The Container Theory of Everything
After seeing numerous people relocate in college with trash bags, much risk can be reduced with proper containers and organization. But this is true for adult life as well, if we assume the future involves increased mobility but also increased displacement.
Just like a house is a container for various cooking supplies, so are rooms just a container inside a house. Backpacks and suitcases are also containers. But we often neglect to have containers for the small items just lying around.
Relating items to a person
A kitchen would be easily organized if each item was associated with an owner who had a respective container in the kitchen. Orphaned items get put in a staging area, then thrown away. This is similar to how Github repositories are related to a person.
Given that survival in the modern era is stratified by organizational, transformational, and logistical competence, common ownership is unviable unless competence levels in a group are similar. Historical examples of freeloader subsidization such as collective farms were huge failures. What I mean by those types of competence is that modern survival is geared toward understanding complex systems and producing them: parsing huge amounts of information, having discipline, assessing large quantities of people, and transforming goods into appealing products and services at a low price, by which we can see engineering pays much more than routine administrative, operations, or assembly roles.
If there is common ownership of items of people who have varying levels of competence, it is invariable that the low competence people will destroy the items of those who have high competence, endangering the safety of the group. The competent quickly evaporate from such a group and form their own communities.
Since society has clear distinctions on competence, a group of people living together must either have filters for group admission or containerize each member’s items, lest the commons as a whole gets destroyed. We see this by chunking society into nice neighborhoods, lots, apartments, and even individual rooms.
Storing containers and types of containers
Shelves are often needed for containers and boxes. Cardboard boxes are used as temporary containers while moving, but what about using permanent plastic storage totes instead?
Containers tend to be built into the house. But I don’t always like these specific cabinets in the kitchen; I want my own shelves where I can easily see what’s inside. I don’t care that much about the aesthetics but more the function. There’s a dining room for the aesthetics.
What I described above are static containers. They just hold things. There is the “moving container” type too. Cars, planes, and trains are these. There are also dynamic containers, which have inputs and outputs, such as houses. A car is both dynamic and moving: it takes in gas, expels gas, and drives around.
Borders, grids, and flows
A house is just a container with a membrane. Bugs inside the house are a failure of this membrane. It should let electricity, water, and mail/packages in while keeping bad things out. Houses are situated within a grid system of utilities and flows. The value of a city, house, or country is often relative to its location within a grid, such as coastal cities being wealthier or homeless peeps gathering near interstate exits.
The quality of roads and delivery services contributes greatly to the material wealth of a nation. I’ve heard that a limiting factor for modular houses is how wide of something can fit on a truck bed going across interstates.
Stocks and flows
This idea is from the book Thinking in Systems. In order for consumption to happen at a rate different from the input, there has to be stocks, like a capacitor. A fridge for food, for example. However, rarely do we see houses equipped with capacitors for electricity or water.
Unfortunately, there is no capacitor for the internet or data flows.
It’s unfortunate that houses don’t track flows: the consumption of electricity by each item per moment or the amount of water coming out of a faucet and the cost per unit. Businesses follow this rule too: they require greater flows of money inward rather than outward, without which they die.
Humans are also dynamic containers
Humans take in foodstuffs and output things into the environment, which signals to other people their internal state and the quality of transformations they make onto things in the world. This is true for portfolio reviews, academic testing, speeches plus debate, and so on. Humans are judged by their output as to the quality of their internals for group affiliation.
USB-C ALL THE THINGS!!!
Minimalism, OneBag, and USB-C are closely related to Container Theory, for all of them support life in the modern world. It is clear that higher levels of organization increase your resilience.
Yes, USB-C all the things. As Vitalik and Pieter’s experiences show, many complementary synergies are coming to create a new sort of culture/religion.
- USB-C all the things
- Minimalism
- Onebag
- Traveling a lot
- Network states
- Technology
- Anti-seed oils
- Bitcoin
- Favorite brands: Uniqlo, MUJI, Xiaomi
- Personal websites
- Network/internet communities
I do this because I have the natural inclinations to do it. Some people don’t have the mental energies to think about all of this. I think anyone can learn how to do this, but it takes a certain personality type to intuitively do this. I probably have a large bias toward this style of thinking, and there hasn’t been any sort of global shock/stress event that tests the effectiveness of certain personalities toward survival yet.
