This is a repeat from an April 2008 posting. There will be more like this coming up. Pick and choose whatever suits your needs.
The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste. Tom Hodgkinson. 2006. Harper Perennial, New York. ISBN 978-0060823221
EXCERPTS
I have tried to bring together three strands of thought into a philosophy for everyday life; these are freedom, merriment and responsibility, or anarchy, medievalism and existentialism. It’s an approach to life that is also known as having a laugh, doing what you want.
In seeking freedom, I would define myself as an anarchist. In anarchy, contracts are made between individuals, not between citizen and state.
How to be free? Well, like it or not, you are free. The real question is whether you choose to exercise that freedom …
Anxiety suits the status quo very well. Anxious people make good consumers and good workers. Governments and big business, therefore, love terrorism – they adore it, it’s good for business.
Anxiety is the sacrifice of creativity in the service of security. It is the giving up of personal freedoms in return for the promise, never fulfilled, of comfort, cotton wool, air-conditioned shopping centers. Security is a myth; it simply doesn’t exist. This does not stop us, however, from constantly chasing it.
Belief in the abstract invention ‘career’ is a middle-class affliction. The lower orders, wisely, don’t quite have the same faith in progress and self-betterment as the bourgeois classes and neither do members of the aristocracy.
And now more than ever before, the middle classes attempt to impose their career ethic on everyone else. This is called ‘government’.
Governments sell themselves by promoting the idea of ‘equal opportunities for everyone to make the best of themselves’ when really what they mean is ‘equal opportunities for every slimebag to rat on his friends and colleagues in order to worship the false god of career advancement.’
Career is just posh slavery. And career is an institutionalized putting-off a paradise deferred.
Career, then, is a Protestant invention and an ideal for living that would have been impossible in the more fatalistic Catholic medieval society.
‘Learn a craft’ is what I suggest to young writers who contact the Idler: carpentry or blacksmithing or gardening or upholstery; such pursuits sit alongside the life of the mind very well.
Clearly we need to find a town of 50,000 people, 50,000 freedom-seekers, put a wall around it, declare it an independent republic and get on with things on our own. The medieval cities demonstrated to [Prince] Kropotkin that, left to our own devices, we can do a much better job of organizing our affairs than any government.
Solar panels are anarchy in action.
And as for your plans for the future? Well: we all know the Jewish joke: How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans.
… our resentment makes it hard for us to escape. Resentment can be a barrier to freedom.
Resentment of others – ‘It’s all right for you,’ the feeling that life is just that little bit easier for everyone else around you – is the first manacle that must be cast off in the quest for freedom.
The problem is not that people are different, but that they do not respect differences.
For some unfathomable reason, everyone seems to want an expensive watch. But isn’t it mighty peculiar that what is in actual fact a symbol of slavery should also have become a status symbol? Wearing a watch indicates to others that you have bound yourself to the modern industrial tempo.
It is one of the triumphs of the capitalist project that the slave-driver is now inside us, which saves an enormous amount on the wage bill.
We should abandon the expression ‘free time’, because it implies its opposite, ‘slave time’.
As the unusual German historian Johan Huizinga says in The Waning of the Middle Ages, modern man sees himself primarily as a worker, and this is the great change. No praying, no fighting, no working the land. Just work, hard work.
Competition is a slave’s creed. We think that by beating up the other guy we elevate ourselves, but, in fact, we are debasing ourselves to the level of a slave. To be competitive is a sign of submission as, really, it just means that we are carrying out the master’s wishes.
… ‘financial services’ – and there’s a euphemism for usury if ever I heard one …
… debt has been compared by many to a modern form of indentured labour. You get into debt, and then you are stuck in a job you hate in order to pay off the debt. This helps the system, as it means that most of us are more or less kept quiet and toiling.
It is credit, not cash, that makes wealth: apparently, rich people are often simply more spectacularly in debt than the rest of us.
To free yourself from the cycle of work-spend-debt-work, simply stop consuming and start creating.
Don’t make luxury into a meaning.
We desire things, we are attached to things, we believe that things will make us better. This process serves the postponement of desire which is one of the characteristic features, indeed a motor, of large-scale capitalism. The desire for things produces a restless craving, and this restless craving leads us into the world and into our schemes for betterment.
This is how capitalism works: through a constant stream of disappointments which encourages the spending of more and more money.
To work hard to produce useless items of nothing and then to make that the sole purpose of living – this is the insanity of desire.
So, put simply, if you have somewhere to live, enough money to buy or produce good food, friends, books and plenty of booze and cigarettes, then how bad can life be?
Desire and modern capitalism preach that means are unimportant and that ends are all: ‘I’m only doing my job.’
… fear is actually rather convenient to the smooth functioning of an orderly society. A docile population which is terrified of the authorities in their various forms, whether supermarket, bank, school or boss, and afraid of other human beings, will more likely depend on objects and institutions to give them guidance, solidity, security and a sense of meaning.
Fear keeps us observing life rather than living it. We are spectators rather than participators.
Fear is a tool of control. It is fear of punishment that will keep a classroom quiet and make the teacher’s job easier; it is fear of the sack that will keep the grumbling workers quiet. Fear is also an efficient controlling device. It also helps us to fulfill our roles as consumers. It is fear of life itself that keeps us spending in the arcades and typing our credit-card numbers into websites.
One source of fear is certainly the education system. Little children are fearless, imperious anarchists, and the education system works and works on them over a period of fifteen years to instill docility so that they won’t complain too much when they end up with a boring job.
Life is about nothingness, so go and create your own life and enjoy it. Everything is vanity, fiction, conditioning, self-created, mind-forg’d.
Vanity and absurdity are the same thing – mere creations of man’s imagination, utterly without meaning.
Governments do too much and they do most of it badly.
Politics is not the art of running a country, it is the art of persuading the people that they need a set of paid politicians to run the country.
… the final insult is that we pay the government between a quarter and a half of our income for the privilege of being patronized and bossed around.
There is a real alternative to elected governments. It is self-government, or anarchy, or running one’s own affairs without relying on external authority.
Anarchy is about the creative spirit fighting the cowed spirit, and the battle has to start within ourselves.
What can we do to be ourselves, rather than trying to conform and contort ourselves into a uniform model? Well, we can start simply by ignoring government. The best way to smash the state is to take no notice of it and hope it goes away.
An important mental step in escaping the power of government is to understand that to some degree, we ourselves are complicit with the problem. By not acting for ourselves, we allow others to act for us.
In the existential world, where life is absurd, you may as well create your own life.
In order to keep bureaucracy and taxes to a minimum, we will earn small amounts of money and instead do favours for each other. We don’t want affordable housing, jobs and shopping centers. Those are slave’s perks, handed down by authority, which may be more or less lenient according to whichever government fate has installed. What we want is to create our own little aristocracies, as D.H. Lawrence has it. We want soil, caravans and trees, smallholdings, vegetable patches, art and crafts. And beer and books. That’s all.
Government is a license for people to kill and rape each other; government creates the killing and raping while pretending to prevent it.
Machines have never liberated us from toil, due to the fact that they need minding by a human being and are owned by the capitalists, in whose hands they become instruments of enslavement and prolonged boredom.
The accusation ‘unprofessional’ means ‘You did not behave like a machine today.’
Digital technology may supply you with what you want, but it won’t supply you with what you need.
The future is always about machines. But I don’t think about the future; I think about the present. The future is a capitalist construct. The past teaches us that the future has let us down, and let us down many, many times. Dreaming of some kind of technological utopia in which the machines will do all the work has failed us before, and it is failing us now, with our new faith in digital technology.
… the fact is, the past is a great treasure store of good ideas for living, ideas that were actually applied and whose results we can see. The problem with ideas of the future is that they are untested; they are all speculation, fantasy.
The very thing that we take on board in order to provide us with security – a home – seems to offer instead only anxiety and a feeling of being trapped.
The mortgage, which puts all the burden of buying a house on the individual, is the logical outcome of the individualization of ownership. But the reality is that in being sold the idea that we should all own our own house, we have simply given into a giant usury con.
We need to diffuse land ownership, ban usurious mortgages, stabilize rents and bring house prices right down. We could perhaps do this by simply losing interest in money-making.
