Levinux, Pipulate & YAMLesque
I'm striving for financial independence and using the 80/20-rule and OpenAI's Codex AI to create a plan of action to help me reach my goals. I'm breaking out of my old habits and focusing on inventing and building in the real and text-based world with Linux, Python, vim & git. I'm taking baby-steps to create a life of abundance and order.
Building Financial Independence: Taking Steps to Create Abundance and Order.
By Michael Levin
Friday, April 28, 2023
Okay the AI-generated fields get used on the very release now on which you give the journal entry a title (thus releasing). I want to be watchful of that. I can always Ctrl+C during the release process, or perhaps I should add a deliberate publish state to the journal entries, so that I can release them explicitly when I’m ready. Anyway stuff that that will be much easier now that I have all the right files loaded simultaneously whenever start a session now.
Keep your life together, Mike. You are not a mess and the center can hold. This is what it is to be human. If it were all chaos and decay and yielding to shitty predominant forces, humanity would have been gone long ago. We have the ability to rise-above and be the masters of our own domain, or at least enough so in order to survive to the next day.
Here are the advice fields given to me by OpenAI’s Codex AI from the prior 2 blog posts:
OpenAI’s Indomitable Spirit advice: It sounds like you are on the right track to finding your ikigai. The next step is to take some time to reflect on what you are passionate about and what brings you joy. Think about what you are naturally good at and what the world needs from you. Once you have identified these areas, you can start to explore how they can be combined to create a meaningful life. Good luck!
OpenAI’s Virtual Env bin advice: The first step in achieving your ikigai is to identify what it is. Take some time to reflect on what brings you joy and purpose, and what your unique skills and passions are. Once you have identified your ikigai, you can then begin to create a plan of action to help you reach your goals. Break down your plan into small, achievable steps and set yourself realistic targets. Make sure to track your progress along the way and celebrate your successes!
I listened to Noam Chomsky a little bit on YouTube yesterday and he was talking about the class war that’s going on and is not called that. How both the Republicans and Democrats are on the same side of the class war, and how the middle class, fictitious and artificial as it may have been in the first place, is being destroyed. And it’s so that we, the under-class, have to be going through a daily struggle. The rat-race or hamster-wheel that keeps us ineffective at the larger possibilities in life, like leading and ruling and passing down generational wealth, and that’s what the rich want.
I agree with a lot of what he says, but I think even the opinion of the rich and privileged can’t be right, even if they’re winning the class war. Smart folks from the trenches can always climb their way up and out, if that’s what they want. Now I’m no fan of the rat-race or hamster-wheel, but I am quite glad that I have the skills that I have, which I think I would have never felt the pressure to develop if things were to easy.
And it’s on those skills upon which I’m attempting now to build my own financial independence. I don’t particularly want to be rich or to run a business. I can hardly think of anything more heinous than having to be on the hook for this and that. A lot of people like that sort of interconnectedness with money-machines, but not me. I want to be free to do what I want, even if that’s nothing.
It’s funny how those two things are interconnected. One is made the theoretical retirement-day goals of the other. And you’re supposed to subjugate yourself to the system and the will of others for the whole lifetime of hard-work and labor, just for a few years of not having to work and to hand down some modest generational wealth.
It’s so easy to get struck by doubt and paralysis, but we have to do tricks to keep ourselves moving forward. Today, it’s going to be to work on my place. Arrange things. Environment matters.
Be a force of order in your own life. Never stop processing. Abide by 80/20-rule solutions. They’re not perfect, but one builds on the next on the next, and there’s a sort of calculus of perfection and non-compromise. But it’s spread out over time. Chip, chip, chip away.
Don’t let the forces of chaos you will meet in your life destroy or rule you. They can’t do for themselves (they’re not organized enough), so they have to prey on the organized. I’ve fallen victim to this more than once in my life. Yet I still have the strength to keep paying and to keep moving forward.
The amount I will have to pay will diminish in the future, and the amount I will be able to put directly towards my own life and that of my child’s will go up. This is a part of the vision.
- Organized facilitating environment
- Portable timeless tools
A place to call home? That’s what Copilot suggests. I feel being nomadic is actually more appealing. I don’t want to be tied down to a place. Land is a tool of the land lords. Let my assets be those they could only dream of.
- It’s time to break out, old buddy.
- Escape rabbit holes!
- Adjust state.
- Remain flexible.
- Tell your stories.
- Enjoy the wild ride.
- Be a force of order.
I’m going to go for a walk now. I’m going to do some shopping at the local grocery store, which for the first time in my life I can easily walk to. I like to walk there with a wagon and not use a shopping cart. I fill my wagon and bring home the goods. I need to do this more often to put myself in that position of abundance mindset.
We all either work from a position of abundance and excess capacity, or we work from a position of “lacking” and “not enough”.
In modern society if you’re not homeless and have a job, you’re not going to starve. And so that position of abundance is a state of mind. It’s a goodness or a badness. We always have to let the goodness reverberate around in our heads and hearts so that it works as a defense against the fears and other lower brainstem shit trying to panic and pull you down.
What I’m passionate about and what brings me joy is the kind of inventing and building one might do in the real-world, but in the text-based world of vim, where a simpler set of rules prevail, and which you can also be productive and build things you can be proud of.
But have I? Have I really? Why not make it teaching others how to achieve that same state if it is of interest to them. That’s sort of what I was going after with Linux, Python, vim & git (LPvg), but I’m thinking I may be better served now with:
- Levinux (hardware layer)
- Pipulate (software layer)
- YAMLesque (application layer)
I’ve changed my site-nav to reflect this. Now I just need the right messaging and landing pages as a start.
It’s always “as a start” with me. I have to be more “underway”. But that does reflect my 1, 2, 3… 1 philosophy. The skill is in always picking the next best #1 baby-step project.