lot of us are very very good at one thing, like I said, and this specialization allows us as a society to do some amazing stuff and get really far. To the moon, literally. It's what enables us to do stuff like make vaccines in a few months, or invent solar panels, or javelin missile launchers, or audio equipment.
But as individuals, this way of organizing competence makes us very reliant on this complicated and increasingly fragile system that provides for our needs as long as we've got the cash. It's that as long as we've got the cash part that's the rub, isn't it. The system is set up so that if you want shelter, if you want food and water, if you want clothes and books and a Spotify account, you've got to learn a specialty and work 40 hours a week for forty years so you can get that cash for that stuff.
So this is point number one. Most of us are broadly incompetent except for one thing, and have to do that one thing to get cash to pay for the stuff we need. Thing number one is an objective observation, not a value judgement. We'll get to subjective judgements in a moment.
**Thing number two is that we're all programmed to want way more stuff than we need for a good life.**
This is the subjective judgement part. Our culture - via marketing and advertising, the growth imperative, etc - is emergently and intentionally designed to get us to want more. As soon as we get more, we want EVEN more. This ever receding mirage of enough is the defining feature of our lives, at least in north america. This dynamic is often referred to as the hedonic treadmill, you run faster and raster but stay in the same place, the same place of vague uneasy discontent and twisting aspiration.
The result of this hedonic treadmill is that we're all confined to working a lot, forever, no matter how much money we make. As soon as we get a raise, we figure out how to spend that on more. We get a bonus - we spend it on more. We work some overtime - we buy even more.
Thing number two is a cultural blind spot to the fact, that after one's basic needs are met, the best things in life are free. Put another way: after one's basic needs are met, happiness and life fulfillment and contentment etc are not correlated to increasing energy and materials consumption.
The implication is that if we can figure out how to want less stuff, we'll need less money.
Okay, things are looking grim. Point one is that we're incompetent and need to earn money for the stuff we need, and thing two is that we're programmed to want more and more stuff so we have to keep earning money forever.
**Thing number three is a reminder that cash isn't the only way to get things that you need.**
We're brought up to be so deep in consumer culture that it can be kind of a shock to realize that it's possible to get certain things without the exchange of money. We're training to always assume that money is the default solution to all of life's problems. But thing three says that you can apply skills to get stuff as well.
For example if you happen to have access to some dirt and possess some gardening skill, then you can grow some tomatoes from seeds and just pick them at some point and eat them. It's important to stress that you have to know what you're doing. If you don't know what you're doing, birds will eat your tomatoes or they won't even grow or, whatever. I don't know, because I'm currently still an incompetent gardener.
If you have skills with auto mechanics, you can save thousands and thousands of dollars, both by doing work yourself and also by just knowing what appropriate preventative maintenance to do and doing it.
If you have some basic carpentry skills, you can save thousands by doing your own renovation or addition or backyard studio or van conversion or whole house.
If you have some skill, some competence at managing money, you can keep your savings safe from bad investments and high brokerage fees.
If you learn the skill of brewing, you can save a lot of money on beer, if that's your thing.
Okay, you get the idea: thing number one is we're all mostly incompetent and dependent on the system to provide stuff for us in exchange for money. Thing number two is the hedonic treadmill of wanting more and more that keeps us locked into working a lot. Thing three is a reminder that you can get stuff without money if you possess the skill to do so.
**This leads us to thing four,
which is a result of putting together things one through three, which is the realization that if you can jump off the hedonic treadmill and realize how little you actually need to live a good life, and if you develop skills to reduce the amount of money you need to spend on the little you do need... then you just don't have to work so much.** You could work part time. Or you could save up for a few years and quit early. Or you could work intermittently - work full time for a year or two, then take a year or two off, then go back. However you like. Point four is that with a little bit of anticonsumer ethos and some skills, you can carve out a huge chunk of autonomy, of time freedom, for yourself.
Point four is where most people stop. Point four comes in a few different flavors, the FIRE movement being one, voluntary simplicity another, and dirtbag culture being another. Point four is where you trim your budget just enough, and develop just enough skills, that you can figure out early retirement or part time work or whatever, spend most of your time doing whatever it is you want to do, and that's way nicer than being burnt out and working your brains out, so a lot of people stop there and they think that's the end of the line. And it's a great place to get to, it's a super liberating realization. Points one through four are well trod territory, thousands if not millions of people have pulled this off in their lives.