The problem with vagabondage is that big governments can’t stand it. They hate the chaos, the unruly elements, the sense that people are wandering around the country doing what they like. When governments increase in power, they all have a resentful way of cracking down on vagabonds.
Putting a lot of time and money into mortgages and the ‘dream home’ is never going to be more than a distraction from the real issue, which is you, and your state of mind.
The family, which should be a source of pleasure, fun, cosiness and nourishment, seems everywhere to produce misery, anger, door-slamming, shouting, cruelty, fighting, death and abuse.
The modern family merely represents a financial burden – in other words, an inducement to take jobs you don’t like.
The commodification of childcare is another of the unhelpful effects of capitalism. You earn money doing something you don’t like in order to pay someone else to ‘do the childcare’, i.e., look after your children.
By confirming the existence of a problem, you create a market. That is why the pharmaceutical industry is forever creating new illnesses; that is why the insurance industry is forever creating new fears; that is why the government is forever creating new enemies.
The wonderful thing about children is not their so-called innocence but their passion, their passion for life and living. This can take the form of tears or laughter, and we need to get it into our heads that tears and laughter are both to be welcomed. You can’t have one without the other. They may even enjoy it – like the medievals, who seemed to embrace all extremes of passion. It is this passion that we need to find in ourselves.
We are fatally over-scheduling our children and creating a nation of useless dependents unable to do anything for themselves apart from the spectacularly useless and costly occupations of computer games, tennis and ballet. We are creating a generation of children who don’t know how to play.
Quality of life has been sacrificed to quantity of life. Living as long as possible rather than living as well as possible – that seems to have become the goal.
Fear of pain, indeed, might be seen as fear of life, since life is pain.
Pain will never leave us. Live with it. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure. Pleasure for yourself and pleasure for those around you. Sex, music, dancing, beer and wine, good company, good work, merry cheer: these are the antidotes to pain, and they are of course only pleasures because we know pain. Without pain, there would be no pleasure.
Private pension plans claim to sell you ‘peace of mind’, i.e., freedom from fear, but the reality is the opposite: they sell us fear and then sell the apparent solution to that fear – money.
So, when it comes to pensions, I am firmly of the ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die’ school. Belief in pensions produces a kind of slavery. If you don’t believe in pensions, then you believe in yourself and you believe in looking after yourself. This makes you free.
Funnily enough, the people who encourage others to worry about the future are those who want your money now.
It makes perfectly logical sense that in societies based on a collective ideal, manners and rituals are of the highest importance, whereas in societies based on a competitive ideal, manners are useful only as a means of getting what you want.
Disintegrating manners are a sign of a disintegrating society.
Don’t bother setting up free republics or moving to a country which offers more liberties. Simply declare yourself to be an independent state. Do not involve and coerce others. This is the only way we will effect a proper revolution.
Self-importance is a trap, because the moment we start to think that we actually matter is the moment when things start to go wrong. The truth is that you are supremely unimportant, and that nothing matters. All of man’s striving is for nothing; all effort is wasted. To realize that everything is meaningless is tremendously liberating, since it then leaves us completely free to create our own lives and ignore the plans that others have for us.
So we can see why artists and writers traditionally tend towards Roman Catholicism, while Protestantism is the religion for the serious man of business, the practical man.
We are all supposed to want to become rich. Wanting to be rich is one of the motors of a competitive world. Wanting to be rich is what keeps us striving, working, fighting, struggling, competing, conning and abandoning morals. And wanting to be rich is the precise impulse that is exploited by the people who actually do become rich, the usurers and the investors, the market manipulators, because they exploit our greed for their own ends. Wanting more money removes us from enjoying the present; it is therefore a Puritan trait. We should celebrate what we have. Wanting to be rich is actually the first desire that must be cast off in the pursuit of freedom.
Do it now. Give things away for free and money will lose its power over you.
… since shopping is today seen as our patriotic duty, to be thrifty is actually to be unpatriotic, and therefore it gives one a pleasant sense of rebelling against the state.
It is not thrift as self-denial and the preaching of sobriety, industry, frugality and virtue to the lower orders that I am recommending; it is more a spirited reclaiming of one’s own finances.
We should also be thrifty with our time, and that means not rushing through things and not wasting our time by giving it to an employer.
The tragedy of the nineteenth century was that Western man came to see himself, first and foremost, as a worker. Life became a serious business. Frivolity, mirth, play, ritual, dance, music, merriment, dressing up: those childish pleasures, all central parts of life for the nobles, priests and peasants of old, had been under constant attack since the middle of the sixteenth century.
Make money out of what you are doing anyway. In my case, I spend each morning writing and reading, and the rest of the day is given up to household work: gardening, cleaning, baking … The evenings are for drinking, eating and talking.
Education itself is a putting-off, a postponement: we are told to work hard to get good results. Why? So we can get a good job. What is a good job? One that pays well. Oh. And that’s it? All this suffering, merely so that we can earn a lot of money, which, even if we manage it, will not solve our problems anyway? It’s a tragically limited idea of what life is all about.
If the mortgage company owns 90 per cent of it, how can this be said to be owning your own house? Instead, you are in slavery to two authorities, the employer and the mortgage company. Fall behind on these payments, and the mortgage company will literally take your home from you. Therefore, you will subject yourself to all sorts of humiliations at work out of fear of losing your job.
Relaxing the hold that work has over your life and replacing it with play can be a slow and gradual process. The key to enjoying a life beyond full-time employment is to realize that, once you stop working full time, you start to become a producer, a creative person, rather than a consumer.
Be a jack of all trades; abandon perfectionism. Embrace the creed of the amateur. Do it for love, not money.
If you enjoy your work, then it’s not work. As my friend Sarah says, the trick to living free is to wake up every morning and screech: ‘Morning, Lord, what have you got for me today?’
QUOTES
Matthew de Abaitua
[Retirement:] secular afterlife.
St. Thomas Aquinas
Abstinence in eating and drinking has no essential bearing on salvation: The kingdom of God is not meat and drink … the holy apostles understood that the kingdom of God does not consist in eating and drinking but in resignation to either lot, for they are neither elated by abundance, nor distressed by want.
Simone de Beauvoir
Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.
Aldous Huxley
There will never be enduring peace unless and until human beings come to accept a philosophy of life more adequate to the cosmic and psychological facts than the insane idolatries of nationalism and the advertising man’s apocalyptic faith in Progress towards a mechanized New Jerusalem.
John of Brunn
A man who has conscience is himself the Devil and hell and purgatory, tormenting himself. He who is free in spirit escapes all these things.
E.M. Forster
Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
Masanobu Fukuoka
Humanity knows nothing at all. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort.
John Keats
Beauty is truth and truth beauty,
That is all ye know and all ye need to know.
C.S. Lewis
I believe a man is happier and happy in a richer way, if he has ‘the freeborn mind’ … and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of the Government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology.
Penny Rimbaud
Our lives are uniquely and intrinsically our own. It is a responsibility that few seem willing to bear.
Bertrand Russell
Democracy, as conceived by politicians, is a form of government, that is to say, it is a method of making people do what their leaders wish under the impression that they are doing what they themselves wish.
Jean-Paul Sartre
It is … senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.
Henry Suso
…Untrammeled freedom … When a man lives according to all his caprices without distinguishing between God and himself, and without looking before or after.
Leo Tolstoy
… even if the absence of government really meant anarchy in the negative disorderly sense of that word – which is far from being the case – even then no anarchical disorder could be worse that the position to which governments have already led their peoples, and to which they are leading them.
Raoul Vaneigem
The consumer cannot and must not ever attain satisfaction.
Showing posts with label alternative life style. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alternative life style. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss - Excerpts
Perhaps few of us can really pull off living well abroad by remotely managing a lucrative out-sourced business. But there are tons of earth-shaking ideas put out here by this extraordinary young man. If nothing else, you will learn just how much of the conventional American dream life can be questioned and shaken down to the very roots. Simply astounding stuff.
Excerpts
If you’re sick of the standard menu of options and prepared to enter a world of infinite options, this book is for you.
The objective is to create freedom of time and place and use both however you want.
