Tyler J. Disney

Get Free: Why Go Fast

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Most of us are locked into lifestyles that require use to exchange 40+hrs/wk of our lives to stay financially afloat. In order to respond appropriately to an uncertain unfolding future, we need more autonomy than that. I’m not going to spend any time in this volume arguing that ‘more personal autonomy of action’ is a desirable state. (I developed that idea in my first book, Deep Response. For this manual it is taken as a given.)

In this context, we can define “freedom” as “how long it would take you to deplete your savings”. If you have $100,000 and spend $10,000 a year, you have ten years of savings.

Freedom = Savings/Cost of Living

Because of the way society is constructed, many of us have been tricked into habits and circumstances where we spend more money than is necessary to live a wonderful life. (In fact, in a lot of cases, the spending of the money decreases our quality of life.) We’ve been tricked into arranging our affairs in unnecessarily expensive ways, and thinking that any reduction in Spending will result in a reduction in Quality of Life.

We’ve been taught that Quality of Life = Cost of Living (the more you spend, the better your life).

This manual offers an alternative: Quality of life = Cost of Living * Skill of Living [1]. (This is a simplification, but it is useful for now in this form.) This means that you can have the same (or higher!) quality of life even at dramatically lower costs of living.

But in fact, this bar chart only tells a small part of the story.

A slightly fuller version of the story is that you can learn skills to decrease cost while maintaining QOL… and then you can keep learning skills, and keep increasing your quality of life, despite having a very low COL. This following graph illustrates using skills to decrease COL, and then using skills to increase QOL. Want a $100k life for $10k?

Even this doesn’t go far enough. There are thresholds, tipping points, accelerations. At a certain point you can buy your time back, which means you can learn skills faster, which means you can unlock even higher qualities of life faster. And claiming that you can get a “$100k Life for $10k” is still framing things in terms of what money can buy, so it’s imaginatively limited. In truth, skills can buy you kinds of life that money cannot. Skills can get you a qualitatively different life, not just quantitatively.

But we’ll return to those higher-order and transcendent dynamics later.

The entire premise of this volume, then, is that we can significantly increase our freedom by reducing our cost of living while maintaining or improving our quality of life via the acquisition and deployment of certain Skills of Living. This is a manual for executing on this premise.

Conceptually, this is an easy thing to do. It is not rocket science.

However, many people find it difficult to execute on this premise and unlock an uncommon level of autonomy for themselves. Why?

In my opinion this work is primarily difficult for emotional and psychological reasons having to do with our relationships with other people, and our identities. And the less naturally frugal of a person you are, the more difficult it is to make these changes in your life.

I am not naturally frugal. I understood conceptually that Freedom = Savings/COL my entire adult life, and I still just blew all my income. I did this mostly because I had emotional and psychological dysfunctions that made reducing my COL emotionally and psychologically difficult. However, I also spent all my money because I lacked awareness of some of the basic skills of low-cost living. I didn’t consciously understand that it was possible to live well on very little money — it was outside of my frame of reference. It didn’t occur to me that it was possible to live well on $10,000 a year. This volume is written for people who, like me, are not naturally frugal and need logistical and emotional frameworks to actually pull off a lower COL in their own lives.

On the logistics and technical skills side of things, this is all fairly straightforward. No higher math is involved, and all of the skills are easily within your abilities. Everything technical in this manual is some variation of “how do I get what I want for less money? How do I decrease COL while maintaining or increasing QOL?” There is learning involved, but it’s mostly just a bit of initial effort, followed repetition to lock in new habits.

What does make the technical aspect challenging is if you choose to go fast. I’m writing this manual from the assumption that you want to do it fast, hence the Crowbar Protocol. The speed is what makes it technically challenging, because you have to learn quickly and recover from mistakes quickly. It can be cognitively overwhelming, particularly if you are balancing work, family life, etc. My recommendation is that you adjust your speed to your cognitive overwhelm threshold. Go as fast as you can, and when it starts to feel like you can’t keep up, dial it back a smidge and lock in. (This is also why you shouldn’t be in

Crowbar Mode for a long time. It can wear you down. Hit it and quit it.)

The Hard Part

Emotionally (psychologically and socially), cranking your COL way down is what is more inherently difficult. Conscious and unconscious status anxiety, peer pressure, misunderstanding and mischaracterization from friends and family, identity issues, overcoming social programming and other internal dilemmas are what make this difficult from a non-technical perspective. The emotionally difficulty tends to be the crux of this process.

The Crowbar Protocol is intended to reduce the emotional pain of this process purely via speed. It’s the rip-the-bandaid-off approach, versus the slowly and agonizingly peeling it off approach. If you go fast enough, people won’t be able to keep up with your rate of change and they’ll be responding to you, rather than having enough time to really entrench and attack you. If you go fast enough, you change a lot of your behaviors which proves to yourself that you are different.

Changing your life across multiple domains is to enter into a liminal state of hypocrisy. Let’s say you start your Crowbar Phase by reducing your food costs. For a month, you focus entirely on reducing your cost of food. You start to build an identity as someone who eats well, but inexpensively.

But you still blow tons of money on housing, and entertainment, and your car, and a hundred other things! What a hypocrite, right? This state is a form of cognitive dissonance. You are building an identity of a wholistically frugal person, but you are not yet wholistically frugal, and you have evidence of this inconsistency everywhere in your life.

This cognitive dissonance is hard to live with, and few people in your life are going to make it easier. The easy solution is to revert to your old behaviors to align with you pre-existing identity.

It is this dynamic which is most difficult to overcome and what causes most failures.

One solution is to go fast. Go as fast as you can. Outrun your old identity, outrun the naysayers and the doubting voices in your head, and build a new identity as quickly as possible. It doesn’t have to be perfect. You can spend time later tidying up the mess you make.

The most important thing is to get as much of your life consistent with your new identity as quickly as possible, and tip the weight of your actions towards proof of your new self. Once you attain this critical threshold things start falling in your favor. The purpose of this manual is to help you get to that point fast.

[1] Jacob Lund Fisker, 2015, https://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/viewtopic.php?p=99322#p99322

Clearwater

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Jack and I went out for another six days, this time just south of the Alaska Range.

We walked five miles in on a road, then gained a ridge we hoped to traverse over and drop down to a glassing spot. The ridge turned out to be much more technical than we expected - third and possibly fourth class. With weather moving in, sundown imminent, and 50+lb packs, that was out of the question. We backtracked and dropped down a gulley, making for a ~15mi day.

#nope ridge

I continue to make noob gains in terms of learning how to be in this landscape. Staying dry and warm enough in a rainy remote location in the 30’s F is a new game to this desert rat. My ancestors are Finnish, Swedish, English, and Scottish, so I figure I’m just going through a process of waking up my latent northern genes.

Unlike most, I didn’t come up here for a job or for a dream of Alaska. I came for a person I’d met who wasn’t as location-independent as I am. I didn’t throw myself at “the Alaska experience” because that had never occurred to me. I love the Mojave and the Sierra and low-key have Reynauds. I don’t (didn’t) hunt or fish or ski and I like the sun, and I am (I was) scared of bears.

Alaska is a rough place to just be, though. You can’t live here indifferently like you can in milder places. You’ll get chewed up. You’ve got to be here, or you’ve got to go. So, here I am. I’m loving it.

Get Free: Introduction

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Solutions return current circumstances to a preferred prior operational dynamic.

Responses engage with current circumstances in a way that moves the system forward to a new operational dynamic.

A comprehensive solution to the polycrisis seeks to return civilization to industrial consumer capitalist pseudo-stability. Critically, seeking a solution to the metacrisis implies no fundamental critique of the structure of that arrangement. Solution-seeking is an affirmation of the basic structural assumptions and mythologies of how we’ve been doing things.

A deep response to the metacrisis begins with a substantial critique of the driving assumptions and mythologies of the current arrangement, proposes alternatives, and seeks to move civilization to a new operational dynamic. Deep response assumes that the fundamental logic of the previous method is inherently dysfunctional and must be phased out for more-functional alternatives.

Solutionism insists that the system is broken and must be fixed. Responsiveness declares that the system is working precisely as intended and must be left behind.[1]

A Protocol for Response at the Personal Level

Among everything else we may have to do to move towards a more harmonious civilization in this time of polycrisis, one of the first things we need to do as individuals is unlearn the implicit operating dynamic of industrial consumer capitalism, begin practicing alternative ways of living, and carve out significant amounts of autonomy from obligate participation in the logic of the inherently flawed system.

The successor societies arising out of the ruins of the 21st century will not find fertile soil in the minds and lives of those who swim as yet unconsciously in the waters of consumerism. And even those consciously aware of and interested in contributing to those successor societies will face great difficulty if the bulk of their life energy remains coupled and devoted to surviving and thriving that system.

The Crowbar Protocol is the first of three stages of Deep Response at the personal level. These stages are the part where you affix your own oxygen mask and get your own house in order. There’s more to responding to the polycrisis than just getting your own house in order. But everything else is a lot harder if your own house is a dumpster fire, so start there.

The Crowbar Protocol is thus not a cheat code for winning the Current Arrangement via clever hacks, and it is not a solution to anything. It is a method for exiting a failing way of life and securing the personal autonomy required to pursue alternatives. It is rough and fast, intended for people who have a burning sense of urgency to get away from the terminal spirit disease of modern culture.

The Protocol is pragmatic and doesn’t bother striving for the illusion of moral purity via ethical consumerism. It’s about:

reducing expenses while improving quality of life,
unlearning socialized consumerist habits of mind,
laying the foundation for radical personal autonomy,
and pareto decoupling your life from industrial consumer society,
quickly.

It is effective, yet difficult. The point of the Crowbar Protocol is to make major changes in your life that allow you to pursue other goals with your life.

The Crowbar Protocol is a phase, not a permanent way of life. It should probably last no longer than 18 months. You can execute Crowbar tactics a la carte at any time, but this guide is about how to employ the Crowbar Protocol to your entire lifestyle all at once.

The protocol is presented in a suggested optimum order, but don’t get hung up. You can do them in a different order, and you can do them serially or in parallel.

An Outline of the Deep Response Crowbar Protocol

Track your income, expenses, and accounts. Don’t make a budget, make a tracker. You are gathering information to improve understanding and fluid decision-making, not attempting to run your life according to a spreadsheet. (Side effect: improved financial literacy and numeracy.)

Eliminate exposure to consumer programming as much as possible. Don’t watch or listen to commercials, don’t listen to materialistic music, get off of social media, set up ad-blockers on your computers, etc.

Stop eating out, avoid processed foods and meat, and stop using inebrients (alcohol, weed, etc). Cook all your food at home using mostly plant based whole food ingredients purchased in bulk or at discount grocers. (Side effect: improved diet and health.)

Get rid of extra stuff (sell > donate > recycle > trash). Find your own balance between minimalism and essentialism. Organize what you decide to keep. (Side effect: you need less house now, and moving is cheaper and easier.)

Move close enough to the places you need to go (work, grocery store, friends) that you don’t need to use a car more often than once a month, so you can sell your car(s). (Side effect: you don’t need a car.)

Sell your car and commute via bicycle or walking. Repair and maintain your bike yourself. (Side effect: increased physical fitness.)

If you can’t or won’t move to a place where you don’t need a car, then own a reliable 10-20yo car and do the maintenance and repairs yourself. Don’t own more car than you need. (If you don’t live in a serious winter place, you don’t need awd/4wd. If you don’t haul firewood, horses, or construction materials for a living, you don’t need a full-size pickup. etc)

Downsize your home so that you aren’t paying for more house than you need. Consider roommates and multigenerational housing, tinyhouses, housesitting, vanlife, house hacking, flipping, moving to a LCOL yet desirable-to-you location, exchanging housing for labor (land/property manager, caretaking), and geographic arbitrage.

What to live in and where to live is extremely personal. Expand your Overton Window and find a situation that works well for you. The best option might involve initially spending money, like buying or building a tinyhouse. (Potential side effects: lower/zero utility bill, improved social life, skill acquisition, income, travel experience for “free”.)

Cancel health insurance and move to a health share. Or, reduce your income (possibly via retirement account contributions) to qualify for subsidized health insurance. If you currently receive health benefits through your employer, keep that. Health shares and subsidized health insurance is primarily for people who fall outside of the employer-plan safety net.