But... and... I think there's a point five. I think this thing is on a roll and there's magic over the horizon. Now, heads up, this is where things get speculative. I'm using my imagination here to project into the future. I don't have any examples to give, although I hope to turn myself into an example.
**Point five is where things get weird in a good way.
Point five is when you spin up a virtuous circle, a positive feedback loop that develops into hypercompetence.**
If you can develop enough skills to get to point four and carve out some time freedom for yourself, one of the things you can spend your time on is... developing further skills that you enjoy doing. Since you've got even more time in your life, you've got even more time available to build skills, so your rate of skill acquisition can - if you want it to - increase. As your skills increase, not only does your cost of living probably decrease even further, but at some point you're going to develop skills to the point that you're good enough that other people would pay you money for it, or they'd do you a favor, or whatever.
If you don't have to work so much because you use skills to get stuff instead of money and are no longer totally incompetent like most of us, then you can spend more time developing even further skills, which can drop your need for money even lower, and at some point you're so good at so much stuff people start noticing random things you're good at and they'll offer you money, or food, or a favor, or whatever, to do some of those things for them, and all of a sudden you realize you're sort of accidentally making enough money to cover your expenses, which by this point are tiny, and so money is just this sort of incidental thing in your life that you don't have to think about much. You no longer have a real job, unless you want one, but if you do have one it's not because you need the money it's because it's interesting and you want to do it.
So one consequence of this virtuous circle is that your level of autonomy becomes extremely durable. You have multiple sources of possible income. You have multiple sources of flows of other things in your life. You could get a job doing half a dozen different things if you wanted to. You get half of your food without paying for it, through gardening and relationships with people who do garden and foraging (urban or rural) and hunting and whatever else you're interested in. At the same time that your access to money is much less likely to fail or to drop below your needs, the amount of money keeps dropping.
Also, with a high level of appropriate skills, you're unlikely to be negatively effected in a huge way during major disruptions. Power outage and the deer in the freezer is going to go bad? No worries, you know how to make jerky or whatever. Sewer is backed up and you can't flush the toilet? That's fine, you go into the garage and bang together a bucket compost toilet in a few hours from some scrap wood you had laying around and set up a safe humanure bin in the backyard. In a car that breaks down out in the middle of nowhere? All good, step 1 don't panic, step two lets pop the hood and see what we got here, you keep spare pantyhose in the boot to replace broken belts...
So point five is if you can set up this positive feedback loop, your freedom becomes much more secured than if you freedom relied totally on, say, your brokerage accounts, and there are fewer environmental circumstances that can really leave you in a jam because... you're just really competent.
**Point six is that the world needs broadly competent people. **
Hyperspecialization has worked out pretty well for society based on metrics of gdp, technological advancement, etc. But it hasn't worked out well from the metrics of average happiness, mental health, physical health, ecosystem health, increased threat of existential risks like nuclear war, biological terrorism, and climate system collapse.
Worsening global instability of climate systems, political systems, and food and resource distribution systems are baked in to the pie we all have to eat over the coming decades and century. This means that we're going to have to increasingly take care of ourselves. The ability of states and of global systems of power to look after our needs as individuals and communities is eroding and will erode faster and faster, in fits and starts. *I'm not going to spend any time backing this up - if you've gotten this far with me, you've already done your homework on this point. If you'd like to do more homework, start with Nate Hagans podcast the Great simplification, I'd say probably start with the Joseph Tainter interview and then go to the Dennis meadows interview and go from there.*
We're going to have to rely on ourselves more, on our own levels of competence, as communities, in the very near future. We're going to have to more and more tend to our own sources of food, energy, water, shelter, hygiene, materials, security, entertainment, art, music, philosophy, and justice, on an increasingly local scale.
This loops back to point 1, which is that we're all mostly incompetent but make up for it buy being specialized at one thing to participate in consumer capitalism. That's not going to work forever. That's a particular arrangement that's only existed for a very short amount of time in human history and it shows no indication of being a durable, long term arrangement. We're going to transition away from that arrangement to, well, something else. No one can say for sure how our societies will be organized in fifty, a hundred, two hundred years, but the smart money is not on increasing specialization and incompetence.