Gold is getting old. The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility. This is an art and a science we will refer to as Lifestyle Design (LD).
I will take it as a given that, for most people, somewhere between six and seven billion of them, the perfect job is the one that takes the least time. The vast majority of people will never find a job that can be an unending source of fulfillment, so that is not the goal here; to free time and automate income is.
… an entrepreneur in the purer sense as first coined by French economist J.B. Say in 1800 – one who shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher yield.
If you can free your time and your location, your money is automatically worth 3-10 times as much.
Options – the ability to choose – is real power.
This is hard for most to accept, but our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.
“Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and cons lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually”, just do it and correct course along the way.
Emphasize strengths, don’t fix weaknesses.
Role models who push us to exceed our limits, physical training that removes our spare tires, and risks that expand our sphere of comfortable action are all examples of eustress – stress that is healthful and the stimulus for growth.
Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.
Conquering Fear = Defining Fear.
Most who avoid quitting their jobs entertain the thought that their course will improve with time or increases in income.
Are you better off than you were on year ago, one month ago, or one week ago? If not, things will not improve by themselves.
What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. As I have heard said, a person’s success in life can usually be measure by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have. Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear.
Don’t only evaluate the potential downside of action. It is equally important to measure the atrocious cost of inaction.
It’s lonely at the top. Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieve great things, so they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for “realistic” goals, paradoxically making them the most time- and energy-consuming. It is easier to raise $10,000,000 that is it $1,000,000. It is easier to pick up the on perfect 10 in the bar than the five 8s.
The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is – here’s the clincher – boredom.
Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.
Remember – boredom is the enemy, not some abstract “failure”.
Living like a millionaire requires doing interesting things and not just owning enviable things.
To have an uncommon lifestyle, you need to develop the uncommon habit of making decisions, both for yourself and for others.
Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.
Pareto’s Law can be summarized as follows: 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs.
1. Which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness?
2. Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness?
I went from chasing and appeasing 120 customers to simply receiving large orders from 8, with absolutely no pleading phone calls or e-mail haranguing. My monthly income increased from $30K to $60K in four weeks and my weekly hours immediately dropped from over 80 to approximately 15.
… lack of time is actually lack of priorities.
Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.
Don’t ever arrive at the office or in front of your computer without a clear list of priorities.
Problems, as a rule, solve themselves or disappear if you remove yourself as an information bottleneck and empower others.
Just as modern man consumes both too many calories and calories of no nutritional value, information workers eat data both in excess and from the wrong sources.
More is not better, and stopping something is often 10 times better than finishing it.
People are smarter than you think. Give them a chance to prove themselves.
Fun things happen when you earn dollars, live on pesos, and compensate in rupees, but that’s just the beginning.
… the most critical of NR skills: remote management and communication.
Being a member of the NR is not just about working smarter. It’s about building a system to replace yourself.
Preparing someone to replace you (even if it never happens) will produce an ultrarefined set of rules that will cut remaining fat and redundancy from your schedule. Lingering unimportant tasks will disappear as soon as someone else is being paid to do them.
If I can do it better than an assistant, why should I pay them at all? Because the goal is to free your time to focus on bigger and better things.
Golden Rule #1: Each delegated task must be both time-consuming and well-defined.
Just as the Model-T brought transportation to the masses, virtual assistants bring eccentric billionaire behavior within reach of each man, woman, and child.
… per-hour cost is not the ultimate determinant of cost. Look at per-task cost.
People can’t believe that most of the ultrasuccessful companies in the world do not manufacture their own products, answer their own phones, ship their own products, or service their own customers.
Our goal is simple: to create an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time.
So first things first: cash flow and time. With these two currencies, all other things are possible. Without them, nothing is possible.
Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is much easier. Don’t create a product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find a market – define your customers – then find or develop a product for them.
Be a member of your target audience and don’t speculate what others need or will be willing to buy.
I have found that a price range of $50-200 per sale provides the most profit for the least customer service hassle. Price high and then justify.
Information products are low-cost, fast to manufacture, and time-consuming for competitors to duplicate.
It is not necessary to be the best – just better than a small target number of your prospective customers.
Aim for a combination of formats that will lend itself to $50-200 pricing, such as a combination of two CDs (30-90 minutes each), a 40-page transcription of the CDs, and a 10-page quickstart guide.
It isn’t enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.
The guard is changing. Being bound to one place will be the new defining feature of middle class.
Question: What did you spend your last $400 on? It’s two or three weekends of nonsense and throwaway forget-the-workweek behavior in most U.S. cities.
How do these numbers compare to your current domestic monthly expenses, including rent, car insurance, utilities, weekend expenditures, partying, public transportation, gas, memberships, subscriptions, food, and all the rest? Add it all up and you may well realize, like I did, that traveling around the world and having the time of your life may save you serious money.
I know too well that it’s easier to live with ourselves if we cite an external reason for inaction.
Extended travel is the perfect excuse to reverse the damage of years of consuming as much as you can afford. It’s time to get rid of clutter disguised as necessities before you drag a five-piece Samsonite set around the world. That is hell on earth.
I no longer take toiletries or more than a week’s worth of clothing. It’s a blast. Finding shaving cream or a dress shirt overseas can produce an adventure in and of itself.
Choose a starting point and then wander until you find your second home.
It is possible to take a mini-retirement in your own country, but the transformative effect is hampered if you are surrounded by people who carry the same socially reinforced baggage.
Too much free time is no more than fertilizer for self-doubt and assorted mental tail-chasing. Subtracting the bad does not create the good. It leaves a vacuum. Decreasing income-driven work isn’t the end goal. Living more – and becoming more – is.
I am 100% convinced that most big questions we feel compelled to face – handed down through centuries of over-thinking and mis-translation – use terms so undefined as to make attempting to answer them a complete waste of time. This isn’t depressing. It’s liberating.
Most questions without answers are just poorly worded.
If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.
Find the cause or vehicle that interests you most and make no apologies.
There is no right answer to the question “What should I do with my life?” Forget “should” altogether.
Most endeavors are like learning to speak a foreign language: to be correct 95% of the time requires six months of concentrated effort, whereas to be correct 98% of the time requires 20-30 years. Focus on great for a few things and good enough for the rest.
Quotations
Jean Cocteau
You have comfort. You don’t have luxury. And don’t tell me that money plays a part. The luxury I advocate has nothing to do with money. It cannot be bought. It is the reward of those who have no fear of discomfort.
Annie Dillard
A schedule defends from chaos and whim.
Albert Einstein
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.
Anatole France
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
Viktor E. Frankl
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
Paul Fussel
Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment.
Bill Gates
The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
William Gibson
The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.
Robert Henri
To be free, to be happy and fruitful, can only be attained through sacrifice of many common but overestimated things.
Jules Henry
Human beings have the capacity to learn to want almost any conceivable material object. Given, then, the emergence of a modern industrial culture capable of producing almost anything, the time is ripe for opening the storehouse of infinite need! … It is the modern Pandora’s box, and its plagues are loose upon the world.
Steve Jobs
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
John F. Kennedy
Once you say you’re going to settle for second, that’s what happens to you in life.
Charles Kuralt
Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.
Anne Lamott
To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass.
Bruce Lee
One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.
Seneca
Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with course and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?”
George Bernard Shaw
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
Herbert Simon
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
Paul Theroux
It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot.
Henry David Thoreau
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
Mark Twain
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
Mark Twain
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Oscar Wilde
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination
Oscar Wilde
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike.
Colin Wilson
The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
Excerpts
If you’re sick of the standard menu of options and prepared to enter a world of infinite options, this book is for you.
The objective is to create freedom of time and place and use both however you want.
Gold is getting old. The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility. This is an art and a science we will refer to as Lifestyle Design (LD).
I will take it as a given that, for most people, somewhere between six and seven billion of them, the perfect job is the one that takes the least time. The vast majority of people will never find a job that can be an unending source of fulfillment, so that is not the goal here; to free time and automate income is.
… an entrepreneur in the purer sense as first coined by French economist J.B. Say in 1800 – one who shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher yield.
If you can free your time and your location, your money is automatically worth 3-10 times as much.
Options – the ability to choose – is real power.