Cancel all subscription services (Netflix, Spotify, substacks, etc) and find free alternatives (libraries, CDs, vinyl, etc).

Get psychological/mental health help. See a therapist, a support group, DIY a modality yourself, engage in your spiritual community, whatever works for you. Most of us are struggling in one way or another, and the greatest risk to our own flourishing is emotional and/or psychological dysfunctions. One warning to bear in mind is that ‘it is no sign of health to be well adjusted to a fundamentally sick society’. You may be mad with cosmological grief. Incorporate this understanding into your self care.

Do a No Buy Year, where you only spend money on essentials like bills and groceries. Begin this after Crowbaring your transportation and housing, which may trigger strategic purchases (sell car > buy a bicycle; sell bigger-than-necessary house > buy materials and tools to build a tinyhouse). (Side effect: this is where the real work of unlearning consumerism happens.)

Pursue high-quality leisure activities that don’t cost anything, like reading library books, walking, working out, writing, making art, making social events with friends/your community, fixing/restoring ‘broken’ things, cooking (as a leisure activity it doesn’t require any more money than you need to spend on food to stay alive anyway), etc.

Become a regular at your library. Get a library card and use it. Read anything you like. Find what you like to read, forget what you ‘should’ read, and don’t stop reading. Reading as a way of life is the cornerstone of a life well lived.

Frame difficult changes as 30-90 day “experiments” and “challenges” to overcome fear and doubt with lifestyle change. When you frame it as a time-bound experiment, it removes the social stigma of “failing” and frames it as information-gathering and skill acquisition. It also requires less commitment to do something for 30 days rather than “the rest of your life”. At the end of the challenge you get to make a decision about how to move forward with your life.

Talk about your plans and lifestyle changes as openly as you like, but do it gracefully. It is easy to inadvertently trigger other people’s defenses by implicitly pointing out dissonances in their own decisions. Clumsy evangelizing can alienate friends and family, and you cannot afford to alienate friends and family. Avoid the temptation to talk disparagingly about normies, including the use of the term “normies”. Dwell on compassionate perspectives and only allow yourself to speak in this way out loud around anyone. Refer to your journey in as humble and self-exploratory terms as feels genuine.

Don’t ask people close to you to Crowbar their lives along with you. It’s better to explain what you’re doing, and why, and actively and explicitly seek ways to accommodate your relationship with those people in the context of your Crowbar phase. If they’re interested in joining, let it be their idea. Lead by example, and if they don’t follow, accept that without complaint.

Plan and execute social experiences that are inexpensive or free. Your social circle and family likely has a habit of “how you hang out” that is based to some degree on spending money, like going to restaurants, bars, shopping, expensive vacations, etc. Do not expect your social circle to adapt to your new weird behaviors. Instead, plan and invite people to picnics, bbqs, hikes, potluck/dinner at your place, game nights, etc. Don’t even talk about money or why you’re doing it. Just start making low- and no-cost social experiences happen.

Find allies and talk regularly for encouragement and support. It is unlikely that everyone in your life is going to understand and support what you’re doing. Instead of demanding that those people understand and support you, find people who already understand what you’re doing and can provide moral support. A chat group with like-minded allies can make or break your Crowbar phase.

Principles

Reducing expenses is more powerful than increasing income. Always reduce or eliminate expenses first, before spending energy on increasing income.

Eliminate categories of expenses first, before spending energy reducing category expenses. (The cheapest auto insurance is to own a bicycle instead of a car. The cheapest cuts of meat are to be vegetarian. The least expensive entertainment is to do things that you intrinsically enjoy that do not cost money or that generate money or that contribute to your community: walks in nature, sewing, reading, throwing potlucks and dinner parties, making music, etc).

The most difficult aspect of the Crowbar phase is relationships. Failure is most often a result of overwhelming/unrelenting social pressure to conform to prior patterns, lack of support, and self-doubt in the face of criticism. Do not underestimate how critical supportive relationships are during this Phase. It is much easier to maintain lifestyle change once you’ve made them and kept to them for a period of time, and the people around you accept the fact that this is just how you live your life. Until then, the people in your life will unconsciously demand that you conform to their old understanding of how you lived your life. This makes it incredibly hard to get through the Crowbar Protocol in one piece.

Results to Expect as a result of your Crowbar Era:

Significantly reduced Cost of Living
Elimination of debt
Accumulation of savings (a money ‘buffer’)
Ability to spend less time earning money (sabbaticals, seasonal work, early ‘retirement’, and part-time work become realistic options).
A more flexible/agile lifestyle (you can move quickly, you can move anywhere, you’re less encumbered by physical things, etc)
A healthier lifestyle (more movement, better nutrition).
More autonomy, either potential (you could quit your job and be fine for months/years) or actual (you move to seasonal/parttime work or do a hybrid approach of house hacking and arbitrage to pay your bills).
Reduced impulses to buy stuff.

In one sentence, the purpose of the crowbar phase is to decrease (or maintain a low) cost of living while maintaining or increasing quality of life in order to deprogram consumer ideology, and to do so as quickly as possible. This is more radical than it sounds.

If you figure out the trick of maintaining or increasing quality of life despite a lower cost of living, then you have subverted the implicit directive of consumer culture which is to maximize earning and spending in an endless and futile race for More. Not just intellectually or rhetorically, you have subverted it with your actions. Your life becomes living proof that we are essentially indoctrinated into wasting something like 7/8’s of our lives on things that don’t matter to us.

In this process, you will change your brain. You will change how you think, if you go deep enough. Doing the practical day to day work of spending less and living more is extremely rich information about your life and your world that you will incorporate into your thinking patterns. This is a feedback loop. The more you do it, the more you believe it, the more it feels natural to do it.

You only need to believe enough to begin, and to get a few small wins in. These small wins feed back into your belief system and will provide extra motivation and desire to keep going.

If you space your wins out too much, it is easy to get bored or discouraged and lose motivation. This is one reason why I recommend going as fast as you can. Start getting small wins, stack and bunch them, and don’t rest on your laurels. Win and keep going, win and keep doing.

If you tackle something too big and thorny too early, and suffer a loss, you can kill all forward momentum. It is important to not suffer too many or too large of losses, especially in the beginning. You will definitely have some failures (aka learning experiences) and discouraging episodes. This is unavoidable and nothing to be ashamed of. It is the cost of learning. But from a technical perspective, especially in the beginning, seek those early wins to build motivational momentum that can carry you through the thornier ones.

Which actions will be easier to pull a win off with has a lot to do with your unique personality. Something that is breezy and kind of fun for me (e.g. building and tweaking a financial resource tracking spreadsheet) might sound like pure psychological torture for you. Building a spreadsheet is the first thing I did, and it helped me build stoke and guide actions. Maybe it should be the last thing you do after you’ve built up a good head of steam already.

With that understood, grab your crowbar and let’s go.

[1] Another distinction of responsiveness is that it places no faith in a static linear plan or narrative. Deep response is based on process rather than plan, on dynamicism rather than static stability. Solutionism insists that things ought to work according to the Plan and fights to make that so. Responsivism asks if things are working out well or not, and adjusts based on the answer, fluidly through time. Solutionism declares that the purpose of a system is what is intended. Responsivism observes that the purpose of a system is what it does.

Up in the Arctic

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been helping Jack build the addition on his house in return for How to Alaska Lessons. He invited me on a caribou hunt north of the Arctic Circle last week.

We drove up on a Saturday and arrived at 10:30pm, found a spot to park on the side of the road in a light rain, and pitched the tent on a slope. My sleeping pad kept sliding on the slippery Tyvek groundsheet and my feet would stick out into the rain, so I had to sleep in the fetal position.

We woke to a light snow, packed up, and walked a half mile to the river. We crossed it on packrafts, then walked another 5 miles or so (you need to be five miles away from the road to hunt with a rifle). Over the marshy tussocky terrain it took us a good six hours to cover that distance.

The next day we glassed from a ridge in the sun, seeing no animals.

The next day we moved camp up and across the river a couple of miles. We got in an hour or two of glassing before the storm came in and we retreated to the tent. We spent the rest of that day and most of the next in the tent, waiting out the weather.

Thursday was cool and clear. We glassed, saw some critters, Jack crossed the river again to try to sneak up on the only two caribou we saw all week, but they weren’t having it and disappeared on us.

On Friday we floated ~8miles back to the road and returned home.

This was my first time above the Arctic Circle, the first time I’ve been snowed on in August, and my first time packrafting. I loved it. I can’t wait to go back out.

Bikepacking May 2026

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From April 27 - May 13, 2026, b7 and I rode from Quail Haven to Bend, Or.

We rode aqueduct, DPW, and highway up along the 395 to Bishop, then did a small section of the Caldera 500 to loop up to Whitmore Hot Springs and back down to town. We took a zero there and then a bus from Bishop to Reno. We rode the NorCal Outback route from Reno to Klamath Falls, where b7 got on a train home. I continued on up the 97 to Bend, Or.

(roughly)

The rig

The Aqueduct

Indian Wells Valley

Alabama Hills

The Sierra from Alabama Hills

I think this is Dog Valley, between Reno and Loyalton shortly after the climb up from Verdi

Red Clover Valley

Roam

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One of the reasons I spend very little money is so that I can take the time to do longer and more frequent trips, travels, roams, wanders, walkabouts, adventures, expeditions, and quests. These are some of them.

Clearwater trip south of the Alaska Range, September 2026
Arctic Caribou Hunt, August 2026
Bikepacking CA > Oregon, May 2026
Motorcycle Road Trip September 2025, US West/Southwest
Far Mountain Traverse Day Hike July 2025, Interior Alaska
Bikejoring the White Mountains March 2025, Interior Alaska
I rode my motorcycle to Alaska, July 2024, CA > AK > CA. (Related: Romantic Quests)
Bikepacking Utah, May 2024
Japan, Fall 2023
My first bikepacking trip, June 2023, CA>OR
A Long Walk, October 2022
A typical day on Rubha Phoil, a permaculture community in Scotland. October 2022
Pyrenees Overnight, July 2022
Morocco and also Morocco, May 2022
The FabFarm, a solarpunk paradise in Portugal. March 2022
Let’s travel the world, March 2022
Death Valley, February 2022
PNW Road Trip July 2021
Serenity Shakedown Cruise, April 2018
Serenity pre-shakedown, March 2018
Driving a Tesla from SF to DC, November 2015

Pattern: do therapy

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Action

Find a therapeutic modality you respond well to and do it. Your therapeutic modality of choice could be ACT, it could be EMDR, it could be regular yoga, it could be grounded in a religious context, it could be lifting weights, it could be fishin’.

Discussion

Almost everybody will improve their subjective experience of life if they engage with a therapeutic modality of some sort.

Quite a few people will improve their experience tremendously, and be able to avoid counter-productive and self-destructive behavior. (I attribute several hundred thousand dollars of needless expenses in my 20’s and 30’s to unresolved psychological issues that the right therapeutic modalities could have helped me avoid wasting, among other things).

If you have a psychologically induced compulsion to gamble irresponsibly, all of the frugality crowbaring and wise financial stewardship practices aren’t going to make a difference. They will be wiped out in your next gambling binge. If ‘shopping’ is more than a socially programmed habit, but rather a psychological survival mechanism for dealing with unresolved trauma, it is going to be difficult to adopt a voluntary simplicity lifestyle. If you are pathologically conflict avoidant, you are not going to be able to built a durable alternative lifestyle in the face of pressure from society and your family.

No amount of lifestyle adjustments are a solution to psychological wounds, baggage, and dysfunction. Some people travel in an attempt to escape their past. Some people cycle through lifestyle experimentation and identity reconstruction. In either case, if the underlying issues go unaddressed, then they will repeat in whatever location of lifestyle iteration is present.

Carving out a simpler and more autonomous lifestyle can help you catch enough of a break from the day to day logistics of 21st century living to devote attention to sorting out your inner issues. A simpler and more autonomous life in and of itself is not the solution to your inner issues.

Most people think of going to an office and talking to a professional for $x00/hr when they think of therapy. That is one style. There are many. Some cost a lot of money, some cost a little, some cost none.

