Independence over Freedom

For a long time, we wondered what to apply ourselves to. We have skills the roman maximalist machine prizes — skills for pushing bits around the internet. We learned to think of ourselves as baristas of artisanal electricity, crafting products by flipping the countless little switches inside a computer. We did this well. We earned more than most. And still the work felt pointless.

This isn't unique to us, or to people who write software. Work has troubled humanity since the start. But something about this age makes the trouble different. The modern world hands us freedoms by the armful. It gives us almost no independence. Life costs so much that a predictable income stops being a choice and becomes a requirement — and that requirement chains us to a long list of predictable costs.

Here is the trade nobody names out loud: every freedom carries a financial cost, and those costs force us into work — at best, nine to five, Monday through Friday, for someone or something else. This binds the employee and the employer both. The employer often takes more from the relationship, but is rarely freer for it. An employee can leave and find other work. An employer carries not just their own debts but the business's debts too. So our question was never how to become self-employed. It is how to have the independence to choose what we do each day.

Let us be clear about what we mean by independence. We don't mean the lone wolf, the man against the world. The independence we seek would make us better members of society than we are now. It is hard to show up for a neighbor at ten in the morning when you're chained to a desk until five. And it is exactly this — that the grind keeps us from being good neighbors — that convinces us something is deeply wrong with how we've agreed to live. The cost of our freedoms is so high that it robs us of the very things that give life meaning.