Dear Friend,
Recommended reading: Fuck You Happiness by Peter Limberg (5min read). Pair with my old article on FU Lifestyle Design.
On with the letter:
I’m writing a book. The working title is The Door of Your Cage Hangs Open: An Emergency Education in Postconsumer Praxis. The conceit is that present-day Tyler travels back to 2011 and gives my 25yo self some life advice.
I am nearly finished with major revisions and will move on to proofing and formatting just as soon as I can finish what is turning out to be the trickiest chapter: systems thinking applied to lifestyle design. I’ve written it three or four ways now and haven’t been satisfied with any of the versions.
I think systems thinking at the personal scale is both the most difficult and the most important concept to communicate. If I don’t get this chapter right I might as well not ship the book. It is the conceptual heart of everything. Without systems thinking none of the rest of it makes any sense.
Today’s letter is my latest attempt to approach the chapter from a different angle. With any luck I’ll be able to use pieces of what I write today to construct a chapter worth printing.
Here goes.
Analysis and Synthesis
I break systems thinking into two activities: analysis and synthesis, or disassembly and reassembly.
Analysis is disassembly — the activity of taking things apart to see what they are composed of. For lifestyle systems thinking we disassemble behaviors (activities) and goals.
Analyzing behavior reveals requirements (or inputs) and outputs (or yields).
The behavior (or activity) of mountain biking requires a bike, parts, money, almost always a vehicle, protective gear, skill, and a certain internal relationship with risk. It yields the state of flow, time spent out in the woods, time spent with friends, a stronger body due to exercise, the risk of a broken body, pollutants as a secondary output of the car required to get the bike and rider to the trailhead, etc.
Cooking at home requires a kitchen, time, information (recipes and techniques), ingredients, and skill. It produces healthier food than all available alternatives, a lower overall cost of food, joy or pride in craft, and possibly opens avenues to higher quality social engagements.
The key insight of disassembly is that that what we think we want isn't what we actually want. We think we want to mountain bike, but mountain biking is just a delivery mechanism for the state of flow, time in the woods, and fun with friends. Those are the things we want. This insight allows us to evaluate the costs of our activities with a steelier eye than when we identify closely with the activities themselves -- "I AM a mountain biker".
I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with identifying with our activities, but for people interested in radical self-transformation everything must be fair game for analysis. We must loosen our grips on identity, at least during analysis.
Analysis - thoughtful disassembly - is preamble to thinking in systems. My colloquial definition of systems thinking is "thinking about the relationships between components rather than the components themselves."
In order to think about the relationships between components in any kind of useful way, however, you have to first understand the components reasonably well. So a prerequisite of systems thinking is component thinking. Skipping this step disconnects you from reality.
With this in mind, the first phase of systems thinking is to get everything onto the table and then take it all apart.
List all behaviors and activities in your life.
Make a list of behaviors and activities you might like to do, or alternatives that suggest themselves to you when looking at the list of behaviors you currently engage in.
Disassemble each one using either inputs and outputs (needs and yields) analysis or reverse wishboning (connect an activity to the primary goal/effect, and then list all positive and negative effects).
An Incomplete list of current behaviors and activities:
Cook at home
Eat mostly vegetarian
Eat lots of whole grains (wheat) and beans (lentils, pinto beans)
Work on BIM business
Make Revit yt videos
Live at QH
Sleep in the studio
Work out 3x/wk
Ruck 2x/wk
Express gratitude every day
Do a weekly checkin with my parents
Write a book on postconsumer praxis
Watch netflix sometimes
Look at instagram daily
Read at night
Participate in the forum daily
Write a fortnightly letter to subscribers
Go on bikepacking adventures
Put on EREfest.
Habituate ttm5k.
Be carfree
Write for an hour minimum every morning
A List of potential behaviors and activities:
Meditate 20min/day
Spend 1-3mo at Duncan's place
Pursue BIM business well past 33x
Buy the land next door
Decide not to build out QH, at least now, and instead wander more
Go all in on making ERE City happen somewhere else
Go all in on permaculture paradise for QH
Prioritize building a socal social network.
Dirtbag climb every season
Go to festivals and hippie retreats - get into the socal boho/dharma/festival/etc scene/culture.
Unplug from the internet/screens for months at a time.
Now we do analysis on each activity. There are two methods. Reverse wishboning is the classic ERE Book Chapter 5 method:
Write an activity on a piece of paper (e.g. ‘downhill mountain biking’).
