Achieving financial freedom seems to be the Holy Grail of the 21st century. New-age gurus like Robert Kiyosaki and Anthony Robbins make it sound like a hallowed goal to achieve failing which our lives would be incomplete, unbalanced and frustrating. Indeed, the idea of spending carefree days on the beach,playing endless rounds of golf or travelling to exotic places while your money is working hard for you generating streams of substantial "passive" income is certainly very desirable and appealing. This is also the dream sold by get-rich-quick schemes and the plethora of multi-level-marketing companies that are now so ubiquitous both online and offline.
Nowhere is the ambition to be financially free more evident than in the financial services industry (the "greedy" bankers and hedge fund managers). "Retire by 40" is the mantra that guides a vast majority of the professionals,including yours truly, through the daily grind. "How much is enough?" is a perennial favourite for post-work barroom discussions, usually yielding wildly varying estimates correlated with the number of years spent by the speaker in the industry.
Recently, I was discussing this topic with a senior banker who having spent more than a decade in the industry was obviously financially secure to support any reasonable lifestyle without working. I asked him why he was still hanging around expecting him to respond with cliches such as how he still finds the work exciting and how everyday is a new challenge. His answer-"I don't know anything else to do"-was most enlightening, to say the least.
It dawned upon me that most people define financial freedom as a freedom from something-- freedom from having to turn up at work everyday, freedom from worrying about the future,freedom from work-related stress and so on. Rarely is it defined as a freedom for something- to create something constructive or to contribute to society.
The difference is subtle but important. Freedom from something can be meaningless if you do not have any idea what to do with the freedom once you have achieved it. In fact, it could end up having negative consequences as you lose some of the intangible securities such as your sense of purpose or your identity which are invariably associated with the process of achieving freedom. Very often, the very skillsets that help you obtain the freedom are completely irrelevant once you have achieved it thus contributing further to the feeling of emptiness.
This is valid for freedom of the non-financial variety as well. Most revolutions in the world fail because the revolutionaries are so consumed with fighting the existing regime that they spend very little time thinking what they would like to do once the fighting is over. They feel lost once the common cause no longer exists. Nor do they have the capability to create, which is the required leadership skill in the new reality.
So we see the paradoxical situation of people willingly continuing in the very state of "bondage" which they have struggled so hard to overcome. Like the prisoner in Shawshank Redemption who,after spending more than fifty years in the prison, refuses to leave the prison when he is finally granted release, these people are too scared of their own freedom. Of course, this need not be the case and financial freedom could be extremely liberating if one has a sense of purpose and mission associated with achieving it.