Talk therapy (ACT, CBT, etc)
Somatic
Gestalt
EMDR
Psycholytic
Psychodelic
Entheogenic
Going to the library and reading all of the books yourself and following the exercises
Various group therapies (e.g. 12 step)
Spiritual practices like meditation, prayer, and yoga are more properly understand as a separate thing, but there is some overlap depending on how you construct your life, so they are worth mentioning.

Here’s one approach if your need for therapy is not an emergency:

Read a lot of books (and articles, and videos, etc) of various therapeutic modalities. Get a sense for what options exist. Do work ‘on yourself’. Take it seriously.
After a time of doing self-work, find a professional to work with. If its a good fit, the professional will be able to help you uncover blind spots, get through plateaus, suggest things you never would have thought of, and mirror things you’re not capable of seeing from within your self.
Work with that professional for a time, and then go back to doing self-work.
Repeat steps 1-3 in a cycle, at whatever tempo works for you.

Pattern: live close to where you go

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Action

Live walking, biking, or easy public transportation distance away from the places you regularly go like work, grocery stores, and social locations.

Discussion

If you live close enough to the places you regularly go, then you don’t need to own a car. Car ownership is expensive, and living further from the places you go obligates you to spend very unproductive time sitting in a car. (Consider that shifting from an half hour car commute to a half hour walk or bicycle commute is a highly net positive gain in terms of money, health, and time because now you don’t need to spend “extra” time exercising.)

This pattern is consistent with reducing overall cost of living strategically and improving general quality of life (embedding exercise in your routine and potentially being more integrated in a local community).

In some places of the world it can be difficult to find a reasonable apartment or house that is close to the places you go. For these places, other patterns may be more appropriate.

This pattern pairs with

don’t own a car
ride your bike places
rent a car for bulk trips instead of owning a car
share housing – have roommates
don’t have more shelter than you need
become a property manager

Catching Up

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It’s been a minute and I have some catching up to do.

I’ve been chugging away on the Crowbar Handbook which you can read as I write each section (recent sections include How to Ditch Your Stuff, What to Do About Work, and Eat Well for Less).

I had a separate email subscription to that, but it stopped working because the service I use changed without telling me, which pissed me off and made me want to set up a manually typeset print newsletter instead, out of spite.

Since my last update I rode out the coldest winter in Alaska on record, which was hard and I definitely got SAD because I just rawdogged it, then went down to the lower 48 and did another bikepacking trip (800mi from the Eastern Sierra to Oregon again), had shenanigans out in the desert, saw lots of friends and made new ones, sold my motorcycle, got stranded in Barstow for 23hrs and 53 minutes, spent a week outside Taos living the #earthship lifestyle, and I just got back to Alaska for mosqui^H^H^H^H^ building season aka summer. It’s good to be reunited with my gf and the dogs. Like this one:

A shot from day one of the ride:

Can’t stop here…

Apropos of nothing, here’s a word facepunch. Happy weekend!

“Hurrying is a drug. It helps people keep themselves from noticing just how much their lives suck. If they stop rushing around, they might have to deal with the appalling mess they and industrial society have jointly made of their lives, and that’s terrifying because it means they might have to change.” ~John Michael Greer

Get Free, Ch. 5: What to Do About Work

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

If your job is fine, just keep doing it for now. If it is a dumpster fire, leave it. In either case, consider a sabbatical or DIY sabbatical to increase the speed of your crowbar phase.

Time Freedom = Savings / Cost of Living. It’s the ratio that matters. If your ratio is 1, you have one year of time freedom. If your ratio is 1/12, you are living paycheck to paycheck. If your ratio is 25-33 and your savings are invested, you probably don’t need to earn any more ever.

The Crowbar Protocol is primarily about decreasing the denominator, that is, decreasing your Cost of Living (COL) while maintaining or improving your quality of life. Most people have a lot of waste in the denominator because the game is rigged against us in various ways (see Beyond #antiwork below), and so can increase the Freedom Ratio faster by playing a different game and focusing on decreasing COL.

Of course, the more money you earn, the more Savings you can accrue, all else being equal. Increasing income isn’t the focus of the Crowbar Protocol. Increasing earnings tends to take a significant amount of personal resources (energy, time, potentially money, etc). As such, I don’t advise spending much attention on increasing income during the Crowbar phase. Income will be addressed in more detail in Volume II.

That said, your job situation might require some decision-making during your Crowbar Phase. The goal here is not “how can I maximize earnings?” or “how can I get a really sweet job/gig that is fulfilling and aligned with my values?” because that’s Volume II and III stuff. The north star is “What situation best supports my efforts to execute the Crowbar Protocol over the next 6-18 months?” In other words, you’re trying to maximize available bandwidth you can allocate towards being successful at Crowbaring your life.

The following are my suggestions:

You should keep your job if it is really fulfilling, or if it’s kinda meh/slightly crap but you don’t have much savings.
Take a sabbatical (formal or informal) if your job sucks, or if it’s meh but you have savings.
You could consider going dirtbag if your job sucks or is meh, but you’ve got a bit of savings.
Treat finding a new job as an emergency top priority if your job sucks and you’re broke. If a job is soul sucking, then that’s sucking energy out of your life that you could otherwise be putting into making your Crowbar Phase a success. So getting out of that situation is a prerequisite to fully entering your Crowbar Phase.

Here’s a diagram:

(Going dirtbag in this context just means “make a radical and probably temporary lifestyle change that reduces COL: live in a van, move in with parents/roommates in a cheap place, do worktrade, etc.” The trick is you’ve got to maintain lifestyle agency otherwise you won’t really have freedom to make personal lifestyle changes. Think this one carefully, the risk is that you just have a dirtbag ‘vacation’ and don’t actually learn anything.)

Further Discussion

If your job is just kind of lame because you have to show up on time and you have a boss who tells you what to do sometimes and you don’t super love that, that’s not actually a problem that needs your attention right now. Getting free of the need to show up to a regular boring stressful potentially bullshit etc job is part of the long game we’re playing, and is not an emergency. So just keep on with your job situation for now if it’s only just a bit lame. We’re going to radically change our relationship with “work” and “jobs” and “income” in volumes 2 and 3, but we’ve got to get our Crowbar Protocol phase squared away first.

What I mean by ‘soul-sucking’ is: is it super toxic? are you self medicating because of how awful it is? Is your supervisor or colleagues or customers doing real emotional, psychological, or physiological damage to you? Are you burnt out, depressed, a shallow whimpering husk of your former or potential self? This is an emergency, and I do not recommend trying to crowbar the rest of your life while showing up to a toxic dumpster fire of an employment situation.

I don’t have advice about how to do that beyond obvious platitudes. I know that “just quit and find a less terrible job” is easier said than done. This manual isn’t about how to fix this problem, because I couldn’t possibly do it justice. The move here is to find help that does do this problem justice. (If you go to the ERE forums and start a journal, you will receive a lot of advice from a wide diversity of intelligent, out-of-the-box thinkers from all over the world.)

If you can find the energy required to radically reduce your expenses, then you’ll need the shitty job less, and maybe buy yourself time to quit and find a less shitty job. But that can be a catch-22, I know, if the job is sucking you dry of the internal resources you need to crowbar your life.

One possible strategy here is to save up a few months living expenses (moving up in the diagram) and either negotiate a sabbatical or execute a “DIY sabbatical”, which is where you quit your job and then either rehire at the same place or just get a different job when you run out of money. During the sabbatical you crowbar your cost of living way down. When you go back to work, you have a much clearer idea of what you actually need from employment and you’ll be on better negotiating terms.

Another circumstance you might be in is that, if you’re being honest with yourself, you are just kind of cruising along at a mediocre position with mediocre pay because you’ve been kind of lazy and avoidant about seeking a better position. If you can put in a little bit of effort and get a raise or a better position or take some training to get on a better track, just do it.

Again, this is not to shame people who are in a genuinely terrible situation or dealing with legitimate internal or external barriers to advancement (neurodivergence and prejudice being the top two examples that come to mind). The long game solution I’m suggesting here when it comes to internal or external barriers is to crowbar your cost of living way down (this volume), develop broad stoke-directed skills that build resilience and usefulness (the next volume), and tie everything in your life together with systems thinking (the third volume), which will result in living life on your own terms, terms that play to your unique strengths and desires and doesn’t require the permission or accommodation of an insane and dysfunctional world system.

Beyond #antiwork

One piece of advice I’ll give to anyone, regardless of how much their job sucks, is to move through and past the #antiwork ruminative attitude that the billionaire capitalists are exploiting us and make it structurally impossible for anyone to have a good life.

Look, yes, the system is designed to make it impossible to win. But it’s designed to make it impossible to win at the game the system convinces us is the only game worth playing, which, surprise surprise, is rigged. That game is also lame, so you shouldn’t want to win it anyway! That game requires hordes of the world’s best and brightest humans to engage in relentless propaganda to convince you that the game is worth playing, and to convince you that all the other possible games are either evil, stupid, or a figment of your imagination. If a game requires that much effort to convince people to play it, that alone should be sufficient reason to do anything else.

Your choices are to

try to win the rigged game, and lose, because it’s rigged and you weren’t born into the Winner class.
give up trying to win and complain about how the game is rigged, and lose, because even if it weren’t rigged, you weren’t even trying to win anymore because you’ve accepted your fate as a member of the loser class.
play a different game, and have a chance of winning.

Spending your cognitive bandwidth on antiwork rumination is a) a waste of time and b) actively harmful because it encourages you to believe that agency is a waste of time. Agency is NOT a waste of time, not if you engage it in service of your own life rather than the shadow world of the game the billionaire capitalists want you to play.

Anyway, if you stick with the path of post-consumerism, then you won’t need a bs job for much longer, because either you’ll be financially independent or you’ll figure out some activities to be engaged in that you really enjoy that also happen to bring in some money. But for right now, I don’t recommend trying to get overly clever with your job situation. You want to be focused on reducing your expenses and clearing out the junk in your life, not trying to YOLO some half baked scheme.

For most stably employed people, the best move for the early crowbar phase is simply to keep on keeping on at work while you radically change the infrastructure of your non-work life and set yourself up for future success on your own terms. We’ll discuss what to do about employment in much greater depth in the following volumes.

Get Free, Ch. 4: Ditch Your Surplus Stuff

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

You likely have a bunch of stuff you don’t really need. It’s lying around your house taking up space, being air conditioned and heated for no reason, slowly losing value while not really being used by you and making you like your space less.

More importantly, letting your excess stuff go will unlock a greater variety of possible creative options for crowbaring your life.

What to ditch:

Clothes and shoes that you don’t wear, or that don’t look good on you, or that are uncomfortable, or that are expensive that you don’t wear often for whatever reason.
Tools you don’t often use.
Kitchen gadgets that you use less than once a month, or that are single-purpose and whose function can be met with another multipurpose tool. (An example is that I don’t own an electric egg beater device. I own an egg beater/whisk attachment, and I own a cordless drill. )
Outdoor gear you don’t use. Seriously, you went kayaking twice, seven years ago. Let someone else play with the kayak.
Art that isn’t hung.
Art that is hung but that you never even notice because it’s been on your wall for seven years and your brain just tunes it out.
Extra or redundant furniture. (Look up Katy Bowman for a radical option.)
Vehicles you don’t really need (we’ll discuss this in more depth soon).
Electronics you don’t use or decide to stop using (TVs, gaming consoles, audio equipment, etc).
Books you don’t or won’t read, or that you simply no longer need to own since libraries exist.
Your box of trophies from Little League. They gave everyone those trophies. Nobody cares. Everybody has the same trophy in their attic. Let it go.

List things on facebook marketplace or ebay and sell as much of it as you can. Have a garage sale. What you can’t sell, take to a donation place or the curb with a “free” sign on it. What you can’t give away, throw away or recycle or compost. If throwing stuff away makes you feel guilty, use that psychological pain as motivation to think really hard before you buy stuff again.

You don’t have to be a capital M Minimalist to be a post-consumer, but it doesn’t hurt. And the minimalist community has a lot of tips, information, strategies, mindset, and inspiration for decluttering and downsizing your material possessions.[1] So I recommend checking that community out – they will help with seeing the practice of decluttering and maintaining a low-stuff lifestyle as a worthwhile and attractive endeavor in and of itself.