Draw a line to the right and write down the main goal or aim of that activity - what is the main Why? (‘the flow state’)
Coming up from the activity write first-order positive/beneficial side effects (exercise, time outdoors, time with friends, etc).
Going down from the activity write first-order negative side effects (expensive, need a car, risk of injury).
Another method is a needs and yields analysis, which is straight from permaculture/ecology. It’s more or less the same thing, but can bring different insights.
Write down an activity.
Write the needs or requirements of the activity, coming in from the left.
Write the outputs or effects of the activity, going out to the right.
These exercises are best done quickly, on pen and paper, without being too precious about it. The sketches themselves are useless - the value is in practicing the mental activity of analysis. Do this enough and it becomes effortless and instinctual. That is the goal of the exercises.
As such, I recommend doing a lot of them.
I suspect that most people don't make lists of all the things they do in their lives. Of the few who do, I wonder how many run analysis on the list? And of those who do run some analysis, are they doing so as a program of internalizing systems thinking? With an ultimate goal of achieving self-actualization, of closing loops in the permaculture/ecological sense of the word, of excising heterotelicities? (Heterotelicity is a fancy word for when two or more of your activities function at cross purposes to each other).
This is why I think this chapter is so important, and why when I read ERE for the first time it blew my mind. ERE was the first and, to date, only text I've ever read that applies systems thinking techniques to lifestyle design. By the time I found ERE I'd read enough about systems thinking to not only be entirely enraptured by it from a purely intellectual standpoint, but to also see it as a critical bit of cognitive kit on the quest to muddle through the polycrisis.
I need to explain myself.
A digression on Why Systems Thinking is vital
I think it is true that "you can't solve problems at the same level of thinking that got you in to them." And it seems that the kind of thinking that got us into the polycrisis is linear thinking, by which I mean thinking that is blind to the emergent effects of complex systems.
The polycrisis is an emergent and complex phenomena, a trap woven from unconscious actions leading to intricate effects and consequences that no mind could haven designed. It takes systems thinking abilities just to see the polycrisis, much less begin to compose any kind of response to it.
As such, I see systems thinking as a necessary cognitive ability for 21st century humans. We need systems thinking to understand our world and we need it to compose our responses. Linear 'solutions' are chaff in the wind, dry farts in the gale of complexity, pathetic plans swallowed by the thunder of god's laughter.
And the best place to begin with systems thinking is in our own lives. For one, our own lives are the only responsible scale at which to learn systems thinking. Impossible-to-predict consequences are a hallmark of systems dynamics, and getting a sense for these forces requires trial and error. We must experiment on ourselves first.
Furthermore, systems thinking is, I think, the only way to ruggedize ourselves to the emergent shitstorm of global consequences headed our way. Linear responses are fragile. Bunkers and bank accounts are linear solutions. Complex webs of relationships, skills, knowledge, information, and experience are systems-level responses. If we want to spend our lives doing anything other than scrambling to get by, anything other than dodging the strikes, if we want to be useful, I mean, then we must ruggedize our own lives. Selfish? Perhaps. But necessary.
—
Back to the main idea: the first step is to make a list of current behaviors, and a list of potential behaviors, and then analyze them. We call this node analysis.
The aim is to habituate nodal analysis - to make it reflexive, automatic. When your attention settles on any activity, you effortlessly and without conscious intent see its components. You see the inputs and yields. You feel them.
This felt sense as a result of habituated analysis explains why some of my behavior comes off mysterious even to myself. Sometimes I make decisions that I can't articulate well. At some point the analysis submerges itself below the level of conscious thought and I feel what to do. An obvious example is car ownership.
I've spent so much time analyzing the effect of car ownership on my life that I don't THINK it's not a good fit for my current lifestyle anymore, I FEEL that it isn't. I feel the cost of gas in my shoulders, the time spent on maintenance in my neck, and the pollutants and GHG emissions in my gut. And on the benefits side, there's just an emptiness.
Sure, zooming along desert highways under a full moon is fun, and it's convenient to get to town in under thirty minutes, but nothing in my life requires these things (no accident, by the way).
Zooming along on my bicycle is a deeper and more thrilling experience, at far less cost. I've arranged my flow of materials (groceries, library books, building materials) to not depend on car ownership, and so I've stopped thinking about car ownership a long time ago. The idea of it feels absurd and hollow. I don't need to think about it, my gut tells me that the answer is LOLnope, and that's good enough for me. People ask me why I don’t have a car and I shrug. Where to start? With my shoulder or my gut? There is no beginning.
