Free as in Freedom: A Guide for Attaining Greater Freedom

Here are some tips to living a freer life and not feeling bogged down by modern times

Hey Internet, Matt here. In today’s post, in honor of the Great USA’s Independence Day, I will take a word from our Founding Fathers and mention some ways I have found to obtain greater degrees of freedom in your life. These ideas will come from both personal experience and from readings I have done in the past few months. Without wasting any time, let’s get into this.

What is freedom anyway?

Asking, “what is freedom?”can get different answers from different people. It can also have different implications from different aspects of one’s life. There is no one-size-fits-all definition for freedom. For instance, financial freedom —not being reliant on a corporate job or in the yoke of debt— is a big deal these days and there are whole communities dedicated to it. Freedom can also be more intangible too. You probably know certain feelings like being free from something you don’t like or free from a mindset holding you back.

There are many ways one can describe freedom and I will list a few that I have found in my own life and some others that I have read about.

Clear Your Calendar

I know what you’re thinking, I can’t clear my calendar of everything, I have many events that are obligations or that I like to do. I’m sure that everyone has some important events every week that I can’t think of taking away from them. Keep those, I say, and remove the superfluous events that are just tying you down to things you want to do. Maybe, just maybe, you don’t need to schedule so many things and take time away from what really matters in your life.

If you have too many things going on, I really do suggest that you audit your calendar and strategically prune it down so that only the important things are able to stay and you free up time for things that you need to do and you have time to relax.

Declutter

On the topic of living with less, more freedom can be attained when you take a look at all that you own and get rid of some of it. You don’t necessarily need to go full ascetic/monk and renounce everything except for your cooking implements and one outfit. All you need to do is go through your stuff and get rid of the things that you don’t use or the things you don’t really want anymore.

There are many peoplr out there that are seen as more qualified than me (some random computer nerd) to give you advice on what to get rid of and how to get rid of it. Check out The Minimalists for some more on this concept of minimizing. There are others on YouTube and elsewhere that take this philosophy and make their own of it. Find what you like if they are too extreme for you.

Always remember the saying you can own something, just don’t let it own you. The owning you part comes to us because, in a sense our possessions come to own us and take our time and attention. Think about it, you could be doing something else right now, anything else, but you are reading this article. Furthermore if that phone or computer breaks, you are at the mercy of your desire to have the computer and eventually buy a new part to fix it. Other things follow the same logic. The more you have, the more space you need to store it.

Do what you can to get rid of as many decisions and as many things you don’t uws as possible and you’ll be more free.

Live Simpler

This is another broad piece of advice. It’s also one I’m gradually trying to implement. Simplicity can go in a similar manner to what I have just discussed and may also have some additional aspects to it. The golden rule for simplicity, in my opinion, is to eliminate as much of the noise as possible and find a peaceful path that is also in accordance with a lifestyle you want to live. For some this may be dropping everything and moving to the countryside to feel the freedom of not having to live in a constraining society. For others, simplicity may come in the form of dropping superfluous things (scheduled or unscheduled) from their day to have more time for the things that really matter (ro just to sit and do nothing).

Simplicity can also come in the things that one does. How? You may ask. Well, you have probably thought about the steps it takes to do something or the amount of things in somethingd that you do. That is the crux of this drive for simplicity. Making things more efficient with time and requiring less material aspects is an art that should be practiced. For instance, don’t you ever reflect and thoroughly enjoy a simple, yet tasty meal or appreciate simple designs better than designs that are elegant, yet cluttered with motifs or other creative aspects?

Living simply can take many forms for many different people, You, dear reader, will need to explore what simplicity means to you to effectively use it as one of the tools to bring more freedom to your life.

Cut out the Unnecessary Noise

In today’s day and age there is a lot of excess noise—lots of distraction—that is competing for our time and attention. This piece may be part of that, but it is up to you to not make it so. There is also a constant push to always fill our time with something that may or may not be useful to us, whether it be a TV show, a sports or video game, some pop album, a podcast of some sort, or a multitude of other things. There is a never-ending of things out there that is being pushed to us.

From personal experience, I have used noise to drown out other things around me in the past. Sometimes that was using a YouTube video to drown out the background noise of people talking or whether it was using music to be in my own little world while walking. Doing this seems innocent (and may well be if done in moderation or sparingly) but it can be damaging when done often. Unnecessary noise may create mental states that you may not want to be present. This can change your character into something you may not want to be and give you things that you don’t necessarily need in your life. Furthermore, it’ll eventually become a distraction from what you really want to do.