By the way, don’t get too worked up over the “I only own 43 things” videos. It can be another form of status anxiety to consume keeping-up-with-the-minimalist-Joneses content. Get the information you need and get out if you find it anxiogenic.

The best way to approach this is to start with a big push where you make a big dent in a short amount of time. Spend a weekend or a week dedicated to getting rid of your stuff. Tackle one room or category of thing (“clothes” or “kitchen stuff” or “outdoor gear”) at a time. Start with whichever room you think is easiest/funnest/will make the biggest impact on your attitude. For some this will be your bedroom/clothes closet, because it’s really nice to sleep in an uncluttered space. For other people this might be the kitchen because you spend a lot of time cooking (at least now you do!) and having only what you need and use makes cooking more pleasant. It doesn’t matter where you start as long as you actually start.

My Preferred Approach:

Designate a temporary staging location or box for processing and storing “to sell” stuff.
Designate a space or box for “to donate” stuff. If you have a car, this can be bags or boxes that live in your trunk, so whenever you are out you can just drop it off.
Take everything out of the storage spaces/closets/nooks/drawers/etc, and put them in a pile in the middle of the room.
Sort the “everything” pile into the “to sell”, “to donate”, “to trash/recycle”, and “to keep” piles.
Put the stuff you’re going to keep back.
Take the to donate stuff to the donation place.
Sell the to sell stuff.
Trash/recycle the rest.

Making these decisions can be mentally and emotionally draining. You might need to do one push per category per weekend for a period of time until you’ve gone through all of your things.

Another approach that I really like is the Packing Party. This is where you pack all of your stuff in boxes as if you were moving, and then only take things out of the boxes as you need them. After a certain amount of time, you have proven what you actually do and do not use in your life. Ditch everything still in a box.

Once you’ve gotten your stuff pared down to a level you’re happy with, you’ll want a system that maintains your amount of stuff at or below that level. This could be a one in, one out system. This could be a “no more things than fit in these defined spaces” system. This could simply be a NBY/lifestyle, which we’ll talk about later.

As your mind flips from consumer habits to post-consumer habits, you won’t really need a defined system. You simply just won’t tolerate a bunch of consumer clutter, you won’t be buying a bunch of dumb stuff all the time, and you’ll like the clean and streamlined way your space is set up and you’ll keep it that way.

Letting go of your surplus stuff is a prerequisite for crowbaring your Shelter situation, so be sure to make some progress on this front before exploring all the Shelter options we’ll get to soon.

[1] I can’t find it now, but my favorite tip from a minimalist blogger from years ago was the following: “How to become a minimalist in three steps. 1) Rent a dumpster. 2) Put your stuff in the dumpster. 3) Congratulations, you’re now a minimalist!”

Get Free, Ch. 3: Eat Well For Less

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The aim in this chapter is to spin up a system whereby you are eating well and not spending very much money or time to do so. In my experience it’s relatively easy to eat for $200 or less per person per month, or $6.66/day. I find it a challenge to eat for only $100 a person unless you’re getting food outside of the grocery store system (e.g. you have a large productive garden, dipnet fish, or dumpster dive).

Now, this is the Crowbar Manual, not the Pattycake Manual. It isn’t supposed to be easy, it’s supposed to be effective. Often, when doing the Crowbar method, we “force” a significant change, which is uncomfortable, and we use that discomfort as a motivational lever to increase our skills to make it feel good.

But nothing kills morale faster than unsatisfying food. If your morale is low because what you’re eating sucks, everything else you’re trying to do is going to be much more difficult. If you associate the entire project of internalizing post-consumer praxis with unsatisfying food, you’re likely to quit.

Because food is the cornerstone of morale, this section is one of if not the most important sections. If you can change your habits such that you’re eating really good food, not spending a ton of time prepping (unless you enjoy food prep, in which case go for it), you look forward to your meals, *and* you’re not spending very much money, you are very well set up for overall success. This can be one of your most important early wins, a win that demonstrates to you that you can make positive changes in your life and enjoy the results.

I recommend putting as much surplus effort into this as possible. You don’t want it to drag out over months and months. I suggest focusing very intensely on this step until you’ve got a system you’re happy with and it is running smoothly. Back-burner whatever you have to in order to get the hang of this as quickly as possible.

I think of the crowbar tactics to eat well for about $200/mo in three stages.

Stage 1 is very simple:

Make the food you eat yourself. Don’t get food from restaurants, take out, doordash, or cafes.
Stop drinking alcohol.
Stop eating meat.
Eat dairy sparingly. Cheese for taste, not the main ingredient.
Buy ingredients, not packaged foods. Buy oats, peanut butter, and honey, not granola. Flour and eggs, not pancake mix. Flour and salt, not bread. Beans and rice, not frozen burritos. Tomatoes, onion, peppers, limes, and chilis, not a tub of salsa.

You can do all of these immediately, with overnight cost reduction results. If you don’t know how to cook, however, you might not know what to do with the whole ingredients you’ve purchased.

The second stage is just one thing:

Learn how to make tasty and easy meals for yourself/your household out of ingredients.

Our culture is weird about food. Cooking can become a status symbol reflecting bourgeoise affectations. Our food choices reflect who we are. If our food isn’t delicious, photogenic, and took 3 hours of prep, then we’re Doing It Wrong. Alternatively, if it isn’t scientifically certified to be The Optimum Best nutrition based on the current internet trend of the month, then we’re Doing It Wrong. What to Cook becomes a fountain of neurosis.

We have the idea that home-cooked meals have to be either some kind of ambitious production, or bland raw vegetables served with a side of suffering. Do your best to recognize and let go of any of these notions that might have been incepted into you.

You have and/or will develop your own ideas about what you Should eat. For the Crowbar, let’s make it simple: learn to cook meals that are easy to make and tasty and make them out of ingredients.

If you aren’t making food that you think is tasty, you won’t want to eat it and you’ll head for Chipotle or the frozen dinners aisle.
If you aren’t making food that is easy to make, you’ll get exhausted from doing prep all the time and just grab takeout.
If you’re making food from whole ingredients and not boxes, even if you’re mostly making pancakes, burritos, and pizza, it’ll probably be a lot healthier than eating out all the time. After you’ve habituated cooking all your meals for yourself, you can devote surplus cognitive bandwidth to dialing in the nutrition optimally for your body and lifestyle.

How do you do this? Write down all your favorite meals. What do you like to eat? For me, the list is:

Burritos (especially breakfast burritos)
Egg sandwiches
Hearty pancakes (with fresh-milled flour and two eggs instead of one. They’re unlike the super fluffy cake pancakes drenched in high fructose corn syrup you get at ihop).
Pizza
Pasta bolognese
Simple salads
Grilled cheese and tomato soup

Doesn’t look super healthy, does it? It isn’t super healthy! But it’s also not super UNhealthy. Let’s break it down:

The burritos are mostly rice and beans, with vegetables (onions, peppers, and salsa which is just vegetables), a small amount of cheese, and a tortilla (DIY or storebought).
Eggs sandos: eggs and sourdough I make myself. A little bit of cheese plus salsa.
Pancakes: Fresh milled flour (I prefer half and half rye flour and winter red flour), an egg, baking soda/baking powder, coconut oil, peanut butter, and a smidge of honey or jam.
Pizza: flour, sourdough starter, a can of diced tomatoes, and costco cheese. This is probably the least healthy thing I eat. But also, if you’re gonna eat a pizza now and again, make it yourself for a dollar or two, rather than twenty bucks and drenched in grease.

You get the idea. I also cook a lot of meals that aren’t necessarily my top favorite comfort foods, but are still plenty tasty and easy:

Lentil stew
All kinds of soups
Chili
Salads with beans for heft
Oats with peanut butter, dates, nuts
Roasted sweet potatoes with veg and beans
Shakshuka
Fried rice

Am I saying that you should eat burritos and pizza every night of the week forever? I am not. I am saying that you can probably relax a bit about food in order to habituate cooking all your food at home, which will make a big different in terms of your cost of living, your health, your time, and your sense of self-efficacy. Once cooking becomes a normal part of your life, you can tweak it to be as perfectly dialed in to whatever food/nutrition scheme you want. Again, cooking just about anything yourself at home is likely to be healthier than if you’re getting most of your food out, or buying pre-packaged foods.

The final note about this is that one component of “easy” can be “cook more than one meal’s worth at a time”. The simplest way is to make more than you need for dinner, and leftovers are tomorrow’s lunch. Breakfast can be super easy oats or egg sandwich or eggs, leftover beans, and spinach. Then you’re essentially only cooking once a day.

A level up from that is to do a big batch of cooking on, say, Sunday. Cook up a big pot of stew, chili, or bolognese, and that can be several meals of the week that you just need to reheat or at most boil up some pasta.

The third stage is about getting your ingredients for as low a cost as possible.

First, pay attention to where you get ingredients from:

Buy in bulk (Costco, Azure Standard, etc). It’s much cheaper to buy 25lbs or rice and beans at a time rather than in cans or the small 1lb bags you get at normal stores. For things like rice, beans, lentils, wheat berries, oats, etc, buy these in bulk. If it’s going to take more than a couple months to eat your way through a bag, get 5gal food grade buckets with gamma seal lids.
Buy from discount grocers (Aldi, Grocery Outlet, etc). The move is: go to the discount grocer first, and if you need anything they don’t have, you can grab it from the ‘normal’ grocery second.
Don’t buy food from Whole Foods, street name “Whole Paycheck”.

Second, take a look at the expense of the individual ingredients you’re buying. It isn’t actually that useful to look at the dollar amount for a given item. What does it mean that a jug of olive oil is $16 and a head of Kale is $2.50? The comparison means nothing. Instead, pay attention to the amount of calories you get per dollar, and the amount of “nutrition” you get per dollar.

Pay attention to the calories per dollar of foods. This is easy to do with the calculator app on your phone. Grab a tub of coconut oil and multiply the calories by the servings. Then divide that number by the price. That’s your calories per dollar ratio. If you eat around 2,000 calories a day, and want to spend $200 or less on food per month, that’s $6.67/day and you need to average about 300 calories per dollar. Don’t take my word for it, maybe I’m lying to test your. Do the math yourself, commit the numbers to memory, and use them as a rule of thumb when shopping. You’ll start to get a sense for what a good cal/$ range is for different kinds of foods.

If you’re a nerd like I am you might make a spreadsheet with a meal plan to figure this out. I did this for a month – I calculated the costs of various ingredients, came up with standard meals, figured out the macros and the cost, and built a system that I knew would result in a <$200/mo grocery bill. Once I’d got the hang of what to cook, I didn’t need the spreadsheet anymore. For me, that was easiest. Most people don’t do things like that. They just follow the above guidelines and adjust as necessary. That’s fine.

Pay attention to nutrients per dollar of foods. I don’t know of a good way to quantify this, but you’ll want to pay attention to it in a qualitative sense at least. Blueberries might have lots of nutrients, but they can cost a lot for a tiny little tub. In contrast, a sack of baby spinach or carrots can cost a couple bucks. Eat more spinach than blueberries, is what I’m saying.

The holy grail is ingredients that are high in both calories and nutrients, can be had inexpensively, are easy to prepare, and can be used in a lot of different delicious recipes. Pinto beans are a great example (refried beans for Mexican food, put them in any kind of soup, in chili, on salads…).

Additionally, there are nutrient benefits in places you might not think of. We’re used to thinking that bread products are trash. That’s because studies are done on breads made from Bread Products using processed flour and additives. Don’t buy white bread! Don’t even buy whole wheat bread! Don’t buy Bread Product! Make your own bread, from grain you grind yourself, from organic wheat and rye berries. It’ll be delicious and hearty.

The calories per dollar for wheat berries is quite high, and by grinding it fresh yourself every couple of weeks you get good nutrients from the whole grains. Making bread is really easy. The internet wants you to think that you have to spend six hours doing 47 steps involving scales and test tubes and all sorts of things to make a loaf of bread. These are foodie status games. By all means do all that stuff if you enjoy spending hours making food that’s 7.4% better than what I can make in seven minutes. Otherwise, just mix flour, salt, water, and yeast (or sourdough starter), knead it with your hands, let it rise for a while, then stick it in the oven and take it out when it looks right.

