Adventure Capitalist

Those who have known me for long will know that I went through a phase of heavy political awareness a few years back - I was (and still am to some extent) what most people would probably call a wild-eyed libertarian with some leanings in the past that even bordered on anarcho-capitalistic thoughts and principles.

At the core of my moral beliefs are the principles of man as Sovereign over himself and the principle of non-aggression. For those unfamiliar with these principles or political philosophy, the logical implications of them are free markets, free trade, free speech, open borders, small government and no crimes that do not explicitly have a victim (a robbery has victims, someone smoking some “herbs” that may or may not be unhealthy to them does not have a victim in sight).

Though my beliefs are still largely the same, and rest on a logically consistent, principled foundation, my way of achieving my own ends has changed. As I’ve matured, I realized that the wheels of the political system move too slowly for me to see any worthwhile change in my lifetime, so I’ve mostly stopped caring about it.

This is where Lifestyle Design comes in - to me it is a means of finding freedom in an unfree world. I’m quite far away from my goals for the time being: I have a mortgage that locks me into a specific locale and it’s laws and taxes, I have a business that is still about 90% location dependent, I am still quite heavily at the mercy of local economic conditions.

But, by redesigning my life, slowly but surely to cut out waste and dependence: I can work towards making my business more location independent, I can work towards relinquishing the things that bind me to one place. Once I have achieved these goals, I might find that I actually want to stay, but at least at that point I will have a choice that is truly a choice: I can move if I don’t like the taxes and the business environment of a specific country. I can move if I don’t like the limitations on free speech, or the intrusions in privacy. I will not be beholden to any given country, government, person or client.

I’m quite a comfortable person, I like my home comforts and I’m not sure I would be cut out to be a permanent nomadic traveler for more than a few years. Maybe certain limitations can be acceptable given other things in life. But by redesigning our lives to at least in theory have freedom to be anywhere, we have a real choice.

Freedom becomes an option we can chose if we so want through how we have designed our lives, rather than being a distant goal that may only be achieved fractionally after a lifetime of fighting the windmills of the electoral process.