What is freedom?

1.

the state of being free or at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint: He won his freedom after a retrial.

2.

exemption from external control, interference, regulation, etc.

3.

the power to determine action without restraint.

So… Are you free? Most likely not! And not independent either since they are synonyms!

And do you want to be? I bet you do! For one I can’t make you free, but I can probably point you in the right direction!

Starting out with independence

We are humans, as such we are born dependant. We rely on others (most times our parents) for everything, from food to protection.

In turn, we usually have to follow some rules imposed by our caretakers, which limits our so called "freedom". These limitations can be upsetting, and most people want to lead their own lives. Usually the first step is to move out of our parent’s home. Sometimes this is not so simple as moving out to college…

Here in Portugal, it is quite common to stay at the parent’s home for College, as the country isn’t so big and the Universities are in the main cities. This leads to some students not finding a place for themselves until mid 20s, some even 30s. I am 21 years and study at my hometown, so I’m not leaving home until ~22-23…

But this is just the first big step…

Jobs

For all it’s worth, studying fits here as well, albeit being "softer" and less monotonous than a normal job, at least where I study!

You are just out of your parent’s house, free at last! But alas… You need money to live, and here comes your next prison: your job!

In a job you are time and physically restrained, you have to be somewhere for a set amount of ours, doing a predetermined task, or even doing nothing… But you have to be there!

Lets assume you have a job you like (which is not necessarily true). Have you never had a day where you just don’t feel like going to work? Maybe that happens once a month… Maybe even once a week! I hope it doesn’t happen everyday!

If you are totally happy with your job, congratulations! If you don’t like what you are doing, or you just don’t like being stuck somewhere… Why are you working? The answer is most likely:

Money

Money is our biggest prison. We have to work to earn it, then we are more or less careful how we spend it, and we go through the cycle again and again…

The problem about money is that we are usually only shown one option to earn it… "A job". And there is a path we should follow, called a "career".

As we have seen a job is very time consuming, usually tiring, boring, repetitive, etc.

What you are looking for, is probably:

Financial freedom

This point is reached when you don’t have to earn another cent in your life… But most people don’t even consider it! They achieve this when they retire, and they get a "pension" from the government, which they paid for all their lives anyway.

The beauty is that there is a finite amount of money, that if you had today you could keep under the couch (or in a bank if you so chose), and be settled for the rest of your life. This amount goes down every year, as you have one year less to pay for…

And this amount depends mainly on how much do you want to live for the rest of your life! If you want to live a lavish life with big houses, sports cars and the like, of course it will be enormous! If you don’t, maybe you’d be surprised in a good way!

To achieve that number without following a normal job is the tricky part. Probably you are getting paid less than your job is worth, for example. After all, the company you work for probably keeps profits… A part of those profits is money from your work that you didn’t receive! This case is hard to fix…

Investing, in real estate or otherwise, starting your own business, making money from skills like writing or singing are, like many others, various ways you can step towards financial freedom… I won’t get into the specifics of each, but one big money maker is SAVING money, it’s incredible how much 5 minutes on google before each significant purchase can save you!

Just keep in mind one very famous quote…

With freedom comes responsibility!

João

Hello again! I think we’ve already spent enough time talking about defining goals so I decided to change the subject a little bit. Today I’ll be writing about the different stages our life goes through. I don’t mean infancy, childhood, adulthood and so on because these are obviously not related to your True Self (do you remember this guy?), these are just a natural consequence of time passing. The stages I’m going to write about are the stages you can choose to be in, which affect your choices and emotions.

From my experience, I don’t think we can spend our life only in one of these stages. I think everyone goes through all of them without any particular order. Please read further and comment at the end of the post. I’d like to know your thoughts about this and if you fit in any of them.

Stage 1 – Confidence

This is somewhere good to be. It feels good! You wake up believing you can do anything and perhaps you believe you can even do it better than everyone else. If you practice some sport you put all your energies into it because you feel unbeatable. If you are good at school you’ll study harder and harder so that you get the very best grade. This applies even for the smallest things you can think of even if it’s getting to the end of a computer game in a time record. Yes this is definitely somewhere we like to be.

However, like most things, it has its cons. This can turn into a very lonely stage if you’re overconfident so that no one can stand near you. Also, during this stage you tend to forget that you also fail and, when you do, two things might happen:

• · You ignore your failure or you just don’t realize you did it which, in my opinion, is the most dumb thing to do;
• · You realize you’re not so good as you thought you were. If you realized this then you aren’t in Stage 1 anymore.