Bottom Line: Cook easy meals that you look forward to eating using calorie- and/or nutrient-dense ingredients

Be sure to learn how to make tasty meals that you look forward to. I don’t love cooking. Most of the time it’s a chore. If there were an inexpensive and just-as-healthy alternative that didn’t involve any effort, I’d do that instead.

The first thing I learned how to make inexpensively was burritos, because I love burritos the most. I make tortillas and salsa from scratch, and buy rice, beans, and spices in bulk, and get organic produce at discount grocers. I love eating my burritos and they cost about a dollar. I recently settled on my preferred salsa: half an onion, maybe a quarter of a can of chipotle chilis in adobe sauce, a can of diced tomatoes, cumin, salt, lime, etc.

I also recently learned how to make pizza. It is so easy. I make the dough the night before, blend a can of diced tomatoes and add salt for the sauce, and top with costco cheese. Delicious. A buck or two for a full pizza pie.

For fancy breakfast I make hearty pancakes. I grind rye and whole wheat flour at home, and use coconut oil and peanut butter and a dash of maple syrup or honey from a friend’s hive. Delicious, filling, and extremely cheap. Or I’ll fry some eggs and put them on top of homemade sourdough. Or good ol’ oats (with almonds and dates, peanut butter, coconut oil, cinnamon, and hemp seeds).

Making chilis and stews takes a few minutes and is hearty and will feed you for days. It takes about four minutes to prepare a lentil ragu or bolognese for pasta, and it’s hearty and full of protein. I regularly prepare pinto bean chili and have sourdough bread with it.

The point is, don’t assume that you need to do some 3-hour prep time Gordon Ramsay sing-along bullshit if you’re going to cook from home. Go for tasty and hearty, not Michelin-aspirational. (Unless you just love cooking and get a lot of satisfaction out of it, in which case chase your stoke on that! And invite me over!)

For the Crowbar Era, it is good enough for now to find easy to make meals that are tasty. Even if all you’re eating is mostly pizza and burritos and pancakes, as long as you’re making these meals from whole foods ingredients and not processed packaged food-products, you’re almost guaranteed to be eating healthier than if you were still eating out a lot or eating prepackaged foods. And you’ll be spending a lot less money.

Get Free, Ch. 2: Build a Model of Your Financial Resources

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In this section we build a spreadsheet to track the inflows, outflows, and stocks of your financial resources.

The Important Thing is the Mental Model

There are plenty of apps and spreadsheet templates you can use to track all of your finances down to the last cent without having to think about it too much. We won’t be using any of those fine tools, because we are trying to err on the side of thinking about it too much (for now).

We are not merely trying to possess all of the correct data. We are trying to build an internalized mental model of the flows and stocks of one specific resource, in this case money. If you use apps or templates you will not build that mental model. It will be a form of consumption – someone else will have built an external model of your money for you, and you will merely consume that information. That is not good enough. I’m going to emphasize my point with a second and third paragraph to convey how important I think this notion is.

If you use apps or templates to complete this section, then you have not completed this section. You need to build a system for tracking your financial resources yourself, manually. (It must go without saying that asking an LLM to make a spreadsheet template for you is very, very much not completing this section.)

By manually creating this system, you will construct an internal mental model of the inflows, outflows, and stocks of your financial resources, and you will begin to cultivate an intuition for the relationship between those things, and you will be able to apply this general mental model to other resources in the future. The ability to apply the insights you get from your financial mental model to other resources is critical at other points in your journey of post-consumer praxis.

If your inflow is smaller than your outflow, your stock will decrease. If outflow is small, stock will increase. If they are the same, stock will stay the same. Think of a barrel under a spigot that you use for watering your garden. Water fills the bucket from the spigot. A hose from the barrel waters your garden. If you use more water on your garden than you put into the bucket from the spigot, the barrel will eventually empty.

Inflation is like evaporation. Over time, if you leave your money alone, it will get smaller. Keeping your money in investment vehicles is kind of like setting up a dew net: over time, the stock will increase. Investing is risky, though, so the amount can go down and up. That’s a whole topic we won’t dive into until later volumes.

If you are hardcore or hate computers you can create a tracking system on paper, but that will be so tedious you won’t want to maintain the system consistently and I don’t recommend it. Use spreadsheet software like LibreOffice Calc (alternatives include Excel or Google Sheets, they are all functionally the same). Once you become unconsciously competent at money, you will only have to interact with your spreadsheet for about 15 minutes a month.

The following is a suggested method for setting up your spreadsheet. If you have no idea how to build a spreadsheet, just follow my suggestion. If you are already a spreadsheet pro and have your own ideas for how to build your tracking system, by all means do so. If you already have a custom tracking spreadsheet that you yourself built that tracks inflows, outflows, and stocks, you’re done here.

Just so long as your spreadsheet tracks inflows, stocks, and outflows, makes sense to you, and doesn’t take much effort to maintain on a monthly basis, it is fit for purpose.

Teach Yourself How To Fish

I’m going to write directives without giving the full click by click instructions, because that would make this manual super long. You need to be able to use the internet to figure out the specific method.

For example, I’m going to tell you to sum up a specific row of data. I’m not going to tell you that the formula to sum a few cells in a row is =sum(C6:F6), or that you can probably do this by just typing “=sum” and then click-dragging the cells you want to sum and then hitting enter. I’m not going to tell you that once you enter the formula in a cell, you can just click and drag down and it will carry the formula down to the rest of the cells.

If you didn’t know that, how would you learn it?

You would open a browser and type “how do I add a row of cells in Excel.” And the internet would tell you the formula. I’m not trying to be flippant or mean by explaining this, some people haven’t habituated the process of just asking a search engine exactly what they’re trying to do. If you find yourself muttering “But HOW do I change the cell color from white to colored?!”, just type exactly those words into a search engine.

Do a search, watch youtube videos. Once you understand the few basic formulas of excel, you can make very powerful yet simple models in a spreadsheet. This is a very valuable skill to gain competence in.

(By the way, if you think that computers frustrate you and that that that is a permanent attribute of either computers or your self, you are wrong. You are frustrated at being unskilled at specific tasks with computers. Nobody truly dislikes a thing they are competent at. The solution to ‘being frustrated by computers’ is to either design a lifestyle so far outside of mainstream norms that you don’t need to use computers at all, or to intentionally develop the skills you need to use computers as a tool and not a psychological torture device. I am not naturally “good” at computers. Computers frustrate me all the time. My current day job is to become frustrated by computers when trying to do a thing, figure out whatever skill or knowledge I need to not be frustrated by the execution of that thing, and then teach that method to other people. It’s not an innate talent, it’s a process.)

How to Build It

We are going to build the minimum viable financial tracker. You will probably want to add features to it. But we’re first going to build just the minimum you need to track your financial resources.

You need one tab to track your stocks, one tab to track your flows, and one tab to summarize the other two tabs and make it easy to see everything in one place. Three tabs: Stocks, Flows, and Dashboard.

I recommend you watch the brief Tour video, and then read the rest of this section, and then watch the video again.

Stocks Tab

Open a new spreadsheet, save it, and name the first tab Stocks.

The First Column header is Date. The rest of the columns are all of your accounts, including the amount of cash in your wallet/in the shoebox under the bed. Start with all accounts outside of tax deferred retirement accounts, and then list your retirement accounts, and then list debts, and then mortgage stuff if you have one.

Stocks not in tax deferred accounts:

Checking
Savings
Cash in wallet and in shoebox under the bed
Money Market/Settlement Fund
Brokerage Account
CDs
Bonds

Stocks in Deferred Accounts:

401k
rIRA
tIRA

Debts:

CC Balance
Auto Loan

House

Remaining Loan Principal
Market Value
Equity (Market Value – Principal)

At the end of the columns of your buckets of money, create another few summary columns:

Total Financial Resources not in deferred Accounts
Total Financial Assets in Tax Deferred Accounts
Total Non-Housing Debts
NW not including moortgage or Equity
NW Including Mortgage
NW Including House Equity

(Right Click > Open in Separate Tab to see larger version)

I always enter debts as a negative number, and format the cells to display red. This is because I am an engineer, not an accountant. Engineers add numbers, and the sign (positive of negative) of the number dictates if the values add or subtract from each other. Accountants list everything as positive numbers, and depending on whether they are assets or liabilities, they add or subtract the numbers from each other. To me, this is confusing, so I use positive and negative numbers. You can do it however you like as long as you are consistent.

Flows Tab

Make a second tab and call it Flows. This is where we track the inflow and outflows of money. It’s the most complex tab.

There are two sections to this Tab. Up at the top are the rows where we sum inflows and outflows by month.

Below this is where we enter every transaction, every dollar that comes in and goes out.

Here’s an overview of where we’re headed:

First build the top section, section 3 in the image.

Make column E the date column, and then list out four income columns and 10-12 expense columns.

Income 1-n could be something like Job, Job2, Side Hustle, and leave any unused ones as Income#.

Expense 1-10 should be something like:
Food
Shelter
Health Insurance
Health Care
Education
Transportation
Communication (internet, phone bill)
Pets
Expense9 (leave the last few like this in case you want to use them later)
Expense10

You’ll notice a few missing categories, like clothes or toiletries or electronics or utilities. The fewer categories you have, the better. You don’t need 30 different categories. Clothes and utility bills are a subcategory of Shelter and you don’t need them separated out here. You don’t need a separate category for Restaurants because you’re about to go to restaurants so infrequently it won’t matter, and it’s just ‘Food.’

Having a category for a thing makes you think you’re supposed to spend money on that thing. If you have a monthly category for “clothes” then some part of your brain thinks you’re supposed to buy clothes every month. If you have a category for “Restaurants” then a part of your brain thinks that you ought to go to restaurants every month. Why build subtle directives into your life that don’t need to be there?

On that note, you should have a category for Education. You don’t need to spend money to get an education if you have a library card, but if you spend zero dollars on education for months and months that should at least make you stop and think about your life choices. Some books aren’t available at the library. There are some courses worth paying for.

Make Section 4, which sums everything up.

To the right of expenses make summary columns for:

Monthly Inflow (just sum all the income cells)
YTD Inflow (Jan will just be that month’s income. February will be Feb Monthly Inflow plus Jan YTD Inflow. Pull Feb down to populate the rest of the cells).
ttmInflow. You can’t build this until you have a year’s worth of data. If you don’t have last year’s worth of data, you can estimate it by figuring out e.g. what your total income was, dividing by 12, and entering that number in every row for the previous 12 months. Once you have real or fudged data, the ttmInflow for January 2026 is the sum of Monthly Inflow from February 2025 through January 2026.

Outflows:

Monthly Outflow (sum all expense cells)
YTD Outflow (Jan is that month’s outflow, Feb is Feb Outflow plus Jan YTD Outflow).
ttmOutflow (Jan 2026 is sum of Feb 2025 through Jan 2025 Monthly Outflow)

Calcs:

Net Monthly Flow (sum of Monthly Inflow and Outflow)
ttmNet Flow (sum of ttmInflow and Outflow)
ttmSR, Savings Rate. This is the percent of your income that you are not spending. It’s just ttmNetFlow/ttmInflow.

Make the Flow Recorder section, section 1 and 2

This is where you input all your transactions.

Down below sections 3 and 4, make a column header for

Amount
Category
Note
Date

Make Date be the same column as Date in Section 3. If you follow my spreadsheet, “Amount” will be column B and Date will be column E.

In columns F through T or so, you are going to make a formula that adds your flow inputs into the correct column based on the Category value. I’m going to explain this formula because it’s the most complicated formula you need.

We want to compare what you type into “Category” column to the headers in Section 3. So in section 2, each cell looks at the cell under Category and says “is this the same as the header above me?” If it is, it adds the value to that cell. If it isn’t, it keeps the cell value as zero.

Let’s build it together. I’ll describe it in words below, but it’ll be easier to watch this video where I walk through it.

Just watch the video instead of trying to follow this text

First, add an entry to row 40. Amount -$50, Category Food, Note Costco, Date March 15. Only the Amount and Category values matter, the Note and date are for your reference.