Distraction is a big deal, as I have come to understand. Being distracted, by definition, will push you from completing the goals that you want to complete. Think about the days that you spend doing things like being obsessed with a TV show or going from one youTube video to the next. How do you feel doing that and how much could you have gotten done if you hadn’t done that when you said you were going to do something you wanted to?

I invite you to be more mindful about what you put into your mind, body and soul. I also invite you to become more aware of what you’re getting out of your actions and consider making different choices to get different results. Removing things may make your life significantly better!

Be (or Don’t Be) Bored

You can debate with me for some time about boredom, but there is one thing I can definitely say is that sometimes the best moments come from the dull moments, the mundane times where you’re deep in contemplation. This point will definitely go hand-in-hand with the previous section. When you’re so simple and eliminate most of the unnecessary noise, there will be many moments of blissful silence which you might have avoided. In these moments you have the most freedom. You are free to think and do whatever comes to mind, whether that be creating some artistic masterpiece, going to the local bookstore and finding a book you’ve been wanting to read for years, or ceiling a friend to discuss something you have had on your mind for a while.

Now, let’s address the don’t be bored part of this section’s title. The state of our post-industrial jobs is debatable, but as one author, Tom Hodgkinson, puts it in his book How to be Free, our post-industrial jobs require concentration but, “not enough to really occupy our time.”He also mentions something that I have felt and dealt with in my own life, that “‘small is beautiful’ […] and ‘big is boring’” which lends itself to the size and shape of modern corporations and other institutions. All of these massive structures impose a sense of uniformity onto their workers, thereby removing the creativity from their jobs. Ideally, this lack of creativity is what creates the boredom. This mindset can likely bleed into other parts of our liives without even seeing it bleed.

Hodgkinson’s solution and something I’d promote is to get a fun hobby or start a group in your community. That hobby may be picking up an instrument (maybe a ukulele, as Hodgkinson recommends) or playing basketball. It doesn’t matter what it is, just find something that makes your life more pleasant to live and less of a bore.

Touch Grass a Bit More Often (Be More Human)

I know what you’re thinking, you probably think that I am not taking this seriously as a blog writer. I assure you that I am, this title is the best thing I could think of to say “Go outside and leave the electronics behind.”

It’s been said that many of us have problems with our relationships with our technology, some of us display addictive patterns with our phones and computers. Others of us spend way too much time on our TVs watching God knows what. While I’m not saying to go without social media (that’s a topic for another day) I am saying to be more mindful of how much time we spend with our screens and not let that interfere with our outside lives.

Some with more luddite-like dispositions may extend this addiction line of thinking to some of our other machines (like our cars and our washing machines) and say we need to take some time away from those. While I appreciate that sentiment, I am aware that most of us won’t go back to hand-washing our things and many more can’t just get up and walk or bike everywhere. There is that side of the argument and you could address it however you like.

I’m sure that you understand the benefits of unplugging from your devices and live in the real world a little more often. It will also help you to be more free because you are no longer one amongst the flood of advertisements and other things competing for your attention, along with millions of notifications. If you want to learn more about this mindset, consider reading books like Low Tech Life by José Briones, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr and Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.

Be Fearless

This is another of Hodgkinson’s bullet points (chapters) in his argument. Essentially he says, and I agree that, we should drop our fear within reason. Whether that means sitting on the sidelines of one’s life, watching TV about something insteda of living it, or even not taking the steps in one’s life that should be taken to get the optimal result, we should release that tension and do what needs to be done for becoming a free human being.

According to Hodgkinson, fear is a “tool of control.” Fear is used everywhere to keep people in line. The teachers in the K-12 system use fear in the form of grades and punishment to stifle creativity and thinking outside of the box and/or breaking the rules. Governments and other institutions use some fear-based mechanisms (like bills, laws, performance reviews, and other things) to keep us in line. The fear gets to us. Hodgkinson and many others (including me) have seen this fear develop into the fear of other human beings. This is not a life I want to live, nor should you.

Hodgkinson ends off his chapter about fear by mentioning Thomas Aquinas and how he thought, “fear is a type of creative force, not a destructive one—It’s not a reason to shrink away from living. Fear is a type of humility.” I think we should take this advice and have a healthy amount of living our life and not allowing fear to get in the way of this living.

Get a horse, go buy a motorcycle, do something to get out of your comfort zone. If you want to be free, break out of the prison of the comfort zone!