This is hard for most to accept, but our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.
“Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and cons lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually”, just do it and correct course along the way.
Emphasize strengths, don’t fix weaknesses.
Role models who push us to exceed our limits, physical training that removes our spare tires, and risks that expand our sphere of comfortable action are all examples of eustress – stress that is healthful and the stimulus for growth.
Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.
Conquering Fear = Defining Fear.
Most who avoid quitting their jobs entertain the thought that their course will improve with time or increases in income.
Are you better off than you were on year ago, one month ago, or one week ago? If not, things will not improve by themselves.
What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. As I have heard said, a person’s success in life can usually be measure by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have. Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear.
Don’t only evaluate the potential downside of action. It is equally important to measure the atrocious cost of inaction.
It’s lonely at the top. Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieve great things, so they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for “realistic” goals, paradoxically making them the most time- and energy-consuming. It is easier to raise $10,000,000 that is it $1,000,000. It is easier to pick up the on perfect 10 in the bar than the five 8s.
The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is – here’s the clincher – boredom.
Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.
Remember – boredom is the enemy, not some abstract “failure”.
Living like a millionaire requires doing interesting things and not just owning enviable things.
To have an uncommon lifestyle, you need to develop the uncommon habit of making decisions, both for yourself and for others.
Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.
Pareto’s Law can be summarized as follows: 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs.
1. Which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness?
2. Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness?
I went from chasing and appeasing 120 customers to simply receiving large orders from 8, with absolutely no pleading phone calls or e-mail haranguing. My monthly income increased from $30K to $60K in four weeks and my weekly hours immediately dropped from over 80 to approximately 15.
… lack of time is actually lack of priorities.
Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.
Don’t ever arrive at the office or in front of your computer without a clear list of priorities.
Problems, as a rule, solve themselves or disappear if you remove yourself as an information bottleneck and empower others.
Just as modern man consumes both too many calories and calories of no nutritional value, information workers eat data both in excess and from the wrong sources.
More is not better, and stopping something is often 10 times better than finishing it.
People are smarter than you think. Give them a chance to prove themselves.
Fun things happen when you earn dollars, live on pesos, and compensate in rupees, but that’s just the beginning.
… the most critical of NR skills: remote management and communication.
Being a member of the NR is not just about working smarter. It’s about building a system to replace yourself.
Preparing someone to replace you (even if it never happens) will produce an ultrarefined set of rules that will cut remaining fat and redundancy from your schedule. Lingering unimportant tasks will disappear as soon as someone else is being paid to do them.
If I can do it better than an assistant, why should I pay them at all? Because the goal is to free your time to focus on bigger and better things.
Golden Rule #1: Each delegated task must be both time-consuming and well-defined.
Just as the Model-T brought transportation to the masses, virtual assistants bring eccentric billionaire behavior within reach of each man, woman, and child.
… per-hour cost is not the ultimate determinant of cost. Look at per-task cost.
People can’t believe that most of the ultrasuccessful companies in the world do not manufacture their own products, answer their own phones, ship their own products, or service their own customers.
Our goal is simple: to create an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time.
So first things first: cash flow and time. With these two currencies, all other things are possible. Without them, nothing is possible.
Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is much easier. Don’t create a product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find a market – define your customers – then find or develop a product for them.
Be a member of your target audience and don’t speculate what others need or will be willing to buy.
I have found that a price range of $50-200 per sale provides the most profit for the least customer service hassle. Price high and then justify.
Information products are low-cost, fast to manufacture, and time-consuming for competitors to duplicate.
It is not necessary to be the best – just better than a small target number of your prospective customers.
Aim for a combination of formats that will lend itself to $50-200 pricing, such as a combination of two CDs (30-90 minutes each), a 40-page transcription of the CDs, and a 10-page quickstart guide.
It isn’t enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.
The guard is changing. Being bound to one place will be the new defining feature of middle class.
Question: What did you spend your last $400 on? It’s two or three weekends of nonsense and throwaway forget-the-workweek behavior in most U.S. cities.
How do these numbers compare to your current domestic monthly expenses, including rent, car insurance, utilities, weekend expenditures, partying, public transportation, gas, memberships, subscriptions, food, and all the rest? Add it all up and you may well realize, like I did, that traveling around the world and having the time of your life may save you serious money.
I know too well that it’s easier to live with ourselves if we cite an external reason for inaction.
Extended travel is the perfect excuse to reverse the damage of years of consuming as much as you can afford. It’s time to get rid of clutter disguised as necessities before you drag a five-piece Samsonite set around the world. That is hell on earth.
I no longer take toiletries or more than a week’s worth of clothing. It’s a blast. Finding shaving cream or a dress shirt overseas can produce an adventure in and of itself.
Choose a starting point and then wander until you find your second home.
It is possible to take a mini-retirement in your own country, but the transformative effect is hampered if you are surrounded by people who carry the same socially reinforced baggage.
Too much free time is no more than fertilizer for self-doubt and assorted mental tail-chasing. Subtracting the bad does not create the good. It leaves a vacuum. Decreasing income-driven work isn’t the end goal. Living more – and becoming more – is.
I am 100% convinced that most big questions we feel compelled to face – handed down through centuries of over-thinking and mis-translation – use terms so undefined as to make attempting to answer them a complete waste of time. This isn’t depressing. It’s liberating.
Most questions without answers are just poorly worded.
If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.
Find the cause or vehicle that interests you most and make no apologies.
There is no right answer to the question “What should I do with my life?” Forget “should” altogether.
Most endeavors are like learning to speak a foreign language: to be correct 95% of the time requires six months of concentrated effort, whereas to be correct 98% of the time requires 20-30 years. Focus on great for a few things and good enough for the rest.
Quotations
Jean Cocteau
You have comfort. You don’t have luxury. And don’t tell me that money plays a part. The luxury I advocate has nothing to do with money. It cannot be bought. It is the reward of those who have no fear of discomfort.
Annie Dillard
A schedule defends from chaos and whim.
Albert Einstein
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.
Anatole France
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
Viktor E. Frankl
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
Paul Fussel
Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment.
Bill Gates
The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
William Gibson
The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.
Robert Henri
To be free, to be happy and fruitful, can only be attained through sacrifice of many common but overestimated things.
Jules Henry
Human beings have the capacity to learn to want almost any conceivable material object. Given, then, the emergence of a modern industrial culture capable of producing almost anything, the time is ripe for opening the storehouse of infinite need! … It is the modern Pandora’s box, and its plagues are loose upon the world.
Steve Jobs
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
John F. Kennedy
Once you say you’re going to settle for second, that’s what happens to you in life.
Charles Kuralt
Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.
Anne Lamott
To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass.
Bruce Lee
One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.
Seneca
Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with course and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?”
George Bernard Shaw
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
Herbert Simon
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
Paul Theroux
It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot.
Henry David Thoreau
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
Mark Twain
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
Mark Twain
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Oscar Wilde
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination
Oscar Wilde
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike.
Colin Wilson
The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
The Freedom Manifesto by Tom Hodgkinson - Excerpts
The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste.
Tom Hodgkinson. 2006. Harper Perennial, New York. ISBN 978-0-06-082322-1
EXCERPTS
I have tried to bring together three strands of thought into a philosophy for everyday life; these are freedom, merriment and responsibility, or anarchy, medievalism and existentialism. It’s an approach to life that is also known as having a laugh, doing what you want.
In seeking freedom, I would define myself as an anarchist. In anarchy, contracts are made between individuals, not between citizen and state.
How to be free? Well, like it or not, you are free. The real question is whether you choose to exercise that freedom …
Anxiety suits the status quo very well. Anxious people make good consumers and good workers. Governments and big business, therefore, love terrorism – they adore it, it’s good for business.
Anxiety is the sacrifice of creativity in the service of security. It is the giving up of personal freedoms in return for the promise, never fulfilled, of comfort, cotton wool, air-conditioned shopping centers. Security is a myth; it simply doesn’t exist. This does not stop us, however, from constantly chasing it.
Belief in the abstract invention ‘career’ is a middle-class affliction. The lower orders, wisely, don’t quite have the same faith in progress and self-betterment as the bourgeois classes and neither do members of the aristocracy.
