I read once in Luxury Fever that it’s quite possible to get used to eating the same meal three times a day, day in and day out. As long as a diet is well-balanced, there’s no harm in repetition. I bet the reason that people are told to eat a varied diet is similar to the reasons behind index fund investing: If you’re clueless, eating a random selection which eventually averages out to whatever everybody else is eating is the most generic recommendation that’s likely not to harm you more than the average.

Can you say corn syrup?

The cheapest “base food” I can think of is rice pilaf. Here are the ingredients:

• Lots of onions, sliced and sauteed.
• Lentils.
• Rice.
• 1.5 times a much water by volume as the lentils + rice volume.

You can make this in a pressure cooker by first sauteing the onions, then adding the lentils, rice, and water, and putting the pressure on.

You can also make this in a slow cooker. Here you need an extra pan to saute the onions.

Fun fact: I don’t recall using the word “saute” in a sentence ever before.

To complete the nutritional balance, add fruit and vegetables as side dishes. If you go with this cooking will be very fast and your grocery budget will be almost solely composed of the cost of fruit and vegetables. Rice, onions(*), and lentils are ridiculously cheap.

(*) Onions store very well in a cool place like a cellar.

You may think this sounds like a boring diet but truth to be told, are you currently excited about what you’re going to eat for your next meal, even if you’re going out? I bet not—I’m sure there will be couple of dissenters in the comments though. The psychological benefits of this diet is that eating something different when you go out or visit others will be fun (again) whereas the pilaf will be a comfortable baseline which is otherwise given little regard—it won’t be boring.

Originally posted 2010-09-16 10:37:11.

One of my early writings on How I became financially independent in 5 years got “stumbled upon” a couple of days agoshortly after I started blogging and I got my 15 minutes of fame. Well, actually a few days of fame. I am fairly sure that the story above has now been read by far more people in two days than my total scientific output has been read throughout my entire career.

So what’s the idea behind stumbled upon and similar sites? The problem facing net surfers is that the internet has acquired a dynamic component from blogging, news reporting, etc. Since search engines are designed to index the static parts of the web, they are no longer the best tool to find the most interesting content. Instead websites are aggregated on the fly into lists which we can call “new”. Users then vote on the “new” list which creates a second list called “popular”. Many users only read the shorter “popular” list and vote on that thus further boosting the numbers. Thus if something makes it onto the “popular” list, it can quickly become very popular as an avalanche starts. Of course it all comes down to the original first snow ball. It’s like asking the question: Why is Paris Hilton famous? What is she famous for? She’s famous for being famous.

I suppose much of this post is only interesting to other bloggers because it’s all about traffic, eye-balls, SEO, etc. However, there is an important observation regarding the rest of society here. If popular acceptance is determined by a single trigger (at the time where something was not popular) what does that mean? It is similar to the origin of weather systems. Here the wings of a butterfly can theoretically trigger a process that eventually develops into a storm. Of course there are lots of butterflies that bask their wings all the time and don’t trigger storms. However, if we mainly look at storms, we might miss most of the butterflies. I enjoy scouting out “butterflies” and I have found a lot of wisdom in “smaller” blogs and “forgotten” posts merely by trawling the web. Maybe I’m old school that way? But I find the same structural dynamics when it comes to investing. A lot of thinking is based on what is popular. Ever wonder why so many people seem to get the same idea at approximately the same time and proceed to go ahead and do the same thing? Is this due to pundits? Or is it due to thinking the same way about the same information? In either case, this leads to momentum plays and eventual bubbles which in the market can generate huge money (as long as you are in front of the crowd). It can also lead to large losses (if you find yourself behind the crowd).
Try reading the new list rather than the popular list even though it is more work. You never know which gem might turn up 🙂

An even better suggestion is to disregard the “news” and start reading history instead. Mostly it is impossible to measure the importance of current events if those are all that is considered. Yet, news are more popular than “context” or history. Hard as it is, try to spend 90% of the time reading history, only 9% of the time reading news and maybe only 1% of the time reading whatever is popular. I have not managed to do that well myself but I know a guy who managed to stay away from newspapers and magazines for an entire year. I think such an undertaking will create the perspective that popularity is only a small part of the entire universe of events and more importantly that “new” events are actually not that new nor are most of them very important seeing that most of them have happened before.

Originally posted 2008-01-16 07:42:20.

