WHY WE HOMESTEAD - CHAPTER 8 - JUST A LITTLE MORE FREEDOM

papa-pepper (80)in #lifestyle • 5 years ago (edited)

Freedom, it sure sounds nice any way.

This is Chapter 8 of my current series about why personally choose to homestead. Hopefully it'll provide some insight for others as to why we have chosen the lifestyle that we have.

CHAPTER 8 - JUST A LITTLE MORE FREEDOM

While any obvious evaluation of the world that we live in will lead one to conclude that freedom is certainly limited these days, we still have a certain desire to experience a healthy level of freedom. Personally, there is a certain amount of freedom that we desire to have in the structure of our day and in our lives in general.

If, for instance, I work a nine to five job, from the time that I’m twenty until I’m sixty-five, then I’ll have a certain restrictive structure to my life. Five days per week, from morning until night, for forty five years, I’ll have a demand put on my life by the job I choose to work. At the moment, I can choose to sleep in if I desire, or to awake earlier than usual and get an early start. But, if I had a traditional job, I would not have that freedom.

Moreover, in a lot of common work environments, the employees generally can get around two to four weeks of vacation per year. Other than weekends (assuming no periodical weekend work requirements exist) the only time such an employee has to do anything else during the day is during these vacation times. “Vacation” is the term used for almost all time the employee is not at work, so whether you are in Cancun or on the couch, it’s still a “vacation.” Also, many appointments or other non-vacation reasons to not be at work during the day fall into this “vacation” category as well, and eat away at the allowed time the employee is permitted to not be at work while still maintaining their employment.

Ultimately, when so few days out of the year are really “your own” and during the rest you are required to be at work in order to keep your job, life can become very restrictive. Too often I recall being “trapped” at work while my family had a real need for me to be home. As time went on, this became more and more difficult for me as well.

Trust me, we did enjoy the vacation time and tried to make the best of any day that I had off of work, but I wasn’t really “free” in the way that I desired, and we certainly weren’t able to live a connected life together as a family in such an employment structure. I had been with a company for many years (it was my longest job ever) before we moved 750 miles away and I had “earned” a lot of vacation during that time. However, some years I may want more than three or four weeks of vacation, and such simply was not permissible in that scenario. A greater freedom and flexibility was the goal.

Trust me, good relationships with the neighbors to have coverage for your livestock or garden is also really important to be able to enjoy time away from the homestead, so that’s one thing to consider as well. You don’t want to get trapped out in the middle of nowhere without the freedom to leave for consecutive days due to animal husbandry requirements on your homestead.

Again, financial obligations can make leaving traditional employment difficult, but by taking the steps of avoiding debt, dropping the cost of living, and providing for more of our own needs, it lightens the financial burden in a way that we hope will make it possible for us to have the freedom to succeed in our home-based, self-employment goals.

It seems that there are a lot of pieces to this puzzle that happen to fit together in some peculiar ways, and I’m glad that we are able to at least see how debt bondage and other common things in our modern society work together to restrict our freedom and time together as a family. As always, this may not be for everyone, but since we’ve got the freedom to restructure our lives and work towards our personal goals, that’s exactly what we’ll be doing.