And now more than ever before, the middle classes attempt to impose their career ethic on everyone else. This is called ‘government’.
Governments sell themselves by promoting the idea of ‘equal opportunities for everyone to make the best of themselves’ when really what they mean is ‘equal opportunities for every slimebag to rat on his friends and colleagues in order to worship the false god of career advancement.’
Career is just posh slavery. And career is an institutionalized putting-off a paradise deferred.
Career, then, is a Protestant invention and an ideal for living that would have been impossible in the more fatalistic Catholic medieval society.
‘Learn a craft’ is what I suggest to young writers who contact the Idler: carpentry or blacksmithing or gardening or upholstery; such pursuits sit alongside the life of the mind very well.
Clearly we need to find a town of 50,000 people, 50,000 freedom-seekers, put a wall around it, declare it an independent republic and get on with things on our own. The medieval cities demonstrated to [Prince] Kropotkin that, left to our own devices, we can do a much better job of organizing our affairs than any government.
Solar panels are anarchy in action.
And as for your plans for the future? Well: we all know the Jewish joke: How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans.
… our resentment makes it hard for us to escape. Resentment can be a barrier to freedom.
Resentment of others – ‘It’s all right for you,’ the feeling that life is just that little bit easier for everyone else around you – is the first manacle that must be cast off in the quest for freedom.
The problem is not that people are different, but that they do not respect differences.
For some unfathomable reason, everyone seems to want an expensive watch. But isn’t it mighty peculiar that what is in actual fact a symbol of slavery should also have become a status symbol? Wearing a watch indicates to others that you have bound yourself to the modern industrial tempo.
It is one of the triumphs of the capitalist project that the slave-driver is now inside us, which saves an enormous amount on the wage bill.
We should abandon the expression ‘free time’, because it implies its opposite, ‘slave time’.
As the unusual German historian Johan Huizinga says in The Waning of the Middle Ages, modern man sees himself primarily as a worker, and this is the great change. No praying, no fighting, no working the land. Just work, hard work.
Competition is a slave’s creed. We think that by beating up the other guy we elevate ourselves, but, in fact, we are debasing ourselves to the level of a slave. To be competitive is a sign of submission as, really, it just means that we are carrying out the master’s wishes.
… ‘financial services’ – and there’s a euphemism for usury if ever I heard one …
… debt has been compared by many to a modern form of indentured labour. You get into debt, and then you are stuck in a job you hate in order to pay off the debt. This helps the system, as it means that most of us are more or less kept quiet and toiling.
It is credit, not cash, that makes wealth: apparently, rich people are often simply more spectacularly in debt than the rest of us.
To free yourself from the cycle of work-spend-debt-work, simply stop consuming and start creating.
Don’t make luxury into a meaning.
We desire things, we are attached to things, we believe that things will make us better. This process serves the postponement of desire which is one of the characteristic features, indeed a motor, of large-scale capitalism. The desire for things produces a restless craving, and this restless craving leads us into the world and into our schemes for betterment.
This is how capitalism works: through a constant stream of disappointments which encourages the spending of more and more money.
To work hard to produce useless items of nothing and then to make that the sole purpose of living – this is the insanity of desire.
So, put simply, if you have somewhere to live, enough money to buy or produce good food, friends, books and plenty of booze and cigarettes, then how bad can life be?
Desire and modern capitalism preach that means are unimportant and that ends are all: ‘I’m only doing my job.’
… fear is actually rather convenient to the smooth functioning of an orderly society. A docile population which is terrified of the authorities in their various forms, whether supermarket, bank, school or boss, and afraid of other human beings, will more likely depend on objects and institutions to give them guidance, solidity, security and a sense of meaning.
Fear keeps us observing life rather than living it. We are spectators rather than participators.
Fear is a tool of control. It is fear of punishment that will keep a classroom quiet and make the teacher’s job easier; it is fear of the sack that will keep the grumbling workers quiet. Fear is also an efficient controlling device. It also helps us to fulfill our roles as consumers. It is fear of life itself that keeps us spending in the arcades and typing our credit-card numbers into websites.
One source of fear is certainly the education system. Little children are fearless, imperious anarchists, and the education system works and works on them over a period of fifteen years to instill docility so that they won’t complain too much when they end up with a boring job.
Life is about nothingness, so go and create your own life and enjoy it. Everything is vanity, fiction, conditioning, self-created, mind-forg’d.
Vanity and absurdity are the same thing – mere creations of man’s imagination, utterly without meaning.
Governments do too much and they do most of it badly.
Politics is not the art of running a country, it is the art of persuading the people that they need a set of paid politicians to run the country.
… the final insult is that we pay the government between a quarter and a half of our income for the privilege of being patronized and bossed around.
There is a real alternative to elected governments. It is self-government, or anarchy, or running one’s own affairs without relying on external authority.
Anarchy is about the creative spirit fighting the cowed spirit, and the battle has to start within ourselves.
What can we do to be ourselves, rather than trying to conform and contort ourselves into a uniform model? Well, we can start simply by ignoring government. The best way to smash the state is to take no notice of it and hope it goes away.
An important mental step in escaping the power of government is to understand that to some degree, we ourselves are complicit with the problem. By not acting for ourselves, we allow others to act for us.
In the existential world, where life is absurd, you may as well create your own life.
In order to keep bureaucracy and taxes to a minimum, we will earn small amounts of money and instead do favours for each other. We don’t want affordable housing, jobs and shopping centers. Those are slave’s perks, handed down by authority, which may be more or less lenient according to whichever government fate has installed. What we want is to create our own little aristocracies, as D.H. Lawrence has it. We want soil, caravans and trees, smallholdings, vegetable patches, art and crafts. And beer and books. That’s all.
Government is a license for people to kill and rape each other; government creates the killing and raping while pretending to prevent it.
Machines have never liberated us from toil, due to the fact that they need minding by a human being and are owned by the capitalists, in whose hands they become instruments of enslavement and prolonged boredom.
The accusation ‘unprofessional’ means ‘You did not behave like a machine today.’
Digital technology may supply you with what you want, but it won’t supply you with what you need.
The future is always about machines. But I don’t think about the future; I think about the present. The future is a capitalist construct. The past teaches us that the future has let us down, and let us down many, many times. Dreaming of some kind of technological utopia in which the machines will do all the work has failed us before, and it is failing us now, with our new faith in digital technology.
… the fact is, the past is a great treasure store of good ideas for living, ideas that were actually applied and whose results we can see. The problem with ideas of the future is that they are untested; they are all speculation, fantasy.
The very thing that we take on board in order to provide us with security – a home – seems to offer instead only anxiety and a feeling of being trapped.
The mortgage, which puts all the burden of buying a house on the individual, is the logical outcome of the individualization of ownership. But the reality is that in being sold the idea that we should all own our own house, we have simply given into a giant usury con.
We need to diffuse land ownership, ban usurious mortgages, stabilize rents and bring house prices right down. We could perhaps do this by simply losing interest in money-making.
The problem with vagabondage is that big governments can’t stand it. They hate the chaos, the unruly elements, the sense that people are wandering around the country doing what they like. When governments increase in power, they all have a resentful way of cracking down on vagabonds.
Putting a lot of time and money into mortgages and the ‘dream home’ is never going to be more than a distraction from the real issue, which is you, and your state of mind.
The family, which should be a source of pleasure, fun, cosiness and nourishment, seems everywhere to produce misery, anger, door-slamming, shouting, cruelty, fighting, death and abuse.
The modern family merely represents a financial burden – in other words, an inducement to take jobs you don’t like.
The commodification of childcare is another of the unhelpful effects of capitalism. You earn money doing something you don’t like in order to pay someone else to ‘do the childcare’, i.e., look after your children.
By confirming the existence of a problem, you create a market. That is why the pharmaceutical industry is forever creating new illnesses; that is why the insurance industry is forever creating new fears; that is why the government is forever creating new enemies.
The wonderful thing about children is not their so-called innocence but their passion, their passion for life and living. This can take the form of tears or laughter, and we need to get it into our heads that tears and laughter are both to be welcomed. You can’t have one without the other. They may even enjoy it – like the medievals, who seemed to embrace all extremes of passion. It is this passion that we need to find in ourselves.
