I used to work in the city. I had one of those soulless jobs where you exchange your general wellbeing for money. I was expected to be in the office before everyone as well as the last one to leave. Even when I got home in the late evening, I really was still at work. I was 'on call', and I got called regularly. Weekends weren't safe either since I had to carry out system checks to ensure our multi-billion dollar trading platform stayed up and running the following week.
Holidays? Hahahaha. Sure, as long as my Blackberry worked wherever I was going. Even though I was entitled to up to 3 weeks of paid vacation I never really could take them off. We were always short staffed - a cost cutting effort that was supposed to be 'temporary'. One middle-manager replaced the other and the situation became permanent.
I remember the day I walked away from that very well paying job to reclaim my life. It was the riskiest thing I had deliberately ever done up until that time. To get up and just leave a highly paid job with a lot of benefits. I decided my actual life was more important. In hindsight I actually didn't have a plan. I think I was hoping for a lottery win or a viral YouTube video or something equally unlikely. But it felt good, and it felt right.
I've since become a serial risk taker. Don't get me wrong, I don't take stupid risks, just calculated ones. Some of them have been epic failures, but I knocked a couple of them out of the park. So much so that they covered for the earlier failures. I have since developed a completely different relationship with money as I had before. I have become less attached to it. I don't try to hoard it and I don't spend money I don't have. You could say I am now 'financially free'.
Most people associate the term 'financial freedom' with having lots of money. That's not necessarily the case. You can be financially free without being rich. The 'freedom' part is the critical bit. I see a lot of people spending money they don't have on things they don't need. They have somehow convinced themselves, or have been convinced by others, that they need said thing. It's a big problem here in the west. The consumerism lifestyle that we live compounded by the constant marketing stimuli that hit us from every angle create constant desire for excess. Learning to free oneself from that desire is as good a way, and probably a faster one, towards freedom.
We are currently witnessing a once-in-a-lifetime event brought to us by cryptocurrency. There is a gigantic transfer of wealth ongoing and a lot of savvy/lucky folks that happen to have been in the right place at the right time are gaining a lot of wealth very quickly. There is a whole new class of super-rich being created right this moment.
Those old enough to remember the dot.com boom (and bust) would be experiencing deja vu, but this time it is a little different. With that boom, there was a higher barrier to entry preventing everyone from participating in, hence benefitting from, the bonanza. This time around, all you really need is a smartphone. Yes some money does help, but I have seen people that started from zero and made it all the way to hero in just a couple of years or less!
Never before has it been this easy to make money on the Internet. I am a veteran of this stuff, so trust me I know. Back in the day, the mechanism didn't even exist. Adsense wasn't a thing. Heck, Google itself wasn't yet a company at all. Making money on the Internet, or "online" as it was more commonly referred to at the time, was a royal pain in the derriere. So much so that it had a bad connotation since most people that did it resorted to spammy, scammy or outright criminal marketing techniques.
Nowadays you can turn on your smartphone camera and talk into it, take a photo, or whip up a quick article and get paid for it. If you told me this was going to be possible one day, back then, I'd laugh you right out of the room. Then I'd follow you outside and keep laughing at you. Then I'd call all my online buddies and we'd all surround you and laugh at you some more while pointing at you like schoolyard bullies.
Back to money and financial freedom. I don't know if it's the poor financial education, or the lack thereof, that causes nearly everyone to develop this unbalanced relationship with it. Perhaps if we're just told the truth about it from the beginning, we'd all be better off today. I remember a colleague asking me about pensions and retirement right when I was leaving the firm. Like I said before, I didn't really have a plan. I'd think about all that later. Now that I have had enough time to think about it I have realised the following;
You know who doesn't have or worry about pensions or retirement? wealthy people, that's who.
It dawned on me that future uncertainty is one of the many tools they use to enslave us in the workforce. The pension scheme, while it has served some positives, is one of those two edged swords and that giant carrot in the distance that keeps you cycling. My opinion of pensions permanently changed when I witnessed how young hot-shot city 'bankers' embezzled entire pension funds as part of the 2007/2008 financial crash. Money diligently put aside by simple folks all their lives gone in one spasm off juvenile risk taking.
I dream of a future where people are able to have a profession on which their actual financial needs don't depend. In that world, people are able to do the work they actually love, and are good at, which would be detached from how they actually make money. I know, I know, it sounds totally impossible and somewhat utopian. But what if someone told you in 1996 that one day someone would find a way to apply cryptographic mathematics to the field of finance, thereby creating multiple multi-millionaires and challenging the stranglehold of banks and governments on money?
Happy International Workers' Day and thank's for reading this.
Peace & Love,
Adé