Long ago I used to believe in eternal human progress. I believed in the singularity. I believed that the future would eventually look something like Startrek. When I was 24 that got turned upside down. I’m not going to repeat all the arguments for the triad of overpopulation, climate change, and resource depletion here. Others have done a better job at that than I can. Suffice to say, having your world view turned over in a “doomfull” way is stressful. Furthermore, it is typically something you have to carry alone. Most people would rather stay in denial, put their fingers in their ears and go “lalalala”.

However, eventually this feeling of hopelessness always seems to be replaced with another form of hope. It’s really just a transition from A to B.

Imagine that you grew up believing you were going to live forever. Now at some point you find out that some day, you are going to die. If you read this you are probably aware of your own mortality, yes? Do you remember when you became aware of it—I mean really aware of it as something that was definitely going to happen to you at some point and not just some abstract concept that happens to others. I don’t really remember it. I think it happened around when I was 19, but it wasn’t a singular outstanding event.

Many people take comfort in that their offspring will carry on their legacy. Truth to be told, your DNA may live on, but your DNA isn’t really you. If you’ve done really well talking to your grand children, your legacy may last 3-4 generations. Beyond that you’re gone. I never got a chance to talk to my great grand parents—consequently, I don’t carry their legacy.

Now imagine that the entire civilization may die in the same sense. How does that make you feel? Some don’t care about that nearly as much as who’s going to win the World Series [in baseball]. I cared a lot. I believed in eternal progress [despite the fact that our civilization has only really believed in that for a couple of hundred years… as mentioned above, how quickly we forget]. Now, I believe in a more cyclical nature of civilization. It is sobering to realize that the Roman Imperial standard of civilization (as measured by city size and running water) was lost and not regained until well into the 19th century. Many believe that our civilization is somehow unique and immune to its eventually fall and decline unlike ALL the civilizations that went before it. I don’t. Some day our cultural icons are going to be gone from human memory. Moon launches may become legend—we don’t carry records written in stone but rather in a very perishable form.

It is important to realize that civilization is a fairly abstract concept. Civilization is an emergent behavior of our combined actions. Like human tissue civilization gets continuously destroyed and rebuilt. As far as I remember, the turnover of all the atoms in a human is on the order of 15 years. All the molecules, which make you you, were somewhere else 15 years ago. This also means that nothing is going to happen to our civilization tomorrow. Change is rather slow. Impacts on individual humans may not be.

It is perfectly possible to live your life while being perfectly oblivious to any kind of collapse. Some of it is too slow for most people to notice. You don’t notice the increased population density (there are now 50% more people than when I was born … when I visited the place I grew up last year much of the nearby farm land had been paved over with subdivisions). You don’t notice that the air gets less clean decade by decade. Some of it is due to the wrong focus. Many think that the political battle is between left vs right when it’s really between consumers and investors.

You can remain oblivious. You can declare that you don’t really care. You can fight for it. Or you can stand aside. Those are your four choices.

Fighting is good, but to remain happy it is best to realize that there’s little a single individual can do and set your expectations accordingly. Work from a baseline of zero: That you can’t do anything about the big problems. Then appreciate anything you get beyond that. Conversely, don’t fall into the trap that there’s nothing you can do personally about your situation. Concern yourself with things you can control. Learn to live with what you can’t.

Incidentally, that’s a pretty useful life philosophy overall. Much unhappiness derive from unmet expectations.

From an individual perspective, everything you do should start with yourself. Work on local change. All superstructures are based on several people thinking along the same lines. All responsibility is ultimately personal; that’s what makes you an adult…if you seek to blame others, you’re just a child—it’s too bad that our culture has devolved into having a substantial fraction of immature and childish people. Consequently, it is useless to rebuild the superstructure without establishing the foundation first. This is why I’m no longer active in the peak oil community—it lacks a foundation. You can’t build a sustainable world as long as people believe in easy technological fixes to their problems.

At least that’s how I see things. You can’t save others before you can save yourself. You shouldn’t blame others until you are free of blame yourself. Philosophy is not something you talk about, it’s what you do.

That’s a lot of moralizing, but it is in my opinion a good way to life. In particular, it is quite possible to live a full life even if civilization was to reach a tipping point and turn over in your lifetime—they tend to decline fully within a span of about a century and it seems to be a bumpy ride down. And if no such tipping is forthcoming or it’s postponed beyond your “expiration date”, I think it is still a good way to live.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to say something a little wiser 50 years from now, but for now, this will have to do.

PS: I don’t really love the end of the world. I just couldn’t resist the title which is of course paraphrased from Dr. Strangelove. I imagine that those who lived through the cold war had a similar attitude towards thermonuclear holocaust as I do towards ecological overshoot.

Originally posted 2010-10-28 23:19:43.