In cell F40, you want to enter the formula. Once you’ve entered the correct formula, you want to be able to drag it across to column T, and then you want to be able to drag that whole row down as far as you need. So you only need to enter this formula once, and then copy it around.

The formula is: =IF($C40=F$4,$B40,0)

In English, this formula is saying: If the value of cell C40 is equal to the value of F4, then return the value of cell B40, If C40 is NOT equal to F4, then return 0.

In this case, the value of cell F4 is Income 1 and the value of C40 is “Food”, so the formula returns zero.

What do the $ signs mean? The $C40 means “If you move this formula to the right or left, keep the reference to column C fixed.” The F$4 means “If you move this formula up or down, keep the reference to row 4 fixed.”

So, click and drag cell F40 all the way across to T40. All the values should be 0, except for cell K40, which should return -50.

Now, you can select cells F40 through T40 and drag them down several rows. As you enter values in columns B and C, the cells in columns F through T will populate.

A little housekeeping: I recommend organizing sections 1 and 2 into monthly blocks, with header rows to make it obvious.

Back up in Section 3, in the cell for the month in question under Income1, sum up all the inputs directly below it for that month. Then drag that cell across all the income and expense cells for that month. You’re now summing up all that month’s expenses.

Make a Dashboard Tab

Make a new tab called Dashboard. These cells mostly just point at cells in the other tabs, but you can add some extra computation tabs like “NW in years”.

Optional: Scrape your previous year’s data to get ttm inflow and outflow

In order to get anywhere, it is helpful to know where you are currently at. To get the trailing twelve month numbers, you need to have data going back twelve months.

The easiest way to estimate this is by figuring out how much you had in your stocks a year ago, and how much you have now. You can calculate total income over the previous twelve months and total expenses. Divide by 12 to get monthly numbers, and enter them in your spreadsheet with a note that they are estimated figures.

You could pull all your statements, dump them into a CSV file, sort and organize them, and enter all the data… but that sounds awful even to me and I like spreadsheets. Only do that if you think you’ll enjoy it. Otherwise just estimate. This does not need to be precise. Getting within a few thousand dollars is fine.

You can skip this step and just operate your spreadsheet and in twelve months you’ll have enough data to have TTM numbers.

Operation

That’s it, your Minimum Viable Tracker is complete. Here’s the Tour video again. I recommend that you operate it for several months before tweaking it too much. A few notes on operation:

Try to update it at least once a month. If you wait longer than that it becomes daunting to catch up and you can just spend six months without updating it. My habit is to update my transactions once a week during my weekly review. This keeps the task of updating it from getting too daunting.
The fewer transactions you make, the easier it is to update your tracker.
If you have a month with a ton of transactions, or are trying to catch up on previous year’s data, you can export your bank transaction statements to a CSV file. Then you can open it in your spreadsheet software, clean the columns up, and paste them into the inputs. This can be the fastest way to get a lot of transactions into your Tracker. But this shouldn’t be your typical method. Typically, just open your transaction portal and manually copy the values over.
If you make a lot of cash transactions, and thus don’t have digital records, I recommend that you keep either a notebook or a digital note in your phone for recording them. Input transactions when you make them, and transfer the information to your Tracker later.

This is Not a Budget

Note that what you have created is not a budget, but rather a tracker. Nothing in this system is telling you how much you should be spending. That is not what it is for.

The purpose of a budget is to tell you how much you can responsibly spend on any given category. A budget makes declarative statements like “Food: $500” and “Fun: $1,000” (as if exchanging money for fun is The Way to have fun lol). Note the complete lack of any such statements in this exercise.

The purpose of a budget is to establish a ceiling for your expenses. The implicit assumption of a budget is that the more you spend, the better your life is. Budgets recognize that if you overspend, eventually the consequences will catch up to you, which is why there’s a do-not-exceed amount. But budgets are a tool to get you to spend up to some amount of money. The purpose of a budget is to control your spending in such a way that you spend as much of it as possible. Budgeting is responsible consumerism.

Additionally, budgets cultivate a scarcity mindset. “You only get this much” is what budgets whisper in your ear. “This is all you get. You can go up to this line – but beyond this line you cannot go. That’s for people who make more than you and have earned the right to spend more than you, loser.” These whispers do us no good. They train us to obsess about what’s on the other side of The Line.

As aspiring post-consumers we reject these perspectives and therefore a budget is not an appropriate tool for what we are doing.

We assume that above some small threshold of spending, other factors dominate quality of life. We are not trying increase spending in the long term. We are trying to find the right balance of spending money and applying skills and strategic thinking that arrives at a material lifestyle that is perfectly sufficient for our needs, enabling and freeing us to spend our attention on things that truly matter to us and help us flourish as humans.

Therefore, we track our expenses, our income, and our stocks, so that we can wisely steward our resources, so that we can spend the vast majority of our time doing anything other than chasing the mirage of the better life on the far side of More, also known as the hedonic treadmill, also known as the bars of the invisible cage of modern life.

A purely logistical reason for not using a budget is that during the crowbar phase your cost of living will likely be dropping. You don’t currently have the information you would need to construct a reasonable budget, because you don’t know what your “natural” cost of living will shake out at once you’ve made all these lifestyle changes. Your current guesses based on your pre-Crowbar phase lifestyle are probably too high. If you set spending ceilings now, they’d either be too high because you based them on your old lifestyle, or unrealistically low because you’re just making a guess. Either way setting expense ceilings now is a waste of time. Building a system for tracking your dropping costs while building a stock and flows model of financial resources is not a waste of time, and will serve you well in the future.

FAQ

Q: But apps will do all this automatically. This is a waste of time.
A: This is not a waste of time. Having the data is only part of the point. We’re trying to change our brains here. There is no app for that. There is a cognitive rewiring benefit to doing this manually. Yes it’s harder. Changing your brain is hard. If it didn’t take some effort, it wouldn’t be changing your brain. Good general advice is to be suspicious of anything that is easy. It might be a waste of time.

By building a spreadsheet that tracks the inflows, outflows, and stocks of money, you are training your brain to think in terms of inflows, outflows, and stocks. Build and operate this spreadsheet consistently for a period of time and you will ‘magically’ think much more intuitively about your money situation.

Q: Can you post your spreadsheet so I can copy it?
A: No. See the answer to the previous question. If you don’t build it yourself you won’t understand it as well and you won’t have as good of a mental model.

Q: What about tracking all of my different investments?
A: We’ll get to that later.

Q: I have debt.
A: Been there. You got this.

Q: Right but how?
A: As your COL drops, save up 1-3months of living expenses, and then everything else goes to paying off debt. While you still have debt, do not undertake any capital intensive projects like a tiny house build (unless you’re getting all the materials for free). Only spend money on absolute necessities and dump everything else into debt payments.

Depending on your wiring, it might be worth it to set up certain rituals or practices around paying off your debt. For example, I really enjoyed making a chart that showed my debt dropping month over month, and estimated when I would hit zero debt. Updating the principal debt amounts after making a payment gave me a psychological reward. You might prefer to pull a hot bath and make your favorite meal when you make your debt payments. Do not go out to a restaurant as a ‘reward’ for making a debt payment. This kind of thinking is a form of psychogical cruelty foisted upon us by consumerism, the ideological system that the elite use to pacify and harness our life energies for their own purposes.

Get Free, Ch. 1: Think About Money to Forget About Money

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

We’re going to spend a lot of time thinking about and dealing with money in this volume. You might get the impression that I’m advocating that you think about money all of the time. I am not.

I advocate that you think intensely about money all of the time for a short period of time, in order to internalize behaviors that serve you, so that you can then mostly not think about money at all. Not thinking about money very much is the end. Thinking about money a lot is the means.

In The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin relates how beginner chess players learn “the numbers” – a numerical value for each piece that they use to calculate the risk and benefit of any given exchange. A beginner chess player will be constantly and consciously running the numbers in their head. Advanced chess players do not do this. Their attention is on “higher” levels of chess strategy.

However, it would be a mistake to assume that since the advanced players don’t run the numbers in their head, beginner players shouldn’t either. Advanced players don’t think about ‘the numbers’ because they have internalized the numbers. They did so many calculations in their head for a period of time that the sense of the numbers became intuitive and they were able to free up attention to place on other, more complex and sophisticated elements of chess strategy.

That is exactly what we are going to do with money. The object of all of this intentional thinking about money is to solve money and to mostly not think about it. The aim is to become an unconsciously good steward of your financial resources.

For much of my 20’s and early 30’s, I was unconsciously incompetent with regards to money. I didn’t understand how stupid I was being with my money. It seemed normal to me to carry debt and not have much savings. I just didn’t think about money very much.

Then I became consciously incompetent, and the knowledge of how badly I was dealing with money stressed me out. This motivated me to start thinking about money and improving my behaviors. Soon enough I became consciously competent – I began managing my money well, but it required conscious thoughtful effort.

After enough repetition of this conscious effort, I became unconsciously competent. I steward my money well, and I just don’t think about it very much.

Much of this volume is about becoming consciously competent at money so that you can become unconsciously competent at money and then not think about it, so that you can spend your attention on cultivating and delivering your gifts to the world while making your dreams come true.

If you try to deliver your gifts to the world and make your dreams come true before becoming at least consciously competent at money, you will almost certainly be at best distracted by money problems and at worst entirely stymied by money problems. You will be constantly running out, or stressed about how to get some more of it, if only to pay the bills, buy food, and keep the lights on. And that would be a shame, because the world wants your gifts, and you want to make your dreams come true.

Note that the aim is not to become conventionally rich — to have “a lot” of money. The aim is to have enough money to run your life. We’ll discuss what enough means shortly.

A warning: don’t get stuck in the consciously competent phase of money stewardship, where you handle your money well and spend all your time thinking about it. This is a trap that a lot of people get stuck in often because they aren’t aware that there’s anything worth thinking about besides money and what money can buy. They have no vision of what they could spend their attention on besides money and the things money can buy, so they spend the rest of their lives fiddling with their money systems and farting around with toys and distractions that they buy with their surplus money. This is not the destination. This is a tempting trap along the way to the destination.

On the far side of thinking about money is a life full of creative expression, collaborative projects, artful endeavor, and rich relationships unfettered by money problems or money obsessions.

References

Waitzkin, Josh. The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance. Free Press, 2008.

We've All Been Lied To

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

As I work on The Crowbar Manual, sometimes I write bits that I realize don’t belong in it.

I’m trying to write more of a technical manual that an ideological polemic, and I don’t want my unhinged rants to distract from the pragmatic advice of the manual. I’d like the manual to be useful to all sorts of people, including people who don’t necessarily share my perspective on society and our place within it.

These letters, however, are the perfect place for my unhinged rants. You literally signed up for it. ;) Below is a section that I decided to take out of the Manual.

The ruling unspoken paradigm of our culture is that increased consumption leads to better lives and societies. This was true up to a point but we’re now well past that point and our societies are now in what ecologists call overshoot. The situation now is that:

Our societies are consuming resources faster than the environment is generating them, which is causing all sorts of problems, and
People are still chasing better lives via increased consumption of one sort or another, despite this no longer being the best strategy.

The brutal truth is that we have plenty of material resources for everyone. Technically speaking there is no need for any material scarcity anywhere. We have solved the technical problems of supplying adequate shelter, food, security, and health services to everyone. The reason we fail to actually deliver these services to everyone, everywhere, is complicated but it’s not because we as a global civilization don’t have enough stuff.

We fail to deliver sufficient material goods to everyone because our societies are programmed to chase More. Our governments are programmed to chase More, our businesses are programmed to chase More, and we as individuals are programmed from birth to chase More as well, mostly because in order for businesses and states to get More they need their subjects to chase More.

The thing with chasing More is that you can never arrive at More. We’re programmed to expend most of our time and energy chasing More, never getting there, and then we die. That is the essential vision of life under consumer culture.

This manual has no insight in how to get society writ large to stop chasing More. This manual is about how to stop chasing More in your own individual life, at the scale of your household. It is about how to arrive at Enough material wealth.

