How To Be Free

On stepping off the treadmill

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you still paying for — in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it”. Ellen Goodman

Recently I met an old school friend I hadn’t seen for fifteen years. He retired recently and on discussing how life has been treating us, we concluded that less work is definitely the way to go! Funnily enough, he has started writing his memoirs, so I recommended the Medium platform to him.

Our discussion on working life, and the passage of time, got me thinking about how many of us spend our lives on the treadmill of work. That treadmill is so easy to step on to, so difficult to step off.

It is so easy to fall into the trap of giving up decades of our lives for work we don’t enjoy. We may put off doing what we really love in life, but for so long we lose our inner spark, our real selves. We may put our real passion in life on a shelf, to instead follow a career in a field which earns more. We may delude ourselves that one day we will come back to that passion, but we neglect it for so long it withers away, and the spark fades, perhaps to be extinguished altogether.

However, the trouble with deferred gratification, is that eventually you run out of road. You get to the later stage of your life, and you realise it has passed you by. You never actually did what you really loved. For many of us on Medium, that passion may be writing.

Creating our own prison

Of course, if we have taken on responsibility for children, we owe it to them to provide for their futures: that is only right if we bring a new life into the world. However, we often make things worse for ourselves than they need to be, by taking on more commitments than we actually need to, perhaps a larger house, a newer car, the latest devices, more holidays than necessary. Perhaps private education for children when free education is available.

Once we take on these commitments, we are obliged to pay for them often over many years of our lives. Then, rather than providing joy and freedom, the commitments become prison bars which force us to continue in a job which crushes our soul. This makes us unhappy, so we buy more consumer goods to cheer ourselves up, which only adds more bars to the window of our prison cell.

If we have taken on debt to pay for all these things, there may be a fair amount of interest to pay each month before we start actually earning anything. We start each month running to stand still. We are stuck on a treadmill of doom of our own making. As Rousseau stated:

“Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains”.

Liberal democracies promise us freedom, yet they come combined with consumer society which encourages ever-greater spending and keeps us imprisoned by our desires for more.

How to be free

This reminded me of one of the most influential books I have read, called “How to be Free”, by Tom Hodgkinson. It is recommended as a guide to how to find happiness by reining in consumer urges. Hodgkinson is also editor of “The Idler” and clearly has his work cut out. He makes the case that slaving for “The Man”, and chasing dollar, has us all enchained.

Hodgkinson’s message is that freedom and happiness comes from stripping life back to what really matters: health, and quality time with family and friends, time to pursue our hobbies, perhaps to turn them into our source of income, and time in nature. Managing to live with less, and enjoying the simple things sets you free from debt, and needing to work so much.

You can only live in one home at a time. You can lie on a beach whether you have nothing or millions. It is a question of perspective, and working out what really matters. In many cases, we create our own prison, by taking on financial commitments we could avoid.

Cars: a money pit

Take our car. Apart from our home, probably the most expensive item in our lives, but an incredible drain on our money. A car that may cost perhaps thirty thousand dollars depreciates rapidly, and after perhaps 15 years has no value. The worst possible investment. You might as well take the money out of your wallet, go into the back yard and burn it. Yet many of us may have two or more cars per family, and change them every three years or so. Madness.

Throw off your manacles

Hodgkinson recommends we free ourselves from these “mind-forged manacles”, from huge debts and high consumption, that require constant work and an endless stream of income, and slow down, simplify, downsize and chill!

Hodgkinson refers to “the tyranny of bills and the freedom of simplicity”. For him, to be idle is to be free, and he urges “cast off your watch….isn’t it mighty peculiar that what is in actual fact a symbol of slavery should also have become a status symbol?”

“The Western world has allowed freedom, merriment and responsibility to be taken from it, from ourselves, and substituted with greed, competition, lonely striving, greyness, debts, McDonald’s and GlaxoSmithKline. The consumer age offers many comforts but few freedoms. Governments by their very nature make endless attacks on our civil liberties. Health and Safety is wheeled out as an excuse to extend government powers.”

