Freedom Through Needing Less

Tom — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 08:23:46 +0000

Half of the sustenance game is ‘getting’. We know how to Get: working more, working harder, working smarter. These are all fitting means to the goal of acquisition. But it’s only half of the picture. The other half is ‘needing’, i.e. the reasons you give yourself for working so hard. Unless you’re a lottery winner you’d better look at the part needing plays in establishing your priorities and motivation, and the toll it may take on your autonomy. It has an enormous effect on the degree of freedom and autonomy you enjoy.

Don’t kid yourself. As hard as you work, you owe it to yourself to also question how much you need, and I mean just as aggressively as you approach the getting, from the time the alarm goes off in the morning until your head hits the pillow at night. The key to increasing your freedom in the short term, today, is found in looking hard at the things that you have decided that you need, the amounts that you let yourself spend.

Is it acceptable for my ‘needs’ to expand to correspond to how hard I’m capable of working? Is it acceptable for my spending to equal and even exceed my best efforts at earning during the best years of my life, so that my time (and even my future, if I’m in debt) is literally traded for these ‘needs’? Probably not, and you might find that needing less is a much easier way to enhance your freedom than making ways to earn more.

Head South

Tom — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 03:42:31 +0000

“Supersonnet— it was a fun ride south; we came to know our pores again and it wasn’t like I’d imagined it would be. Shit it was real-er, I never had any idea what time it was, and I was so happy I almost threw up. Big winners in Vegas and who even cared? The course was set, we’d gone tangential and infused the path with our resolve. We couldn’t lose.

The unreality of finally getting on that airplane Sonnet….. Landing here I caught mystupidself bemoaning the hell of ~25 hrs in transit (like I didn’t give my blood for it) and then I saw the Balinese boy with his grandmother sitting on a bed frame in front of their house all smiles in slow motion as I passed by in the taxi, sun shards & incense smoke through the trees, a small sight that I was so lucky to have made it here JUST in time to affirm for you….”

Wage Freedom » Winning Freedom

Freedom Through Needing Less

Head South