Synthesis: Patterns of Composition
So that is analysis. The next step is synthesis. I find it devilishly difficult to articulate a process for.
The best I've got is a handful of patterns and exercises. These exercises are different methods for composing the pieces you got during analysis.
What we're making isn't a machine, we're making a dynamic system that flows through time. There isn't a single static thing about what we're trying to make, and this is why I think musical composition is maybe the best metaphor for what we're trying to do here and why the activity resists proscription so resolutely.
If what we're doing is like musical composition, then proscription is anathema. The best I can do is suggest some techniques, some patterns -- but I cannot explain the insights you will have. I cannot give you tests and metrics to know when you're 'done', when you've got it 'right'.
So when it comes to nodal composition, that is, when it comes time to think about the relationships between nodes, here's a list of useful patterns:
a web-like structure. Webs aren't efficient, they are resilient. We want resilience. Efficiency is fragile. We’re looking for desired effects that are supported by multiple actions.
Loose coupling. A loosely coupled node doesn't depend tightly on other nodes.
Diversity of resource flows. If you get money from only one source (e.g. a specialized career), what happens if that industry suffers a downturn? If you only get food from the grocery store, what happens when a severe global pandemic or local disaster disrupts the supply chains that stock that grocery store with food?
Buffers, tanks, stocks. The opposite of just-in-time logistics. Have a deep pantry. Have a big emergency cash fund. Have emergency water and supplies. Have backups.
Niches and cycles, and interception nets. I'm still working on how to apply this pattern. I picked it up from my study of permaculture. Think of your life as a system that energy flows through in different forms (money, mental energy, relationships, physical energy, social reputation, etc). Energy enters your life and later it leaves your life. You can use it more than once: you can pass the outputs of one process to another process, to another process, etc. In the same way that Earthships collect water from the rain, and then use that water to wash dishes, and then to irrigate plants, and then to flush toilets, and then to irrigate outdoor plants, so too can you pass resources through your life from function to function.
What we’re trying to do is to create what ERE people call a Web of Goals, or WOG. Goals is a tricky word, though, and we mean it in a very technical sort of way. We don’t make a distinction between goals and effects. This is ERE Book Chapter 5 stuff. If you don’t like the word goals (I don’t either) you can think of the project as building a Web of Consequences, a WOC. Or a Web of Effects, a WOE (heh).[1]
(Side note: It’s well worth studying cascading failures. I recommend John Robb and Laurence Gonzalez.)
Enough words, let's do some exercises. There's no right or wrong way to construct a Web of Goals/Effects/Consequences. Try one way, and then another, and another, quickly. Don't be precious about it. The sketches themselves are useless - the value lies in the activity of creating them.
Here are some seed prompts:
From the lists you made above, write down a few goals. Then write activities that you do that result in those goals, and connect the two with lines. Use circles for activities/behaviors and squares for goals/effects. Keep going, see if you can get your full list on the page.
Pick three values/metagoals. Then connect goals that are aligned with those values. Then connect activities that result in those goals.
At the center of a piece of paper write "me" and circle yourself. Write down your needs and desires (food, sex, sleep, friends, contentment). Write down activities that result in those needs being met.
I cannot overstate how useless the sketches are. I’ve scarcely looked at one twice. It is the activity of making the sketch that changed how I thought, which is the entire purpose of the exercise.
The purpose of showing you three random sketches of mine isn’t so you can copy them or learn any tactics, it’s so you can see how truly useless they are. I bet your first reaction on looking at those sketches was something along the lines of “pff tldr nope!”
That’s exactly right. That what I think when I look at them too, and I made them. It was the making, not the having, that was valuable.
Footnoted digresssion
[1]WOE or WOC, I like the idea of getting away from the word 'goal', which a) has baggage and b) implies more agency and dominative control than perhaps is good when doing systems thinking. We think of goals as things that we're responsible for, things that we want and things that we wrest from the soup of experience. It makes us forgers, blacksmiths of reality. Effects and consequences makes us gardeners, tenders, encouragers, stewards of reality, which is more what I'm after.
I like the way web of consequences reads. It helps remind us that actions have consequences, and at the level of systems the emergent consequences can be unpredictable.