Feeding the hand that bites us

Hodgkinson continues:

“What we need now is a radical redefinition of human relationships, one based on local needs rather than the greed of global capitalism.” Hodgkinson looks at “the barriers to freedom and how we can free ourselves from anxiety, fear, mortgages, money, guilt, debt, governments, boredom, supermarkets, bills, melancholy, pain depression and waste”.

He claims governments seek to keep us in a permanent state of debt and anxiety, while corporations bombard us with advertisements to create wants we never knew we had:

“The commercial world, then, treats us like celebrities — ‘Because you’re worth it’ it says. It flatters and kowtows to us and keeps on doing so right up until the moment we hand over our credit-card details. Then we are cast aside and condemned to a purgatory of being held in a queue on a customer service line for all eternity. What fools we are.” In the words of CRASS founder Penny Rimbaud, “…we feed the hand that bites us”! The advertising industry ensures we never have enough — you are just one object away from happiness.

Hodgkinson continues:

“Put simply, if you avoid consuming the products of the system, then you will not have to pay for those products……The oppression will gradually depart from your doorstep. And you won’t have to work so hard. Life will become cheaper and easier.”

This is a theme taken up by the Voluntary Simplicity Movement.

The lure of career and idiot bosses

It is tempting to move up the career ladder, to take on more responsibility, to pay for all the debts and obligations we have taken on. However, that is a slippery slope. As we earn more we just adjust our expectations, and before we know it, we have taken on more possessions and commitments as we earn more, and are no better off!

Hodgkinson dismisses the lure of career:

“You start out doing work experience, you graduate to being bossed around by idiots, you become idiotic and, then if it all works out well, you end up being the idiot who bosses other people around…..Meanwhile, you salary rises, and you buy bigger cars and houses…..Career….is a greedy monster, never satisfied, always wanting more.”

He advocates avoiding over-specialising, or we risk become useless at everything except the one focus of our career, though rather like Paolo Coelho in “The Alchemist”, he exhorts, “find your gift”.

Cut up your credit card

Of course, to make matters worse, our economies are completely geared around feeding our desires, to keep us spending, to encourage ever more consumption. Companies constantly bombard us with advertising, much of it now carefully tailored by algorithms to know just how to tempt us most to buy things we don’t need. The advertising is almost impossible to escape. Is this real freedom?

Consumerism is a never-ending itch — the feeling that just one more thing and we will be happy. Except that doesn’t work. We buy that one more thing and it doesn’t quite hit the spot. More stuff actually makes us more miserable, which we try to escape from by……buying more. A never-ending cycle of misery.

The only way to break this cycle of addiction to consuming is to go cold turkey. It can be horrible to start with, like if you have been used to having a couple of sugars in your coffee and suddenly stop.

However, once you break the cycle, it suddenly becomes easier. The first week or month may be difficult, but then you suddenly turn the corner. The thing then, is not to fall off the wagon!

Hodgkinson states:

“Today we are imprisoned by our desires…….Shopping is just such a drag. I’d rather be drinking……The key is not to give up all pleasures but to be a master of them.”

The advice that material goods can actually make us more miserable is echoed in the words of philosopher Bertrand Russell:

“It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.”

So cut up your credit card!

When less is more

Real freedom, and real happiness, come from learning to be satisfied with less material goods and appreciating the good things in life which cost nothing: family and friends.

A local walk in nature costs nothing. Why pay an entry fee for a visitor attraction? Why pay for gym membership when we can just go for a run or do some housework rather than pay a cleaner, do some gardening rather than pay someone to do it for us, wash our car rather than pay to put it through the carwash?

That gadget you are tempted to buy online will only probably be used a few times, and then be shoved in a cupboard and forgotten, go out of date and need upgrading, or break and need replacing. Better not to buy it in the first place.

Learn to be happy with less to discover real freedom. Consumers of the world rebel: you have nothing to lose but your chains!