From the very important things in life, freedom is the most invisible one. Often driven by inertia, you are not reminded that you have near infinite different paths of future choices. And some lead to freedom you can only dream about.
We define Freedom as how many meaningfully different paths you can take. Many different paths = High freedom. Few different paths = Low freedom. The constraints on freedom are in the Game of Self (our own abilities, fears and barriers) and in the Game of Life (our health, family and relationships, moral responsibilities and finances). Freedom is everywhere which makes it all-important as love and happiness.
A central concept of I Grow Younger is to use freedom as the metric for success in self improvement. Freedom is measurable – it’s the amount of different things you can do. We compare the freedom of me now to the potential freedom of future me. Only people with a certain level of freedom can participate in making the world better at scale – the more people with the higher freedom, the better. The rest are just fighting for their own survival. We define self growth as improving long term freedom.
Some people feel that pure freedom only exists in the abstract and can only be lost in real life, leading to an endless struggle against the constraints to keep at least some freedom. But this is not true as life also creates freedom for you – by inventing and discovering new stuff and even more so at a high level, we can increase our Long Term Freedom for us and others.
Freedom does not mean a lack of commitment to the rich, beautiful things in life. Starting a family and having kids may seem like a huge limitation on freedom and in reality it is. But life with kids gives you freedom too, because you can experience a new universe of emotions that people without kids will probably never be able to. You lose a lot and gain a lot.
Increasing your long term freedom means more chances to find self-love and unconditional love. More experience to build wisdom upon. More self-knowledge about what brings you happiness. More given to your loved ones and humanity in general. Your potential is and will always be limitless. But the journey of fulfilling more of it sooner goes via increasing your Long Term Freedom at every possible step.
Most things can be done in millions of ways. If you limit yourself to what your broad group does, you will not end up in special places, have interesting ideas or earn more money. Identities, stories and boxes limit our long term freedom. Having a changing identity or even none is a feature. You will inevitably write down your own. When you fight for your long term freedom, you are on thevright path. When you fight for the long term freedom of others, you’re a hero by definition.
If we want the highest long term freedom possible, we need to live at a faster pace so we develop deeper intuition about choices and options, consider every option possible consciously and maximize the long term freedom on each choice.
