Ownership of Your Human Life

Who owns you? To what obligations have you promised? Do you have freedom of choices or freedom of choice?

Every day I evaluate my life and try to measure what I am doing to what I believe I can do. I find that most days, my assessment is aligned. If I believe I can do it, then I normally accomplish it. But this makes me wonder about the limitations of belief. What would happen if I suddenly chose to believe that I could do something I never had done before? Let’s say it is something that ‘has’ been done before, just not by me. If I believe that I could do it, then could I?

And now let’s take this up to the next level. There are an infinite number things that we could do that haven’t been done yet. How do we assess the reasonable from the impossible? Or is it all possible with enough ingenuity and creativity. These particular Human attributes that define us from the other species on this planet.

This takes me back to my original question of ownership. Freedom is the state of belief. You believe you can free yourself from your obligations to others. For instance: We as a Human species need a certain amount of material things to live long and prosperous lives. We need to eat, clothe, have shelter, find social bonding, and learn. All these things we are indebted to others to provide. The stores have food and clothes. Someone else built our shelters we live in. Our social groups tend to be centered on our work or family. And the cost of learning is a lifetime financial obligation.

This is where the power of choice comes in. We can either choose from different providers or we can choose to be the provider. As a much more specific example, let’s take the problem of food. If we learned to cook we reduce the financial cost of going to restaurants. If we learned to grow our own vegetables, we take out of the equation the high cost of healthy food and add in the convenience of walking to our garden. Buying fresh meat and cooking it that day reduces waste. With time, we could start to preserve our EXTRA vegetables and meat through dehydration. Having the EXTRA is key to our freedom. What freedom would come from knowing that you have a year’s worth of food available in your own pantry. Knowing that you and your family would never starve.

My challenge to you is to add this thought process to other areas of your life. You bought a large house. It is a liability until you decide to rent out the spare room on Airbnb. You have extra space in a large garage, you could rent it out. Turn the EXTRA in your life into EXTRA freedom.

In the end, it is our life and our choice. Are we taking the time to design our own lives to acquire the EXTRA, or is someone else designing our lives for us and ensuring any EXTRA goes to them? If the latter is true, how can we say we are free.