Learn New Skills

Skills are the things that make the world go around. Think about it, you run into people with varying skillsets all of the time. The mechanic you took your car for a repair is an expert in the machines from your manufacturer, the butcher you bought beef chuck steaks from is an expert in making the right cuts on beef, pork, and chicken; The IT guys at work are (usually) experts at getting all of the computers, networks and other devices working; and all of the people you see on TV are skilled at keeping an audience and doing something that evokes emotion. Everyone has some sort of skills and getting more useful ones makes a person more valuable.

Now, I’m not, in any way, condoning saying to run wild and gather many skills that can’t get you further in life. What I am saying is to go out and get useful skills. Use me as an example: I am learning to compose better written materials, I am learning how to speak a couple of languages (Arabic and Turkish), and I am also learning how to do forensics and incident response on computers. For now, these skills can align with one another very well. In the future, I will be a well paid investigator of incidents of malicious activity on various systems. With my writing skills honed in, I will be able to compose succinct reports that convey the results of my investigations well to the people I need to communicate them to. Finally the extra languages that I am learning will possibly be helpful in letting me communicate what I know to more people than I previously was able to. I am lso working on learning repairing things and building things whenever I have time.

So for the sake of you and your freedom, learn some new skills that will help you to not rely heavily on others and also to contribute more to the overall human collective. The world is yours, go forth and learn how to use it well!

Togetherness

This post is becoming longer than I intended. For your sake, this will be the last section before I end it. I’d preferably write a book on this topic if I wanted it to be longer.

It would be amazing to be be in a society where it was encouraged to go outside AND socialize AND be present and in the moment with large groups AND live in communal quarters. Despite the drawbacks of each of those and the drawbacks of the whole, it is definitely far superior to the loneliness epicemic that the western nations face today. As we see the prevalence of loneliness, we need to change the way we do things. We need to begin to form communities in our areas and do our best to include everyone we know in them.

In his chapter entitled Banish Loneliness, Hodgkinson compares today’s nature to two different places in time: the nature of the middle ages (as he does many times throughout the book) and other lesser developed countries. In the first example, Hodgkinson mentions that (despite al of its problems) the middle ages was an era of “love thy neighbor” and fraternity where “nobody was a slave and there nobody held private property either; all things were held in common without division, as though there was one single inheritance for all men,” as opposed to today where there is private property that definitely creates competition (keeping up with the Joneses) and covetousness. This modern notion of wanting to have all of the best things and being envious of those who have better things than you is very toxic to forming great communities because there will always be this underlying sense of jealousy, a jealousy that detracts from genuine connection, when another gets something that is arbitrarily better than yours. This notion of private property also leads to something that breaks up community: shrinking back into one’s house. This is not as nefarious and destructive as the ‘Keeping Up With the Joneses’, but it is worth talking about. The way we use our houses today, packing them full of things and stuffing as many screens as possible makes them more interesting than going outside and being around others. Being around the influences we see on TV can turn us into some very unsociable people (Hodgkinson’s ‘neighbors from Hell’ which is never a good thing.

How do we fix this? Well, we first have to make friends in our communities. We then have to go outside with them all in groups. Then we gradually include more people in the groups, and when those people get well-acquainted with the group we keep on going out with them. Now, how do we get rid of the ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ mindset? To get rid of that, and thus be freer, we should gradually make this sort of materialism be taboo and also be present with ourselves when we are acting this way. We should also stop seeking and striving to always impress others.

Conclusion

This post has been a combination of ideas from many different sources. I included ideas from the author of How to be Free, The Idler Magazine and other works, Tom Hodgkinson; the authors of The Minimalsts blog, Love People, Use Things, Everything That Remains, Less is Now, and Minimalism (among other works), Joshua FIelds Millburn amd Ryan Nicodemus (AKA The Minimalists); the author of Slow Productivity and Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport; and José Briones, the author of Low Tech Life. Feel free to check their work out if any of these ideas resonated with you.

Out of all of these ideas I just talked about, I have to say that my favorite ones were ‘learning more new skills’, ‘cut down unnecessary noise’, and ‘be (or don’t be) bored. I like all of these ideas together because applying them has helped me immensely in the past few months and I think they can help many other people. Finishing a master’s degree taught me the importance of focus and attention. Writing a thesis takes alot of attention to not only not make grammatical errors, but to follow all of my arguments and provide proper support for each argument. Achieving this took a combination of all of these aspects of my argument. I’m very sure that people can utilize these states in their own way to get big things done or to just do the smaller things better.

I hopw you enjoyed this post. If you did, don’t hesitate to subscribe and share it with your friends. Until next time, this has been Matt, talking about how to be a more free person. Salutes to your freedom as a human, Matt OUT!