The Illusion of Freedom: The Deeper Root Cause of Wage Slavery
Wage Slavery: being trapped by the bills you must pay and NEEDING a paycheck in order to pay them month-to-month. In other words, being forced to do work that you hate out of necessity.
So I’ve been thinking about wage slavery a lot recently as I’ve been shifting from full-time work to contract-based freelance work. It occurred to me that escaping the rat race is not only an incredibly challenging thing to do, but also very rare to find examples in our immediate social circles.
Wage slavery is so endemic that it’s hard to see it’s slavery-like qualities. How you’re utterly trapped because of bills and so you literally need to work full-time at a company who basically owns you.
The Pull
The pull. I’ve felt it, you probably have too.
That cultural force enticing you into the 9-5 grind. That feeling that something is off if you aren’t doing anything with your time. That feeling of restlessness when there are no more tasks to check off the to-do list. The feeling that without constant work we feel aimless
This is the bleak state of our world. We feel we must be employed full time or else something is wrong.
Wage slavery is the lie of our times. Get this, 99.999999% of companies don’t care about you one bit. It’s evident that each new generation is seeing more clearly how bullshit this lie is, yet it’s the still the pinnacle of life in our global civilization. Everything else is oriented around this.
It’s so ingrained that our job has become the primary orienting factor for most. I’m talking about mistaking our careers for our identity. We ask that oh so pernicious question “What do you do?”
Life is so short and we’re spending the majority of our time clocking into organizations that don’t give a fuck about us.
Always On Remote Work Slavery
The worst part is that these organizations that we’re giving our life to aren’t making any meaningful contribution to humanity (well most of them). In my search to make a living through remote work I’ve been confronted with the meaninglessness of so many startups (DeFi protocols I’m looking at you). Does my life add up to nothing more than pushing buttons on a computer screen?
Moloch has entrapped us so deeply that there’s no escape. Negative sum games have made us discard our core values in search of higher paying jobs.
Our minds have been enslaved at the hands of an economic machine enacted long before we were born and that’s utterly larger and more complex than any of us can fathom. Daniel Schmachtenberger has argue that our complex civilization is a form of artificial general intelligence that already controls us. We’re working for it’s agenda rather than the other way around. The dynamic between the government, corporations, shareholder interests and citizens has created a system where no one can stop the game. We’re all stuck in a system larger than any one person.
And we are casualties of this changing world. Sometimes the pay is genuinely good. Yet at the end of the day, no amount of money will pay for our lost zest for life.No matter how much you’re paid, you’re still a wage slave. If you’re making $1 mil/year but you’re at the office 24/7 and required to work at the time the organization says you need to work then you’re still a slave! Don’t you get it. You’re a slave no matter how much money you make. The only way to escape wage slavery is to control your time.
“You’re not going to get rich renting out your time” - Naval Ravikant
The Root Cause of Wage Slavery
The status quo has a tight pull on us, and it will capture us (our attention, our life-force, our very being) if we don’t have a strong enough vision and confidence in what we want. It’s extremely difficult to see what the vast majority of people in this world are doing and to choose to do something differently. It takes guts. And without a proper vision and adequate conviction in the life that you know is possible you will inevitably get trapped back in the very cycle that you’re trying to avoid. Your sense of purpose has to be deep, and in order to cultivate that soul-level conviction on it’s own takes a transformational process towards the depths of the human psyche.
It all comes back to development mate. At the end of the day, it takes nothing less than the complete transformation of the human being to live a beautiful and happy life.
The Pyramid Scheme of Society
The game theory says that society needs to be structured this way. That the incentive landscape in life ensures that this is how society is set up.
Poverty only exists because there are also wealthy people. Giving everyone on the planet a million dollars today wouldn’t fix anything because then a coffee would cost $200k or something atrocious.
If everyone was completely equal in power then one person couldn’t force another person to do anything. There would be no incentives to be a security guard at an airport or to drive dump trucks. The reason that people do jobs that society needs is because some people hold the cards and have more power than other people. That being said, technology is ramping up at an increasingly exponential rate that it makes sense that robots could do all of our dirty jobs within a decade. What are we left with? Serious play.
What is Money?
In order to escape wage slavery with the goal of creating a better environment for our own flourishing, it helps to get clear on what the nature of money is. I invite you to grab a notebook and write at the top “What is money?” And to sit with that question with the intent to become conscious of the nature of money. To get at the root of what it is. Finished? Okay here’s what I’ve distilled as the nature of money.
Money is a way of co-ordinating the flow of resources in society. The easiest way to get someone to do something for you in society is by having more money than them and paying them to do the thing.
Money is luxury. The only way to have luxury is to have money. Those two go hand in hand.
Money is freedom. The more money that you have the more freedom you have to do with your time what you want to do.
Money is a social construct: it’s an abstraction that we use to determine the value of various things in society, and many times this abstraction totally underestimates or overestimates the value of a given thing. Think about it, the reason that we have money is because we used to trade our objects for other valuable objects. Then instead of trying to make sure we don’t get scammed, we created money to be the sole source of truth. Money became the object of exchange because with you could acquire separate objects of value from other people and everyone deemed that exchanging coins was easier than bartering for everything. In a system where an abstraction is given purchasing power then everyone wants money, not everyone wants your goat milk brahhh.
Money is stress. The more money that we have to hold onto the more stressed we become that we can lose it. If we have millions in our bank then there will be a genuine physiological response in our body at the thought of losing it because we’ve mistaken it for our identity
Money is NOT time. The modern world in which we are all wage slaves and sell our valuable time for a finite amount of money makes it seem that we can reduce our time down to a dollar amount, but this is an externality of the status quo. Some people separate money and time and those are usually the people with the most wealth.
Money is an abstracted form of transactional value: Instead of having to trade good for goods we created an abstracted form of value that can be exchanged for that everyone wants because not everyone wants your potatoes.
Money has become synonymous with survival: All of our basic needs: food, shelter, warmth require money as payment. Therefore if you have money you have survival. If you don’t, well then you better figure out how to build a house of your own.
Money is power: Those with the most money are also those with the most power. It’s not just a correlational relationship, but a causal one. If you have money to spend you can get all sorts of people to work for you. If you don’t, then good luck, maybe try the visionary thing for a while. With money you can have people build you a massive house, cook for you, garden for you, work on your business for you, etc. Therefore, money is power.
Becoming more conscious of what money actually is can help us to relate with it in a way that doesn’t cause us so much damn stress and meaninglessness in life. At the end of the day, money is multi-faceted and if we peer into the many layers and utilizations of money we can then develop a better relationship to it.
Money is something that can work for us, but we first need to figure out how to make it work for us. It’s not easy to make money work for us but it’s possible. One of the pillars that Naval Ravikant talks about that is applicable here is that you can never become free renting out your time. You must own a share in a business or property. Without that you’re going to have a difficult time becoming free of the system of wage slavery all around us.
Stay tuned for Part 2 on my current strategies for escaping wage slavery :0