We are fatally over-scheduling our children and creating a nation of useless dependents unable to do anything for themselves apart from the spectacularly useless and costly occupations of computer games, tennis and ballet. We are creating a generation of children who don’t know how to play.
Quality of life has been sacrificed to quantity of life. Living as long as possible rather than living as well as possible – that seems to have become the goal.
Fear of pain, indeed, might be seen as fear of life, since life is pain.
Pain will never leave us. Live with it. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure. Pleasure for yourself and pleasure for those around you. Sex, music, dancing, beer and wine, good company, good work, merry cheer: these are the antidotes to pain, and they are of course only pleasures because we know pain. Without pain, there would be no pleasure.
Private pension plans claim to sell you ‘peace of mind’, i.e., freedom from fear, but the reality is the opposite: they sell us fear and then sell the apparent solution to that fear – money.
So, when it comes to pensions, I am firmly of the ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die’ school. Belief in pensions produces a kind of slavery. If you don’t believe in pensions, then you believe in yourself and you believe in looking after yourself. This makes you free.
Funnily enough, the people who encourage others to worry about the future are those who want your money now.
It makes perfectly logical sense that in societies based on a collective ideal, manners and rituals are of the highest importance, whereas in societies based on a competitive ideal, manners are useful only as a means of getting what you want.
Disintegrating manners are a sign of a disintegrating society.
Don’t bother setting up free republics or moving to a country which offers more liberties. Simply declare yourself to be an independent state. Do not involve and coerce others. This is the only way we will effect a proper revolution.
Self-importance is a trap, because the moment we start to think that we actually matter is the moment when things start to go wrong. The truth is that you are supremely unimportant, and that nothing matters. All of man’s striving is for nothing; all effort is wasted. To realize that everything is meaningless is tremendously liberating, since it then leaves us completely free to create our own lives and ignore the plans that others have for us.
So we can see why artists and writers traditionally tend towards Roman Catholicism, while Protestantism is the religion for the serious man of business, the practical man.
We are all supposed to want to become rich. Wanting to be rich is one of the motors of a competitive world. Wanting to be rich is what keeps us striving, working, fighting, struggling, competing, conning and abandoning morals. And wanting to be rich is the precise impulse that is exploited by the people who actually do become rich, the usurers and the investors, the market manipulators, because they exploit our greed for their own ends. Wanting more money removes us from enjoying the present; it is therefore a Puritan trait. We should celebrate what we have. Wanting to be rich is actually the first desire that must be cast off in the pursuit of freedom.
Do it now. Give things away for free and money will lose its power over you.
… since shopping is today seen as our patriotic duty, to be thrifty is actually to be unpatriotic, and therefore it gives one a pleasant sense of rebelling against the state.
It is not thrift as self-denial and the preaching of sobriety, industry, frugality and virtue to the lower orders that I am recommending; it is more a spirited reclaiming of one’s own finances.
We should also be thrifty with our time, and that means not rushing through things and not wasting our time by giving it to an employer.
The tragedy of the nineteenth century was that Western man came to see himself, first and foremost, as a worker. Life became a serious business. Frivolity, mirth, play, ritual, dance, music, merriment, dressing up: those childish pleasures, all central parts of life for the nobles, priests and peasants of old, had been under constant attack since the middle of the sixteenth century.
Make money out of what you are doing anyway. In my case, I spend each morning writing and reading, and the rest of the day is given up to household work: gardening, cleaning, baking … The evenings are for drinking, eating and talking.
Education itself is a putting-off, a postponement: we are told to work hard to get good results. Why? So we can get a good job. What is a good job? One that pays well. Oh. And that’s it? All this suffering, merely so that we can earn a lot of money, which, even if we manage it, will not solve our problems anyway? It’s a tragically limited idea of what life is all about.
If the mortgage company owns 90 per cent of it, how can this be said to be owning your own house? Instead, you are in slavery to two authorities, the employer and the mortgage company. Fall behind on these payments, and the mortgage company will literally take your home from you. Therefore, you will subject yourself to all sorts of humiliations at work out of fear of losing your job.
Relaxing the hold that work has over your life and replacing it with play can be a slow and gradual process. The key to enjoying a life beyond full-time employment is to realize that, once you stop working full time, you start to become a producer, a creative person, rather than a consumer.
Be a jack of all trades; abandon perfectionism. Embrace the creed of the amateur. Do it for love, not money.
If you enjoy your work, then it’s not work. As my friend Sarah says, the trick to living free is to wake up every morning and screech: ‘Morning, Lord, what have you got for me today?’
QUOTES
Matthew de Abaitua
[Retirement:] secular afterlife.
St. Thomas Aquinas
Abstinence in eating and drinking has no essential bearing on salvation: The kingdom of God is not meat and drink … the holy apostles understood that the kingdom of God does not consist in eating and drinking but in resignation to either lot, for they are neither elated by abundance, nor distressed by want.
Simone de Beauvoir
Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.
Aldous Huxley
There will never be enduring peace unless and until human beings come to accept a philosophy of life more adequate to the cosmic and psychological facts than the insane idolatries of nationalism and the advertising man’s apocalyptic faith in Progress towards a mechanized New Jerusalem.
John of Brunn
A man who has conscience is himself the Devil and hell and purgatory, tormenting himself. He who is free in spirit escapes all these things.
E.M. Forster
Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
Masanobu Fukuoka
Humanity knows nothing at all. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort.
John Keats
Beauty is truth and truth beauty,
That is all ye know and all ye need to know.
C.S. Lewis
I believe a man is happier and happy in a richer way, if he has ‘the freeborn mind’ … and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of the Government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology.
Penny Rimbaud
Our lives are uniquely and intrinsically our own. It is a responsibility that few seem willing to bear.
Bertrand Russell
Democracy, as conceived by politicians, is a form of government, that is to say, it is a method of making people do what their leaders wish under the impression that they are doing what they themselves wish.
Jean-Paul Sartre
It is … senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.
Henry Suso
…Untrammeled freedom … When a man lives according to all his caprices without distinguishing between God and himself, and without looking before or after.
Leo Tolstoy
… even if the absence of government really meant anarchy in the negative disorderly sense of that word – which is far from being the case – even then no anarchical disorder could be worse that the position to which governments have already led their peoples, and to which they are leading them.
Raoul Vaneigem
The consumer cannot and must not ever attain satisfaction.
Tom Hodgkinson. 2006. Harper Perennial, New York. ISBN 978-0-06-082322-1
EXCERPTS
I have tried to bring together three strands of thought into a philosophy for everyday life; these are freedom, merriment and responsibility, or anarchy, medievalism and existentialism. It’s an approach to life that is also known as having a laugh, doing what you want.
In seeking freedom, I would define myself as an anarchist. In anarchy, contracts are made between individuals, not between citizen and state.
How to be free? Well, like it or not, you are free. The real question is whether you choose to exercise that freedom …
Anxiety suits the status quo very well. Anxious people make good consumers and good workers. Governments and big business, therefore, love terrorism – they adore it, it’s good for business.
Anxiety is the sacrifice of creativity in the service of security. It is the giving up of personal freedoms in return for the promise, never fulfilled, of comfort, cotton wool, air-conditioned shopping centers. Security is a myth; it simply doesn’t exist. This does not stop us, however, from constantly chasing it.
Belief in the abstract invention ‘career’ is a middle-class affliction. The lower orders, wisely, don’t quite have the same faith in progress and self-betterment as the bourgeois classes and neither do members of the aristocracy.
And now more than ever before, the middle classes attempt to impose their career ethic on everyone else. This is called ‘government’.
Governments sell themselves by promoting the idea of ‘equal opportunities for everyone to make the best of themselves’ when really what they mean is ‘equal opportunities for every slimebag to rat on his friends and colleagues in order to worship the false god of career advancement.’
Career is just posh slavery. And career is an institutionalized putting-off a paradise deferred.
Career, then, is a Protestant invention and an ideal for living that would have been impossible in the more fatalistic Catholic medieval society.
‘Learn a craft’ is what I suggest to young writers who contact the Idler: carpentry or blacksmithing or gardening or upholstery; such pursuits sit alongside the life of the mind very well.
