10 Key Motivators:#6 More free time
Working for an employer is a sink down which a very large part of your time will disappear. Perhaps you enjoy your job. Maybe showing up at work every morning is a positive joy. Then why are you reading this blog? Enjoy it or not, in all likelihood you are a “wage slave”. Wage slaves have to report to work at a time prescribed by their employer and remain at their workplace until another time prescribed by their employer. For many people, freedom comes at weekends and for one brief 2-week vacation once per year.
Life in the Employment Penitentiary
This discipline extends throughout the average person’s working life. It often starts at age 16 and, for those who are “fortunate” enough to avoid downsizing, redundancy and other unnatural disasters, goes on until age 65. That is a period of 49 years of incarceration in the working world. The average person may expect to survive for maybe 10 years following retirement. If the average person has managed to scrape enough money together during their working life, that all-too-brief interval between retirement and membership in the choir immortal may bring some sampling of the pleasures of freedom.
Flexible Slavery
Some people enjoy the luxury of relaxed servitude. Schemes such as “flexible working hours” can permit wage slaves some elasticity in their terms of incarceration. But the inevitability of reporting to the workplace can only be adjusted within very tight guidelines. Wouldn’t it be nice to be the master of your own time? Financial independence means that you are no longer a wage slave. No more reporting to work at a time determined by somebody else, in exchange for money that is already committed to paying the mortgage and utility bills, taxes, car loans and other fixed expenses.
Punch Your Own Clock
For many years I deceived myself into believing that I was pursuing a career. I was doing something useful in the world. But the seasons they went round and round and grey hairs started appearing on my head. As I neared the involuntary end of my career I met a group of gentlemen who were doing something useful in the world that was peripheral to the mainstream of industrial activity. I made contacts with other people who were similarly inclined and I began to get involved in fulfilling activities that were disconnected from my role as a wage slave. In effect, I was enjoying the satisfaction of doing something useful in the world without coupling my activities to the need to earn a living. I was elated to a far greater degree than I ever experienced while working for a salary. I was using time – my time – in a manner chosen by me.
Nothing is Really Work …
Of course, substituting wage slavery with self-employment often imposes an even greater commitment of time. The difference is that the timekeeper is you. And, as the Scottish writer James M. Barrie once said: “Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.”