I don’t have an answer as to why some people are messy and some people are not, and I think a person with natural tendencies for organization only becomes messy if they get depressed or sick, but I haven’t seen any circumstances where a messy person transforms into a clean person despite the encouragement of those around them.
Where to start?
Reduce attachment to useless material things such as souvenirs. And if you have a natural attachment to something like a blanket, which finds us all, just hide it in a box somewhere and keep it stored. Certain people instinctively find this hard. I do. I don’t like throwing away things, even cheap things, because I develop some sort of mental attachment.
Get the optimal version of something, like a specific pen. I use the Pilot G-2 1mm. It can be a long journey to find what works. I tried all sorts of pens before: Papermate, MUJI, regular BIC pens, fountain pens, and so on.
Is price an issue?
No, not necessarily. It’s more about buying optimal quality items and reducing the things you buy as well. I wouldn’t buy an expensive TV, pointlessly large recliner set, over-specced car, “luxury” items, all of which often cost thousands of dollars while someone in living in a house with default beige carpets.
There is an order to purchasing things, and people seem to invert the order. Obese people driving a giant truck, for example. A multi thousand dollar recliner is only the capstone to a house with good floors in a good neighborhood.
A large amount of things in this “USB-C” culture become digitized, so it may not be a good fit for those who like notebooks and art and cutesy journal setups. Photography and videography are useful because they convey a sense of feeling and a transport through time without bulk.
It’s probably not easy to do in a rural spot, a very small town, if your family background is poor, and so on, but so are most things in life given those circumstances.
The biggest expense in this culture tends to be the laptop (generally an M-series Macbook). It is the means of communication (cool personal website) and the means of income generation.
What are some things you can recommend?
- Thinkpads, Macbooks
- eReaders (Boox, for example. Feel like Daylight/Remarkable overpriced.)
- Durables:
- Aer
- Darn Tough Tactical (socks don’t feel fluffy though)
- Lululemon Utilitech
- Outlier
- GRIP6 Belts (annoying cuz metal buckle goes off in TSA, carbon fiber overpriced though)
- REI
- Goruck
- Uniqlo is okay, quality has gone down
- IKEA (quality go down too) (HEMA is also OK, only in Western Europe though)
- Accessories:
- MUJI, Xiaomi
- Storage:
- Greenmade shelving & black/yellow storage crate
- Dolly
- Lifetime folding table/chair
- Exercise:
- Resistance bands
- Rings
- Pull-up bar
- Travel:
- Global Entry
- Multiple bank accounts in different countries
You should have a car. It’s an indispensible part of the modern infrastructure landscape, even though I hate driving. Electric scooter also useful for micromobility. Depending on how big of an organization you end up running, this could extend to warehouses, lift trucks, private jets, and so on.
A projector could be a good replacement for a TV.
Don’t do drugs or drink. It makes you stupid. Read economics, finance, history, technology, social sciences, philosophy. Pirate all your books.
There are some overlaps between this culture, “prepping,” and hiking, although it differs in that prepping tends to skew toward conspiracy and impracticality while hiking involves making life difficult for personal enjoyment. I would much prefer a cabin over backpacking.
It’s not so much that hiking is difficult. Difficult things are useful to build perseverance. Just that most hiking is fake in the way that running ovals is fake, and fake things are immensely and intrinsically boring.
What is the goal?
The goal is so that if you have to leave your house or move around, you can store everything in a few crates and aren’t attached to giant things like a TV, sofa, or are totally unorganized.
This could be whether a fire, natural disaster, or so on strike. This could be if you are moving around a lot for internships.
It is a certain lifestyle for cultivating certain abilities, moralities, and temperaments that are beneficial when those around are slothful and indolent.
Life is hard. This attitude doesn’t guarantee success. But it’s better than doing nothing.