How to Be Free

Becoming Your True Self

Decide what total freedom means for you. Can you be free if you live at home with your parents? Can you be free if you're incarcerated in a jail, or live under a totalitarian regime? Can you be free if you work 9-5? It all depends on you. Only you can actively improve yourself and your station in life, moving toward the freest possible version of you. For lots of people, moving to college seems like total freedom: no parents, unlimited Xbox, and co-ed bathrooms! But college is still a campus-shaped bubble where meals arrive with the swipe of a card that someone else probably paid for, where you've got to live by the rules of the syllabus if you want to pass.

Identify what you want from life. Think forward to the end of your life. When you're looking back over it, what do you hope to see? A life of pleasure? Of accomplishment? Of family and success? Of endless parties? Do you want to be respected and feared, or do you want to live a quiet life of solitude and contemplation? Try to identify what will make you happy, in and of itself, and what kind of a life makes room for that happiness. Many people instinctively think large sums of money lead to limitless freedom and happiness. While that may be true, try to think instead about what it is you'd do with an unlimited supply of money. What would it make easier, specifically? What would you do if money were no object? How would you spend your time? There's your answer. If you struggle to decide, instead of focusing on an ideal day--which, let's face it, we'd probably all spend at the beach--Try to think of your ideal week. After a whole week on the beach, we'd all probably end up sunburned and bored. What kind of work would you do? When would you do it? Where?

Identify what is keeping you from getting what you want. Are you living your ideal life right now? If not, what stands in your way? What would need to change to get what you want? If you are living your ideal life, what would be necessary to sustain your lifestyle? Why aren't you doing what you want right now, today, this moment, this second? What's stopping you? Again, it's easy to blame money for our problems: "If only I had the money, I could get that new guitar and my band would be great," we say, making excuses for why we're not signed to a lucrative record deal, forgetting that a new guitar has nothing to do with your ability to write a catchy melody, play well, and work hard on stage. If only you had the money, it's true, you could travel to Thailand, or write novels all day, or spend all your time gardening heirloom hot peppers. But it's probably not money that's really keeping you from doing those things--it's you giving up on the hand you've been dealt, and folding the cards.

Identify the steps necessary in achieving what you want. It's hard to find total freedom and happiness overnight. It'll likely take some effort to get what you want and find your ideal environment in which to live your life. What efforts on your part will be necessary to getting what you want? Say you decided your ideal life involves having a small and loving family, who leads a quiet life in the country growing vegetables. If that would give you the type of freedom you desire, what can you do now that will actively move you toward that reality? In the long term, you might start studying permaculture, or wildlife management, or some other field that would involve work in the natural world. Where might you like to own a home? Would you build your own house or buy one? What do you need to save to make it a reality? In the short-term, you might check out rural co-ops or communes you could visit and exchange work for room and board. Or check out World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF), a program that lets you volunteer on organic farms around the world, getting experience.

Surround yourself with people you admire. Role models are essential in finding your true self. As much as we like to think of ourselves as perfectly individual snowflakes, it's important to surround yourself with people who live as you would like to live, not to mimic their behavior, but to learn from it and apply their lessons in your own life. Be careful of constantly comparing yourself to other people if it makes you get down on yourself. Remember, you never know what hardships others really face, only the outside view. Competition can be good for some people and terrible for others. Know yourself and focus on your own life. Worry about your own backyard. Meryl Streep Meryl Streep, Actor Identify confident role models to inspire your personal growth. "I think the best role models for women are people who are fruitfully and confidently themselves, who bring light into the world."

Being Responsible for Yourself

Do it yourself. If you can do something, do it. If you don't need help, don't ask for it. Taking more responsibility for your life and becoming accountable for yourself is the right and responsibility of a life lived freely. Volunteer for things that fall in your wheelhouse, and take on projects that might challenge your abilities, so you can improve yourself and your work. Try to actively expand the list of things you can do by yourself. While it's true you can take your car into the shop every time a light goes out, you'll save money and become more self-reliant if you learn to perform a basic tune-up. Alternatively, it's also good to accept help and learn to recognize when you need it. Being self-reliant doesn't mean being foolish and ignorant of your abilities. If you don't know how to change your car tire, learn how, so you can become more free and less reliant on others in the future. But in the moment, be honest with yourself.

