Thank you for sharing this insightful and obviously very personal article, however I think it might need a bit of editing as there seems to be a massively repeated section in the middle. 👍
Effort mode is genuinely underused, but the framing here buries the real issue. most people don't hit a quality ceiling because of settings, they hit it because their prompts are vague. opus on high effort with a bad prompt still hallucinates confidently.
"Freedom at level one is fundamentally about removing things. You’re stripping constraints away. The boss. The commute. The financial anxiety. The obligations. The worry. And once you’ve stripped enough of them, you wake up one morning in the apartment you used to dream about, drinking coffee from the $2,000 Espresso machine you used to dream about, opening the newest Macbook Pro you used to dream about, and there’s a quiet hum of is this it?"
This is SO true - I've been through it and lived it. It's hard to convince people who haven't gotten there what it's like.
I'm not at a point where I can do level 2 too well, but my Substack here is part of that, in a way. I'm trying to give back and help older guys who are going through what I've been through to show them there can be light at the end of the tunnel, and it can be better than it was before.
Thank you for sharing this insightful and obviously very personal article, however I think it might need a bit of editing as there seems to be a massively repeated section in the middle. 👍
Effort mode is genuinely underused, but the framing here buries the real issue. most people don't hit a quality ceiling because of settings, they hit it because their prompts are vague. opus on high effort with a bad prompt still hallucinates confidently.
Very true. There’s a key tension also: most people can’t even get to the point where saving 50% is realistic.
And for some of us, saving 50% means working 100% of the time, leaving very little space to actually build or live the freedom we’re trying to buy.
This also reminded me of Die With Zero: at some point, optimizing too much for future freedom can become its own trap.
You may end up saving for a life you’re too exhausted, too constrained, or too late to actually live.
"Freedom at level one is fundamentally about removing things. You’re stripping constraints away. The boss. The commute. The financial anxiety. The obligations. The worry. And once you’ve stripped enough of them, you wake up one morning in the apartment you used to dream about, drinking coffee from the $2,000 Espresso machine you used to dream about, opening the newest Macbook Pro you used to dream about, and there’s a quiet hum of is this it?"
This is SO true - I've been through it and lived it. It's hard to convince people who haven't gotten there what it's like.
I'm not at a point where I can do level 2 too well, but my Substack here is part of that, in a way. I'm trying to give back and help older guys who are going through what I've been through to show them there can be light at the end of the tunnel, and it can be better than it was before.