3 weeks before Christmas, my CEO sent a company-wide slack message informing everyone that 66% of roles would be dissolved immediately.
That was the last day of work for hundreds of us, with the holidays right around the corner.
And no one even did anything wrong.
Great workers. Great people. But dependent on the company.
And unfortunately, the company was no longer dependent on us.
Reading that message at 7am in my underwear is when it finally clicked.
This was the moment I fully understood what it means to be dependent.
If you want to take back your life, this is just one of three dependencies you need to address.
This article will show you the 3 doors out of a dependent life.
The Default Life Is The Dependent Life
You already know the dependent life well.
You see it in your most annoying coworkers, relatives, and friends.
The people that have just accepted that life sucks, work sucks, the boss sucks, the wife sucks, the in-laws suck, the president sucks, everything sucks.
They can never do what they want to do, they always have to do something they don’t want to do, and it’s always someone else’s fault.
As soon as they get a chance to get away from reality, they engage in sedentary escapism. TV, sports, video games, doom scrolling, etc.
Not to vilify those things. All can be positive (except maybe doomscrolling) but when used as escapism, they make you more programmable.
These people are everywhere, and if you’ve never thought about it, you’re probably one of them.
Almost everyone is until they realize they don’t have to be.
Life doesn’t have to suck. You can pick up the controller at any time and start playing the game.
Until then, you’ll remain in the back seat, and life will continue to happen to you.
It’s a decision you have to make:
Put in the effort to become an agent and take control of your life’s steering wheel?
Or remain a programmable NPC in the back seat?
Keep thinking everything sucks, and everything will continue to suck.
Once you do decide to take back your life, where do you start?
The 3 Doors Out of The Dependent Life
There are 3 doors out of the dependent life.
The financial freedom everyone is chasing is only one.
Many people are focused on financial freedom, but often at the expense of intellectual and physiological autonomy.
But you can achieve “financial freedom” and still not be autonomous.
If your life is dictated by financial, intellectual, or physical dependencies, you are not autonomous. Money only solves one piece of the puzzle.
In the modern world, the walls of these dependencies are closing in faster than ever. If you don’t find an exit now, you might get crushed.
Door 1 - Financial Autonomy
Financial Autonomy - having the financial means to do the things you want to do without being tied to the things you don’t want to do
Money is a resource required to participate in society. If you want to play the game, you have to make and spend money.
Most people vilify money and the pursuit of wealth. As a result, they end up with financial dependencies and limitations.
This happens for two reasons.
People who struggle financially often vilify money as a way to justify their lack of it.
They think the financial struggles make them a more moral person.
And it makes complete sense when you watch billionaires screw people over through the lens of the media.
But money itself is not evil. It’s a resource.When you vilify money, you push it away.
You can’t deem something evil and also want more of it simultaneously.
It’s like stepping on the gas and the brake at the same time.
Demonizing money keeps it away from you.
These 2 behaviors feed into each other in a loop, creating a reality for the person stuck in it where money is simultaneously pure evil, and the only thing they desperately need to survive.
You are living in a contradiction.
The point of money is not to use it to screw people over. The point of money is to unlock access to things.
This is important on three levels: survival, participation, and freedom.
Level 3 Financial autonomy is the end goal. The financial means to do the things you want to do regardless of what stands in your way.
If you keep demonizing money, you keep pushing it away, and you keep yourself on the survival level.
Every time you want to do something nice for yourself or your family, you have to ask your boss or your bank account for permission.
And either one can say no.
To truly become autonomous, you must take control of your finances.
It’s free-to-play vs pay-to-win in real life. You can complain and lose, or you can pick up the controller, play, earn, and win.
Start by eliminating dependencies. If you’re relying on a single source of income, pursue an independent source of income.
I personally recommend building a hub-centric digital business.
It minimizes cost and friction and unlocks multiple income streams, so if one of them disappears, you’re not on your ass.
Plus no one can hold your one income source over your head anymore. You decide what’s worth your time.
To go deeper on building a profitable digital business, check out 3 Mechanisms to Maximize Your Financial Autonomy.
Door 2 - Intellectual Autonomy
Intellectual autonomy - conscious and intentional curation of inputs, beliefs, values, and ideas, never being put in a position to act against those beliefs.
Most people pick a side, then consume the media that validates that side.
That’s backwards.
What you need to do is consume a variety of media, conscious of the bias, and make an informed decision based on the sum of that material.
Otherwise, you are renting out space in your head to the content, news, and people that validate your beliefs instead of challenging them.
Challenging beliefs is how you grow intellectually, relationally, and spiritually.
This headspace-renting results in reactive behavior, victim mentality, lack of thought ownership, and an insatiable hunger for escapism.
This makes it easy for external influences to take the wheel and steer your life for you.
If you’re not paying attention, they won’t take you where you want to go.
They’ll take you where they want you to go.
If you want to take back the wheel, you need to actively curate your thinking, otherwise beliefs will be planted without your knowledge or consent.
(This is literally how brainwashing works.)
If you react instead of respond,
if you make excuses instead of explanations,
if you seek evidence that only supports your beliefs,
you have not made it through this door yet.
Start with media consumption.
