Becoming A Sovereign Individual

Financial Independence and Individual Autonomy is the new measure of success.

In 1997 a prophetic book was published with the title The Sovereign Individual. Within it’s pages are a declaration that we are today living through a transition from one age to the next. We are leaving the Industrial Age and entering the Information Age.

The claim is that major socio-political shifts throughout history happen, not because of a shift in collective ideology or morality, but because of advances in technology. The invention of the microprocessor, and then the internet, and now blockchain technology, is claimed as evidence that we are living through a transition as drastic as the transition from hunting-and-gathering societies to agricultural societies.

Individuals Are Being Liberated Like Never Before

As every forward step in the evolution of humanity tends towards an increase in freedom and liberty, we can certainly expect as much as a result of the current shift.

Yes, the shift we are living through is both good and bad, and it will likely be far from an easy transition. It will bring with it economic turmoil, social unrest, moral confusion, and violent conflict as the old world Nation-State lashes out in it’s death throws. But it will also bring opportunity for those who ride the wave of change gracefully into the next stage of human society.

At times it will be tempting to panic. To become terrified that the world is coming to an end and to rally to frantically fight to defend the old world from it’s destruction. It may seem as if all progress built henceforth is being lost, and that all depends on the struggle to preserve it from it’s demise. But this is the path of fear, and also of great suffering and struggle.

Steemit Represents The Liberation Of The Individual

The better path, is the path of love, gratitude, and cooperation. The old must give way to the new, and as the Industrial Age structures are crumbling around us, we must be able to squint through the dust hard enough to see the rays of morning light as they begin to pierce through the dark clouds revealing the new age.

With the invention of the Internet, and Bitcoin, and now Steemit, the predictions made in The Sovereign Individual are now coming true.

”For the first time, those who can educate and motivate themselves will be almost entirely free to invent their own work and realize the full benefits of their own productivity. Genius will be unleashed, freed from both the oppression of government and the drags of racial and ethnic prejudice.”

Ideas Are Becoming Wealth

We see today people becoming millionaires by making YouTube videos. We see people writing books and self publishing through Amazon, and Itunes, and their own website. We see writers making a living by writing articles for Steemit alone. We see web design, and artists of all kinds now finding a place to express themselves and be compensated for their work. We see programmers and software engineers working from anywhere in the world. Contractors and freelancers of all sorts can advertise and sell their services to anyone in the world from the comfort of their living rooms.

For all of these things, a specific geographical location is not required, nor do they come with a boss, or a set wage, or set schedule or set amount of hours per week. These “jobs” can be done from anywhere in the world, and the amount of effort and hours invested is entirely up to the individual.

Moreover, it does not matter your race, your looks, your age, your sexual proclivities, or the way you wear your hair. We are all playing on an equal playing field in the realm of ideas on the internet.

“Merit, wherever it arises, will be rewarded as never before. In an environment where the greatest source of wealth will be the ideas you have in your head rather than physical capital alone, anyone who thinks clearly will potentially be rich. The Information Age will be the age of upward mobility. It will afford far more equal opportunity for the billions of humans in parts of the world that never shared fully in the prosperity of industrial society. The brightest, most successful and ambitious of these will emerge as truly Sovereign Individuals.”

In the Information Age, a “job” will be a task to do, not a position you “have.”

The fact that you are on Steemit is testament to your being open to change. It is through innovations exactly like Steemit and Bitcoin and the internet as a whole that will provide the opportunity to become a Sovereign Individual.

To me, becoming a Sovereign Individual means having financial independence. It means not having a 9 to 5 job and working for a big corporation I don’t like, not being forced to do a trivial task that I don’t actually want to do, not being forced to live in a certain area, and show up at a certain place for a certain amount of hours 5 days a week. It means waking up every morning in the place I want to be, and doing the thing I want to do, for as long as I want to do it, and being beholden to no one but myself.

If the prophecy comes true, we all can look forward to such a future eventually. But whether we get to experience financial independence and individual autonomy now, or whether we will struggle to hang on to the old world way of doing things until the day we die, is all dependent on us.

“At first, only a handful will achieve full financial sovereignty. But this does not negate the advantages of financial independence… In the future, one of the milestones by which you measure your financial success will be not just how many zeros you can add to your net worth, but whether you can structure your affairs in a way that enables you to realize full individual autonomy and independence. The more clever you are, the less propulsion you will require to achieve financial escape velocity. Persons of even quite modest means will soar as the gravitational pull of politics on the global economy weakens. Unprecedented financial independence will be a reachable goal in your lifetime.”

#money
#howto
#philosophy
#technology
#steemit