Tyler J. Disney

Understand Your World

We must understand the reality we have in order to understand our opportunities to build the realities we want.

Strategy and Tactics

01

Limits & collapse

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02

Status & culture

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03

Enough

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Strategy & sensemaking

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Post Filter: Understand

110 posts

2026

  1. We've All Been Lied To
  2. I’m writing a book and you can read it now

2025

  1. Early Seeing, Field Manuals, Winter
  2. How to Build a Post-Consumer Society
  3. Pareto Renunciation
  4. Problems, Predicaments, and The Meaning of Life
  5. Swirling Dust
  6. Patterns of Response
  7. More Notes on The Aesthetics of Endeavor
  8. The Crushing Horror of Freedom
  9. Dear J: The Horror of Freedom and the Coziness of Obligate Work
  10. The Work, the Nucleus, and Going First
  11. Dear J: Thinking about Systems
  12. Free Em All, Let Gaia Sort Em Out
  13. The Will to Art
  14. An Aesthetics of Existence
  15. Imagine
  16. Deep Response: Figures
  17. Deep Response: Further Reading
  18. The Day the World Stops Shopping

2024

  1. The book is done!
  2. DEEP RESPONSE: An Emergency Education in Post-Consumer Praxis
  3. Deep Response: Chapter 1
  4. The Global Equitable Burn Rate
  5. The Don't Get Stuck Principle
  6. The Skills Principle and Mojave Solarpunkery
  7. The Put Your Own Oxygen Mask On First Principle
  8. The Maxims of Advanced Retroadaptics
  9. Get Going
  10. AMA2: Letting Go of the Dark Lust for Money and Status
  11. Your Life is a System
  12. How to See Your Life From the Outside
  13. Walking Off the Hangover
  14. Back of the Envelope Freedom Math
  15. The Ethical Consumption Limit is $7,360
  16. Mapping Ultralearning Projects

2023

  1. Intense DIY Skill Acquisition and Win Loops
  2. A Stoke-Centric Getting Things Done System: First Thoughts
  3. Anti-defeatist
  4. High Leverage Skills
  5. Comparative Advantage and Skill Development
  6. Polymathic Skill Acquisition
  7. Self Sovereignty and Sabotage
  8. Pessimism, Xrisk, Dissensus, and Sailing Adventures, a Flotilla Chat | Episode 16
  9. Who This Is For and What I Am Doing Here | Podcast Episode 011

2022

  1. The Crowbar Approach
  2. Workflow Design and Jedi Mind Tricks
  3. Episode 008: Listening to the Birds, a conversation
  4. Skills
  5. Listening to the birds
  6. The Hypercompetence Loop | Podcast Episode 007
  7. An Aggressively Optimistic Daydream of the Future
  8. Resilience or Efficiency?
  9. The Wandering Engineer | Podcast Episode 005
  10. The Lifeboat Flotilla | Podcast Episode 004
  11. The Skill Ratchet | Podcast Episode 3
  12. Claw your freedom back from the maw of consumer culture: Podcast Episode 2
  13. Facing the Future | Podcast Episode 001
  14. How to Quit Your Job if you Can’t Quit Your Job
  15. Angry Teenage Anticonsumerism vs Nonconsumer Generosity

2021

  1. How to Change Your Life
  2. Lifestyle Constraints
  3. ERE is The Work
  4. What ERE Is*
  5. The Lifestyle Change vs. System Change debate is fake
  6. The error bars of uncertainty will swallow your life's work like the ocean
  7. A Structure of Action
  8. Something to Fight For
  9. How to Decide What to Do With Your Life: Models and Heuristics
  10. FU Lifestyle Design
  11. The Only Game in Town
  12. This is not a drill
  13. Deep Frugality and Coffee
  14. Entitlement
  15. Frugality is not sacrifice
  16. Why Frugality? Part 2: The Good Life
  17. Why Frugality? Part I: Being Eco
  18. It's not that simple

2019

  1. Sorry to bother you, but your house is on fire

2014

  1. Refusal is a Tactical Decision
  2. Dropping the Bomb: The Perturbation of Refusal

2013

  1. Deep Green Bomb Factories
  2. Punk Engineering: Definitions
  3. The Materiality of Virtual Design Modeling

2012

  1. Radical Design Activism
  2. The Virtuous Cycle of Design Modeling
  3. It's the Growth Paradigm, Stupid
  4. Two Worlds
  5. The Rise and Fall of the Idea of Progress
  6. The Moral Philosophy of Kicking Ass
  7. Creative Maladjustment
  8. Evolving Engineering Culture and Morality

2011

  1. Why Engineers Ought to Make Good Dissidents
  2. How Not to Model an Appropriate Technology Project us
  3. Incrementalism is Suicide
  4. Occupy Design: Or, Why I Joined the General Strike in Oakland
  5. Visions 1
  6. Visions of the Future
  7. We're On To You
  8. Technology Isn't Magical
  9. Tim Ferriss, the Long Now, and how the Meta-Skill of Learning will help us Save the World
  10. The Shape of the Future
  11. Atemporal Engineering
  12. Redefining Engineering Vernacular
  13. How to Win Hearts and Minds
  14. Is Kick-Ass Visual Communication Important for Engineering?
  15. Green Tech is a Fad
  16. (de)Automation: The Divine is In the Details
  17. Engineering Criticism
  18. The Language of Design