Prioritize conscious consumption instead of mindless doomscrolling.
Give your attention to content that is stimulating, not numbing.
(Any kind of content, not just social media. Books, articles, podcasts, videos, news, music, TV, movies, sports, magazines, etc.)
Consider why the content is engaging, whether you agree or disagree, and what open questions remain.
This will help you continue the cycle of conscious consumption.
Audit your social circle and relationships
Spend more time with the people who are more autonomous.
Spend less time with the people living the dependent life.
Often they mean well, but they’ll keep you stuck in it too.
Be spiritually curious, not religiously dogmatic
Organized religion can be a wonderful thing, and has been very beneficial for countless people across many generations.
It can also be an excellent tool for brainwashing.
Is your pastor brainwashing you? Probably not.
But, I encourage you to approach religious and spiritual systems as a lens of understanding, rather than strict rules and beliefs.
When you take this approach, you’re no longer limited by a single practice.
You can extract wisdom and values from any religion without being locked into the more arbitrary dogmatic principles.
Door 3 - Physiological Autonomy
Physiological Autonomy - maintaining a physical and medical condition that reduces or eliminates physiological dependencies.
The same problem that causes financial dependence also tends to cause physiological dependence.
Classic day job symptoms include poor posture, elevated stress, a low-quality diet, lack of willpower, etc.
All these compound and contribute to a life dictated by your physical ability (or lack thereof).
The less you are able to physically do, the less of a reason there is to do anything.
The more you can do, the more of a reason there is to continue existence.
Don’t you want to be able to get on the floor to play with your kids?
Don’t you want to be able to do physically challenging activities?
Don’t you want to be able to have sex like you’re in your 20s?
Personally I love having the ability to move my body and do the things I really enjoy like hiking, skiing, climbing, swimming, jumping, etc.
To unlock and maintain that ability, you need to move your body.
Any car guy will tell you that to keep a car in pristine condition, you not only have to take care of it, but you also have to keep driving it regularly.
“You’ll never be able to move like that when you’re older.”
Maybe I’ll never get older if I keep moving like that.
If you let physical ability determine the decisions you make,
if you prefer sedentary escapism to physical stimulation,
if you let your impulses control your behavior,
you have not made it through this door yet.
To keep it simple, I recommend focusing on 3 main areas:
Cultivate strength through resistance training
use free-weights, machines, your bodyweight or shit you can find around the house.
Get on a well-rounded program that makes consistency easy.
Improve mobility and stability
Increase the range of motion your joints can move through. That increases your ability to perform everyday tasks and, ultimately, physically demanding activities, more comfortably and easily.
Personally my favorite way to do this is by sitting on the floor.
Elevate your heart rate regularly
Do short bursts of high intensity (sprint/HIIT)
And do longer durations of low intensity (brisk walking)
Even just once a week puts you leagues ahead of the version of you that does nothing.
You must actively use your body. Limited use is what causes atrophy and deterioration.
Use it or lose it.
You Have No Control In The Back Seat
Succumbing to the dependent life keeps you in the back seat.
Meanwhile, in the front of the car, your dependencies take turns at the wheel, steering you to a destination of their choosing, with little regard for what you think you want.
If you want to go where you want to go, you have to take the wheel.
You do that by limiting the influence those dependencies have on you.
But first you need to know where you actually want to go.
Create a one-sentence reality that describes the future you want to live in.
Everything you do should be in support of that long-term vision.
This requires clarity of vision, which is a continually evolving process.
But the clarity never comes if the vision process never starts.
For more in-depth direction on the vision process, check out The 2-Part Cycle That Makes Every Decision Obvious.
Go where the puck will be, not where it is now.
“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”
—Wayne Gretsky
Pay attention to the landscape of your reality as it evolves.
Each evolution of the current landscape may impact your future vision.
It’s evolving faster than ever before, and so drastically that your vision could become outdated, impractical, or irrelevant quickly.
If you want to pursue an achievable vision, the vision needs to evolve with the landscape to remain compatible with reality.
Otherwise, you’ll keep yourself busy, and think you’re making progress.
But you’ll realize too late that reality has evolved and left your vision behind.
And your work was for nothing.
It’s like only looking at the front wheel of your bicycle.
Sure, you’re watching what’s happening in your immediate reality.
But if you’re not paying attention to how your landscape is changing, you’ll probably crash the bike.
The simple solution to this is, again, conscious consumption.
Don’t consume news media through the lens “what’s happening right now?”
Instead use the lens “How does what’s happening now influence the evolution of the landscape in the future?”
And consider what effect this has on your vision for the future. Does it change what is possible? Or how you might accomplish it? Or why it’s important?
Evaluating everything through the lens of a long-term vision is how you can be sure you’re working toward a worthwhile destination.
One Dependency At A Time
You don’t have to take all this on at once.
Start with the door that feels the most dependent. The most like someone else is driving. Identify the dependencies and take the wheel back, one at a time.
If this article resonated with you, and you want to cultivate your own autonomy, consider subscribing.
I write about business and personal development to help you take back your financial, intellectual, and physiological autonomy. And I write about futurism to help you preserve that autonomy.
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See you inside,
Tim