Wait wait hang on, let’s recap.
I had a 12-year career in the sustainable built environment designing energy efficient healthy non-toxic mechanical systems for buildings. It was awesome and the people were great. Luckily, I got laid off in 2021.
I was metacrisis-aware the whole time, frantically trying to figure out how to help avert global disaster. The more I understood the problem, the less clear it became what needed to be done. I mostly just read a bunch and tuckered myself out. It was exhausting and entirely unproductive. It’s embarrassing how little I accomplished considering how much I thought about The World’s Problems. Don’t be that guy.
Because I was trying to solve the world’s problems I didn’t put any attention to my own problems or dysfunctions. One result of this is that I was kinda dumb with money and just spent all of whatever I earned. For a while there I spent more than whatever I earned. Dumb! Very dumb! That this was a contradiction of my purported values didn’t totally register with me at the time.
In January 2020 I found ERE, which stands for Early Retirement Extreme. I don't really care about Retirement, but ERE promised me that I could massively increase my personal autonomy, resilience, and skillset, and massively decrease my consumption or footprint. Put those two things together and I could devote my time and attention on things that actually matter without having to do what anyone else told me to do. ERE explained exactly how to do these things in a very brass tacks kind of way that made immediate sense to me.
I spent the next four years of my life intensely focused on decreasing my cost of living, acquiring broad skills, and internalizing systems thinking at the scale of my own life. This is why it was lucky that I got laid off, I wouldn't have had the time to learn all this stuff if I was working full time.
I brought my cost of living down from $70k/yr to less than $10k/yr, I learned a lot, I traveled, I internalized systems thinking, I leveled up in a lot of different ways, and my subjective sense of well-being - basically, how stoked I am at any given moment - has gone way, way up.
I'm a fairly existential kind of guy. I've spent a lot of my life in a state of existential dread or despair -- not depression, more like dread mixed with anxiety about the state of consciousness and the meaning of everything. That's just how I'm wired. Now, I spend most of my time in a state of existential exuberance, and I have what I learned in the past five years to thank for this.
It pisses me off that I had to look so long for the information I needed to make these changes in my life and it was in such an obscure place, so I wrote my own book, the exact book I wish someone had handed to me when I was 25 years old. It's called Deep Response: An Emergency Education in Post-Consumer Praxis. You can check it out and read or listen to the first chapter for free.
That brings us up to the present moment. What am I doing now?
Well, you remember how I said I used to spend $70k year, and that I got laid off in 2021, about a year after I started reducing my cost of living? That means that I'm not done earning money. I'm currently working on a business venture with the aim of quote unquote "solving money forever" using the personal finance techniques of the FIRE movement. I intend to become financially independent at a very low cost of living in the very near future, in order to free up my time and attention to work on that which I want to work on for the rest of my life.
You might say "oh, you're trying to retire early" and my answer is "no, hell with that, my goal in life is to work on cool projects with interesting people for the rest of my life." Becoming financially independent is a means of maximizing personal autonomy so I can pick and choose what projects to work on and never have to work with people who suck.
What kind of projects do I want to work on? I want to build the solarpunk future that I've been dreaming about since I was a kid. I want to build beautiful and radical infrastructure for living that supports human flourishing and integrates with natural systems. I want to build systems that increase human adaptability over the coming decades, which are only going to get more crazy, while decreasing negative impact on Gaia. I want to build stuff that regenerates destroyed habitats. I want to build stuff so beautiful that people use the word "enchanted" to describe it. When I look at 99% of the built environment I am offended at how shitty it is. So I just want to spend the rest of my life designing and building human life support systems that I think don't suck.
(Of course there’s much more to effective response than the physical infrastructure - there’s governance and alternative social arrangements and cultural expressions and all sorts of things - but for me the locus of my interest and ability centers around the material and energetic infrastructure of a sane society.)
Right now, that's not exactly what I'm doing. Right now I'm buying my autonomy and some seed funding to be able to chase this dream for the rest of my life without having to worry about boring details like how to pay the bills. I’m trying to just get all that over with now. What I'm doing right now is on the path towards what I want to be doing, and let me tell you, after a decade plus of uncertainty and doubt, it feels amazing to feel like I am, finally, on my path.
You might be thinking why on earth would I care what this dude’s dreams are. The takeaway is that what I spent four years learning has delivered me to a place in my life where I am in the process of making my dreams come true. If making your own dreams come true amidst the maelstrom of the metacrisis while increasing personal autonomy and resilience at an annual lifestyle cost of $10,000/yr or less sounds intriguing, you might be interested in that book I wrote which is intended to help make it more obvious to other people how to do the same. Helping other people figure out how to make their own dreams come true is, more or less, why I type stuff on the internet.
And if building the solarpunk world of your dreams sounds up your alley, we should chat, because maybe in the near future we can build cool stuff together. That’s the other reason I type stuff on the internet - to find The Others.