Clearly we need to find a town of 50,000 people, 50,000 freedom-seekers, put a wall around it, declare it an independent republic and get on with things on our own. The medieval cities demonstrated to [Prince] Kropotkin that, left to our own devices, we can do a much better job of organizing our affairs than any government.
Solar panels are anarchy in action.
And as for your plans for the future? Well: we all know the Jewish joke: How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans.
… our resentment makes it hard for us to escape. Resentment can be a barrier to freedom.
Resentment of others – ‘It’s all right for you,’ the feeling that life is just that little bit easier for everyone else around you – is the first manacle that must be cast off in the quest for freedom.
The problem is not that people are different, but that they do not respect differences.
For some unfathomable reason, everyone seems to want an expensive watch. But isn’t it mighty peculiar that what is in actual fact a symbol of slavery should also have become a status symbol? Wearing a watch indicates to others that you have bound yourself to the modern industrial tempo.
It is one of the triumphs of the capitalist project that the slave-driver is now inside us, which saves an enormous amount on the wage bill.
We should abandon the expression ‘free time’, because it implies its opposite, ‘slave time’.
As the unusual German historian Johan Huizinga says in The Waning of the Middle Ages, modern man sees himself primarily as a worker, and this is the great change. No praying, no fighting, no working the land. Just work, hard work.
Competition is a slave’s creed. We think that by beating up the other guy we elevate ourselves, but, in fact, we are debasing ourselves to the level of a slave. To be competitive is a sign of submission as, really, it just means that we are carrying out the master’s wishes.
… ‘financial services’ – and there’s a euphemism for usury if ever I heard one …
… debt has been compared by many to a modern form of indentured labour. You get into debt, and then you are stuck in a job you hate in order to pay off the debt. This helps the system, as it means that most of us are more or less kept quiet and toiling.
It is credit, not cash, that makes wealth: apparently, rich people are often simply more spectacularly in debt than the rest of us.
To free yourself from the cycle of work-spend-debt-work, simply stop consuming and start creating.
Don’t make luxury into a meaning.
We desire things, we are attached to things, we believe that things will make us better. This process serves the postponement of desire which is one of the characteristic features, indeed a motor, of large-scale capitalism. The desire for things produces a restless craving, and this restless craving leads us into the world and into our schemes for betterment.
This is how capitalism works: through a constant stream of disappointments which encourages the spending of more and more money.
To work hard to produce useless items of nothing and then to make that the sole purpose of living – this is the insanity of desire.
So, put simply, if you have somewhere to live, enough money to buy or produce good food, friends, books and plenty of booze and cigarettes, then how bad can life be?
Desire and modern capitalism preach that means are unimportant and that ends are all: ‘I’m only doing my job.’
… fear is actually rather convenient to the smooth functioning of an orderly society. A docile population which is terrified of the authorities in their various forms, whether supermarket, bank, school or boss, and afraid of other human beings, will more likely depend on objects and institutions to give them guidance, solidity, security and a sense of meaning.
Fear keeps us observing life rather than living it. We are spectators rather than participators.
Fear is a tool of control. It is fear of punishment that will keep a classroom quiet and make the teacher’s job easier; it is fear of the sack that will keep the grumbling workers quiet. Fear is also an efficient controlling device. It also helps us to fulfill our roles as consumers. It is fear of life itself that keeps us spending in the arcades and typing our credit-card numbers into websites.
One source of fear is certainly the education system. Little children are fearless, imperious anarchists, and the education system works and works on them over a period of fifteen years to instill docility so that they won’t complain too much when they end up with a boring job.
Life is about nothingness, so go and create your own life and enjoy it. Everything is vanity, fiction, conditioning, self-created, mind-forg’d.
Vanity and absurdity are the same thing – mere creations of man’s imagination, utterly without meaning.
Governments do too much and they do most of it badly.
Politics is not the art of running a country, it is the art of persuading the people that they need a set of paid politicians to run the country.
… the final insult is that we pay the government between a quarter and a half of our income for the privilege of being patronized and bossed around.
There is a real alternative to elected governments. It is self-government, or anarchy, or running one’s own affairs without relying on external authority.
Anarchy is about the creative spirit fighting the cowed spirit, and the battle has to start within ourselves.
What can we do to be ourselves, rather than trying to conform and contort ourselves into a uniform model? Well, we can start simply by ignoring government. The best way to smash the state is to take no notice of it and hope it goes away.
An important mental step in escaping the power of government is to understand that to some degree, we ourselves are complicit with the problem. By not acting for ourselves, we allow others to act for us.
In the existential world, where life is absurd, you may as well create your own life.
In order to keep bureaucracy and taxes to a minimum, we will earn small amounts of money and instead do favours for each other. We don’t want affordable housing, jobs and shopping centers. Those are slave’s perks, handed down by authority, which may be more or less lenient according to whichever government fate has installed. What we want is to create our own little aristocracies, as D.H. Lawrence has it. We want soil, caravans and trees, smallholdings, vegetable patches, art and crafts. And beer and books. That’s all.
Government is a license for people to kill and rape each other; government creates the killing and raping while pretending to prevent it.
Machines have never liberated us from toil, due to the fact that they need minding by a human being and are owned by the capitalists, in whose hands they become instruments of enslavement and prolonged boredom.
The accusation ‘unprofessional’ means ‘You did not behave like a machine today.’
Digital technology may supply you with what you want, but it won’t supply you with what you need.
The future is always about machines. But I don’t think about the future; I think about the present. The future is a capitalist construct. The past teaches us that the future has let us down, and let us down many, many times. Dreaming of some kind of technological utopia in which the machines will do all the work has failed us before, and it is failing us now, with our new faith in digital technology.
… the fact is, the past is a great treasure store of good ideas for living, ideas that were actually applied and whose results we can see. The problem with ideas of the future is that they are untested; they are all speculation, fantasy.
The very thing that we take on board in order to provide us with security – a home – seems to offer instead only anxiety and a feeling of being trapped.
The mortgage, which puts all the burden of buying a house on the individual, is the logical outcome of the individualization of ownership. But the reality is that in being sold the idea that we should all own our own house, we have simply given into a giant usury con.
We need to diffuse land ownership, ban usurious mortgages, stabilize rents and bring house prices right down. We could perhaps do this by simply losing interest in money-making.
The problem with vagabondage is that big governments can’t stand it. They hate the chaos, the unruly elements, the sense that people are wandering around the country doing what they like. When governments increase in power, they all have a resentful way of cracking down on vagabonds.
Putting a lot of time and money into mortgages and the ‘dream home’ is never going to be more than a distraction from the real issue, which is you, and your state of mind.
The family, which should be a source of pleasure, fun, cosiness and nourishment, seems everywhere to produce misery, anger, door-slamming, shouting, cruelty, fighting, death and abuse.
The modern family merely represents a financial burden – in other words, an inducement to take jobs you don’t like.
The commodification of childcare is another of the unhelpful effects of capitalism. You earn money doing something you don’t like in order to pay someone else to ‘do the childcare’, i.e., look after your children.
By confirming the existence of a problem, you create a market. That is why the pharmaceutical industry is forever creating new illnesses; that is why the insurance industry is forever creating new fears; that is why the government is forever creating new enemies.
The wonderful thing about children is not their so-called innocence but their passion, their passion for life and living. This can take the form of tears or laughter, and we need to get it into our heads that tears and laughter are both to be welcomed. You can’t have one without the other. They may even enjoy it – like the medievals, who seemed to embrace all extremes of passion. It is this passion that we need to find in ourselves.
We are fatally over-scheduling our children and creating a nation of useless dependents unable to do anything for themselves apart from the spectacularly useless and costly occupations of computer games, tennis and ballet. We are creating a generation of children who don’t know how to play.
Quality of life has been sacrificed to quantity of life. Living as long as possible rather than living as well as possible – that seems to have become the goal.
Fear of pain, indeed, might be seen as fear of life, since life is pain.
Pain will never leave us. Live with it. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure. Pleasure for yourself and pleasure for those around you. Sex, music, dancing, beer and wine, good company, good work, merry cheer: these are the antidotes to pain, and they are of course only pleasures because we know pain. Without pain, there would be no pleasure.
