Life as a training arena for the stoic virtues

Antinous is the true stoic of us. If anyone would rate the four stoic virtues, Antinous would clearly come out on top.

Antinous wears a better social mask; he's friendly, agreeable, likeable.

If there's something that is going for Lucilius, then that would be that he's got his emotions on close range. Too close, according to himself.

We have come up with all sorts of explanations of the differences that are most of the time quite amusing. Probably genetics, and the role we played in our early teens seems to have colored these parts of our personalities.

A lot of things about personality are on a flip-side scale; on one hand, and on the other hand, and everything can be both good and bad, and there's no real value judgement to a personality trait, or so the common wisdom goes.

But here's something where the stoics, and the ancients before them, knew: that some scales are absolute. More is just better. And that insight is underlying the concept of the stoic virtues: fortitude, prudence, justice and temperance.

Fortitude

Fortitude, strength, the ability to endure the necessary hard times and do what must be done during challenges that life unavoidably entails.

"Are you samurai?"  is a question we ask each other sometimes, after having had a stab at the playstation game "The Ghost of Tsushima" where the phrase gets thrown around a lot.  

We say it like a; "wht the f*ck, how hard can it be?" and a "stop complaining, and get it done!"

Are you samurai?

To some extend it works. And it reminds of that some of the ghosts we face and that are stopping us from showing the strength needed in everyday life is more in our minds than real.

Prudence

Prudence, the ability to step back and think about the course of action and make cold-headed decisions. In latin, the word is prudentia, and this virtue is sometimes just translated as wisdom. 

So the ability to back off, let go of anger, giving up short term wants or silly cravings of recognition, and clearly see what path is best. 

Lucilius, as said above, especially can feel the sting of anger and get carried away by emotions. And it's dangerous. Suddenly he might have said something, let something slip, that gets a life of it's own.

Once upon a time, allegedly, there was a tribe in the arctics, that had the concept that they had a soul that always walked beside them, a kind of mirror-spirit of themselves, that they called the bigger man. 

They themselves were just the little man, consumed and dragged into the petty things of life.

But when something happens, we (and they) can always ask what the bigger man would do. 

Do we feel assaulted? Then we ought to ask ourselves: what would be the little man's response? And what would the bigger man do?

Justice.

Justice is about doing the right choice, of having an adequate sense of right and acting in accordance with the laws and what's right.

So not trying to cut a shorter path that isn't right, doing evil for short term games, and accept the just laws that govern human interactions and act in accordance with one's values.

Do the right thing.

Temperance.

Temperance is knowing what is enough, knowing how to control oneself, one's emotions and one's wants. 

There's more to temperance. As anyone striving to financial freedom knows, moderation is an absolute necessity to walk this path. Someone who cannot temper his appetites will always want more, and thus never becomes truly rich and never reach any kind of significant freedom.

Being In The Arena

The virtues are learned in the arena, with other people, while we are trying to achieve something difficult and of value.

The arena provides the training ground needed for freedom.

We suspect that it's much harder to chisel out the virtues if one is too deep into a propped-up otium. 

The world and its challenges, correctly taken on, train us in fortitude, temperance, prudence and justice.

Venus punishes Psyche with a task (more precisely to get water from a high rock guarded by dragons).

Ca 1692-1702, Luca Giordano

That's why, according to a more hardcore attitude, we should thank the gods for the misfortunes they throw in our way. 

If one should be able to truly enjoy freedom, we suspect that one better be trained, and keep on training, and embrace the training opportunities the arena throws in one's direction.

Farewell,

//antinous&lucilius

Truly not a slave: when the paycheck looses its attraction

What would your boss say if you came in and requested a 40% salary increase for the next year? And a 40% increase the year after that? Would she happily agree? Or would the cadres at your company think that you are more than insane?

A few years ago, we could expect a 40 k€ return from our investments for that year. The year after, this had increased to 60 k€, as it happened to be a good year.  The year after that, it was up at 80 k€.

That's a 100% increase in our income from investments per year over two years, or roughly an increase with 41% per year. All that just because we save and invest conservatively in our pathfinder portfolio. 

This is after-tax, in-our-pocket (or rather, investment account) money. So in many regards, much better than paycheck-money.

Now, compare that to how our salaries increased during the same period. These years were good to both of us, as we had changed job and had some salary progression. In the same time, that increase was hardly above 10% per year, so very, very far from the 40% increases in investment income.

This increase in investment income keeps rolling forward in a pace that is much, much quicker than any salary progression. 