You can arrive at Enough. You can’t arrive at More. By the end of this manual you might be able to actually pick a specific number and say “that will be enough”, and get there, and then do anything else with your life.

We’re programmed to increase spending in step with increased income. We’re programmed to think that if we don’t buy and own a house, we’re losers.

Something odd is happening with society. The rules are changing but people aren’t fully acknowledging it.

It used to be that you could pay for an education with a job while going to school, and then you could pretty easily get a job if you looked right, and then you could have some kids and buy a house and a car or two and that just wasn’t a big deal, and health insurance was easy to get, and your workplace culture was basically okay and you were respected.

It’s now not easy to get all of those things, even if you look right. But the expectation that it’s easy is still there.

A while ago, if you wanted an education and a house and kids and health insurance but you didn’t have it there was something wrong with you. You were a loser, or a dummy, or something. (The other possibility is that you weren’t a straight and square white dude, in which case of course you couldn’t get those things easily, because society wasn’t built for you.)

Now, to get all those things with relative ease, you need to have a lot going for you. You need a bit of a head start, more luck than usual, an IQ a standard deviation or two above average won’t hurt, and you need to not have any particular disadvantages.

But the changing landscape of achieving the dream lifestyle hasn’t fully been acknowledged. Why not?

Well, more or less, the older generations need younger generations to at least try to keep showing up for jobs and to try to get some money and to spend all of their money on stuff because otherwise the economy will struggle, and if the economy struggles then retirement accounts and house equity won’t do so well, and the older generation’s lifelong pursuit of More will struggle.

There are big, big problems with the way things are going. Systems in overshoot have a day of reckoning ahead of them, always. But most people who are close to their own finish line hope that day of Reckoning is Later, and so in the meantime they still just want More, and it doesn’t matter too much to them who has to be called a loser and manipulated into chasing the mirage of an old dying dream in order for them to continue to get theirs.

So work harder, loser. The reason you don’t have a house and can’t qualify for a housing loan is because you don’t work hard enough, or you are too whiny, or something.

I have no advice for how to qualify for a housing loan. I’ve never even seriously considered buying a house myself. I rented at more than 30% of my income, and then I lived in not-made-for-Instagram tiny houses I built myself out in the desert. I currently live in a cabin in Alaska that someone else owns and I pay utilities and do DIY around the place. I’m not saying you need to live in a tiny house out in the desert. I’m saying that I’m not someone who Made It and ticked all the 20th century lifestyle dream boxes and is now telling you to suck it up.

This manual is not about how to achieve the 20th century lifestyle dream. It’s not about how to hack the system. It’s about how to stop playing the consumerism game altogether.

Everything about 20th century western society was built on the implicit paradigm that more material consumption equals better life. Unless you were born and raised under a rock, you were programmed this way, as was I.

This manual is about deprogramming yourself from that assumption.

This manual is about realizing that, actually, if you’re able to reject the lifestyle dreams that were incepted into you since birth, you can have a good life that doesn’t depend on More. You can build a life that depends only on Enough. And Enough is much, much easier to get than More. The Enough game isn’t rigged like the More game.

As a bonus, you will be less and less an unwilling stooge of the older generations that want to exploit your desire for a decent life on their terms. You will begin to learn the skills and the practices to build a good life on your terms.

Consumer culture says that quality of life is 95% composed of material wealth.

Postconsumer culture says that quality of life is composed of something like 10-25% material wealth, Enough so that you aren’t hungry or cold or in danger. The rest is skills, relationships, wisdom, fill in the blank according to your own unique psychology and human interestingness.

This manual doesn’t assume that They are going to fix the dysfunctions of our unfair, unjust system. It doesn’t give any advice for how to get society to increase taxes from people who’ve gotten enormously More.

This manual assumes that you’re done waiting for society to suck less and are prepared to play a different game.

I’m writing a book and you can read it now

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’m writing a pragmatic ‘field manual’ companion to Deep Response. I’m publishing it a section at a time online, over at patternsofdeepresponse.com.

Want to get it in your inbox as I write each section? Here’s a subscription signup link. The fastest I’ll send update emails is once a week.

Do you know what the difference between a preface and an introduction is? Neither did I. A preface explains why the book you’re about to read exists. An introduction is about the actual content of the book.

The following is the preface for Patterns of Deep Response Volume 1: Your Crowbar Era. It’s an explanation of why I’m writing it.

_(By the way, I don’t use LLMs for any part of my writing process. I enjoy the process of writing. I don’t enjoy the process of writing with the assistance of an LLM. Simple. That is my reason.

…well, that, and I’m worried that if start letting LLMs help with creative stuff my brain will turn into sawdust. So those are my two reasons.

…

Actually also, I’m just generally uncomfortable with a synthetic intelligence that I don’t really understand that needs careful tuning and guardrails to not be a grimdark nazi sociopath being embedded in my life in an inextricable way, so I’m still keeping LLMs at arm’s length.

That’s three. Three reasons I don’t write with LLMs.)_

v1.00.01 Preface

In late 2024 I released a book titled Deep Response: An Emergency Education in Post-Consumer Praxis.

It was a lightly fictional conversation between my 38 year old self and my 25 year old self. My younger self was really worked up about climate change, resource depletion, and biodiversity loss. He was hoovering up books like Overshoot and Limits to Growth and inspired by books like The Ecotechnic Future and Entropia. He understood much about the dysfunctions of the world and wanted to be involved in making the world function better.

And in fact he worked as an engineer to help decarbonize the built environment, so on paper his career was well aligned with his understanding of the world. But he struggled with the ambivalence and disillusion that so often afflicts young, naive, idealistic people trying to make their dent in the universe. He perceived at varying levels of awareness misalignments and inconsistencies between his own life, his work, his understanding of the world, and his place in it. These inconsistencies and paradoxes, and his inability to resolve them, haunted him and caused a fair amount of internal tension.

I wish someone had handed 25 year old me a book explaining my misunderstandings and laying out a structure for approaching my life which would increase coherence and not make me feel so lost and frustrated. I couldn’t find that book anywhere, so I wrote it.

In Deep Response I had to convince my younger self that pursuing personal autonomy was not only a worthwhile goal but a strategic imperative particularly for people who wanted to make an impact in the world. I had to convince him that he was actually being selfish by refusing to be a good steward of his own resources in a way that would lead towards increased personal autonomy.

I had to point out the ridiculous hypocrisy of trying to get society to function within ecological and resource limits in my professional life while carrying significant consumer debt in my personal life.

I had to make the case that if what was called for was no less than a paradigm shift, a different kind of thinking, then not only the most pragmatic but the most moral place to start was at the scale of our own households. (Pragmatic because we have more control over our own households and can learn faster with a smaller scale sandbox, and more moral because we aren’t inflicting the consequences of our inevitable beginner mistakes on anyone else.)

I had to make the case to my younger self that one of the reasons for his disillusionment had to do with his suspicion that he was playing engineer on the Titanic.

“…new systems will emerge from the dissolution of the old system, and those are the systems that deserve your attention and effort.”

“What new systems?” he asks.

“I mean the successor cultures that are emerging from the dissolution of this one,” I gesture around us. “Cultures that operate based on rules aligned to biophysical reality. The cultures that are growing in the cracks of the old system.

“You need to understand that you can’t work on these successor cultures if you’re still running the programming from the old system. If you’re still trying to brute force everything and operating in a state of overshoot, unable to think in systems, fragile to disruption, enmeshed in dysfunctional psychological patterns, unable to carve out time to think and respond to the future as it arrives. In a very technical sense of the word, right now you don’t deserve to work on these new cultures. You will damage them if you try to. This is why you have to collapse your scope to your personal life, to the scale of your household, and build a functional system at that scale before you expand back outwards again. You have to become the kind of person who can contribute meaningfully to these successor cultures.”

I know this is hard for him to hear. He’s got so much effort already invested in his current way of thinking.

“Or,” I continue, “you can keep doing what you’re doing. Huck yourself at projects, pull overnighters, burn yourself out on projects that get canceled anyway, trash your relationships and your health, and drown in the uncertainty that any of your sacrifice is worth it. Along the way rack up five figures of consumer debt with nothing to show for it at the end. Your call.”

I do sincerely wish my younger self could have read something like Deep Response, and I wrote with exactly that person in mind. But of course time travel is not real, and who I actually wrote Deep Response for is people like younger Tyler. People who see the monstrous dysfunction of the world and want to Do Something About It and in fact probably are some number of years into full-scale professional effort towards that end, but are carrying a heavy load of uncertainty, cognitive dissonance, and internal-life-systems incoherence.

I did my best to explain where that uncertainty was coming from and one possible strategy for dealing with and resolving it, a strategy that does not involve capitulation, naive idealism, or magical thinking. Ultimately I built a case for an education in post-consumer praxis as a foundation for a purposeful life, a curriculum which would result in a lifestyle ‘rugged enough for dream chasing.’

“When you internalize systems thinking you decrease the amount of resources required to run your life, and you reduce the friction. This creates more space for you to think about your life, to simply be, without all of the running around, and to experiment with different activities. You tweak and tune as you go, observing the effect that different behaviors have on your overall experience of life. You remember, or discover, dreams and desires that you’d long forgotten about or didn’t even know you had, and have the space to pursue them. You stop doing things that block your dreams. Your stress levels comes down and you don’t need to use coping or numbing agents like alcohol as much, which improves the overall function of your life system because coping and numbing dissociates you from the experience of life and introduces other sources of friction. Over time your life activities converge on the imprint of interests, desires, and purpose that every human is born with, the grooves everyone has deep down. The closer you get to this imprint the stronger your attraction to it – it functions like a gravity well, the closer you get the stronger you feel it – and it eventually feels effortless to simply do the things you were made to do. Your life becomes consistently amazing.”

I spent a lot of words convincing my younger self that there was a better way to achieve the goals he thought he wanted, and that his then-current methods would lead him into a decade-long quagmire. That he was, in fact, walking into a trap.

I’m proud of what I wrote, but for people who are already on board with pursuing a curriculum of post-consumer praxis, Deep Response is unwieldy. In my opinion it doesn’t fall into the category of book that delivers a satisfyingly savage critique of The System but disappoints completely in terms of providing an alternative plan of action.

Deep Response isn’t in fact a critique of The System at all. It presupposes a certain critique of The System (laid out better than I possibly could by the books listed in my bibliography) and if you don’t agree with the broad outlines of that critique then Deep Response is not for you.

Deep Response is:

a critique of one certain kind of response to The System, the response that I embodied for about a decade in my 20’s and early 30’s and found to be ineffective, and
it is the outline of a response that I think is a much more practicable approach. It is a gesture in the correct direction and an encouraging pat on the shoulder.

For those interested in more than just an argument, an outline, and some encouragement, however, Deep Response is insufficient. It wants for a workbook, a DIY handbook, a how-to manual. So that’s what I’m working on now. I want it to be a brass tacks, useful, no fluff, field manual for people who want to unlearn consumerism, cultivate an uncommon amount of autonomy and resilience for themselves and their households, and bend the trajectory of their lives towards prefigurative work on the kinds of societies we actually want to live in rather than this ridiculous nonsense we’re being handed now.

I very much enjoyed the process of writing Deep Response, which I worked on from late 2022 through the end of 2024. But I missed sharing what I was writing on a more regular basis and feeling like I was part of a dialogue with other people out there in the world.

For this project I am going to experiment with writing in public. As I finish the ‘internet-grade draft’ of each section, I’ll post it here. Assuming I think it’s worthwhile to do so, when I finish I’ll bundle it all up, do a print-grade edit, and make it available as a book as well.

A major reason for doing this is that I want to expose this project to feedback as it develops, not just all at the end. I suspect this will make the overall project of more real use to people, which is the whole reason I’m doing this.

So please do leave a comment or send me a note with any thoughts or questions you have along the way. Thanks for reading.

Get Free: Preface

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In late 2024 I released a book titled Deep Response: An Emergency Education in Post-Consumer Praxis.

I had to make the case to my younger self that one of the reasons for his disillusionment had to do with his suspicion that he was playing engineer on the Titanic.

“…new systems will emerge from the dissolution of the old system, and those are the systems that deserve your attention and effort.”

“What new systems?” he asks.