Private pension plans claim to sell you ‘peace of mind’, i.e., freedom from fear, but the reality is the opposite: they sell us fear and then sell the apparent solution to that fear – money.
So, when it comes to pensions, I am firmly of the ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die’ school. Belief in pensions produces a kind of slavery. If you don’t believe in pensions, then you believe in yourself and you believe in looking after yourself. This makes you free.
Funnily enough, the people who encourage others to worry about the future are those who want your money now.
It makes perfectly logical sense that in societies based on a collective ideal, manners and rituals are of the highest importance, whereas in societies based on a competitive ideal, manners are useful only as a means of getting what you want.
Disintegrating manners are a sign of a disintegrating society.
Don’t bother setting up free republics or moving to a country which offers more liberties. Simply declare yourself to be an independent state. Do not involve and coerce others. This is the only way we will effect a proper revolution.
Self-importance is a trap, because the moment we start to think that we actually matter is the moment when things start to go wrong. The truth is that you are supremely unimportant, and that nothing matters. All of man’s striving is for nothing; all effort is wasted. To realize that everything is meaningless is tremendously liberating, since it then leaves us completely free to create our own lives and ignore the plans that others have for us.
So we can see why artists and writers traditionally tend towards Roman Catholicism, while Protestantism is the religion for the serious man of business, the practical man.
We are all supposed to want to become rich. Wanting to be rich is one of the motors of a competitive world. Wanting to be rich is what keeps us striving, working, fighting, struggling, competing, conning and abandoning morals. And wanting to be rich is the precise impulse that is exploited by the people who actually do become rich, the usurers and the investors, the market manipulators, because they exploit our greed for their own ends. Wanting more money removes us from enjoying the present; it is therefore a Puritan trait. We should celebrate what we have. Wanting to be rich is actually the first desire that must be cast off in the pursuit of freedom.
Do it now. Give things away for free and money will lose its power over you.
… since shopping is today seen as our patriotic duty, to be thrifty is actually to be unpatriotic, and therefore it gives one a pleasant sense of rebelling against the state.
It is not thrift as self-denial and the preaching of sobriety, industry, frugality and virtue to the lower orders that I am recommending; it is more a spirited reclaiming of one’s own finances.
We should also be thrifty with our time, and that means not rushing through things and not wasting our time by giving it to an employer.
The tragedy of the nineteenth century was that Western man came to see himself, first and foremost, as a worker. Life became a serious business. Frivolity, mirth, play, ritual, dance, music, merriment, dressing up: those childish pleasures, all central parts of life for the nobles, priests and peasants of old, had been under constant attack since the middle of the sixteenth century.
Make money out of what you are doing anyway. In my case, I spend each morning writing and reading, and the rest of the day is given up to household work: gardening, cleaning, baking … The evenings are for drinking, eating and talking.
Education itself is a putting-off, a postponement: we are told to work hard to get good results. Why? So we can get a good job. What is a good job? One that pays well. Oh. And that’s it? All this suffering, merely so that we can earn a lot of money, which, even if we manage it, will not solve our problems anyway? It’s a tragically limited idea of what life is all about.
If the mortgage company owns 90 per cent of it, how can this be said to be owning your own house? Instead, you are in slavery to two authorities, the employer and the mortgage company. Fall behind on these payments, and the mortgage company will literally take your home from you. Therefore, you will subject yourself to all sorts of humiliations at work out of fear of losing your job.
Relaxing the hold that work has over your life and replacing it with play can be a slow and gradual process. The key to enjoying a life beyond full-time employment is to realize that, once you stop working full time, you start to become a producer, a creative person, rather than a consumer.
Be a jack of all trades; abandon perfectionism. Embrace the creed of the amateur. Do it for love, not money.
If you enjoy your work, then it’s not work. As my friend Sarah says, the trick to living free is to wake up every morning and screech: ‘Morning, Lord, what have you got for me today?’
QUOTES
Matthew de Abaitua
[Retirement:] secular afterlife.
St. Thomas Aquinas
Abstinence in eating and drinking has no essential bearing on salvation: The kingdom of God is not meat and drink … the holy apostles understood that the kingdom of God does not consist in eating and drinking but in resignation to either lot, for they are neither elated by abundance, nor distressed by want.
Simone de Beauvoir
Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.
Aldous Huxley
There will never be enduring peace unless and until human beings come to accept a philosophy of life more adequate to the cosmic and psychological facts than the insane idolatries of nationalism and the advertising man’s apocalyptic faith in Progress towards a mechanized New Jerusalem.
John of Brunn
A man who has conscience is himself the Devil and hell and purgatory, tormenting himself. He who is free in spirit escapes all these things.
E.M. Forster
Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
Masanobu Fukuoka
Humanity knows nothing at all. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort.
John Keats
Beauty is truth and truth beauty,
That is all ye know and all ye need to know.
C.S. Lewis
I believe a man is happier and happy in a richer way, if he has ‘the freeborn mind’ … and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of the Government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology.
Penny Rimbaud
Our lives are uniquely and intrinsically our own. It is a responsibility that few seem willing to bear.
Bertrand Russell
Democracy, as conceived by politicians, is a form of government, that is to say, it is a method of making people do what their leaders wish under the impression that they are doing what they themselves wish.
Jean-Paul Sartre
It is … senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.
Henry Suso
…Untrammeled freedom … When a man lives according to all his caprices without distinguishing between God and himself, and without looking before or after.
Leo Tolstoy
… even if the absence of government really meant anarchy in the negative disorderly sense of that word – which is far from being the case – even then no anarchical disorder could be worse that the position to which governments have already led their peoples, and to which they are leading them.
Raoul Vaneigem
The consumer cannot and must not ever attain satisfaction.
Monday, October 8, 2007
Michael Childress Blog - Kickoff
Hello Readers (readers-to-be, that is)
This blog is designed to fill several roles:
This blog is designed to fill several roles:
- A personal perspective on the state of the country and of the world. This will tend to be dark, because the American Dream, and the dreams of the Founding Fathers, are almost completely undermined now by the REAL powers that be - who I will generally refer to as Our Masters. I will be providing evidence and commentary on this over time.
- A survey of ideas about how to dodge, as much as possible, the bad effects of the dark changes coming over the American scene. Dropping out of the system is one idea, with lots of alternatives, protecting your extremely vulnerable assets any way possible is another, although everything you have and hold is in peril, and ways and means to drop out of the sight and consciousness of Our Masters is a third.
- A personal chronicle of sorts as I try to effect some of these ideas. I don't want to detail my life and moods or anything like that, but instead talk about decisions and consequences, what worked and what didn't. I'll also report on what I have discovered about other people's efforts along these lines.
The content will be varied, and will include:
- What I call "Resource Reviews". These are mostly excerpts and quotes from relevant books.
- Links to resources and information. There are some good web sites and blogs and commentaries out there on the Net (none in the mainstream media of course: "The Revolution will not be televised."), and I will present links and other means of access as I come across them.
- News. If something important happens, I'll provide links and possibly commentaries.
- Chronicle. I have some decisions to make, and, indeed, we all have some decisions to make. Things are changing very rapidly, and a lot of people, in fact, probably 95% of the American "Sheeple" are going to get run over. So I will report on what I want to accomplish, how I go about it, and what the results are. And for other people's efforts, too.
- Anything else that I think would be enlightening or helpful for those of you with similar perspectives.
Comments to this blog are welcome. However, lots of what I will present will appear to be controversial and, for some of you, outrageous and provocative. That is not my intent. I just want to report on things as I see them. I welcome alternative viewpoints, but comments will be moderated - there is just too much incivility, rudeness, anger, frustration, and fear out there in the world, and a lot of this mind-set flows in the anonymous blogosphere. Drama and confrontation are tools of Our Masters, providing emotional distraction from the more important issues at hand.
Some basic themes:
"Be a tree not worth cutting down."
- Reg Saner
"War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength."
- George Orwell's Newspeak
"Fiat is money.
Debt is wealth.
Ignorance is Knowledge."
- Modern-Day Newspeak
Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open.
Mike Childress
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