I’m posting a series of principles or maxims of Advanced Retroadaptics. Here was the first post on the Long Dance principle.
The Put Your Own Oxygen Mask on First Principle
Bias decisions towards increasing durable personal autonomy and cooperative self-reliance. Get as free as possible as quickly as possible. You can't do much good if you've still got handcuffs on, golden or otherwise. The other principles hinge on being able to operate with high levels of personal autonomy. This isn't an individualism vs. collectivism issue, it's fine to be cooperatively self-reliant, if that's how you want to think about it. The main thing is to increase autonomy of decision-making.
It's better to have as much agency over your actions as possible, so that you can make decisions according to your own values and interests rather than the values of whatever entity has a claim on your autonomy, such as what Nate Hagen’s refers to as the Economic Superorganism.
If you have a full time job that you must maintain in order to pay the bills, for example, you're giving a massive amount of your attention and energy to that job, instead of building the integrity of your personal life, the life of your family and community, in short, the lifeboat flotilla. Unless, of course, you're fortunate to be employed in something that you consider to be relevant to the flotilla and personal integrity, in which case that's awesome.
Now you might be saying, uh, Tyler, if I don't work this job, my family is going to starve on the streets. Yes yes, I don't mean just up and quit your job if you don't have your needs otherwise met. The spirit of this Principle is to seek ways to minimize your dependence on things like full time jobs in order to get your needs met. There are a million possible ways to make decisions with these principles in mind. That's sort of the whole point of principles: they are statements of generalized intent or mindset, with the particulars left up to the individual.
For example, a few particular decisions one could make that are in alignment with this principle:
.Pay off all debt and commit to never going into debt again
.Save up an emergency fund of three months of living expenses
.Read a bunch of books on non-conventional personal finance so that you become skilled in the dark arts of economically freeing yourself and your family from a system that wants you to be locked in to a neverending treadmill of consumption and drudgery. (I can recommend a few)
.Learn deep frugality or voluntary simplicity to decrease your theoretical minimum cost of living, and then
.Save up liquid assets of ten years of living expenses
.And then twenty
.And then thirty - and then hey presto you never have to work again if you don't want to.
.If you're addicted to alcohol or drugs, or anything else, make it a top priority to get help and quit.
This principle implies frugality and wise financial stewardship. Once you've gotten the amount of money you need to a really low level, there are a lot of options for reducing the amount of time you spend on goals that are not your own: you can work part time and still cover your financial needs, you can work intermittently, or you can seek some measure of financial independence and just never work again.
Wise financial stewardship is a hard sell for many compassionate, crisis-aware people, because they assume that any attention diverted to their own financial system is selfish, is attention diverted from Helping the World, and is therefor immoral and/or icky.
We need to get over this childish self-sabotage. Grow up and take care of your own shit so that you can compoundingly increase your ability to help the rest of us aka deliver your gifts to the world with a minimum of friction and with less blocked or wasted effort.
I spent years in a state of personal financial insecurity (five figure consumer debt) for no better reason than that I unconsciously had an aversion to dealing with my own financial stance in a responsible manner. This was very, very dumb of me. Don’t be like past Tyler.
Reading
Your Money or Your Life is the classic modern introduction to getting your financial house in order, in order to show up however you want in the world. Vicki Robin also has a great podcast What Could Go Right which you can find at her website.
Early Retirement Extreme is, obviously, what I consider to be the definitive textbook for the work of how to write your own instruction manual for escaping the Plato’s Cave of Consumer Culture Lock-in.
From the archives, my post on FU Lifestyle Design.
Not necessarily related to the Oxygen Mask Principle, I really liked this article on lifestyle design by Kyle over at sloww - particularly the quotes from Maslow about self-actualization.