Let’s go on to Stage 2. Hang in there!

Stage 2 – Loneliness

This is the worst stage to be. Feeling lonely is surely the worst feeling in the world. It’s worst than feeling pain because you also feel that no one cares about your pain. Franz Kafka which was a very renowned writer once wrote that worse than being alone is being alone among others… and I agree with him.

This is surely a very sad stage to be in but one must take this chance to think about life.

“What did I do wrong?”

“How can I do better?”

“Where do I want to go?”

Answering these questions is the first step to get out of the sad stage 2. Doing something about it is the next and last step. Depending on your actions and choices you may get to stage 3.

Stage 3 – Love

Eventually everyone gets here because no one can handle this world alone. One surely can use some extra help on that task. It doesn’t matter if you’re the confident type or the lonely type of person because you can’t resist love! At least I hope you can’t because I think that is where our true humanity lies. Kissing someone, caring for someone, giving birth to a new person is the only thing which kept us going. We may have our jobs and our daily routines but at the end of the day we wish for someone to hold us.

Sometimes we tend to forget how Love is important and we mistreat our parents or our friends or our girlfriend/boyfriend. But I’m sure you’d miss them if they walked away from you. At least I do…

So… after all, in which stage are you?

Kind regards,

Pedro

This week I had planned to write about Independence. That is surely a topic I will post about, just not today!  Somewhere this week I realized I had a much more pressing case to show you.

I have a friend, let’s call him Mark.

Mark is currently in the 4th year of an Engineering course in Lisbon, that lasts 5 years, one of the best you can take in Portugal.

Mark is intelligent and is even one year younger than his peers. He never liked to study a lot, but through high school he didn’t need to anyway. Once in college, and coming from a town 400km away from Lisbon, he easily made friends with guys from the same part of Portugal, who took the same train to go home as he did on weekends. These were not ordinary friends, turns out they were two of the best students in the course. They were very intelligent, and to support it they studied enough to achieve top grades at almost every class.

So why am I talking about Mark? You will find out soon enough… Keep reading =)

Somewhere over the second and third year, Mark grew distant to the friends he had made. He was roommate to one of them, but he moved out.  He started partying more, and studying less, but his grades were still good enough to pass classes.

Then, somewhere between the third and fourth year, he got a girlfriend back at home. This should be good news! But as it turns out…

Mark started going home every weekend. It is important to note its very hard for a student from out of town to study when he goes back home, so on weeks with tests/projects to deliver, most students stay in Lisbon to work on the weekend.

Problems that arise from going home every weekend:

• - Much less study and work on difficult weeks.
• - More expenses, and Mark is from a family which struggles a bit in terms of money.
• - Less hanging out with colleagues.

All this versus the so called LOVE.

The current situation:

Mark is missing classes to go home on Thursdays,  is starting the week tired by catching a 5 hour bus on Sundays that arrives at Lisbon 5am on Mondays.

Mark is spending more money. Mark complains about his Dad threatening to stop paying for College. Mark is thinking about quitting the course, with more than half the classes passed.

Mark is waiting for the girlfriend to save enough money to move in with her somewhere in Lisbon, while she currently is a waitress at her Dad’s cafe.

The future situation:

Mark realizes the way this is going, shifts things up a bit so he can study more, and finishes the course, so he can get a much better job, being able to provide better for his girlfriend and future family.

Mark doesn’t change anything, quits the course or his Dad forces him to quit, struggles to find a low paying job, and with no qualifications keeps struggling for the following years as well.

What would you do? What is the underlying problem here? Should he keep the current life he has so he can keep the "love" for his girlfriend? What is a better job at loving her, visiting her every weekend, or missing one or two weekends every month so you can provide a better future for both?

For me, the answer is easy, for him it seems it is as well, but its the opposite of my answer…

In the end, it’s decisions like this that define our lives. Therefore, it is in our best interest that we should think about these decisions well.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life regretting a road I took, or one I didn’t take but should have.

I sincerely hope you enjoyed this post, as I find it a very intriguing life case that makes me sad to see it unfold everyday. It covers lots of topics that interest me, from love, to money, to independence…

Hope you can learn as much from it as I did!

João