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Robert Anton Wilson was, is, and always will be a fascinating and hiliarious writer to me. I first read The Illuminatus! Trilogy when I was 13, and while it was coincident with a total and suffocating blackout of meaning, I no longer think reading it actually caused that to happen in any significant sense. Au contraire: Teen me found refuge in his absurdity - it felt bedrock nihilstic, sure, but a far more artfully and deeply buried nihilism than I was able to find elsewhere at the time. (My words, not his. RAW wouldn’t describe himself as anywhere close to a nihilist. I think the glove fits.)

So it’s interesting I mostly don’t take his ideas seriously anymore. (I’m aware of the irony, RAW fans, that should show you how far from grace I’ve fallen.) Why not? I guess I grew out of it. I’m not a bleeding mess on my parents’ discount carpet anymore. I’m a blissfully boring, salaried techie with a wife I adore and a lake in walking distance. To the folks screaming “No, you don’t get it, RAW isn’t just this drugged out space hippie! He’s so much more than that!”, hold that thought.

Nowadays I get a lot more valuable-feeling life advice by reading the works of guys like Patrick “patio11” McKenzie. Mr. McKenzie is the opposite of someone I would call “boring”. But of course I would say that. I’m this guy’s target audience. All of the ways in which my brain now wants to scream “They don’t get it, this guy is so much more than just a really good finance writer!” prove it.

Most of us don’t take life advice from people we don’t identify with on some level. This makes sense: We identify with people who appear similar to us; folks who are similar to us often face similar problems to us; advice meted from actual people who have actually faced similar problems to us is much more likely to be useful to us in the future. I don’t identify with drugged out space hippies anymore, so RAW’s words ring hollow now, even though there was a time where they definitely didn’t – and that’s okay.

Of the people you identify with, most interesting advice is not of the flavor “This is great! Keep doing what you’re doing, at the same level you’re doing it.” Some of it is positive reinforcement - doing ten times as much really is unpleasant advice that works. But most of the interesting advice is about scaling back various things that detract from your ultimate success. If you’re a very disagreeable junior backend engineer, your moderately disagreeable senior backend engineer coworker might advise you, “I get it, trust me, I do, – but if you learn to be a little more patient, you’ll make twice as much in your career. Your choice. Not mine.”

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Which brings us full circle to patio11. What “scale it back” type advice resonates with me the most? It starts with the scant bits and pieces in which he talks about his reasons and experiences with moving to Japan soon after graduating college.

I did something quite similar, s/Japan/Finland/g. I moved for love! The greatest woman on Earth was just waiting there for the COVID-19 borders to lift so I could finally fly over. I did so about 2 weeks after Finland declared itself once again open to import luxury husbands. I admit, sometimes I feel self conscious of the fact that e.g. I “gave up” my chance at working for AWS in my twenties for the opportunity to have a wife I adore and a lake in walking distance. Patrick spoke about his own move on the podcast Conversations with Tyler a while back, and I found myself struck by how equivocal his own thoughts on the early decision to move and its consequences sounded. Hear that hum in the background? That’s my “wow he’s just like me” machine revving up.

If you read Patrick’s other writings, however, he really hammers in the point that money is fungible, money is fungible, money is fungible. Having more of it, negotiating for more of it, etc. matters a great deal, but you can always trade it in for things that matter more to you. I imagine this emphasis comes out of the fact that his solo entrepreneurship let him totally escape the fascinating crush box that is Japanese salarymandom, but it pulls double duty as good Straussian advice to guys like me who get too easily vision-tunneled into thinking money is all that matters, period.

Put these two things together, and it’s not hard to imagine this kind of guy saying, “It is true that moving from the States was statistically a blow to your early salary. It is also true that you got the glances dowh second greatest woman on Earth, and that probably would not have happened had you not moved when and how you did. With the proviso that my views are not the view of my employer: I think you got a bargain.”