And part of the problem with how things are currently set up, is that since everyone is so narrowly specialized, they don't understand how what they're doing effects what other people are doing, or how it effects other places in the world. We've got this system where a bunch of specialists are running around not understanding the unintended negative side effects of them deploying their specialty on the world. Chemical engineers not understanding the effect of dumping pesticides into rivers and the downstream effects etc etc. So another reason to start to build broad latticeworks of competency is that we can avoid this blindness to the impacts of what we do. We need people who are not just good at stuff, but are good at seeing the whole system, understand how everything works together, and can act in ways that don't create more problems than they solve. (this should maybe be a standalone point)
I'd like to make very very clear here that I'm using the word community very intentionally. The lone wolves aren't going to make it very long. The isolated rugged individualists, by and large, are going to die alone. I think. So please, never mistake my position. I think that developing deep social roots throughout one's community locally and abroad is perhaps the most important thing we can be doing. I do not think buying isolated property in northern idaho, building a bunker, and never meeting your neighbors, is a good idea. Massive mistake. I'll be returning to this point in more detail again and again.
But for right now, the point is that in order to meet the future halfway (to borrow Nate Hagen's phrase), we autta be spending as much time as we can developing broad and appropriate practical skills.
But this is kind of good news! It's not like in order to meet the future we have to learn how to do something that really sucks, or is really risky. We just have to figure out how to get good at a bunch of different things. Turns out, humans like getting good at stuff. That's basically the whole point of the dopamine system, which to make it really simple is like feel-good drugs that motivates us to get off our asses and learn and explore and do new things. So, a, the process if done right is intrinsically enjoyable, and b, the more skills we develop the more autonomy and personal security we build for ourselves, so our lifestyles become harder to disrupt in a negative way. So even if all these really smart people are totally wrong about energy descent and someone figures out cold fusion the future is going to more resemble star trek than anything else, that's fine, our lives will be that much better, full of autonomy, enjoyable activities, and security.
So to recap:
We're all incompetent and have to earn money doing some really specialized thing so we can solve our problems with money instead of ability, and
consumer culture programs us to always want more, so we can never stop working no matter how much money we earn.
is just a reminder that it IS possible to get some stuff for less money or even no money, by deploying skills or competence in those areas.
puts points 1-3 together and says hey, wait a minute, if I can just short circuit the hedonic treadmill by realizing how little stuff I need for a good life, and develop some skills for the stuff I do need, then I don't have to work as much as we're taught to assume. I could retire early or only work parttime or intermittently.
Is the idea that if, once earning a bit of time freedom, you put even more time into skill development, you can set up a positive feedback loop where you gain more skills, which leads to more competence, autonomy, and security, which leads to more time spent developing skills, etc. By harnessing the power of this positive feedback loop, we can become extraordinarily competent people, the likes of which the world hasn't seen in a long, long time. We can only speculate what communities full of people this competent will be able to pull off.
and point six is that beyond the boundary of your own skin or family, our communities are going to need more and more competent people to help see after securing the things we need like food, energy, water, shelter, security, etc. In other words, the lifeboat flotilla can use broadly competent people. So this idea of becoming hypercompetent badasses is not a merely individualistic obsession, it also actually ought to be focused outward to other people, it ought to be woven in to one's social environment. I actually think this is so important a point that I plan on taking the entire next episode to devote to it.
**Point seven is almost an appendix, or a pre-condition, but point seven is that that the amplifying signal of the feedback loop is the pleasure you get from getting better at doing the things you're doing.**
Your skill development must be driven by intrinsic motivation. You've gotta be stoked to do it. You find some skill to work on, some activity that requires competence and focus, and you enjoy it. You find the process and the effort pleasurable, so you do it. Since you spend time on it, you get better, and your performance at that skill increases. Well, that feels nice too, so you do it more, so you get better, so you do it more, etc.
I think this point can't be overemphasized. Intrinsic motivation, and I'm going to use the word stoke for intrinsic motivation from here on out, is necessary. No stoke, no positive feedback loop. If you're motivated to develop skills for external rewards, for the money, for the trophy at the end, that will destabilize the feedback loop and the whole thing will fall apart. You'll revert back to thing four. Which isn't a bad place, so that's the cool thing with this, if it takes a few tries to get the feedback loop off the ground, the failure mode is.... actually pretty nice. So you don't have to stress about failure and can focus on giving it a solid go.
