Living free | Regaining Freedom - The Authentic Life

The Gift of Anger

Your anger is a gift.

Zack de la Rocha (Rage Against The Machine)

Usually when people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.

Malcolm X

Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave!

Blade Runner (1982)

Slavery is a metaphor for a person who is not in control of their own life, but has their choices made for them. A man decides, a slave obeys.

The slave can have two internal responses to his situation. He can be sad, and passively accept it, but mourn inside, yearning for a better world. The outcome is no change. Emotion is directed inwards, leaving the outer world untouched. Not daring to express outrage, fear constrains the slave to internalise their problems.

The other response is anger. Anger means directing emotional energy outwards, towards making positive change. Anger is forceful non-acceptance of the status quo. It mobilises and catalyses individual resources towards change. Anger overcomes the constraints of fear, resulting in action.

Dealing with the Boss From Hell

We’ve all worked with the boss from hell. There are lots of types – the incompetent chair warmer, the obstructor, the ice cold backstabber, the teflon coated blame shifter, the psychopathic manipulator, the game player, the obnoxious person who is lacking in common decency or basic social skills, or combinations of these nasty traits. There is one thing in common – their ability to inflict misery on you at work.

Most organisations would rather pay the price for the boss from hell than throw them on the corporate scrapheap where they belong. So how do you deal with the boss who makes turning up to work something that you dread? Read on to find out what I did.

Moving From Consumer to Producer

We live in a culture that venerates consumerism – the cult of consumption. At the same time, if we only consumer what others provide, we up alienated and disempowered, leaving us feeling empty inside. The consumer culture keeps us on the treadmill, working our lives away, and at the end we are left with some gadgets that end up being put in a dumpster, and second hand ideas scavenged from Hollywood movies.

This posting is about moving from being a blind consumer of good and ideas produced by others – buying whatever is advertised, to someone who makes up their own mind on what they buy, and not only that, produces their own ideas and goods and participates in the market on their own terms as an equal. Read on to find out more.

Local vs Global – Becoming Resilient

For most of human history, the majority of people worked and lived within 10 kilometers of where they were born. International trade and travel now allows us to obtain goods from overseas and easily move to other countries, but at the same time, we are now dependent on oil to transport our food to us and allow us to get to our jobs. We no longer produce local food or energy or work near our homes.

Whilst cheap imports now underpin our way of life and standard of living, loss of local employment weakens our society. Parents have to work away from their children for much of the day, leaving little time for families. A lot of what we earn needs to be spent to maintain even a basic standard of living.

Globalism offers benefits, but how can we manage the drawbacks in our individual lives – economic insecurity, vulnerability to cuts in energy, food and water and demands on our time and family life?

Changing Perspectives on Sustainability

I’ve recently written about building resilient households and communities. This is a result of a mindset shift to free thinking that embraces technology, yet rejects the prevailing views of society based around control and hierarchy in favour of independent thought.

We’ve seen the fruit of conventional authoritarian thinking – massive bank losses, ordinary people losing their houses and jobs, problems of alienation, environmental destruction and wastage and constant warfare.

Read on to find out more about the contrast of values between traditional thinking and free thinking, and how this impacts on environmental sustainability and personal and community well being. Read more…

Resilience and Sustainability Principles for Freedom

Recently I wrote about how I see a sustainable, resilient community functioning. This would be based on renewable energy and local production of food and engagement with the market through production of goods and services from within the community. I see this an antidote to the stress, economic uncertainty, lack of autonomy and fragility I see in traditional centralised systems. I’d like to follow up with this posting about some of the principles that I see as necessary for successful resilient and sustainable communities or individual living.

The Resilient Community – A Plan

Recently, I’ve been considering the economic turmoil we find ourselves in. In my view, it is more than a recession, or a depression. I think that it is a turning point in society where the old ways of being a slave to conventional wisdom are no longer sustainable, and where we have an opportunity for greater freedom. This post is about an idea of a sustainable, resilient community that will help us regain our independence and freedom.

The Penalty of Leadership

In life there are the people who innovate, achieve and create the good things that we enjoy, and there are those who never measure up, know that they don’t and instead try to pull others down to their level of mediocrity.

Time and Money – Leaving the Rat Race Behind

You’ve probably heard the expression that time is money. This article is about how the free person needs to break the link between the two – so that time is time and money is money – and leave the rat race behind.

The term “rat race” evokes an image of the lab rat furiously running through a maze which ultimately leads nowhere. Similarly, linking time and money means not enough of either, and just enough to survive.

That Was Then, This Is Now

This posting is about leaving behind irrelevant outmoded ideas and ways, and being adaptable enough to survive and thrive in today (rather than yesterday’s world).