Past principles of Advanced Retroadaptics were the Long Dance Principle, the Put Your Own Oxygen Mask on First Principle, and the Skills Principle.
Today I want to talk about the Don’t Get Stuck Inside Your Own System Principle.
Don’t Spend Your Life Chasing Someone Else’s Story
Getting your own house in order via increasing your financial independence and skilling up is significant but doesn’t have to be the lifelong focus. They are means to another end. Some people take the ideas of increasing economic and resource self-sufficiency and they extrapolate the practice to the extreme of total self-sufficiency. This isn’t really necessary and for a lot of people isn’t desirable.
I think a narrative exists that suggests that if you really cared about self-sufficiency or decoupling from industrial civilization or whatever, you’d necessarily go totally off-grid and homestead and only eat food that comes from your own land and the whole nine yards.
And look, if you want to do that, cool, do it.
But if, like 95% of people, that doesn’t actually sound fun to you, also cool, don’t do it.
The idea that each of us has to go totally self sufficient on a full time basis as a prerequisite to moving on and doing anything else in the world is insane.
Why I call this the “Don’t Get Stuck” principle is because I think some people get the idea that they should, that they are supposed to go full send on the self-sufficiency thing, and they spend years and decades chasing that story because they haven’t encountered other narratives or ideas about what they can/should/want to do with their lives. Homesteading etc is one path. There are many.
So, yes, get FI, get some resource buffers, develop skills, ruggedize your life, and then move on to whatever you want your life to be about: contribute to the Flotilla, spin up a community garden, write a book, or just hang out and be a good human. There’s a world of options out there.
In Other News, I’m in Alaska Again
And it’s beautiful up here.
Ice crystals on a deck railing.
Reading
I like Kyla Scanlon’s newsletter quite a lot for breaking down financial and macroeconomic information in a way I can (kind of) understand. Her post-election debrief was worth reading in full.
On the theme of recommended writing about money is Matt Levine’s newsletter, which is a) educational and b) the most consistently funny thing I read every week, and yes it’s about extremely nerdy financial arcana.