Pookish Commandment Three: Become Financially Free

Becoming financially independent is one of the greatest changes you can make to your life. You become in control of your life when you have all of your assets paying all of your expenses and you don’t need a job. There are many books and much information on how to become financially free so I won’t talk about that here. But there is something else I have been wondering…

Why did men become, and strive, to become employees forever?

It is a fascinating question. The idea of financial freedom is not new. So what possibly could get 90% of the population into becoming wage slaves?

We are put in school at about five years old. We are then told to do stuff. This does not change until the day we retire (for many men, this is sixty years later). The idea of doing nothing is alien to us. If someone does nothing, hostility and mockery is sent at that person. “Lazy!” they say.

The child, since the age of five, then goes through school. He often goes to college where he is told to do more things. After college, he gets a job and keeps doing what someone else wants him to do.

After a while, you would think, “Wouldn’t he try to get out of the position of being leveraged?” Yes, you would. I never understood why the masses didn’t attempt to escape from being a wage slave. The reason why most men never escape the wage slave mentality is because of their woman.

During college or shortly after, a man meets a woman. The sparks fly. They end up getting married. This means they must move into some apartment and soon to a house. The bills keep getting larger. And then the wife gets pregnant and the little bundle of joy comes home. Babies are extraordinarily expensive (and taxing on health and sanity as well). The parents, at least the father if the wife wants to stay home, has to work harder to make ends meet. More babies appear. The husband has to keep working and working and working. The husband will become so accustomed to working that he will feel himself a failure if he doesn’t work in some way. He will be incapable of doing nothing. If he retires, he usually dies soon afterward (statistics show many men passing away right after retiring. All that work, and you can’t enjoy the little freedom at the end.).

I know many men in their 30s with families. I rarely see them because they are always working. They work because their expenses are so high. But they also work because their woman has completely taken over the household. Their household is so dirty, and filled with screaming kids and a fat wife, that they are HAPPY to work overtime. The more they work, the harder it is for them to do nothing.

“But Pook,” you ask. “Why should one do nothing? Isn’t it better to work?”

No. The founder of MTV gives this advice to those who are financially able to retire: “Wait one year before you do anything else. For one year, do absolutely nothing. It will be the hardest thing you do in your life.”

And, sure enough, it is especially if you have been conditioned to ‘work’ since the age of five. We are all brainwashed in some fashion. I have experience with some professional ‘brainwashing’ places, these unique ‘forums.’ The one thing they try to do is to keep you hungry, keep you sleepy, and not allow you to be alone doing nothing. If you are alone doing nothing, you can think. If you think, you suddenly realize what a bogus operation it all is. In many jobs they will attempt to brainwash you. At one job, after a hard day’s work, I want to go home, rest, and do whatever. The job tried to invade that as well, making it almost where I *never* had rest. I said, “To hell with you,” to that job. If an employer is trying to brainwash me, I just give them a middle finger and walk out. If you want my work, do it by pay, do it by making the job environment pleasant, do it by some other benefits, but don’t do it by ‘brainwashing.’ It is like they want you to love your ‘job’ like you would ‘love’ a woman. Those who have no passion beforehand are vulnerable to this brainwashing.

As these men work and work, they lose their greatest assets: time and health. Soon it becomes too late for them to become financially free even if they do snap out of it.

Imagine! A childhood in a mass produced schools, mass produced colleges, mass produced ‘jobs,’ to live in mass produced houses and suburbs (little artificial towns with fountains), and when we die we retire on some ‘mass produced’ package plan and go to the mass produced nursery homes.

That is 95% of the population’s life. This is The Way.

Women do not question it. They plan and see it. They do not imagine financial freedom and rarely see it for what it means. If you tell a woman you want to become financially free, they will run for the hills. It shows that women do not like rich men, they like rich men they can brainwash. Women marry wage slaves. If you do not want to become a wage slave, don’t get married. Your wife will support you in getting a bigger paycheck. But she will not support you in getting a bigger soul.

One pattern I noticed is that all the great humanities, the great songs, art, and literature, never came from peasants. It always came from the aristocracy or people funded directly by the aristocracy. To Americans, you know that the ‘founding fathers’ like Washington were well educated and cultured. But they were that way because they were financially free.

Being financially free is not about greed. It is to allow the First Pookish Commandment to become true: to be who you are. If you enjoy writing poetry, becoming financially free will allow you to pursue poetry. If you enjoy racing cars, becoming financially free allows you to do that.

It is hard to be who you are when a stupid job is in the way. The rich believe the word job means Just Over Broke.

People say that wealth changes you. It doesn’t. Rather, it changes everyone around you. People who were your friends will grow angry that you ‘have money.’ They will despise you. It is lonely at the top.

As Esther Vilar from her excellent book, the Manipulated Man, describes:

“If a young man gets married, starts a family, and spends the rest of his life working at a soul- destroying job, he is held up as an example of virtue and responsibility. The other type of man, living only for himself, working only for himself, doing first one thing and then another simply because he enjoys it and because he has to keep only himself, sleeping where and when he wants, and facing woman when he meets her, on equal terms and not as one of a million slaves, is rejected by society. The free, unshackled man has no place in its midst.”