It compounds quicker than one expects

Scientif38, CC-3.0

So, as all proponents of the FIRE-movement knows, there's a point where the investment income can cover for one's basic needs. 

Let's ask for a radical salary increase, shall we?

But there's also a point where the investment income is as big as the salary itself, and then - quite quickly - comes a point where the salary income just can't match the investment income at all under any realistic assumptions.

That's the point when a very substantial increase in salary - which for most people would mean a very drastic increase in responsibility or required skills - doesn't really do a significant change in total income nor wealth.

And then, suddenly, there's no salary that can realistically be paid, in any wage-based profession, that can be economically interesting to us anymore.

Truly not a slave 

This is the point where we loose financial connections the labour market, at least for all kinds of normal, labour-market-based monetary reasons.

We suspect that we have no inherent feeling that such a point in the financial journey exists. It should always be economically useful to work and earn one's living, right? Yet take any billionaire. There is no economic way of employing them with motivation of any normal paycheck.

There's a point like that for you and us as well. In Sweden, the take-home after-tax average salary after 5+ university studies is around 40 k€ (yes, we're in Europe, but the point still holds). That is a number we swooshed by several years ago with our investment income alone, and then continue to go beyond, with a very significant increase in our "investment salary increase" every year.

The progression, as we saw with the numbers, is such  that our bosses would be very surprised if we asked them to please keep up with our investment income increases with matching salary increases.

When most people hits a million euro, and keeps lifestyle inflation at bay, then it starts to get really hard to make significant improvements to one's economy by working for a monthly paycheck. The investment income becomes more than twice as large as what one earns via the paycheck. 

Suddenly, as sudden as how quickly a surprise avalanche builds up, it's no longer possible to employ us anymore, at least not for economic reasons. 

Then truly, we're not slaves any more.

At that point, only our own devotion can buy our time.

Farewell,

//antinous&lucilius

Volatility from a 5 year perspective: Welcome to the 1825 days year

Once upon a time, at the birth of our solar system, the time for the earth to spin around the sun became the 365 1/4 days we are used to.

It was a God given, a necessity, perhaps, and of course entirely out of human control.

Those 365 days has some impacts on our life, and certainly our evolution. For the two of us, the arctic summer and winter are a stark reminder of the solar year, on other places closer to the equator the climate will be more stable year round. 

The Arctic Sun

In the heated, air-conditioned, civilized life of today, the impact of earth's rotation on everyday life is smaller. The time it takes for earth to orbit the sun would seem even more arbitrary if one lived outside our frame of reference, let's say on one of the moons of Jupiter. 

From a more elevated perspective, an earth year is a seemingly randomly set constant.

Yet, we tend to give this period an out-of-proportion importance. We count our age in it, we celebrate the summer and winter solstice and equinoxes with rites and feasts. 

In finance the year has significance as well; as if the returns of our investments where a crop to be harvested every year. The year is the basis for what we understand with returns; if we see the number 7% it's assumed that it's the annual return that is meant. 

What is the impact of this metaphor on our thinking about investments? Investments that might not really care about the arctic sun, the moons of Jupiter or the passing of midsummer? 

What if we measured returns in another constant? 

Let's say that we just as arbitrarily instead measured a new unit that we set at 43 800 earth hours, or 1825 earth days, corresponding to 5 earth years. 

A unit, as if earth was spinning five years slower than we are used to. Or as if one only can be bothered to have a look at the planet every five year and wouldn't notice that it's actually spinning faster. Or as if we saw that grand red dot in the clouds of the gas giant Jupiter from our moon every five years, and measured the passing of time in red-dot-revolutions and not earth years.

What would we think of our investments then? How would volatility look with our new, more relaxed, slower 1825 days year's perspective? What decisions would we make?

Let's plot our pathfinder portfolio's return excluding inflation in a logarithmic diagram, with our normal earth years and our new, 1825-days-years. 

A thin red thread that always strives upwards

And voilà. An almost straight, red line that always marshes on upwards and never ever turns the other way. It's the same return, just with a lower resolution.

Our way of looking at things are bound by conventions that might be out of place. This hints on what volatility looks like for the Gods. 

And perhaps, it could for us too.

Farewell,

//antinous&lucilius

The built-in Identity Crisis of work-life: How Dante's Inferno got it right

A common way to enter the fire community seems to be to go through some kind of mid-life crisis.