Why is intrinsic motivation necessary? To put it bluntly, stoke kicks willpower's ass, any day of the week. You don't need willpower to do something you want to do. (repeat this sentence) You just do it. In fact, sometimes you need to exert willpower to get yourself to stop doing something you want to do, in order to get up and pee or take the trash out.
And because stoke has this incredible power to keep you locked on and lovingly focused on something, your performance at it is way above anything you could achieve if you were trying to whiteknuckle it, to grind it out. By performance I mean both how good you are at the thing, and how rapidly you learn the thing during the process of skill development. Stoke can fuel tremendously rapid skill acquisition.
There's a neurological, neurochemical component of this - when you're fully engaged in activities you enjoy, the brain is doing all kinds of things with dopamine and norepinephrine and myelenation and other things to enhance the learning process. You literally learn faster, have more insights, etc, when you're stoke driven. This is why it's so important, but it's also important because...
the whole point of life is to do more stuff you want to do and do less stuff you don't want to do, right? Any strategy that involves doing stuff you enjoy, that lights you up, has got something going for it. And this requirement that you enjoy what you're doing, it's an assurance that there's no way to fail at this. If you're spending time doing things you enjoy, then kind of no matter what happens you're spending your time well.
You need to enjoy the skills you develop. You need to be intrinsically motivated. You can't force this stuff. Or rather you can try to force skill learning, but you'll burn out and you won't get into that positive feedback loop. There will be nothing remarkable about your experience.
If you try to develop these skills and all you're thinking about is how low your monthly expenses are going to be, or the end result, in other words if you're focused on external rewards, this whole thing is going to crash and burn. Don't do stuff you don't want to do. Do stuff you want to do. This is a really important point, a lesson that I'm taking a lifetime to learn but since I'm learning it the hard way I'm really understanding how entirely vital it is. You need to enjoy not just the results of your skills, you need to enjoy doing the thing itself.
This in itself is a skill, I've come to believe. There's two sides to it: one is the skill of not letting something you're intrinsically motivated to do become corrupted by external rewards, and thing two is how to subjectively convert things you are indifferent about to things that you're stoked to do.
We need to understand a few things here about intrinsic motivation, which will make it clearer why it's so crucial to this process. We need to understand the mechanics of stoke.
### Protecting Stoke: The Stewards of Stoke
They say that if you can get paid to do something you love, you'll never work a day in your life.
They also say that depending on doing something you love doing to pay the bills is the quickest way to learn to hate doing that thing, to destroy your love for it.
That second thing is worth paying attention to. It is all too easy to burn out. The science of stoke, of intrinsic motivation, gives us some clues as to why this is. They've done studies with children who loved drawing, where they started giving the kids treats as rewards for drawing. Eventually this made the kids draw less, their stoke literally dropped as a result of being rewarded for doing what they enjoyed.
"Intrinsic motivation is the spontaneous, internally directed drive towards novelty and challenges, with an implication for increasing one's knowledge and capacity." (Domenico and Ryan, 2014)
The important point here is that phrase internally directed, which just means we need to have the sense that we are in control, that we are doing something because we ourselves chose freely to do it, and not for any other reason. Any kind of external reward, any extrinsic source of motivation, sucks the power out of intrinsic motivation, because it casts doubt on this sense that we're acting autonomously.
The implication here is that in order to maintain solid stoke, we need to protect our sense of agency over what we're doing. We need to be vigilant about allowing the corrupting influence of external rewards into our stoke fuelled activities. This is one reason why I've come to think that there is a skill, a metaskill, to chasing stoke.
### Avoid external rewards
One simple way to do this is to just avoid any and all external rewards. If someone offers you money for something, don't accept it. Don't throw parties after you complete some milestone on your project, because to your brain that's an external reward. Don't use that trick where you say if you just put in one more hour, then you'll get to have a brownie or a hot soak or whatever. That's an external reward. If you have people in your life who give you lots of praise for doing what you're doing, stop telling them you're doing stuff.
