Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION - Posts Tagged "freedom"

On Saturday I went hiking in Swatara State Park, and the hike was of sufficient length to leave me in a state of complete exhaustion for the rest of the day. I spent it on the couch, watching Murder, She Wrote and various other low-energy pursuits which in no way involved writing my Saturday blog. For those of you who care, assuming such creatures exist, you have my apologies. While I have greatly enjoyed putting out two blogs a week, every week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, there are times when life just gets the best of me and I can't make my deadlines, self-imposed or otherwise.

It is now 10:33 PM on Sunday night, and I am sitting here by the light of a red lamp and a single candle, sipping whiskey on the rocks. I have been a busy boy since I knocked off work on Friday, and am almost relieved to be returning to the grind of what I sometimes refer to as "my day job" tomorrow morning. In recent weeks I've made a point of being more productive in my personal life, i.e. doing more and breaking out of my ordinary ruts and routines, and while it has been rewarding, it has also been exhausting. I once took a personality quiz which told me I am an "extroverted introvert," and one of the characteristics of this beast is that while he enjoys socializing, it costs him a great deal of energy which can only be replenished in solitude. Today was a solitary day, and it gave me time to recharge my batteries, all the while plotting further adventures.

For people like me, who have to force themselves into action, and who are at any rate disorganized and procratinatory by nature, it's a big deal to make plans, and an even bigger deal to keep them. I have been working harder than I would have believed to notch as much travel as I can this year, but haven't gone anywhere farther than 100 miles from my home. That will change in a few weeks when I go to Dallas. Aside from driving through the North Texas "funnel" and stopping for gas, I've never actually been to Texas, so that will be an experience. I am also currently in the finer details of a weeklong excursion to Canada in the summer, during which I hope to see Toronto, Ottowa, Montreal and Quebec City, or at least some combination of the same. I am also hopeful of seeing Los Angeles again by the fall, and plan a long weekend getaway to the Jacksonville area before too long. How much of this will actually come off I can't yet say: travel is terribly expensive nowadays, and that got me thinking about a rather sore subject: the cost of living.

I am not referring to the ordinary cost of living as it is defined by the government. I mean the literal cost of living -- the fact that we must pay to simply exist. When you really think about it, there is nothing, literally nothing, in modern life which does not require money. Food, shelter, drinking and bathing water, clothing, transportation, education, recreation, procreation -- it all has to be paid for in hard cash. We do not actually have to hand over money for the air we breathe, but I am convinced that if corporations could find a way to charge us for our O2, they would happily do so. Whenever I see films or documentaries on tribal societies, or even the settlers of the Old West, what strikes me is their actual, physical freedom in the literal sense of the word. They are not free from disease or hard work, but they are free from the taxman. They are free from the landlord. They are free from the bureacrat, the functionary, the lawyer and the sheriff. They do not pay for their food or clothing and they do not ask permission to move their residence. No one is telling them what to do: what they do is driven by necessity, and to a much smaller extent, by whim and desire. They have the awesome responsibility of taking care of themselves, and answering to almost no one.

Nowadays, we are locked into a pattern of existence quite the opposite of the one for which we were genetically designed. Our tribal groupings have been destroyed, and we no longer experience freedom in any meaningful sense. We cannot, for example, just decide to go live in the woods, because the woods are now someone else's property. Thanks to corporations, in some states we cannot even live off the grid without breaking the law: to collect rainwater, for example, or generate your own electricity, will land you in jail, for the simple reason that corporations can't profit off you if you aren't paying for their services. From the moment we are born, we are numbered, registered, logged, booked, and tracked. We are also governed by a staggering number of laws, rules, and regulations, which grow in number every year. What's more, we must pay agencies we never really see for the privilege of living anywhere at all. Somehow "they" -- this strange conglomeration of governments and banks and wealthy individuals -- own everything, and they make us pay out the nose to have anything. This requires most of us to work at exhausting, mind-numbing jobs which do not really produce anything and have little justification for their existence, so we can make a barely sufficient paycheck to cover our rent.

Think on that for a moment. How much more freedom would you have if you did not have to pay rent, or a mortgage? Most people's lives would change immeasurably for the better. I myself would live a completely different lifestyle, be free from the vast majority of my worries, and be able not only to enjoy myself more fully, but also help others less fortunate than myself. The few times in life I was rent-free, my bank account swole to outrageous proportions (relatively speaking) in a very short period of time. Yet most of us not only have rent/mortage, utilities, food, etc. to pay for, we also must pay student loans, credit card bills, and suchlike. The focus of our lives -- the best parts of our lives, physically and mentally -- is making money to have the necessities of life. Not to get ahead. Not to live our dreams. But simply to tread water, to stay afloat. And it is a struggle many people are losing. Right now, everything from gasoline to electricity to food to hotel rooms are all outrageously expensive. When I was in college, a gallon of gas cost 99 cents. It is now about $3.50 - $4.00. People shrug and say "inflation," as if that were a natural and not an artificial process: they also point out that people make more money now than they did then. And this is true. But do they make 350 - 400% more money? It seems to me that we are in a race we cannot win. That we are dying, economically, by inches. That every decade takes a little more actual freedom away from us. And I don't just mean economic freedom. I mean freedom from fear. Money, in the last extremity, does not buy us goods and services: it shields us from fear. If I took a straw poll about the worries of the ordinary person in this country, I am 100% confident that their fears have a hell of a lot less to do with the war in Ukraine, or the environment, or China, than they have to do with the price of bread and electricity. Everything keeps going up, up, up, and with that "up," down goes freedom.

When I was a child, I used to ask my father why people couldn't choose their nationality, or simply choose not to have one. Why they simply couldn't opt out of modern life and go live on a boat in the ocean or in the woods, so long as they were willing to accept the consequences of self-exile. He never really gave me an answer I could accept. Decades later I am still wondering. Why is it that we have no really meaningful say in the lives we lead, why are most of the choices offered to us are as meaningless as whether our car is silver or red? Why our are destinies written for us by accidents of birth? Why can't we walk away, and try some other way of life which doesn't involve the rat race, the energy drinks, the anxiety and insomnia and doom-scrolling depression? Is this all simply a terrible accident, a result of one too many bad decisions by our ancestors, or does it conform to someone's wicked master plan? Why, oh why, does every vacation, every moment of real spiritual and psychological pleasure, development or growth, even love itself, have to be paid for by cold, hard cash?

I have answers to none of these questions. In some cases I don't even have any theories. Like you, I'm stuck on the treadmill, the grindstone, the hamster wheel, trying to push the fucking thing along with one hand and snatch crumbs of prosperity with the other. I don't often have time or energy to philosophize. But every now and again, when the whiskey is close to hand and the candle flickers, I dream of freedom. Of taking a long ride in a glass-topped train through the snow-encumbered Canadian rockies while the sun blazes overhead -- until it doesn't, and the Northern Lights fill the night sky. Such trips are available. Such freedom is available.

But it costs $8,000.