I didn’t think about it this way, but it makes sense on first reading. Just like I want to learn to take responsibility for as much as I can . . .
FI/CF also wants to get better so people can interpret it correctly more readily and apply it better. So I should find ways to back up my accusations. I didn’t even realize they were accusations but that is making more sense now. Basically if some negative outcome happened, it’s either entirely my fault, or entirely CF’s fault, or somewhere in between and both sides could have done stuff better. The third seems correct to me, but I didn’t realize how my thoughts were not giving much information on specifics or how to analyze what really went wrong. I will look through Discord archives at some point and try to find at least one specific example to look at like, like I did with that thing about honesty I was worried about, where I was worried that past age 25 I wouldn’t be able to learn to be honest, or that it would be very hard and I would give up rather than succeed.
Sorry about this. I don’t want to bash people. I will try to do better in the future and not bash people outside of the forum.
I don’t think I view other people as inferior. I’ve realized that I often come across as pretentious or feeling superior to other people but I’ve thought about it a lot and tried to figure out how to change or whether it’s really true or not. This has been an issue I’ve been aware of for ~6 years, when I was around 21, since my high school friend group brought it up with me, and we discussed it. After the discussion it seemed like they understood me better and realized I wasn’t trying to be pretentious, and I was making a bunch of mistakes and just as flawed as them, if not more flawed, in many ways. I had a lot of respect for what they were doing with their lives, I was just stumbling over and over again. Maybe I go through phases of needing to feel superior to then try to justify my own failures and existence? I don’t know. I’d like to be at a point where it doesn’t really matter what other people are doing and I’m not viewing myself as inferior or superior or bashing or praising them, but kinda just learning from whatever I see others doing, asking for perspective and advice, and then trying to implement it and seeing what happens.
I think everyone has the potential to be growing, but I don’t think everyone really wants to or chooses to. I mean I struggle with this too, so I wouldn’t put myself out of that boat. Maybe the problem is I’m also putting myself on the wrong comparison scale, e.g. viewing myself as inferior or flawed because I quit FI/CF while other people did not. If I’m doing that to myself, then I’d be doing it to other people as well and comparing them to me on that scale. I don’t think that’s what I’m doing but I admit it’s possible. The more I think about it the more it seems reasonable. I do admire and respect the people who participate a lot in FI/CF and seem to value growing philosophically, and of course you/curi for starting it and keeping it going for so long, and for creating so much freely available high quality content around it.
But I think a lot of that respect and admiration is unreasonable, in the same way that the potential disdain or contempt or superiority you’re seeing in my text is, because rather than being based on actual explanations and high quality ideas about the world and people, maybe it’s based on status and social reality or confused and incomplete ideas taken from all the stuff I’ve read and thought about.
Maybe I have these feelings and don’t know about them consciously. But I should find a way to become aware of them, admit them, and slowly change them. I think the first step is to say that I will not bash people on the forum or put them down, and if it happens again, I should want to be told and be open to it and treat it as a second warning of sorts so that I can realize that it’s an even bigger issue than I thought. Thanks for pointing it out. I will be more conscious of it now. The nice thing I guess is that my text will reveal more about my thinking than my own self-awareness of my thoughts, so if I’m open to critical analysis of my writing, I can learn more about myself faster than if I close myself off to that source of information. I think I was emotional when I started writing this, but I am less emotional now as I finish writing it. Progress.
I will try to add more detail to what led me to writing this. I think part of it was a conversation I had with an ex-colleague where we were trying to figure out why we were drawn to each other and he explained that he has lots of smart friends but they seem to want to exert effort to watch Netflix or just engage in entertainment/consumption rather than their own projects or learning stuff. I do realize that all of that has a place, and can also be part of learning and progress. But it reminded me of this part of this article: Fallible Ideas – Persistence
do you do stuff in order to have breaks? or do you take breaks in order to do more stuff?
When I re-read this part I thought about it and realized that most of my life I have just been doing stuff to take breaks. When I was a teen, around age 14, I read Robert Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” book and wanted to get into real estate investing. He wrote about passive income and I thought that if I invested in real estate, I could retire early and never work again. I told my high school friend about it and he said, “So you want be to a landlord or property manager?” and I kind of dismissed him. But I later realized he was right. Of course investing in real estate is a ton of upfront work, and there is lots of knowledge and risk involved, and property maintenance is its own entire task. Yeah, I can outsource it, but that’ll cost me and it’s not so easy to just make that a “passive” income. I was pretty naive about it, and I was engaging in wishful thinking at the time, since if I had looked into what my friend said, I would have learnt more quickly. I’m still friends with him, and he was one of the people main people who helped me learn about my pretentiousness ~7 years later when I was 21. I respect him a lot, in part because he seems way better at handling reality than I am, and he’s never used CF/FI. So there’s something he’s doing and thinking that’s great. I’ve had lots of conversations with him to ask about it and try to figure it out, but I haven’t really gleaned much.
I think a lot of the conflicts I run into are confusing to me in part because I can’t tell when people are giving me advice because they want me to improve along the path to my goals, or when they are telling me stuff because they think I should change my goals to be more stable/less risky. I think both could be good advice but I guess I feel threatened when I get the sense that sometimes people me feedback based on their potential insecurity or fear of risk rather than wanting me to grow.
But maybe the solution is to make my best effort to assume that they want what’s best for me and try to learn from it as best as I can to fit it into my understanding of the world and my goals. Doing this with my dad would be good practice potentially since I want to learn his perspective on things. He seems way more cautious than me but he also has a lot of life experience that I can learn from, and I like hearing his stories. Sometimes it feels like he wants to see me take a more stable/reliable/less risky route in life, and I can’t blame him for that, but I guess I bristle at that because it feels like reliable/predictable = more likely to end in mediocrity. But I think that’s irrationality from me. Of course there must be a way to reliably plan a life that can become great. This forum could help me plan my next 5 years to do exactly that and it wouldn’t exactly be risky because I could learn a lot from the failures/mistakes and make adjustments as I go.
I have been trying to think more about myself, but I’ve noticed that I’m pretty bad at doing both well. I seem to either become too self-centred and self-focused, or too anxious about what I’m saying about other people and then censoring myself too much. I think even when I do just one of the two, I tend to do it poorly rather than well, because if I’m focused on other people and judging them accurately rather than too negatively or too positively, I should be able to do it without anxiety or fear, but I am not able to do that.
Thanks for pointing this out. I don’t know what to do about it, other than to write more carefully to try to think about the implications of my writing and how it’s basically accusing other people in an indirect way (which is maybe even more nasty and socially mean than just directly putting an example and asking a direct question or making a direct accusation, because then people can analyze it and point out what really happened), or to put disclaimers, or to just try to only mention these things when I can pull a specific example, and otherwise don’t mention it at all until I find the example. I think I like the last option best. What do you think? Or is there an option I didn’t list that is even better? I have to go to bed soon as I have an interview in 5 hours (I planned my day poorly, I should be getting more sleep than that before 2 interviews back to back. Means I messed up planning my day and executing it for my priorities)
I also really want to record me reading at least one of the CF intuition articles before I go to bed because I hate that I’ve procrastinated it for 2+ days. I also did 10 minutes of PM work just so I could do something there and have a non-zero day on it, since I’ve been procrastinating that too. Will post the video in the Apricus - Meta-Discussion of my Emotions and Diagnosing My Difficulty Engaging with FI Long-term - #25 by Apricus thread