“I mean the successor cultures that are emerging from the dissolution of this one,” I gesture around us. “Cultures that operate based on rules aligned to biophysical reality. The cultures that are growing in the cracks of the old system.

“You need to understand that you can’t work on these successor cultures if you’re still running the programming from the old system. If you’re still trying to brute force everything and operating in a state of overshoot, unable to think in systems, fragile to disruption, enmeshed in dysfunctional psychological patterns, unable to carve out time to think and respond to the future as it arrives. In a very technical sense of the word, right now you don’t deserve to work on these new cultures. You will damage them if you try to. This is why you have to collapse your scope to your personal life, to the scale of your household, and build a functional system at that scale before you expand back outwards again. You have to become the kind of person who can contribute meaningfully to these successor cultures.”

I know this is hard for him to hear. He’s got so much effort already invested in his current way of thinking.

“Or,” I continue, “you can keep doing what you’re doing. Huck yourself at projects, pull overnighters, burn yourself out on projects that get canceled anyway, trash your relationships and your health, and drown in the uncertainty that any of your sacrifice is worth it. Along the way rack up five figures of consumer debt with nothing to show for it at the end. Your call.”

“When you internalize systems thinking you decrease the amount of resources required to run your life, and you reduce the friction. This creates more space for you to think about your life, to simply be, without all of the running around, and to experiment with different activities. You tweak and tune as you go, observing the effect that different behaviors have on your overall experience of life. You remember, or discover, dreams and desires that you’d long forgotten about or didn’t even know you had, and have the space to pursue them. You stop doing things that block your dreams. Your stress levels comes down and you don’t need to use coping or numbing agents like alcohol as much, which improves the overall function of your life system because coping and numbing dissociates you from the experience of life and introduces other sources of friction. Over time your life activities converge on the imprint of interests, desires, and purpose that every human is born with, the grooves everyone has deep down. The closer you get to this imprint the stronger your attraction to it – it functions like a gravity well, the closer you get the stronger you feel it – and it eventually feels effortless to simply do the things you were made to do. Your life becomes consistently amazing.”

I’m proud of what I wrote, but for people who are already on board with pursuing a curriculum of post-consumer praxis and want to dive in to practical matters, Deep Response is at best a primer. It was mostly intended to function as an argument for a certain course of action, without actually diving into the nitty gritty details of that course of action.

Deep Response also isn’t a critique of The System at all. It presupposes a certain critique of The System (laid out better than I possibly could by the books listed in my bibliography) and if you don’t agree with the broad outlines of that critique then Deep Response is not for you.

Deep Response is:

a critique of one certain kind of response to The System, the response that I embodied for about a decade in my 20’s and early 30’s and found to be ineffective, and
it is the outline of a response that I think is a much more practicable approach. It is a gesture in the correct direction and an encouraging pat on the shoulder.

For those interested in more than just an argument, an outline, and some encouragement, you’ll want something like a how-to manual. So that’s what I’m working on now. I want it to be a brass tacks, useful, no fluff, field manual for people who want to unlearn consumerism, cultivate an uncommon amount of autonomy and resilience for themselves and their households, and bend the trajectory of their lives towards prefigurative work on the kinds of societies we actually want to live in rather than this ridiculous nonsense we’re being handed now.

So please do leave a comment or send me a note with any thoughts or questions you have along the way. Thanks for reading.

PS: I realized I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from doing some abstract psuedo-philosophizing, but I knew it would detract from the text if I peppered it throughout the text. So I’m stuffing all that stuff in the Introduction, which you can feel perfectly free to skip if you want to just get on with it.

Early Seeing, Field Manuals, Winter

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I ran across Adrian Lambert’s article If Collapse is Inevitable, Why Does Seeing Early Matter? and highlighted about 90% of it. If you’re into Deep Response, you’ll like it.

tl;dr: One function of neurodivergent cognition might be to early-recognize societal collapse or unfolding predicaments and begin the work not of preventing collapse but of cultivating diverse adaptive responses.

Ring any bells?

Speaking of Deep Response, I started writing the field manual companion volumes to Deep Response. I’m releasing it in public a chapter or section at a time. (I’ll also make audio out of the sections as I go, so that’s what my podcast will mostly become.)

If you read Deep Response and were left wondering how exactly to begin executing the ideas, then Patterns of Deep Response is for you.

Otherwise I’m enjoying the Fairbanks winter, working on my projects (writing, business, DIY around the cabin), getting out for fatbike rides when its not too cold, working out with Jack again now that he’s back in town, and hanging out with dogs.

Noonish in December

I bought a car. Surprised? Yeah, turns out that cars are useful here. Also I have schemes for it. It’s a 2001 Honda CR-V manual with a broken speedo, odometer frozen at 103k, slips out of 5th in the cold, the drivers door latch doesn’t work in the cold, the exhaust leaks, and the rear hatch doesn’t open. Call it a fixer-upper, or maybe a rescue. It was pretty clearly neglected and sat around a bit. The engine appears to run fine, which isn’t a huge surprise. So it’s both immediately useful and a bit of a project, which I’m excited about. The need to effect some repairs on it was part of the attraction.

The cabin

How to Build a Post-Consumer Society

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I don’t think that you can build a post-consumer society if you can’t build an even partially post-consumer lifestyle.

A society is a collection of people who have a network of relationships with each other. The attributes of the people, and the nature of the relationships between the people, define the nature of the society. (The character of the society may be unpredictable - that is, the attributes of the society may be impossible to predict based on knowledge of the people and their relationships.)

A group of consumers who have a network of relationships with each other based on the logic of consumerism is a consumer society. Depending on the characteristics of the particular consumers and the particular forms of relationships, the character of the overall society could vary widely.

A collection of post-consumers in a network of relationships with each other based on any form of non-consumer logic is a post-consumer society. As ‘post-consumerism’ is less one particular thing and more an umbrella term for what it is not, this society could exhibit any number of not predictable emergent characteristics.

There are at least two key components here:

the characteristics of the individuals in the society, and
the nature of the relationships between those individuals.

The characteristics of the individuals to a large degree informs the possibilities for the nature of relationships they may have with each other. Conversely, the nature of the relationships they have with each other will inform what characteristics ‘want’ to arise or express in the individuals.

If this sounds complex, don’t worry. I’m sure what I’ve just presented is a gross simplification of the true complexity of societies. But this simple model is useful for now because it allows us to say that:

A collection of consumers who are waiting for a post-consumer society to exist before making any changes in their own lives is a consumer society filled with angsty anti-consumer wannabes (who probably despise themselves).

And also we can say:

A collection of consumers who vocally oppose the effects of consumerism yet continue to uphold and participate in relationships based on the logic of consumerism is one particular, peculiar form of consumer society.

If we want a post-consumer society, our simple model implies that we need to change the characteristics of the individuals in the society as well as the nature of the relationships between those individuals.

But, as stated above, each of these things effects the other. The individuals inform the relationships and the relationships inform the individuals.

What to do?

My answer is to stop overthinking things already and get on with making the changes that are within your control, and then FAFO from there.

It is much easier for me to begin the work of changing the characteristics of myself as an individual than it is to change the nature of my relationships with everything that I’m in relationship with (friends, family, boss, employer, local government, my church, my pets…). That’s where I can begin.

And once I begin working on the characteristics of myself, particularly as I internalize those characteristics, the changing nature of my self as an individual in a web of relationships with other people and things will exert some kind of influence on those things.

Of course, mostly the influence will be from those other things upon me. I still live in a consumer society. Holding fast in my post-consumer individual characteristics is very difficult.

This is why it’s so important to Find The Others - other individuals who have approximately similar goals as yourself, who are attempting to cultivate similar characteristics within themselves. When you form relationships with individuals like this, you can begin the work of forming non-consumer or post-consumer kinds of relationships with them. This reduces the influence of consumer logistics on your life.

It will take a long, long time for the process of early-adopter post-consumers changing their own characteristics, Finding The Others, and forming new kinds of relationships with each other and with other things, to form anything close to what might one day be called a true post-consumer society. It’s easy to get bummed out that we’re still enmeshed within the logics of consumer culture, which is why I think it’s important to embrace the transition logic of Pareto decoupling.

But I can’t think of any other way to get there. And maybe the nature of change will surprise us. Perhaps we’ll stumble upon an inflection point and get to live through one of those “years where decades pass” events. Perhaps not. Perhaps that event is far past the horizons of our lifespans. No matter.

All this is to explain why I think that the first place to start with The Flotilla is with our own lives, at the household scale. I think that trying to skip straight to the fun stuff - the Flotilla, group projects, things that impact other people - without getting our own shit together first, is actually irresponsible and risks triggering serious negative unintended consequences.

I think that a lot of the failures of previous attempts to create alternative forms of society can be explained by getting this sequence mixed up. I think if you sit in a room and think up a bunch of rules for the ideal nature of relationships between individuals, and then take a bunch of more or less off the shelf individuals (even though they may be LARPing as alt because they read a few books and took the right drugs and learned the right buzzwords) and throw them together, it’s doomed to fail. It’s doomed to fail because that’s the exact kind of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place: linear, mechanistic thinking, thinking that you can come up with a Plan and then arrange people like cogs in a machine and then turn the crank and watch it go.

As urgent as our predicaments are, and as strongly as we yearn for a vision of the future we can see so clearly, I think we need more the attitude of the gardener, the wildlands horticulturalist, the steward.

I think to build the society we want we need to start with ourselves.

Goals of this phase include:

to habituate post-consumer modes of living at the scale of our own households.
To deprogram ourselves from the consumer modes of thinking we were born into,
to unlearn the thought-terminating clichés of industrial consumer culture.
To build resilient, rugged, even anti-fragile systems at the scale of our own lives to reduce the amount of logistical overhead we have to do to maintain our own personal life support systems, so that we can show up in the world to deliver our gifts more fully, AND to learn in the relatively safe sandboxes of our own lives how some of these principles work.
To find and connect with other people who are on similar journeys, both a bit ahead and a bit behind us. In an ideal flow we learn something from someone a bit ahead of us, incorporate it into our own practice, and then as soon as possible turn around and teach it to someone coming along behind us.
To define “enough” for ourselves in terms of material sufficiency
To decouple our personal Quality of Life from Amount of Resources Consumed, beyond a reasonable threshold of sufficiency, in our own minds, experientially, not just academically.

—

…and, I think the greatest danger with this approach is getting stuck in endless self-improvement. More on that later.

Pareto Renunciation

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Dear J,

We live in a society defined by industrial consumerist logistics. Our food, shelter, transportation, information, and governance systems all exist within a system that runs on the logic of industrial consumerism.

Those of us who see the terminal problems of industrial consumerism seek to build/cultivate a different, post-consumer lifestyle and society. It seems largely impossible — or at least enormously difficult — to create a bubble society or a bubble life that is entirely dissociated from industrial consumer society. At the very least there is no way to escape being within the claimed jurisdiction of systems of power associated with industrial consumer societies.

The vision of the future is a post-industrial-consumerist world. But we happen not to live in that world yet. This can make living inside of industrial consumer society distressing.

Instead of thinking that the ‘best’ life is one that is entirely decoupled from industrial consumer society, accept that it’s virtually impossible to pull that off at this time in history and seek instead to Pareto decouple.

Pareto Optimization is a process of designing a system with multiple objectives where you can’t move towards one goal without moving away from another.

Reject the 80% that is insane and toxic, keep or tolerate the 20% that isn’t such a big deal – or would be a Sisyphean feat to roll back, or is unavailable to people living in the 21st century.

For example, it might theoretically be possible to 100% decouple your food from industrial society. You might go neoprimitive and hunt and forage with stone age tools you build yourself… but most of our wildlands won’t even support that because they’ve been depleted by modernity already so it isn’t a universalizable choice.

Pareto rejecting modernity is about discerning what elements of modernity cause harm (to you and others), cause fragility (by tightly coupling you to systems of modern logistics), or are simply unaligned with your existential-aesthetic preferences.

For many, if not all, aspects of lifestyle logistics, “decoupling” from industrial consumer society might look more like loosening the coupling rather than fully decoupling.

Best,

PS Here’s my trip report for my motorcycle ride, and some cabinets I built for my studio in the desert before heading north.