Prioritize your wants and needs. Identify the things you want and the things that you need to live your ideal life to help create perspective. "Needs" include anything necessary to sustain a comfortable life. This includes food, shelter, and basic health care. "Wants" might include travel funds, books and movies, or whatever it is that would improve your quality of life. Ideally, if you think about these things as a Venn diagram, they should look as close as possible like a single circle, overlapping almost entirely if you've structured your life in an ideal way. If what you need and what you want line-up, you'll be living the happy and free life you want to lead. What might you change to realign the diagram? Try to create a budget to account for all your needs and as much want as possible to live sustainably. The less you have to worry about money--the less you have to think about it at all--the better off and the more free you'll be.

Pay off all your debts and live within your means. Student loans and credit card debt will keep you under a heavy curtain of debt that makes it very difficult to live by your own hand. If you're beholden to debtors, can you be truly free? It's a challenge that's unavoidable for some, but you can help yourself move toward freedom by paying down your debts as best you can and as quickly as you can, and by avoiding accruing new debt.

Be the boss of your life. Find work that you love and the work that will allow you to live freely and do what you want. Even if you have to report to a real "boss," you're beholden to no one as long as you say so. You're in charge of your own life. If you work in an environment that doesn't afford you enough freedom, find a new job. How you choose to define work might be complicated. Plenty of people "work" during the day doing something that may or may not define their calling in life. Walt Whitman was an ambulance driver, but he also wrote some of the greatest American poems ever written. If your ideal life involves working only 15 or 20 hours a week, it might be difficult to sustain that life in Manhattan or Los Angeles. Prioritize the various aspects of your ideal life. If the desire to live in a cultural hub outweighs your desire to work less, get multiple jobs, 8 roommates, and move to the Big Apple. If your time is more precious to you, find somewhere the cost of living is cheap and you'll have your time.

Write your own code and live by it. What are the criteria of a life lived well? What is necessary to move through the world with dignity and poise? One person's rules may not be applicable for everyone, but it's helpful to have them for yourself. If you want to be free and call the shots, write your own code like the Klingon or the Samurai, and live by it. Lastly remember that in order to achieve your biggest dreams you need to have faith in yourself.Always believe you can do it, cause at the end of the day the person who says they can't and the person who says they can will probably both be right.You are what you believe.

Seizing Each Day

Allow yourself to act impulsively, sometimes. Fried squid and bloody Marys for breakfast on a Wednesday--why not? Weekdays don't have to be plain oatmeal and black coffee. If it sounds good to you and there's no harm in doing it, do it. Breaking up monotony and listening to your own impulses can be a great way of keeping life fresh and exciting. As long as it's legal and not counterproductive to some necessary part of your life, act impulsively. Live in the moment. Sometimes, allowing yourself to break small rules of protocol or tact can be a good way of asserting your freedom in the world. Play what you want on the jukebox, even if the other bar patrons don't want all 11 minutes of "Heard it Through the Grapevine."

Visit new places. Expanding your perspective of the world and learning to embrace freedom requires that you occasionally get outside your comfort zone and experience new things. Visit new places, try new activities, eat new foods. Explore the world and enjoy it. Traveling can be big or small. You don't have to hitchhike to South America to travel and experience something new. Visit new parts of town you've never visited, or explore the small town next to yours. Go somewhere you don't know anyone and learn everything you can. If it's new to you, Brooklyn might as well be Crawfordsville.

Celebrate every accomplishment, no matter how small. Allow yourself to be proud of yourself. Allow yourself to celebrate successes, or even to celebrate a lack of failures. Each day you've successfully negotiated is cause for reasonable celebrations. Spend time with people you enjoy and give yourself good reasons to work hard.

Start living freely right now. The older you get and the more of the world you experience, the more one thing becomes clear: the only circumstance that's keeping you from happiness and freedom is yourself. Let go of your preconceptions, your hang-ups, and your fears. Free your mind by letting yourself experience the world fully and make each day count. Live the life you want to lead. There's no reason not to. Be careful of becoming a slave to your ideal version of yourself. It's easy to say, "Everything will be better after I graduate" or "Everything will be better after I get this project done" or "Everything will be better when I move to Portland." Will it? How can you be free in spite of your challenges? How can you be free right now, where you live, right this second? How can you change your environment for the better?