Is Simple Freedom Possible?

I love freedom. But I want simple freedom, not the complicated variety.

I do not want to wait for the next politician to say he, or she, is going to give me a little more freedom. They say whatever it takes to get elected. Why would you believe them? What evidence is there that any politician cares about your freedom with the exception of Ron Paul, maybe. Why do you think someone who has power over you wants to give you anything? Why do you think the government is going to give you anything when all they do is take, take and take. They steal, kill and even when they are not stealing and killing, they make everything more difficult with ridiculous amounts of laws and regulations.

I want freedom, simple freedom. Freedom in all it's forms.

Freedom from:

1. Rage. I do not want to be around people who ever exhibit rage.

2. Sarcasm. I do not need excessive sarcasm in my life. I don't mind a little bit of humorous sarcasm, but I think you know the kind of sarcasm that is no good. The hurtful kind. The kind that makes you feel bad. The kind of sarcasm that is meant to demean and manipulate.

3. Criticism. Why my wife, now ex-wife, felt she needed to criticize me is beyond me. I want to live my life as if I am a good person and that I matter. Being criticized does does factor into that kind of a life.

4. Excessive demands. You can get closer to simple freedom by avoiding people and situations that do not demand so much from you.

5. Excessive toil. Why do you want to have so much work that is hard to do? There are labor saving machines and tools to do most of the hard work. There are younger people and people who will do the hard work that is excessive for you. They want to do it now when they are young.

6. Exhaustion. Living an exhausted life is not healthy. It is not like wearing the rad badge of courage, it is just a stupid way to live.

7. Boredom. There is so much to do, to see, to read, to watch, to listen to and to experience. You really should never need to experience much boredom.

8. Tedious work. If your work is tedious, you need to start looking for something you actually want to do.

9. Invasions of my privacy. Privacy is crucial to personal development work. You want to have long stretches of uninterrupted free time by yourself to do whatever you are trying to do. You want to avoid the circumstances that cause your privacy to be invaded. You want the pleasure of alone time. You want to obtain the simple freedom of doing what you want to do without someone looking at you.

10. From a mountain of stuff. The very act of tossing out stuff is simple freedom at it's best. It is so easy to just throw things away and gain space and time.

11. Limitations.

12. Questioning. I have always wanted to be free of someone questioning me. To me, being questioned is so degrading, so humiliating, so unnecessary. When I was a senior in high school and when I would come home from college to my hometown, I wanted to go out in the evenings with my friends. When I would be going out the door my parents would ask me where I was going, who I was going to see and what I was going to do. I hated this intrusion into my life. I love my parents but hated this questioning. I rarely answered honestly. I wanted to spare them the truth.

The truth was that I was going to spend 6 or 7 hours drinking heavily with my best friends. We were going to do our best to have the time of our life. We often did. It was a glorious time. We always had fun. We drank beer. We drank shots. We drove fast. We chased women. We joked around. We laughed all night long. We sang at the top of our lungs. We played dice and other drinking games. We went to parties. We went to bars all over. We danced. We met women. We made out with women. We got laid. We had fun. We lived. Sometimes we ran from the cops.

How could I explain this to my parents? This desire to live, to enjoy life? To live a wild life of pleasure and reckless fun.

I could not. I have not been able to this day.

I do not regret one second of those days. They are still some of the highlights of my life.

My only regret is that I did not do it more and that it is hard to get together with my old friends very often anymore.

How can a young man explain to his parents what he is going to do?

He can't. That is my point. The questioning is what I hated.

I did not want to die in a fiery car accident. No one did. We wanted to live. We did not go out to get into trouble. We did not go out to fight. We did not go out to get blind drunk out of our minds and wrap our cars around a tree. We went out to have fun and to live.

How can you explain this desire to live a wild life, free of excessive inhibitions to people who just cannot understand this way of living?

So I didn't explain. I did not discuss. I did not tell them what I did or was going to do.

I learned early in life to just be quiet about what I was doing. There is no need to explain your every move. You do not have to get permission to do the things you want to do. You do not need to explain why you want to do what you want to do.

Don't waste your precious life explaining and discussing or justifying what you are doing. That is a waste of life.

Don't spend your life looking behind you at someone who cannot understand. Don't feel guilty because you want to live a different kind of life that someone else may not approve of. You do not need approval. You do not have to feel guilt. You are not hurting anyone are you? Maybe you are hurting your health a little, but this is your life to decide.

The first step to simple freedom is to not feel the need to explain everything you want to do. You just start to do what you want without excessive explaining. You obviously will not hurt others but if the things you want to do are not approved by others you do not bother to explain and ask permission.

You can not get the freedom you desire, or crave, without expending massive energy and making huge changes in your life situation.

You can't just watch a little less TV and call it freedom. That is a start, but only a start to simple freedom.

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