There's Nothing More Important Than Our Freedom

Lucilius was trying to go back in memory and see how the seeds to his quest for freedom, including financial freedom, was born. 

The First Seed

One of the most fundamental and first seeds where planted around the age of 16. 

I was then living in southern France. My family there was more African than French according to themselves, with a grounded attitude of trust in humanity. It was the kind of family that would never lock the doors to the house, in case if someone needed to get in, in the same way that people might do the same high up on arctic latitudes. 

Contrarian ideas fostered by necessity and climate.

One day my foster-dad got hold of me and said in the only language he knew - the local dialect of southern French, with a certain twang to it - if you know you know.

- Il n'y a rien de plus important que ta liberté. 

There's nothing more important than your freedom.

That wisdom stuck. He phrased it simply, in a heart-felt way that my real parents never had done, and we're probably incapable to even formulate. 

These words became an ingrained attitude to many of my choices later in life, and I still can recall the episode, more than 20 years later. 

Place de la Republique, Arles
CC 2.5 Rolf Süssbrich

The Second Seed

Then, coming of age as a young boy in Scandinavia, and in a surprisingly conservative, calvinistic and eerily religious village, had its next levels of impacts.

Let's not dwell too much on it, but for many obvious reasons I had a strong sense that the world around me was fake. 

To me, what was judged as the normal life was marrowed in what I saw as hypocrisy and narrowness. In parallel, I think, to the sense that the fire community also discover that 'normal' and 'what's in your own interest' are two very different things.

Happiness doesn't come in a standard package, for anyone, from what we've seen so far.

I started my life as a young adult with an ingrained idea of the importance of freedom, and knowing that normal and good where two different things.

Anyhow, we both started our lives as young adults.And our work-lives began. We thought we had so much figured out. But we were clinging to shallow identities based on our work, and still in a sense, we were quite lost. 

The Third Seed

Antinous and I met, became friends and finally understood that we could just move in together as well. 

But our jobs took worse turns, for both of us. This was of course nothing unexpected that this might happen sooner or later. 

But, in retrospect, we had built a lot of our sense of worth on our work identity.

And what felt like burnout at the time, was in all regards an identity crisis. Who where we if work didn't, well, work?

And work is nothing one can say no to, as long as one wants to pay the rent. 

Or so we thought.

What we actually needed was a deeper identity, not as linked to our titles and careers, but linked to something more fundamental: to who we were and what made us happy with life. And we clearly needed more sources of safety.

That was when we understood that work in the usual, identity-creating way of looking at it, as a profession, is not as robust nor as mandatory as it might seem.

The idea is born

I, Lucilius, noted that I had quite some money saved, mostly in bonds and on savings accounts, and I hadn't been thinking very much about it. But I did realize that the yearly return - around 4-5% - was not enough to live from our accumulate anything substantial from compound interest.

Antinous, who has this ability to have sudden insights as if the muses are talking directly to him, then noted that if I payed attention to the returns, I could probably quite easily reach 7%.

That idea changed things. Then suddenly we started to understand that it was feasible to actually build a fortune for us, not-at-all extraordinary people. And the nest-egg could become big enough to live indefinitely from.

There was a lot of rich-by-Excel going on that spring.

And we started to study how to set up our finances, and what portfolio to go for. That took around 3 months, then we acted.

Conclusions

To value one's freedom, then to see the shallowness a life called normal, and to crave a new, independent identity. A freedom that cannot easily be taken away.

Those were the three seeds that gave emotional fuel to value our path to freedom, when the realizations finally came.

Such was our build-up to our realization of venturing out onto the freedom journey.

Farewell,

//antinous&lucilius.