This is kind of a limited method. It's very blunt, not very fine. And a lot of times you do want those external rewards, those yields of your labor, you just don't want them to corrupt your enjoyment of the activity. This is one reason why having a tiny cost of living makes this process so much easier, I think. It's impossible to not care so much if you get paid or not if you need to generate a lot of money just to keep food on the table.
Doing whatever you have to do to get to point four, where you have a very small cost of living and lots of free time, means that either you don't have to generate money at all because you're financially independent, or you only really need to generate some money here and there, means that the pressure is off.
You can afford to spend three months doing something that doesn't get remunerated at all because you have savings, you can wait long stretches before getting paid a little and that's fine. So if in your mind getting paid is essentially incidental to the reasons for doing the thing, that yeah you need to make some money but it's not a big deal, then that's a much easier place to be in and protect your activities from external rewards and burnout.
That's all a way to protect stoke by controlling your external environment, by being a goalie and defending your activity from external rewards, or from making the importance of external rewards much less, just bashing them away, right.
### Subjective mind control
Another method, a more subtle method, is to control your internal environment. It turns out that our experience of external rewards and their impact on stoke is subject to subjective cognitive control. By that I mean that external rewards are interpreted in our minds as a positive event, and we can let our minds anticipate that event in advance and we can let our minds go wild with celebration when that event happens. Those experiences are when the damage gets done. But, if we can control our minds, control our subjective response to external rewards, we can effectively turn the gain down on external rewards and minimize the damage it does to our stoke.
So you get paid to do something you like. Whatever. You don't even think about it. So someone says something nice about something you did. Fine, nice, already forgot about it, don't give a shit, moving on. This is called flattening the curve of dopamine response.
So that's what not to focus on, but that's sort of like telling someone to not think of a purple elephant, right? You can't focus on not focusing on something. You have to focus on something else. What should you focus on?
Well, you should focus on the activity you're stoked to do. Don't think of the result, don't think of the podium, the paycheck, the compliments, when you're not doing the thing think about what doing the thing is like, and when you're doing the thing let your mind be totally absorbed in what you're doing in the moment. Let the thing itself be the reward that unfolds in realtime moment after moment after moment. This is how time dilates, how you get lost in the love of the thing, and how you slip into the positive feedback loop.
Some people are naturally very good at this. Actually, some people are incapable of doing anything BUT this, and a lot of them are friends of mine. It's like external rewards have no impact on them and they only do stuff they want to do. I envy them. I'm not wired that way. It's easy for me to get into a groove of grinding, of slogging, of thinking that I need to do some thing for some external reason. And so for me, one of the reasons I've been spending so much time digging into the science of intrinsic motivation is that I need to develop the skill of stoke.
### Goals and plans are a source of external control
One of the things I uncovered that totally blew my mind is how goals and plans can act as external rewards and thus as demotivators. Okay, remember, in order for stoke to exist, you've got to have the sense that your actions are internally directed, that you yourself are in control.
Well what is a plan or a goal? Five minutes after you create a goal, it's an external thing that is saying "you must go this way". A goal is something that says here's the path, don't deviate from it. Once you have a goal, you hand control over to it, which even if you're the person who created the goal, it becomes an external source of influence in your actions, and thus corrupts stoke. The further in the future the realization of the goal is, the more it degrades stoke, for reasons having to do with the dopamine response system.
This of course made me think about what the impact of having an overall vision for my life, a huge life goal, is like. Or rather, what the impact is of spending a lot of time thinking about an overall vision. Because that's just like having a goal that you can never achieve. And there is nothing so demotivating as anticipating the pleasure of achieving something that never comes. Again, this is a known dynamic of the dopamine response system, there's no crash like the crash of frustrated anticipation. Imagine a life that is just a rolling, continuous frustration of desire. What would that do to a person?
Of course I don't think we should throw away visions and goals entirely. They're useful to get us pointed in the right direction. But once pointed in the approximate right direction, we should forget those goals as much as possible, get them as far out of our heads as we possibly can, and focus on delight led exploration and challenge. Every once in a while we should come up for air and check in on our goals, see where we are, see if we still like that old goal or if what we've learned in the meantime means we should change our heading a bit, and reorient as necessary, and then totally forget about it again to get happily lost in the stoke.