Identity, crisis and burn-out

At the core of the fire community (and mid-life crisis, for that matter) seems to be not finance, but identity. 

What do we mean with that? Let's start by looking at identity. Here's an attempt at a two-fold definition. 

For an individual in relation to a group, identity will be any trait that most sets the individual apart from the  group.

For instance, in a small work place being gay will probably set you apart. Are you among gay friends, being the country boy might set you apart, et cetera.

Inversely, for the individual, identity will be the counteracting trait; anything that includes the person to a group and, importantly, also preferably puts that person higher up in the hierarchy, the status ladder, of that identity-creating group. 

During university and our early careers, we suspect they most high- and medium-achievers are so consumed with an identity based on a strive to find a profession, conforming into a role, that the profession becomes the trait that includes us in a group and sets us apart from other groups. 

Hence profession is a strong candidate to create our identity.

And with identity comes a lot more: the feeling of self-worth, feeling of respect in society and by friends and family and so on and so forth.

If it's not profession, other aspects are likely to compensate for identity: the kids, the house, the husband, friends.

These identities are naturally shallow, and early in life they need to be shallow to guide us into taking concrete, tangible (and by necessity, shallow) action. 

But kids grow up. Work changes and evolves and we become obsolete. The apartment or house as an identity creator? Let's not even go there. 

This early identity, as it's shallow - and society seems to need to keep our identities quite shallow - will eventually hit that trigger event that causes the identity to shatter, and a personal identity crisis will evolve. 

There comes a point when the identity and status in regards to one's chosen group is lost.

But with the identity goes one's feeling of self-worth, respect, belonging and recognition. We're probably hard-wired to react very strongly when that is lost, as this is something that was - and still is - potentially truly dangerous.

This loss of identity is so painful that it needs to be masked in other terms; often given an aura of scientism in the miss-normer of burn-out.

There might be some painful truth here. But in the midst of all ideas around burn-out, identity might often be an unfortunately lost concept.

The Evolutionary Advantage of Burn Out

If a sense of loss of identity wasn't involved, a burnout and the related feeling of stress might be easier to brush off. 

But the loss of identity makes it go deep.

A change in identity is intertwined with a feeling of gliding downward on the hierarchy ladder that our shallow identity is attached to.

Unfortunately for us humans, this seems to have a natural defense system that kicks in, to prevent us from doing dangerous attempts on the hierarchy ladder, as we have failed, or so our evolution tells us. 

There's an obvious evolutionary advantage to avoid further group exclusion. The one that survives, even further down in the group hierarchy, might still be lucky and propagate some more genes, compared to the one that challenges the status ladder and gets killed by the new matriarch, or whatever.

The name of that defense mechanism might very well be depression. Depression seems to be designed to keep us at bay, passively, and consider our options.

Let's sum up: the rules of life forces us to create a guiding identity, that through precisely it's concreteness is shallow and easily scattered, and then makes us fall down the status ladder into burnout and depression.

Is this even designed into the fabric if the human condition in society? This seems to be nothing new. 

Dante's Inferno, which, like the tradition of the alchemists, might have been a way to disguise philosophy and life advice in a religious language acceptable of the age, seems to be one large allegory on this theme, as a symbolic master piece about the midlife crisis and how it affects us and how to get throw it.

As we recall the protagonist's decent starts with:

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Dante et Virgile en enfer
William-Adolphe Bouguereau,1850

The midlife crisis is not just a theme in literature and art, it is also a core idea in individuation: to cast off the limited potential we have forced to constrain ourselves with to fit in society. Which is really nothing else than our constructed, shallow and fragile identity that we need to shake off through the nadir of our life. 

Our ambitions lead us exactly to the point where we do not want to be.

At some point in life, one will discover that what builds our identity isn't as stable and reliable as we hoped, and well, then our identities weren't as reliable and stable as we thought.

And that, not surprisingly as Dante saw, leads to a journey though hell that we must endure to reach heaven.

Conclusion

Here lies part of the beauty with the FIRE-movement. We need to build something more reliable to lean against than an all-too strong identification with things that will be taken away from us. 

Financial independence is a good and important step on that journey.

As long as we needed the paycheck, we are in a sense doomed to struggle with our identity and how it collides with the demands of our profession. 

This kind of identity struggle is not a good foundation to build a new, more free and robust identity upon.

At some point, though, one can become more free, perhaps supported by financial freedom, and start to reinvent the potential one has in life.

As long as that doesn't happen too late.

Farewell.

//antinous&lucilius