Quantity has a quality of its own
Evolution
Let’s look at the Long-term freedom specter starting from the worst level and improving. It starts at zero with you being hypothetically dead. With low long term freedom your future choices are crippled by very poor health, being caught in abuse cycles, modern slavery, life imprisonment or other extremely limiting circumstances.
Next on the freedom ladder, you are mostly healthy and free from abuse, but have extremely limited resources since you live in extreme poverty.
As we go higher and higher, you earn more, can take better care of yourself and your family and allocate more of your time to search for happiness instead of fighting for survival. Your barriers up to here were mostly Game of Life ones (concerning resources).
As life up the spectrum gets more comfortable and resources more abundant, you may feel less challenged, meaning you may encounter more Game of Self problems – motivation may be low and the lack of meaning in your life more pressing, potentially leading to depression, anxiety or addiction. If you’re not happy because of internal barriers, you’re not truly free. A comfortable life, combined with easy dopamine hits from social media and other sources, is a direct path to inertia and sheep mode in your life.
As we get to a middle class person in western societies, the amount of long-term freedom has significantly increased. Your wealth and income will allow you to live mostly where you want, change jobs or start your own business.
As you become wealthy, resources are no longer a problem, and you seem to have no more pressing Game of Life challenges to solve. You need to be grateful and wise, give to charity and live happily. But this is actually just the beginning of the long-term freedom spectrum.
You did what you could for your freedom. But there are billions of people in the world who have way less freedom. I take it as a responsibility to fight for their freedom too. It’s scientifically proven that helping others brings joy and meaning to life, and the feeling of development and growth is great for mental health. This “second mountain” you can climb is virtually unlimited. No goals, no limitations, only a fulfilling flow.
We can define complete freedom as the ability to significantly improve the long-term freedom of every human or conscious animal in the world that struggles with it. Complete freedom means no more preventable death and suffering on Earth of any conscious being.
Complete freedom means being able to stop any war or violent conflict and to be able to free any innocent or political prisoner anywhere on earth. And we can agree that we all want it to happen, so it’s not a morality (quality) problem, it’s exclusively a lack of freedom (quantity) problem.
The freedom of animals is almost non-existent due to the incomprehensible scale of modern factory farming. According to Peter Singer, this is the greatest moral crime of our time.
The morality scale (the “quality” of your actions)
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
This is mostly about how much you value others and about not putting your needs, ego or beliefs above their needs and their humanity.
The average person is at least half moral. This is consistent with the theory that morality was a beneficial evolutionary trait. According to my observations, around 30% of people are actually so highly moral that it becomes an obstacle for their personal growth journey and reduces their long-term freedom a lot.
Historically, the destroyers were winning for a long time. But things gradually improved. More trade made people and countries cooperative. Civil rights and protections followed, rule of law, eventually democracy. Women and minorities received rights and protections. But I find the main keys to progress to have been science and technology – they created a framework which helped ideas become reality. Ideas are what will save us from hate, division, misinformation and populism. Ideas open the gates for a refreshed, more compassionate view of the other side.
The world has come to the point where it’s easier to create than to destroy. In the digital world, destruction is easily reversed, and the friction of creation is very low. This gives rise to projects of monumental scale and quality, such as Wikipedia and open-source software like Linux.
Since most people want to contribute ideas for the common good, the contribution of them is a net positive for society at large. When we add that the most moral people are also largely afraid to scale their contribution, we come to the conclusion that humans are morally positive, and we need to give every person more freedom to do just that. Which is what I Grow Younger is created to do.
The freedom scale (the “quantity” of your actions)
One of our multipliers (morality, a quality) is at 60-70% of its potential in the average person. The other one (freedom, a quantity) is at maximum 0,00001% for the average person.
Both you and the world need you to scale the long-term freedom as far as you can go.
How do we scale our freedom?
Building some kind of business is the most common way to wealth and freedom. This way you make money, which can be converted into many freedom-improving activities for you and others: Hiring people whom to delegate to and free time, Trading, Reinvesting, Supporting good causes, Hiring people who can bring positive change to the world. It starts and ends with hiring. Nothing is as valuable as the efforts of smart, motivated people.
But before you actually have anything, where do you start?
A. The Love strategy in Business (Game of Self)
The best first step is hiring a person you genuinely care for. Even better, you can hire your girlfriend/boyfriend.
You just mixed work and love, doubled the Motivation, created Long-term urgency (you need to earn enough to pay a salary), as well as short-term urgency (you have to start doing something right now). Empathy and work-related compassion becomes even more precious. Every time humanity and compassion triumphs over distance and indifference, you will see a massive increase in happiness and performance. Most people’s main drivers are not money and net worth but rather appreciation, freedom, growth and fun.
Love will help you scale a business.
B. The Spam strategy in Business (Game of Life)
(Spam is the SEO industry’s slang term for going for quantity)
Prioritizing is important in life, but there is also another approach to getting it done – do everything. It is more effective, because of speed. Doing it is usually way faster than thinking about it, and then doing it. The doer approach also delivers the healthy chaos that is essential for an early stage business because you need to maximize diverse experience, and build intuition and meta skills. And finally, the more you are in hunter mode, the more you do. The more you do, the more you enter and stay in hunter mode. A total win-win-win.
Spam is simply a direct, non-bullshit path to information, attention and money. If you’re brief and direct, people will appreciate you valuing their time. If you’re cute and funny, they will value you trying to brighten up their day. Many will gladly point you to better directions.
The spark is The Love strategy, which aligns your Game of Self with the business. The fuel is The Spam strategy, which aligns your Game of Life with the business. Your journey to money and high freedom has begun. By starting optimally, you’re halfway there.
